Note: The mixed tape described in this essay — The M.A. Blues — was given to me by my friend Kelly Rudd when we were juniors at St. George’s School in Spokane, Washington in the mid-1990s. Kelly is now a distinguished attorney in Wyoming and will likely deny, with professional seriousness, certain details in this piece, particularly the late-night excursions to the basement to watch scrambled Playboy or Cinemax on cable. Nevertheless, a flat fact remains a flat fact.

The nickname “M.A.” came from our older friend Brent Olsen, who solved the problem of too many similar family names by assigning everyone initials: Matt became M.A., Mike M.I., Pat P.A., my father Ross R.O., and my mother Claudia C.L. Brent later went on to become a successful potato farmer in Republic, Washington, where Olsen’s Famous Potatoes now appear on menus across Eastern Washington and beyond.

The artists mentioned in the Kumamoto tapes from 1997 — This Mortal Coil, Cocteau Twins, Slowdive, Mojave 3, and His Name Is Alive — were central to the atmospheric indie and dream-pop soundscape of that era and formed the emotional palette of those early tapes.

As with most mixed tapes, the exact track lists have partly faded into memory. What remains vivid is not the precise sequencing but the feeling of the object itself: a hand-labeled cassette, built slowly, and handed from one person to another with care.

The first great mixed tape I ever received came from Kelly Rudd when we were juniors at St. George’s School in Spokane.

Kelly lived in what we always referred to, half joking and half in awe, as the Rudd mini-mansion, owned by his father Art Rudd the dentist and his mother Robin. It was the sort of house that made teenage sleepovers feel like minor expeditions. His bedroom was on the second floor, and that’s where the tape appeared.

He handed it to me casually.

“I made this for you,” he said. “Hope you like it.”

It was a black Maxell cassette. On the spine, written in careful handwriting, were the words:

The M.A. Blues.

“M.A.” was my nickname at the time. Our older friend Brent Olsen had decided that all the family names in our orbit sounded too similar, so he invented a system of initials: I became M.A. for Matt, my brother Mike was M.I., my brother Pat P.A., my dad R.O., my mom C.L. Brent later went on to become a well-known potato farmer up in Republic, Washington, selling Olsen’s Famous Potatoes to restaurants all over Eastern Washington. But at the time he was simply the guy who had given me a nickname that eventually ended up on the spine of a mixed tape.

Kelly and I stayed up late that night. I slept on the futon in his room. At some point we wandered down to the basement and watched scrambled Playboy or Cinemax on cable. Kelly will absolutely deny this now, as the distinguished Wyoming lawyer he has become, but a flat fact is a flat fact, baby.

The real moment, though, happened later.

Back at my own house.

My bedroom was at the front of the house, small and slightly chaotic. I had a green CD player with a tiny black-and-white TV built into it. VH1 ran constantly. I remember seeing the Replacements’ “Merry Go Round” on that little screen and falling in love with it. The room also contained a teenage anthropologist’s collection of beer bottles lining the walls. Beavis and Butt-Head ran on MTV. Seinfeld reruns. Law & Order reruns. The usual educational programming of the era.

That’s where I first really listened to The M.A. Blues.

The tape opened with George Thorogood’s “I Drink Alone.” I loved that immediately. It had swagger. It had barroom confidence.

Then came AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.” That one hit even harder. Along with what came later on the tape, it felt strangely adult. Not scandalous exactly, but like it belonged to a slightly older world than the one I was living in.

Somewhere in the sequence Kelly slipped in Robert Johnson’s “They’re Red Hot.” Suddenly the tape reached backward sixty years into the original blues. That alone felt like a kind of lesson.

But the moment that sealed the whole thing was near the end.

Dire Straits — “Your Latest Trick.”

The slow saxophone intro.
The late-night mood.
The strange wooziness of the rhythm.

It sounded like 2 a.m. in a bar somewhere, even though I was just a high school kid sitting in a small bedroom in Spokane.

That was when I realized something important.

This wasn’t just a bunch of songs.

Kelly had built a mood.

The tape moved from rowdy blues swagger to something cinematic and nocturnal. It felt deliberate. Sequenced. Composed.

In other words, it felt like an art form.

---

Mixed tapes in those years were somewhat common, but rare enough that they still mattered. People made them for friends, sometimes for girlfriends. I never made one for my early high-school crushes Blythe or Gina, though I did write Blythe long romantic poems instead. (Those stories live elsewhere on this site.)

But the mixed tape itself carried a particular social meaning.

It was an intimate gesture.

A curated, hand-crafted artifact given and received with love.

You had to sit there with the stereo, dubbing songs one by one, rewinding, getting the levels right, deciding what went on Side A and what went on Side B. A standard cassette gave you about ninety minutes total, forty-five minutes per side. That limit mattered. It forced choices.

A mixed tape was basically a short story told with songs.

---

A few years later I found myself on the other side of the ritual.

In the summer of 1997, in Kumamoto, during the first weeks of my relationship with Sachie, I made three mixed tapes for her. They were on deep blue Maxell cassettes, and they were extremely moody.

Artists like:

• This Mortal Coil
• Cocteau Twins
• Slowdive
• Mojave 3
• His Name Is Alive

It was the full late-90s dream-pop emotional weather system.

Those tapes mattered. They were given to her within the first couple of weeks of our relationship, and they became part of the early rhythm of us dating. She would play them in her minivan, and I have the impression she played them a lot.

In the cassette era that was basically a form of romantic language.

Before texting.
Before Spotify.
Before sending links.

A mixed tape said something very simple:

I spent hours thinking about you.

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The culture faded quietly around 2000.

Burned CDs arrived. Napster arrived. Then digital libraries and services like eMusic. I switched to digital music around that time and stopped using cassettes almost overnight.

Technologically the cassette lingered for another decade or so, but socially the mixed-tape ritual was already gone.

Today something of the spirit survives.

My friend Ian still makes enormous playlists mapping entire musical ecosystems — Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, the Dirty Three, the whole Cave universe. They’re impressive, but they often run hundreds of songs long. More like archives than gestures.

I’ve made a number of strong Spotify playlists myself — ones devoted to the Mendoza Line orbit (Shannon, Tim, Elizabeth) and another exploring the strange constellation around Michael Knott, Lifesavers Underground, and Aunt Betty’s. Those playlists really work.

But the social loop isn’t the same.

Only Ian has ever really listened to them.

That’s the quiet difference between eras.

A mixed tape once had a specific recipient. It was handed over physically. It traveled from one person’s room or car stereo into another person’s life.

A playlist floats in the cloud.

Which is why I can still picture that black Maxell cassette labeled The M.A. Blues.

It began in a second-floor bedroom in a Spokane mini-mansion and ended up playing through cheap speakers in a teenage bedroom full of beer bottles and VH1 reruns.

And when the saxophone from “Your Latest Trick” came out of the speakers, the room suddenly felt larger.

A door had opened.

Not just into music, but into the strange, beautiful possibility that songs — arranged carefully enough — could create an entire emotional world and hand it, quietly, from one friend to another.

Dedication:

For tapers everywhere.

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