Y'know, I really need to drag out my old cassettes.

When I started amassing anything remotely resembling my own music collection, I was a cassette tape fanatic. That coincides with my favored mode of listening to music at the time, which was jacked into a Walkman.

I probably have something on the order of 300 - 400 factory cassettes, and heaven only knows how many dubs.

I've been considering a number of ideas for submissions to the next HH issue, and one of them is how the music of my youth stands up for me today. After recently acquiring a copy of Bad Brains I Against I, and having listened the bits off the disc, I gotta say that it holds up for me like a comfy pair of Doc Martens. Going even further back, I have found that even Adam Ant still has this thing for me which transcends nostalgia. That is, I can listen to this stuff today, and it appeals to me in ways that I would not have even expected at the age of 17. At least, I don't think so. 17-year-old me hardly conceived of making it to 21, much less 35.

Which, by the way, I surpassed that mark on Feb. 6 -- sharing my day of birth with Babe Ruth, Bob Marley, Tom Brokaw, and ... Ronald Reagan.