Exactly 20 years ago, my greatest mix tape circumnavigated the USA

On April 2, 1995, I departed Oakland, Calif., in a no-options, two-wheel-drive 1988 Toyota Hilux (a truck marketed by Toyota USA as, simply, "the Toyota Pickup"). On April 23, 1995, I returned to California, having passed through 28 states and having had many adventures. I'll be writing a bit more about the details of this trip later in the week, but for now it's time to discuss the primary mix tape -- a 90-minute Maxell cassette with 24 tracks -- that ended up helping make the trip so memorable: The Orange Tape.

Good old no-frills, 22R-powered Toyota pickup. Excellent road-trip vehicle.

Murilee Martin

I took this trip with my friend (and future brother-in-law) Jim, and the '88 Toyota pickup belonged to him. He'd bought it brand-new in Lemon Grove, Calif., after a ruthless and lengthy bargaining session during which he demanded the lowest-priced model with exactly zero options. No bumpers. Four-speed manual transmission. Carbureted 97-horse 22R engine. No radio. No lighter. Steel wheels. By the time we took our trip, this 7-year-old truck already had 150,000 hard miles on it. It also had a camper shell (which was stolen in Oakland a few years later).

This is how you listened to music in your car 20 years ago.

Murilee Martin

The compact disc appeared in large numbers in 1983, which means that there was a five-year period during which record stores carried both CDs and 8-track tapes of the same albums. However, the humble audio cassette tape debuted in 1963 -- a year before 8-tracks -- and remained relevant well into the late 1990s. Nobody driving any sort of hooptie in the middle 1990s had a CD player in the car, and so cassette mixtapes were still fully mainstream in 1995. I had been working on evolving the perfect road-trip mixtape since blank cassettes became sufficiently cheap in the early 1980s, and I think I may have created the ideal one … a couple of years before audio coding formats sent both tapes and CDs to the oblivion they deserved.

New cassette decks were still priced out of reach of your typical mid-90s slacker, so we rigged up this swap-meet system.

Murilee Martin

New tape decks were still prohibitively expensive to Grunge Era slackers, and anyway a nice deck would just get ripped off right away on the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area. Jim's truck had no sound system (unless you count singing "Row Row Row Your Boat" along to the clattery agricultural note of the 22R engine), so we hit the Oakland Coliseum Flea Market to do some audio-component shopping. We picked up an early-1980s-vintage Sanyo AM/FM/cassette deck (with auto-reverse!) and a crappy Kraco amplifier (with power meter!) for 15 bucks total, then headed over to the junkyard to invest five bucks in a pair of Tercel speakers that bolted right into the pickup's doors (in those days, most intact-looking cassette decks got plucked out of cheap wrecking yards within hours of appearing in the inventory, so the swap meet was your best bet for a working cassette player). A little soldering, a piece of scrap wood cut to the right shape, a few wood screws, and we had tunes for our trip!

This is one of the first images I ever made in Photoshop. Printed via dot-matrix, of course.

Murilee Martin

I made a set of four or five "Road To Victory" tapes for this trip, each with a different situation in mind, and each color-coded for easy location in the heaps of crap that always build up in a vehicle on a long road trip. The label featured an image of my 1965 Chevrolet Impala sedan driving at a mushroom cloud. There was The Red Tape, which was intended for use when our energy was flagging and we needed jolting back into alertness; it started off with Faith No More's manic "Surprise! You're Dead!" and was full of punk and metal. We had The Blue Tape, a tape full of instrumentals suitable for long contemplative stretches of highway, and so forth. It turned out to be The Orange Tape that we listened to in more or less constant rotation, however; it was meant as a sort of all-purpose tape and featured some road-tested song sequences I'd honed on dozens of mixtapes I'd put together during the previous decade.

The Orange Tape became the soundtrack of our trip.

Murilee Martin

I've put together a YouTube playlist of all the songs, in order, on The Orange Tape, so you might as well get that started now. It opens up with a trio of instrumentals I'd used together on a previous mixtape; first, Duane Eddy's twangy rock-n-roll hit of 1959, "Forty Miles of Bad Road," then sticks with the same era and genre for the next song: Bo Diddley's "Aztec" from 1961. Then we fast-forward to, well, the dystopic future of the space station Marcus Garvey, where computer-generated dub plays for the Rastafarian Navy at all times (actually, we fast-forward to 1984, when Sly & Robbie released "A Dub Experience"), and the nerve-unjangling sound of "Assault on Station Five."

I’ve been everywhere, man, i've been everywhere.< p

Murilee Martin

After that, it made sense to hear Massive Attack's "Five Man Army," a hallucinatorily dystopic -- yet with a good highway-drive pace -- piece from their great 1991 album. Lest we find the driver dozing at the wheel, the next track on The Orange Tape is the 1979 cover of June Carter Cash's "Ring of Fire" by Wall of Voodoo, featuring a beautifully noisy Malaise Era guitar solo and all the Stan Ridgway vocals necessary for the occasion.

As we entered a new state, we’d add it to the list on the label for our main traveling cassette tape.< p

Murilee Martin

Our trip took us east to Nevada, then north to Idaho, a right turn headed into the Upper Midwest, then continuing clockwise around the country. We used the back of The Orange Tape's label to write down the date we entered each state; the reference to South "Hell" Dakota is the result of a very unpleasant experience at the hands of the SDHP (more on that later). We camped, crashed on friends' couches in places like Indianapolis, Chicago, and Brooklyn, and we listened to The Orange Tape over and over and over. We'd play it for our hosts during stops, and they'd ask to make a copy. To this day, I still hear about those copies of the tape, while just about all memory of the Blue, Red, Green, and Chrome Tapes has disappeared completely.

I ditched almost all of my once-extensive cassette collection, but I still have the original Orange Tape.

Murilee Martin

Of course, these days I listen to The Orange Tape in pure electronic format, on a smartphone connected to the car's sound system via Bluetooth, because cassettes suck. Still, I've kept the original Orange Tape. Here's the complete track list:

SIDE A

1. Duane Eddy: "Forty Miles of Bad Road"

2. Bo Diddley: "Aztec"

3. Sly & Robbie: "Assault On Station Five"

4. Massive Attack: "Five Man Army"

5. Wall of Voodoo: "Ring of Fire"

6. Ween: "I Can't Put My Finger On It"

7. David Byrne & Brian Eno: "Regiment"

8. MC 900 Ft Jesus: "Falling Elevators"

9. Golden Earring: "Radar Love"

10. Dr. John: "I Been Hoodoo'd"

11. Yesca: "Lost Due To Incompetence (Theme For a Big Green Van)"