My first real business was selling tape covers on Grateful Dead Tour.

You know, tape covers. For cassettes, of course.

I mean, it solved real pain.

Like, what else would you put on your bootleg of 5/8/77?

Tape trading was a fine art for the musically obsessed and supremely nerdy. You might procure a brick of blank Maxell XLIIs from Radio Shack and borrow a few bootlegs from another Deadhead. Then you'd load their tape in your source, maybe a Sony TC-K677 3-head, connected via line-in to an NAAC Nakamichi Dragon, tweaking levels and simultaneously pressing play on the first and record on the second.

Labeling mattered to cassette-trading audiophiles. If the source bootleg was a gen1, the recorded copy would be a gen2. A ‘crispy’ pristine Betty Cantor-Jackson SDBD was coveted fare; rumors always swirled of undiscovered releases.

What made my tape covers special? The art, of course. I'd produce a template, then enlist Mike, my often-stoned roommate to illustrate something - say Jerry's face melting out of a bong or into a pile of mushrooms.

Six to a sheet, taped flat, then reproduced at Kinkos, laid on thick-stock colored paper to be sliced with a manual stack cutter.

The predictability of the post office always fascinated me. So I opened a PO Box at the Prudential Center. I stamped the back of every printed tape cover with the address and a website, and called the whole thing Balls Productions, as if to make it official-like.

Covers were 8 for $1, I mean, what in holy hell, what a supreme deal right?

To drive sales, I'd trot around the lot before and after shows, hoisting a ratty cardboard sign with covers affixed to them. A buck here, a buck there, maybe six sets for $5 and at the end of the night I'd have enough to buy a lot burrito and possibly a T-shirt (also of Jerry melting into a pile of mushrooms).

But it was really the marketing on the back that made it a rational exercise. I'd arrive at the PO Box to dozens of envelopes stuffed with dollar bills, and I would fulfill them in my spare time, mostly after work, but sometimes at the office while still wearing my pressed dress shirt and corporate-flunky tie.

Creativity is the spirit of all sales, and so as Phish tours began, I enlisted other designers. James was the dirty sort, so his covers included a set of dangling balls (for Stash, of course) and another with a suggestive drape for, well, for the song Curtain, I guess, also of course.

Another friend, Rene (aka: Schven aka MoistBuddah) designed a new option, one with the setlist pre-printed for shows that reflected important moment's in the band's history. Obviously 12/31/95. And, for sure, the bass-boosted 4/16/92. 6/17/94 got the nod because it was the OJ show and 3/22/93 because that's when they played Gamehendge.

And, yes, all throughout I continued to collect my own tapes, an obsession out of control. Countless hours of recording and cataloging, stacking by date in big wood racks of 100 tapes each. A single rack eventually became two, two became four, four became eight, until I lugged nearly twenty racks and 2,000 tapes with me every time I moved.

Initially my girlfriend thought all of this cute and maybe a bit nerdy-cool, that is until she became my wife.

Then she just found it annoying.

The clutter was too much, she said. And it was true, I never listened to them anymore, preferring the digital options of Archive.org or Relisten.

And so, reluctantly, I took all the covers off the Dead tapes. Ultimately four trash bags of cassettes ended up on the curb on trash day. In the morning they were gone; I mourned them for weeks.

For the remaining Phish tapes, my wife offered mercy, and some lad on a Phish message board promised to care for them. I’ll listen to every single one, they offered, and they'd upload any important material onto digital services.

This felt right.

He arrived at the house, awkward but nice, if not strange (I mean, ask yourself, who do you think is coming by to pick up 1,000 Phish cassette tapes?), but seemed to be Wook enough. Six trips down the stairs and then he fled in his car. After one lame note establishing his busyness he ghosted me, never to surface again.

I'd like to believe that somewhere, somehow, there are still cassette collectors. Yes, I know, it seems pointless - you might be right there - but then again I find vinyl inane.

And as for the tape covers, I'd like to believe that the owner of PO Box 990799 in Boston occasionally receives a random envelope with a random dollar bill - and feels downright sorry that they have no tape covers to send in return.