“You must hear it,” hissed my friend. “Casey Kasem completely loses his shit.”

Invoking that name — that mighty American Top 40 baritone — already carbon-dates this conversation. The setting: a college campus in a bygone era, when FM radio hosts could be mentioned in casual conversation, an epoch before Google crawled the earth.

“It’s extreeeemely raaaare,” continued my collegiate companion, elongating the vowels with pronounced superiority.

“Oh, it’s extremely rare?” I played along. “Can I hear it?”

“It’s on the internet,” he spat back. “alt.binaries.music.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. It sounded like a jumble of random syllables, the sputtering noise that my cranky Oldsmobile Cutlass made when trying to start on winter mornings.

“Never mind,” he groaned, not even hiding his smug contempt. “I’ll make a hard copy for you.”

The next day, he was pounding on my dorm room door, a cassette tape in hand, which had five words scrawled on it:

extremely rare: fucking dog dying

Sliding the tape into my boombox, suspiciously, I pressed play. This short bit of audio — an illicitly recorded out-take from Casey Kasem’s radio show — filled the room:

Casey Kasem, “American Top 40"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDYK2H0ldbo

When it was over, I pressed rewind. Then play. Rewind again. And play again.

Then I immediately made three cassette copies. I wanted a fourth, but decided not to dub over my copy of Van Halen II.