Go-Go’s: Vacation / Beatnik Beach ‘Cassingle’

Format: cassette

Label: IRS Records

Country: US

Year: 1982

 

A week without you

Thought I’d forget

Two weeks without you

And I still haven’t gotten over you yet

I don’t have too many cassettes in my collection. They served their purpose back in the day, as they were portable and great for the car. But they’re fragile, and since they could be recorded over I’ve always seen them as more of a neutral ‘media’ than a solid unalterable product such as a vinyl record. I recently dropped off my handful of store-bought cassettes at the thrift store. One of the exceptions to the collection purge was this little item. It seemed unique enough to hold onto.

The Cassette Single (also trademarked as ‘Cassingle’) was an odd format meant to replace the 7″ in the same way the cassette replaced the LP in the portable arena. With their lower price-point, they enabled the consumer-on-the-go to test the waters before committing to the larger purchase of a full album. I had always been under the impression that the Cassingle was pretty much a failed format (it never seemed very practical idea to me) but apparently it had a semi-successful run in the market, especially in Europe. By the 90s the Cassette Single lived on primarily as a promotional tool.

This Go-Go’s Cassingle is cited as being the first of its kind released in the US, although there are older examples from the UK. ‘Vacation’ was the third single released from the LP of the same name, and the band’s second-highest charting hit- reaching #8 in the US. It’s unclear how much this cassette version added to that success however…