No Matter What, I'll Always Wonder Why Grandma Gave Me a Badfinger Cassette

This Christmas Eve will be the 124th anniversary of my grandmother’s [Mom’s mom] birth. If she happens to visit me in a dream that night and tells me that I can ask her one — but only one — question, this is what I will ask:

“You gave me two cassette tapes for Christmas sometime in the mid-1970s: Badfinger’s No Dice and Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly. Neither of these tapes were on my Christmas list or really anywhere remotely in my consciousness at that point in my life. Can you describe the thought process that led you to procure and present me with these tapes?”

I know this may seem like a frivolous question, but those cassettes, and how I came to own them, have become one of the central mysteries of my life.

To be clear, going forward with this remembrance: Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly soundtrack is just as important to this tale as No Dice is. But the Mystical Dice called No Dice forward, so it is the album I am focusing on right now.

Badfinger’s second album, No Dice, was released on November 9, 1970, making its release perhaps the most significant thing to happen to me on November 9, until the birth of our son Jimmy on that date in 1997. However, on the actual release date in 1970, I was five years old. My love of music was already there, but I would not have had any idea who or what Badfinger was that day.

No Dice was propelled by a work of crunchy guitar pop rock genius, “No Matter What”, as well as the doleful ballad “Without You”, which has achieved standard status via iconic covers by many, most notably Harry Nilsson and Mariah Carey.

[Also, trigger warning: if you are not familiar with Badfinger and decided to read about them, be prepared — their story is tragic.]

What I know is this: one Christmas sometime in the mid-1970s, my grandmother gave me the two aforementioned cassettes as Christmas presents, either on Christmas Eve or on Christmas Day. I don’t think I knew anything about Badfinger or Curtis Mayfield at the time, though it is entirely possible that I would have accidentally heard Badfinger’s hits on the a.m. radio stations that were often playing in my presence those days. I may have experienced Mayfield in that way as well, since two Superfly tracks — “Freddie’s Dead” and the title song — were Top 10 pop hits in 1972.

But seriously though, Grandma: this stuff wasn’t prominent on my radar. What’s going on here?

The tapes may have coincided with me receiving a funky blue Panasonic cassette tape player/recorder (do a Google search on “blue Panasonic cassette tape player” and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about, and you’ll agree with me that it was funky, for sure). Grandma had intel that I was able to listen to cassettes and she wanted to facilitate my cassette listening.

I used to think that Grandma assigned one of my aunts the task to “find Richie some cassettes he’d like,” but cursory interviews with the aunts have yielded no memories of this happening. She could have put my mother on the case as well, but I’m not sure Mom would have gone with Badfinger and Mayfield.

I know Grandma worked at a Grant’s department store. Maybe she ambled over to the record department and asked a young, hipster casher to pick a few things for her grandson? That seems probable.

It’s also entirely possible that Grandma picked the tapes herself. She was, after all, younger than I am now during the period in question. But again, even if she knew Badfinger and Curtis, I don’t know that she would have consciously gone that way, especially given the scantily-clad No Dice cover model and the subject matter of Superfly. Grandma could be a bit of a gatekeeper regarding the pop culture I consumed. For example, I am fairly certain Mom told me once that Grandma complained to her that I shouldn’t be listening to Ringo Starr’s “No No Song” so much, considering it mentioned cocaine.

One final theory is that one of the aforementioned aunts had owned the tapes and had decided to get rid of them, so Grandma took them to give to me.

I should also note that I may have once asked Grandma why she gave me the tapes, but if I did, I think her response was that she was mystified as I was about this. If that conversation did happen, no satisfying explanation emerged from it.

In the end though, I was grateful for the tapes and each of them eventually made their way into my blue Panasonic tape player. I don’t remember playing either one of them that often, but just like so many future cultural artifacts of the 1970s, I soaked them up, and maybe even subconsciously stored No Dice and Superfly in the “Follow up in 10 or more years” file in my brain.

When the time was right, I was fully ready to take on No Dice and Superfly. And that’s why I’m sitting here on a Sunday morning, 59 years old, listening to a 54-year-old blast of guitar-based power pop and loving it so much. So, so much.

And when the dice fall on Superfly, I will listen and love it so much as well.

As much as I wish I could definitively nail down what prompted Grandma to give me the Badfinger and Mayfield cassettes so many Christmases ago, the truth is that I revel in the mystery. The cassettes are long gone, but I’ve had both records on vinyl in my collection for years. I also know that Jimmy has a reissue of Superfly in his collection, and our son Chris is a huge fan of Badfinger’s “No Matter What.” No matter what Grandma’s motivations and techniques for giving me those tapes were, they’re both gifts that have kept on giving.

So, yeah. Thanks, Grandma.

P.S. My other grandmother was cool too, and may someday wind up in one of these Mystical Dice entries.