Don’t know about you, but my vehicle’s got a tape player. For playing good, old-fashioned cassettes. And with my iPod seemingly down for the count, I’ve been revisiting some old favorites from the long-disgraced, but suddenly-hip medium of cassettes.

My big, plastic cassette box is really a vibrant time capsule. Whether it’s pulling out an oddball artist (Shellyann Orphan), a long-forgotten bootleg (Pixies, The Cure) or a personal story-maker (a Concrete Blonde live recording, hand-delivered to me the day after the show by the bootlegger), the cassette box has been a giver of great and surprising things of late.

The tape that got the most play in recent weeks is a mixtape of songs by Jeff Barbush, who headed up bands like the Painkillers and the Deadbeats, and who also did a fair share of home recording. The tape was given to me, if memory serves, by Marcia Pandolfi, whose brother Carl was a member of the Painkillers.* That group, as I’ll ramble on about to anyone, is primarily responsible for my caring about pop music, at all, as they practiced two-doors-down from where I spent a chunk of my teens. Just as I was ready to absorb local rock, a local rock band was playing on the block.

Those Painkiller songs are special to me. And, with a bit of time, the entirety of the Barbush cassette is locked into my head.

Of late, I’ve played with the idea of what to do with material like this, in terms of sharing. It’s solid music, still. It extends the life of a musician who passed too soon. It’s classic Saint Louis pop and is deserving on just that level. It really should be heard by more than just myself and the passengers in my truck; or by the other folks hipped into similar cassettes and home tapings.

So, the thought goes like this: start by finding some of the principals behind the music. See if they’re down with a limited-run CD. Talk to folks like Chris King, whose Enormous Richard recently re-released a long-ago cassette onto CD. Locate someone to bump the original recordings into a more digitally-pleasing form. And then drum-up the couple-hundred dollars to run, let’s say, 100 discs, for those who’d be naturally inclined to also fall in love with these songs.

This idea, it seems, could have legs. Or it could not. I’m open to discussions. And, in the meantime, I’ll be humming along to songs so catchy, so sweet, that I’m not the only deserving to hear such treasures. Thanks, Jeff Barbush, for leaving me something so wonderful, a cassette of magic, as much as a cassette of music.

* Rene Spencer Saller also made for me a fantastic mix-up CD of Painkillers tracks a few years back and it’s gotten steady play over time, as well. But, as determined, I’m not blessed with a new-fangled CD player in the car. Some of those cuts, too, deserve a hearing.

As someone who, by and large, works alone, I find myself coming up with ideas. All the damned time. They don’t necessarily have a straight path in moving from my head to some type of reality, due to lack of finances, shaky technical skills and countless other mix-ups that can trip up even the simplest of them.

These ideas come too frequently, at times, and without that over-the-cubicle vetting that office workers can employ (and, dare I say, enjoy), these schemes all seem really, really good. To me. At some point, I begin to act on them, solo or with a small group of (hopefully sympathetic) sympathizers. Some die a gruesome, public death, after being bounced into brief web life. Others are sent to an early passing via countless, unproductive e-mails. More just sit around, flat-lining through a few conversations of marginal encouragement and the bullying presence of newer concepts.

In some cases, there’s still a feeling that a project’s in there, untapped and somehow doable. In others, my thought is that some type of karmic good can come from freeing the information, allowing the germ of an idea to be picked up by somebody with the resources to make them happen.

In other, more-accurate words: I’m sick of the contents of my own skull. And in the spirit of some late-summer, mental housekeeping, I’m going to bounce out as many ideas as I can find from notebooks, scraps of paper, e-mail sent boxes and faulty memories. If this takes a week, it takes a week. It’ll probably take more than a single one, probably well into September. My five readers are welcome to comment, borrow or steal anything along the way, assuming there’s even the mildest basis of usefulness to them.

The process starts to play out tomorrow, with one that’s actually a project that could happen without a ton of cash and with marginal amounts of legwork. From there, bullets fly in all sorts of directions. Enjoy this embarrassing display of unfocused creativity and feel free to comment, pass along to idea-thieving pals or simply ignore.

The Great Unload, 2010. Should be stupid. And freeing. Type at you tomorrow…