Eight-Track Mind

My veteran stereo receiver recently reached the end of its days. My needs are simple, but I wasn't taken with any of the immediate replacement options. A friend offered to give me an old Yamaha receiver, so I took him up on it. It's cool and old-school, without the surround-sound pizzazz that would have been extraneous for my use, but with a sufficient number of inputs. I need inputs for phono, CD, TV, cassette, and mini-disc. I hooked the whole magilla up Tuesday morning, and tested the respective inputs with a Peter & Gordon LP, a power pop compilation CD, a Veronica Mars blu-ray, a B.D. Love cassette, and a back-and-forth mini-disc run-through of playing The Flashcubes and recording the previously-noted Peter & Gordon LP. All systems GO!, and my rock 'n' roll capabilities have now been duly restored.



While I had everything disassembled and about to be put back together, I tested one other piece of equipment, something I've never had hooked up on any permanent basis. I connected my eight-track player, and listened to a minute of my only eight-track tape, Dedication by The Bay City Rollers.



Although all but 16 days of my teen years were contained within that garish decade called the 1970s, eight-tracks were never my thing. I was primarily a vinyl guy, LPs and 45s alike. My first tape recorder was a reel-to-reel, and I moved from there to cassettes. The reel-to-reel was exclusively a plaything for recording--I never owned a prerecorded reel-to-reel product--and my cassette players were mostly for recording, too. I had a few cassettes, though the only one I remember owning in the '70s was my copy of the Billy Jack soundtrack. GO AHEAD AND HATE YOUR NEIGHBOR, GO AHEAD AND CHEAT A FRIEND..!  Oops--sorry! '70s flashback there. I also recall listening to my cousin Mark's Deep Purple cassettes during our summer vacations in Missouri. To this day, a spin of "Highway Star" calls those happy days to the forefront of my memories. 



But really, my cassette deck was mostly used for creating mixtapes, accomplished by placing the little gizmo right next to one of the speakers at our home stereo, putting the needle on a Beatles, Elton John, or Three Dog Night record, and trying to press RECORD on the deck before the music started. Fidelity? Not my main interest. I also tried to record my own comedy bits, either solo or with Mark. Not much fidelity there, either.



It must have been around 1977 or so that we got a new family stereo, with turntable, AM/FM tuner, and...eight-track? Awrighty. The eight-track never got much attention from me; I have a vague recollection of trying and failing to use the eight-track to record...something. God knows what. Still, knowing there was an eight-track player at my disposal, I bought exactly one budget eight-track tape: a collection of early sides by Paul Revere & the Raiders. That eight-track contained material predating the Raiders' more successful run with Columbia Records, and it included stuff like their instrumental hit "Like, Long Hair." I chiefly remember a song called "Sharon," because I was keepin' company at the time with a girl named Sharon, whom I'd met that fall '77 semester at college. Sharon wasn't in the picture with me for very long, making it really easy to pinpoint the approximate date of that stereo and its underused eight-track.

For dramatic purposes, the part of my ex-girlfriend Sharon shall be played by my vintage 1977 poster of actress Suzanne Somers

That stereo is, of course, long gone, and so is my Paul Revere & the Raiders eight-track. And, um, Sharon, too; she was gone by the end of '77. I never gave much thought to eight-tracks again until, believe it or not, the '90s, courtesy of my radio co-host Dana. Some time in between the death of our first radio show We're Your Friends For Now in 1991 and the dawn of the inexplicably long-lived This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio at the end of '98, Dana surprised me with the gift of an old eight-track player, and the above-mentioned Bay City Rollers tape. 

It still works, or at least it works as well as an eight-track player should be expected to work. I've often thought about hooking it up and leaving it hooked up, just because, but I could never spare an input for it. 

Until now. 

My freshly-installed Yamaha has enough open jacks for me to leave the eight-track player in place, and be free to re-live the '70s Bay City Rollers eight-track experience at will. If I could find 'em cheaply, I could even expand my eight-track collection with tapes by The Ramones, The Flamin' Groovies, The Isley Brothers, The Raspberries, and...and....

No.

Over these past few years, I've begun a conscious effort to curtail my natural packrat ways. I'm not going to stop accumulating books--let's not get crazy--but I sold nearly two-thirds of my comic book collection. I still buy new comic books, but I only keep a few of them. I rarely buy vinyl, and I try to keep my CD purchases within range of my ability to store them. I'm trying to cut back on tchotchkes. I don't need to add eight-tracks to my vast accumulation of stuff.

So, with some reluctance, I disconnected the eight-track player and put it back in storage. If I ever really want to, I could hook it back up should the mood strike me, whenever, subject to the whims of my eight-track mind. Push and play. I feel younger already.



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Fans of pop music will want to check out Waterloo Sunset--Benefit For This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio, a new pop compilation benefiting SPARK! Syracuse, the home of This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl. TIR'N'RR Allstars--Steve Stoeckel, Bruce Gordon, Joel Tinnel, Stacy Carson, Eytan Mirsky, Teresa Cowles, Dan Pavelich, Irene Peña, Keith Klingensmith, and Rich Firestone--offer a fantastic new version of The Kinks' classic "Waterloo Sunset." That's supplemented by eleven more tracks (plus a hidden bonus track), including previously-unreleased gems from The Click Beetles, Eytan Mirsky, Pop Co-Op, Irene Peña, Michael Slawter (covering The Posies), and The Anderson Council (covering XTC), a new remix of "Infinite Soul" by The Grip Weeds, and familiar TIRnRR Fave Raves by Vegas With Randolph, Gretchen's Wheel, The Armoires, and Pacific Soul Ltd. Oh, and that mystery bonus track? It's exquisite. You need this. You're buying the digital download from from Futureman, and/or the CD from Kool Kat Musik.

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