At Home in Hespeler

One likes to believe in the freedom of music.

Rush – Spirit of Radio.

“If you want,” I said to my son, “you can put some music of your music on for a while.”

He’s 14, quiet in the monosyllabic way unique to teenage boys and has a lovely smile. He flashed it now, half in a laugh.

“No.”

We were renovating a bathroom/closet and the two of us were putting up the drywall. Born to Run was on, not something he would listen to voluntarily. He’s into rap and modern pop, meaning Beyonce, Usher &tc. Bruce Springsteen is not his thing. Yet he refused my simple request with almost a chuckle.

“Don’t have any rap 8-tracks?” I asked innocently, and his time he did laugh.

“No.”

I bought the 8-track player on eBay about a year ago, and now have a small collection of tapes, also mostly bought on eBay. It was a lark really, buying a piece of obsolete audio equipment that most people couldn’t get rid of fast enough back around 1980. But it was a lark that has come with it’s small pleasures. The fact that, as near as I can tell, a rap album has never been released on 8-track is one of those pleasures.

But there’s more. eBay is full of tapes at any given time and spending half-an-hour nosing through, bidding a dollar here, two there is a bit of fun. More fun is wandering through a used stuff store and stumbling on an otherwise unexpected cache of tapes. Truth is, until you have heard Boston’s first blasting though an 8-track player, as I have after stumbling across it at the Stratford Antique Mall, you just haven’t heard it in all it’s analogue glory.

Pulling out the 8-track and throwing on some classic rock is guaranteed to generate a conversation. Other people my age remember having 8-tracks, haven’t seen them in years, and end up reminiscing about everything from music they haven’t heard since 1978 to the way you had to use a matchbook to lift the tape and keep the audio lined up with the tracks.

A couple of years ago I predicted 8-tracks might make a comeback and while I hate to take credit, even when well deserved, and it hardly qualifies as a real comeback, a noticeable thing has happened. A year ago, one-dollar 8-tracks where common on eBay. Those same 8-tracks now cost $6-8. There’s been a defined spike in the price, which leads one to believe it’s not just me who has discovered 8-tracks.

The good life is in the small pleasures. Discovering a love for 8-tracks after all these years is one of the smallest.

The Freedom of Music, This Week on my I-Pod 8-track, Beyonce, Boston, Bruce Springsteen, eBay, Stratford Antique Mall, Usher

One likes to believe in the freedom of music.

Rush – Spirit of Radio.

I’ve discussed the return of the LP in this feature before. In fact, this feature could almost be called “The Return of the LP,” some weeks. The music industry looking backwards in order to move forward comes up a lot, it seems. This week, for instance, Foo Fighter’s drummer and Dave Grohl pal Taylor Hawkins released his second album with his non-Foo’s band, Taylor Hawkins & the Coat Tail Riders. The album, Red Light Fever, is available in the usual sources: iTunes download, CD and LP. What’s new in the last year is, the LP sales are featured prominently on the bands websites. Buy it today on…, and LP is right there with the other two getting front billing. There was something else, something different and entirely new to me at the TH&TCTR web site: mention of eight-tracks. There was a twitter contest were you could win an eight-track of Red Light Fever and they would throw in the 8-track player. You could also listen to a streamed version of the album by taking a virtual eight-track and putting it in an virtual eight-track player. So are eight-tracks back?

In his self-proclaimed classic rock manifesto, I Hate New Music, Dave Thompson argues the eight-track was the best delivery method of music ever devised:

…Vinyl? Scratchy, warped and needs too much cleaning. Cassettes? Hissy, fragile and they look like crap. CDs? Coasters with a superiority complex.
MP3s? Great! I’ll happily pay ninety-nine cents for nothing whatsoever. Eight-tracks, on the other hand – you know you’ve got a pocketful of something with an eight-track. Plus, they have the greatest sound reproduction you’ve ever heard.

I’ve never owned a pre-recorded eight-track. I had an eight-track player/recorder as an adolescent, and used it to turn my brothers LPs into something I could listen to without pissing him off three times a day. Pirating they call it now, which it was in as much as I had to gain access to his room and leave again, with an album I wanted, without getting caught. Making an eight-track and getting the album back in less than an hour was survival more than piracy, but pirates had to survive too.

So while I learnt all the words to Bat Out of Hell, and had my introduction to Led Zeppelin IV – the greatest album of all time – off of an eight-track, I have never owned a store bought one. Never had Houses of the Holy with the fade-out-click-and-fade-in during No Quarter, may be the only person of my generation not to have owned Frampton Comes Alive on the format and certainly never had Venus and Mars on the format – which Thompson claims is the greatest aural experience a human can have, or something like that. No, I owned all that stuff on album, and made eight-track mixed tapes of the best of it.

Taylor Hawkins, however, apparently agrees with Dave Thompson about eight-tracks sound reproduction. The web site that streams his album brags of being in “eight-track quality.” It’s a cool page, where you place the eight-track tape into the animated deck, and it plays. You can’t skip songs, but you can click through the tracks the same as with a regular eight-track player. Nice.

But does it mark the return of eight-tracks? To answer, an observation: they don’t sell eight-tracks on the web site. It’s possible Taylor Hawkins is waaay out ahead of a trend, however, he doesn’t have enough faith in the trend to actually sell eight-tracks. Furthermore, I could find no other artist making their music available in the format, no stores specializing in it, not even any one selling new eight-track players. There are some web sites that specialize in eight-tracks, but they are nostalgic in nature.

Eight-tracks inherent strength in it’s day was it’s portability. When the car companies started putting eight-track players in cars in the mid-late 60’s, a time when AM radio was the norm, they created a drive around music system where you could chose what you would listen to when you drive. It created a demand, and eight-tracks took off. With in car entertainment systems that include DVD players, CD/MP3 players and iPod connectors, modern cars have no need for eight-track players.

It seems unlikely that any real demand for eight-tracks will be forthcoming, which means it seems unlikely eight-track tapes are about to achieve any kind of renaissance. Sorry Taylor Hawkins.

The Freedom of Music, This Week on my I-Pod 8-track, Bat Out of Hell, CD, Coat Tail Riders, Dave Grohl, Dave Thompson, eight-track, Foo Fighters, Frampton Comes Alive, Houses of the Holy, I Hate New Music, I Hate New Music: The Classic Rock Manifesto, LP, MP3, No Quarter, Red Light Fever, Taylor Hawkins, Venus and Mars