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Film/Music
The Cartridge FamilyFilm and Zine Celebrate the 8-Track
By Tom Warner
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So Wrong They’re Right
Directed by Russ Forster
R |
uss Forster wants to make one thing perfectly clear: He is not a trite nostalgist. Talking with me over the phone from his home in East Detroit, the 32-year-old director of So Wrong They’re Right - the award-winning 92-minute film documenting his 10,000 mile trek across the United States with cinematographer Dan Sutherland in search of 8-Track fanatics (or “trackers” as he likes to call them) - insists that it’s not a film about nostalgia or the kitsch value of the clunky 8-Track cartridges and their tape-eating players, which have become symbols of the worst excesses of cheesy 70’s culture.
“I See the film being not so much about 8-Tracks as it is about people ...To me, the ostensible topic is not as fascinating as just the exploration of eccentric but articulate personalities,” says Forster, who as editor of the celebrated quarterly fanzine 8-Track Mind (carried by Mount Vernon’s Atomic Books) has come into contact with an ever-growing number of devotees of the medium
And we meet them, as Forster interviews more than 20 trackers, from intriguing nobodies like 16-year-old Christine Williams (whose tapes are a hand-me-downs from a generation she can’t possibly remember) to such luminaries as the indie-rock band Gumball (who, in the film’s highlight, discuss how they scored 25,000 8-tracks from a Pennsylvania warehouse), writer Pagan Kennedy (author of the excellent 70’s culture tome Platforms), and The Duplex Planet editor David Greenberger. Forster finds in them a composite picture of the “skeptical yet inquisitive mind of the 90’s 8-Track enthusiast.”
Why the sudden interest in 8-Tracks, the heyday of which probably ended around 1971, when the first auto-reverse cassette decks appeared in cars? After all, weren’t they, as interviewee Phil X.Milstein says in the film “probably the dumbest musical format” ever? The sound quality was bad (hissing, jamming, the ka-chunk as programs changed, sounds “bleeding as traces of other programs overlapped the current program) and the cover graphics were an afterthought. And as Greenberger points out , 8-Tracks weren’t so much about music as just “a formula way of dropping information in.” This meant songs were often re-arranged, cut in half, or even excluded altogether from an albums line-up in order to meet the mediums time constraints.
Invented in the early 60s by William Powell Lear, the man behind the Learjet, the 8-Track wasn’t anything more than a modification of existing shell-encased continuous-loop audiotape systems. In retrospect, Lear’s biggest accomplishment was marketing the 8-Track to the automotive industry: In 1966, it was offered as an in-dash option on all Fords; Chrysler and GM followed suit in 1967.
But by the late 70s, the compact cassette had become a viable alternative to the 8-Track. The big record companies stopped making 8-Tracks in 1983. With the exception of a few truck stops that sell country and western 8-Tracks still produced by Nashville, the format has been relegated to thrift stores, garage sales and landfills.
But while 8-Tracks in the 90s might be, as Dallas collector James “Big Bucks” Burnett calls them “the orphans of musical formats,” many people today are rushing to adopt this problem child, especially indie-rock musicians, some of whom issue new releases on the now-kitschy cartridges. In Baltimore, our own Estrojet just put out an album on 8-Track, and You Say When Records plans to offer an up-coming local-bands competition on the format this summer.
| The Crazy Eight The 8-Track Hall of Fame Though 8-Track Mind editor Russ Forster steadfastly maintains that 8-Tracks have no value, there are collectors who consider the following tapes valuable and noteworthy: 1.Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed. Reeds rcord-contract-beaking excersise in dissonant feedback seems well-suited for the endless-loop format of the 8-Track. 2.Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols. Mainly because someone bought a copy for $100. The next day, in protest, another collector sold a copy for one cent. 3.Cloud Nine by George Harrison. It’s the last Beatle-related product issued on 8-Track - a copy recently sold for $150. 4.Berlin by Lou Reed. The 8-Track version of this album contains incidental music not found on any other format, linking the opener “Berlin” with the next track, “Lady Day”. 5.Animals by Pink Floyd. Unlike the vinyl/CD/Cassette tape releases, which start with “Pigs on the Wing 1” and end with “Pigs on the Wing 2”, the 8-Track puts both parts together, bridged by an extra guitar solo not available in any other format. 6.Electric Light Orchestra. the 8-Track features an anonymous photo of another band! 7.Frank Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim. Extremely rare aborted second collaboration between Ol’ Blue Eyes and the legendary Brazilian composer/guitarist which never made it to test pressings on vinyl. The owner of one copy told the music-collector magazine Goldmine that he wouldn’t part with it for under $5,000. 8.The Yardbirds With Jimmy Page. The 8-Track includes a version of “Dazed and Confused” entitled “I’m Confused.” |
Beyond the Kitsch appeal, Forster claims the 90s 8-Track nostalgia has been motivated by a combination of economics and “consumer disobedience” to marketers who phase out vinyl to sell compact discs and then phase out compact discs to sell DAT or DCC or whatever’s designated as The Next Big Format. “When it started , it was basically a core group of people who were artists and Renaissance people, but who also were quite poor,” he says. “There was definite tie-in with thrift stores and being able to amass a library of music on an extremely tight budget.
It certainly worked for Forster, who’s saved enough pennies to finance his $25,000 film entirely on his own. Unfortunately, Forster sees a new generation of collectors who objectify the 8-Track as a valuable commodity rather than a symbolic pursuit of non-conformity. (In the film, Burnett reports selling a copy of Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols for $100.) “8-Tracks have no monetary value,’ Forster insists, and that’s why he and some other enthusiasts encourage swap meets where trades are the rule and no 8-Track can be sold for more than 50 cents.
Forster himself came to embrace 8-Tracks when he took over 8-Track Mind from founder Gordon Van Gelder. Though his ‘zine includes articles about the history, technology and repair of 8-Tracks, it’s the letters column that gives 8-TM it’s vitality, brimming with zealous testimonials and amusing anecdotes of the very much alive fans of an otherwise dead format. It’s that grass-roots enthusiasm- not just the “ostensible topic” of 8-Tracks- that inspired Forster to embark on his 16mm film odyssey in March of 1994.
Forster traveled in a loop around the United States, starting in his hometown of Chicago, heading west to Seattle and Portland, continuing down through Nevada and California, and swinging through Dallas and New Orleans before winding up the East Coast and toward his current home in Detroit. Last year, he again took to the road, this time with a finished product. He traveled more than 13,000 miles to screen So Wrong, They’re Right in more than 30 cities, along the way taking Best Feature-Length Documentary honors at the 1995 Chicago Underground Film Festival.
Like the music format it “ostensibly” documents, the film itself is kind of clunky (much hand-held cinematography) and certainly not flawless. The predominantly instrumental soundtrack, for example, surprisingly contains no 8-Track noise other than the occasional doctored ka-chunk. Mostly original music from the various Chicago-area bands Renaissance man Forster has been in over the past 13 years - it simulates the 8-Track experience by continually pumping out an endless “loop” of background tunes, but there are times the viewer feels a little disconnected. When someone onscreen is talking about some quirk of 8-Tracks, you want to hear what they’re talking about. Instead, you hear lounge music.
Forster explains that he didn’t want to get sued for using artist songs without permission (and, on such a low budget, he couldn’t afford to buy the rights), plus he wanted the films soundtrack to be very generic and “just fill up space in the background” so it didn’t detract from the interviews.
Many of the interviewees in So Wrong, They’re Right seem not to so much espouse Forsters oft-quoted “disobedience” to “being told what to consume” but rather come off as name-dropping pseudohipsters. For example, viewers have to suffer though boheme Jean Erhardt reading excerpts of self-indulgent gibberish from her (not surprisingly ) unpublished novel Kippo, supposedly included here because it was written while listening to 8-Tracks.
But, thankfully, there are more than enough lucid moments from other collectors to make up for the self-congratulating kitschy-kudos of the nouveau 8-Track lifestylers. Chicagoan Jeff Economy makes a convincing point about the ephemeral nature of the death-wish 8-Track, which seems to fade every time you play it; “You never know if this is the last time I’ll hear it,” he reflects “so you start transferring the music to memory so you can lay that loop over in your head.” Another Chicagoan, C.G.Colson, relates how 8-Tracks can help you score chicks, reminiscing about a girl who, initially reluctant to get in his car, changed her tune when she saw the dash cluttered with cartridges. She figured she could trust a guy who was so open about such an uncool hobby.
The members of Gumball are shown discussing their mountain of uncoolness: a virtual landfill of 8-Tracks, 25,000 in all, purchased from a warehouse in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Gumball’s big score is a story unto itself and has been previously documented by Chip Rowe in the Washington City Paper and in Chip’s Fanzine Chips Closet Cleaner. Suffice it to say, the boys have a Bermuda Triangle of 8-Tracks so plentiful they don’t even know exactly what they own. While their collection includes such prizes as Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (the Holy Grail of Cartridges - see “The Crazy Eight,” above), it’s the grade-B stuff that fascinates them, and they have it by the truckload: soundalike bands such as Rock Revival and the Decibels, corny gospel, and , at last count, 103 copies of The Andrea True Connection Album. (Andrea was an unremarkable porno actress turned unremarkable disco singer - remember “More, More, More”?)
Forster will be in town June 2 at a one-night-only screening of his film at the Mansion Theater; he’ll stick around to answer questions and sell merchandise afterward. Then he’s off on another leg of his seemingly endless film - tour loop.
“So far, it’s been absolutely exasperating and utterly exciting...meeting so many people it makes my head spin,” he says. “Hopefully, a nation of skeptics will feel the same when watching the film companion to my magazine.” But as he cautions at the end of So Wrong, They’re Right, the 8-Track lifestyle is not for everyone - its for the nonconformists who are sick of being told what to hear and how to hear it. “So what if the tape unravels and grinds to a cacophonous halt in the player?” he asks. “I’d rather feel pain than feel numb.”
8-Track Mind is available for $8 for a one year subscription and So Wrong, They’re Right is available for $25 from 8-TM Publications, P.O.Box 90, East Detroit, MI 48021-0090.
Source: City Paper May 1996
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Music
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GoofFellas
The Gospel According to Telephone Pranksters
By Tom Warner
Several years ago, some bored young girls making prank phone calls came across my number, and apparently liking my answering machine message (at the time it featured the Trammps singing “Disoc Inferno”), became repeat offenders. Every night, I would come home, see the flashing red light on the answering and hit the play button to hear the latest installment form the giggling pre-pubescents I christened the Mystery Girls. Obviously trying to get me in trouble with my wife, the girls always pretended to by my mistresses (“Where were you last night? I was so cold lying in bed without you” and “Haven’t you left your wife yet?”), but far from being annoyed, my wife and I were greatly amused, and actually looked forward to their calls (tells you something about our exciting lives, doesn’t it?).
Part of our fascination was with the girl’s sexual naiveté’ (when one says “You have the sexiest you-know-what in town,” we seriously doubted if she even knew what a “you-know-what” was), but mainly we enjoyed those calls because they broke up the monotony of our answering machine status quo, characterized by all those mundane, functional messages from doctor’s offices, credit card companies, charities, and dreaded telemarketers.
It’s been years now since the Mystery Girls called, and I miss them. I suspect they have blossomed into young adult phone callers who now use the blower for more productive pursuits such as gossip and boy talk. That’s a shame, but according to prank experts, perhaps inevitable. “Unfortunately, pranks are usually identified with - and limited to - preadult stages of development,” observe V.Vale and Andrea Juno in their RE/SEARCH #11: Pranks! “The role model of the adult prankster is a scarce archetype indeed.”
Role models for adult phone pranksters are rarer still, but they’re out there, and when they surface Their antics are even more memorable because they’re so unexpected. (Who can forget the shock generated earlier this year during Ross Perot’s appearance on NBC’s Today show when a viewer identified as “Bob of Bowie” called in to ask the Texas billionaire if he had ever experienced a “Vulcan mind-meld with [radio personality] Howard Stern’s penis”?) What follows are reviews of three prank-phone-call collections that, thanks to the civic-minded foresight of the anonymous auteurs who recorded them for posterity, are currently available for your listening pleasure.
Billed as a “Documentary CD”, Tube Bar Deluxe (Teen Beat) celebrates the power and the glory of the prank phone call, presenting two actual recordings that have achieved cult status in prank folklore: The “Tube Bar” (or “Red”) tape and highlights from the career of the Screamer, a Washington DC based talk-show saboteur. For filler, Tean Beat’s added Peter Boyle’s liberal, hippie, race-bashing diatribe from John Avildsen’s 1970 film, Joe (“forty-two percent of all liberals are queer; that’s a fact - the Wallace people took a poll”), and a Sassy magazine readers dying-to-be-hip audio letter to the editors of the pop-culture fanzine Teenage Gang Debs (the best thing I can say about this is that she taped over a Sonny and Chers Greatest Hits to record it).
Fans of the Simpsons may not know it, but when Bart calls Moe and tricks the sullen bartender into calling out such ridiculous names as I.P.Freely or Jacques Strap, he’s reenacting a G-Rated version of real-life events that took place in Jersey City, New Jersey sometime in the late 70s. There a group of anonymous ball busters turned the telephone into an instrument of torture for Louis “Red” Deutsch, feisty owner and barkeep of the Tube Bar, a power-drinkers joint (no food, no women and nothing but hard liquor dispensed at the bar) named for its proximity to the commuter train tunnel.
Like Bart, the callers ask Red to call out the type of names every self-respecting 12-year-old boy knows by heart - Mike Hunt, Hugh Douche, Al Koholic, Phil DeGrave, Stu Pit - some so obviously bogus (Al Breaky-ernek, Hal Ja-like-a-kik) that you have to wonder if Red suffered oxygen deprivation during the first trimester. And considering that the Tube Bar didn’t serve food, I’d love to know what the regulars thought when Red was duped into shouting out ‘Pepe Roni”, “Bill Loney”, “Sal Lami”’, “and “ Cole Cutz.”
It takes Red awhile to figure it all out, bur once he does, he proves that he is every bit as tough as he is dense, unleashing a stream of obscenities that would make 2 Live Crew blush. Trademark Redisms include “Ya Yellow Rat Bastard,” “I’ll cut yer belly open and show you all the black stuff you got in there,” and his famous threat of puttin “two zigs on your both your cheeks,” the latter referring to the Mob’s tradition of slashing someone’s face with a disfiguring zigzag pattern to mark the victim for life as a squealer. Through it all, you have to love Red’s raspy voice (which sounds like he gargles with broken glass) and his combative spirit. He gets wound up so tightly you can almost hear the veins in his head throbbing and see his eyes popping out of their sockets.
Some Red aficionados with and ear for detail have determined - by tracing a football score heard in the background - that the tape was recorded in 1978. Since Red died in 1983 at the age of 93, that would make him 88 at the time of these calls! It’s a real wonder the man didn’t have a heart attack. Especially when in the tape’s cruelest (and most hilarious) moment, one of his tormenters sends him through the ceiling with this call : “Yeah, I just want to tell ya that we dug yer mudder up and fucked her, her skeleton.” A swell bunch of guys.
It’s a good thing Red didn’t have caller ID, because I don’t think there would be any doubt there would be blood on the Tube tracks had Red actually met his tormentors. In fact, legend has it that Red once had to be talked out of shooting a guy who came into the bar claiming to be an anonymous caller. (Film Threat magazine editor Christian Gore was so fascinated by this imagined confrontation that he made a film about it, Red; see sidebar.)
The amazing thing to me is that nine years after Red’s death, none of the perpetrators has stepped forward to take credit for the Tube Bar tape. Could it be that these guys are afraid of Red reaching from the grave to administer two zigs to their faces! I’d like to think so, because, like Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan, Red has taken on that bigger-than-life aspect of an American folk hero.
| Red All Over For $10, interested parties can join the Official Red Fan Club (Milk-It-To-Death Productions, 6520 Selma Ave., Suite 232, Hollywood, CA 90028) and get the complete unedited Red Tape, including calls for Ben Dover, Bob Wire and Phil Latio and an unsuccessful attempt to ask for Phil’s lady freind Connie Lingus - the only reason the slow-witted Red doesn’t fall for this one is because the Tube Bar was strictly stag - plus Charlie Benentes sample-heavy music track “Red Jam”. You’ll also receive a complete transcript of the tape painstakingly compiled by Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian; The Red Newsletter; membership card; free prank tapes; and order form for Red T-shirts. If you’re truly obsessed, send $21.95 to the same folks to see Film Threat Editor Christian Gore’s Red Video (1991, 35 minutes, b&w), Starring Laurence Tierney as Red. Physically, Tierney’s Red is faithful to the popular conception of the barkeep as a big, bald, undershirt-clad Fred Merts clone. This was the look Drew Friedman created for Red in his 1989 RAW Magazine strip (volume two, number one). Friedmans’s “official” Tube Bar T-Shirt (Shown In Picture) is available for $15 from Arquest Unlimited, (P.O.Box 643, Hillsdalw, MI 49242, or call 1-800-253-0428). Red’s legacy also lives on in popular song, Listen for Red Samples onAnthrax “I’m The Man, 91” Remix (Coproduced by Charlie “Red Jam” Benante ) from Attack Of The Killer B’s (Island) and hear Red answering the phone at the beginning of Dramarama’s “Haven’t Got A Clue” From their Vinyl (Chameleon). |
Compared to the Tube Bar callers, the exploits of the chameleon-like Screamer seem down right civil, but then he had to be a lot more crafty to get around the seven second delay of talk radio. Knowing that he can be cut off at any second without his scam getting on the air, the Screamer learned the fine art of the set up.
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