Not a great score but what made my day was for the first time in at least 8 years is Goodwill is carrying 8 track tapes (see the price tag). Will this be a new trend? Was this a freak accident? Only time will tell but if I get any more Bobby Sherman tapes I'm going to invest in a Bobby Sherman lunch box to store them.

Last week I got the 8 track score of the summer. Summer may have just gotten underway but I’m willing to wager the entire Emerson, Lake & Palmer on 8 track that it won’t be topped.  Here’s a portion of the 142 8 track tapes from 2 large boxes, and unlike the usual bland Readers Digest Hits of America this collection could power a small FM classic rock radio station. Lots of Stones, Kinks, Elvis Costello, Beatles, some k-tel and even a few with the fun art boxes that rarely survive, I’ve already gone through a half a roll of sensing foil getting them in shape.

More interesting is they were obtained from a person who has been following this blog for 12 years and after nearly 15 years of writing about these tapes he’s the first person I’ve met with a connection to it, sad huh?  I only hope that one day I end up like the woman who ran The Bloody Board Buffy the Vampire Slayer board who posted nearly 40,000 posts and was the only member of the group https://encyclopediadramatica.es/The_Bloody_Board until she was found out and vanished. If obsession needs a patron saint it’s Jamie Masters.

I’ll be putting an 8 track player in the tiki room but am trying to find one with a tropical look to it as not to clash, these worlds rarely collide but I may be able to make it work with the brown earth tones that are prevalent in  wood grain consoles, let’s see where this goes.

Were’ rolling on to yard sale season and this week it warmed my heart that even 40 years later you can still find a Panasonic Pump player in the wild. This one was sitting in a cardboard whiskey box for a few decades and works very well, and seeing that it’s road trip season I was fortunate enough to find a fun 8 track travel pack by Sears. Sears was a major stereo player in the 70s and didn’t skimp on 8 tracks most of them are without pretence and built like a tank. These accessories are 3 unused 80 min blank tapes and a head cleaner housed in a handsome faux leather case.

 

 

I added another coveted Monkees 8 track tape “Changes” to the collection, I have 6 and need 3 more to go, The Monkees, the Soundtrack of Head, and Present, who has them? I’m only counting the originals on Cologems label for now, once I get the set I’ll go for that 80’s tape with That Was Then This is Now they put out through the 80’s revival.

I like the Colegem label, most of the recordings are from records and TV and if you’re lucky you’ll find the tape in its original plastic tub albeit More of The Monkees sports a flatpack that is also nonconventional. Sadly I only have one tub so I don’t get to see the cover art and have to settle for the red label. Also what sets them apart is instead of using traditional pressure pads these babies use those tense metal inserts with felt on the tips I wish this was the standard since the felt is an easy fix and the sound on these is pretty constant.

Still waiting on the roof and every day is use the wet dry vac for 40 mins and dump out 15 gallons of carpet soaked water, how was your week?

Talk about retro, this week I found a box of tapes that the guy at the yard sale I could have for free. This kind of stuff use to happen all the time but I can’t remember the last time I got an assortment for nothing, and unlike most of the gift tapes you don’t look in the pressure pad there were a few good ones here- Ventures, Soul Train, Elvis, Mama Cass, The Soundtrack from Hair and Boots Randolph (no comment). If this is the tip off for spring and summer sales I’m excited.

 

Also the junque store is getting a new roof and is half done, the only problem is half done means the tar has been removed this week and now it’s like a spaghetti colander with the relentless Pacific Northwest rains and like it or not the carpet is getting a shampoo along with the tables and chairs and classic rock albums too. 

Christmas has always been known for irritating carols and standards, and if you work in retail I can understand your pain. I on the hand have come to learn to enjoy a song or two and like it that these songs have an expiration date on them and often wish other holidays had soundtracks to them. Other than old lang syne and the Monster Mash holidays are pretty music free.

 

But in order to feel your pain in bad Christmas music from the bowels of the garage are these 3 gems, Christmas Hits For Dancing, Disco Noel and Merry Christmas from the Brady Bunch. The first 2 are interchangeable and I would wager that they are performed by the same studio band with one label being a subsidy of the other, all you need is 30 secs of the first song to know what the every other one sound like, generic disco beats with a woman singing Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer. Only in the polyester 70’s could you imagine someone dancing like John Travolta under the tree to this on X-mas morning, I have a love hate relationship with that decade. The Brady Bunch is a TV family that sings like anyone’s family if they had a record deal. I only wish they got Alice to sing Jingle Bells with the Batman smells lyrics to make it interesting.

For those who only look at the journal it might be fun to go back to the original pages from 1999, the home page was changed in mid the 2000s but the links to the players and tapes are ancient, I was going to delete them but I like the history and since 8 tracks were obsolete back then they still have relevancy. I miss the old sites like, Angelfire or Geocities and my old midi file that took up all the bandwidth and took 20 mins to load on a 56k modem. I’m glad I have a few quaint gifs on them though. Part of me hates social media and simple webpage where you could launch one in seconds rather than the learning of FrontPage 98 and html to fine tune it. I wish there was a hoarder site that collected webpages before they were blogs pre 2000. https://gregg-n.tripod.com/

^{Summer is about done and this year I learned that even when you buy a tomato plant in spring with a few fruits on it you’ll get the same amount of tomatoes as one you grow from a 5 inch sapling. This week’s finds came from a guy whose garage was filled up with 45 rpm records which I usually like but they were 95% country. I’ve noticed country music is a lot like classical music in the sense that it’s everywhere and no one wants it, but if you did imagine how much fun it would be to collect, and how many scores you find. I’d update daily instead of occasionally. This guy also had a few of those slotted cases with 8 tracks in them and offered all of them to me for $5 or $.50 each, I didn’t need the country carts but I did want the Klowns with the art box and the groovy Sessions 70’s Gold and The Road To Ruin tape. All have been on heavy rotation this week.}

^{Also at another sale I saw a lamp that goes with the Sessions tape that I approached and the seller began shaming me, asking me why anyone would want such an ugly lamp. I told him it was perfect in my pad and since he made an effort to emasculate my taste I knew I wasn’t going to spend a lot and got it to my car for $5.00. It's wild}

 

It’s been pretty update free this summer. I’d like to say I’ve been having so much fun in the sun I completely forgot, but mostly it’s because I don’t want to bore anyone with all the country music tapes I left behind without any regret. When I think about it most classic rock music of any type is getting hard to find in 8 track or even Lp form, CDs aren’t so bad but they’ve never been my interest since they seem to scratch even if they’re left to sit in a jewel box for years. I wonder if you can put the “harder to scratch” Blue ray philosophy to them?

This week I hit an estate sale by a retired worker from a company called Hercules that use to make Polaris missiles and all kinds of fun aviation rockets that didn’t disappoint. The ad in the paper talked about trident missile books and according to the guy running it the Feds came flashing their badges to make sure it was on the level. I’ve never seen an estate sale raided and was intrigued.

Turns out he was a packrat from the 60s with all kinds of rocket toys, 1960s Playboy mags, and radios and with the dirt cheap prices, I filled up the car for 18 bucks. The best thing I score were these posters by David Klein from TWA with bold graphics ushering in the jet age back with it was upscale and sexy. Fast forward to today where sneakers and flip flops are the rule and everything is done the least expensive way possible.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Found a small collection of disco carts in a barn that was so dark I ended up thumbing through them with the light of my cell phone. Most disco is pretty terrible but it’s probably the only genre that all the music existed in 8 track tapes and died before it did. I’m hoping one day to find one of those 8 track players that have built in disco lights which are getting really hard to find. Three of them are compilations by sound-alike bands, my favorite is one by a group called Studio 78 which is fun because Studio 54 was an A list club with top acts and this is a tape of crappy covers by a band that is a takeoff of Studio 54. If I was an adult in 70s I wouldn’t be let into Studio 54 but would have to settle for Studio 78. This tape was made for me. The other tape is titled The World’s Greatest Disco Party Album which looks like a disco mix tape.

Finally one to get excited about, this is Boney M a fun tape that still holds out and even one of their songs made it to the Nintendo video game Just Dance, with the disco history song Rasputin, and for jollies they cover King of The Road and Heart of Gold and pull it off without getting cheesey.