Right before this plague hit I was scheduled for a new rug and had an appointment for the carpet men to install a rug that was a remnant from a retirement home that looks like a black version of the wall paper of Blanche Devereaux’s from The Golden Girls bedroom. After I cleared out the living room of the phonograph and 8 track player everything got pushed back 2 months and standing, so now I’m living in an empty sitting room and not sure if I’m ready to drag everything of the boxes just so I’ll have to go through the packing drill in a month, so this is my current sound system.

Long time no blog, but I figure no one wants to hear about me finding lots of country and classical tapes or machines that are stuck on program 4 and not worth a second glance which is too bad since it was a nice Sears portable, that being said today I found a beautiful low-fi SoundDesign player that brings back memories of one of those all in one TV/phonograph/radio consoles that use to be placed predominately in most of those gracious living homes in the mid 1970's. This baby plays cassettes 8 tracks and the radio and with the matching speakers will accent any mid century abode.

Also this weekend I found one of those drugstore rotating comic book racks I grabbed for a c-note. It's a nice way to display bronze aged comics and there's no pharmacist yelling at my 11 year old self that this isn’t a library.

 

It's always nice to find a clean 8 track player with the paperwork still attched, this one is from Sears and has a cigarette lighter adapter, although now I hear cigarette lighters in cars are refered to as "power adapters" but my car is from 2000 so it's still relevent, and since the CD player stopped working last month I'm back in the sadle with 8 track tapes and looking for a way of coming to a quick stop without having the player fly under the seat. 
 

 

 It' nice to know that the term "shrinkflation" applied to 8 track tapes back in the day too as you can see in these sleeves. The next step was those tape companies that just gave up and sold tapes shrinkwrapped like it was game over.

I picked up this K-tel in store demo on ebay that was once played in the store on an 8 track player, I like it because it's a compilation that is made from 5 different compilation tapes, I wonder what mulitverse it came from?

It's been a while since I got a big score and with only 2 sales all week I bucked the odds and found one from a house that was vacated several years until the owner’s son came by to unloaded the contents. It was mostly garage items and furniture until I wandered into an anteroom filled with boxes and popped one open and found it filled with 8 tracks. The guy running the sale said I could have them all for $40 and I bought them sight unseen and am now the proud owner of 14 boxes of about a 60 40 ratio of reel to reel tapes and 8 track tapes, mostly of them are easy listening that I'll probably let go in lots but a few gems stood out like the soundtrack of Willy Wonka and The Planet of The Apes.
 

I've been downsizing a lot lately, not the fine stock but duplicates and triplicates of such tapes as The Carpenters Greatest Hits and most of Neil Diamond's tapes, I sold about 100 of them to someone in Washington DC so I'm expecting some politician to make a speech soon saying "This system is about as outdated as 8 track tapes" and dumping them on the floor. I hope so.

Not really 8 Tracky but a nice addition to the genre is this super cool psychedelic Light Organ, these were avalible in the 70's at Radio Shack and when you turn them on the lights would follow the songs of the music playing for a home version of Lasarium. https://www.tripsavvy.com/laserium-retro-light-and-music-show-in-van-nuys-1586952

I suppose it was a precursor to the days when I use to play CDs in the CD Rom part of the computer and turn on the screen saver but even that sound quaint today

 

Last week reminded me of the early days of this blog when on any given weekend I'd come home with a mother load of tapes and spend most of the week with 20 tapes to listen to. It started at a sale with mostly household and car items but in the back of the garage were 8 medium boxes that said "8 tracks" on them and after a little negotiating I got them for a song that separated on to the next track ($23 actually) for 386 tapes, the guy who ran the sale said the tapes were there when he moved in and I think that will happen if I move on out of this house too. Of course I had to wade through about 90 country tapes and many copies of Carly Simon's Anticipation but found a few gems too like a unusual compilation titled Wild Thing on a label called Lakeshore Music, a few Duran Duran tapes I didn't have and two players hidden in one of the larger boxes.