Houston We Have Achieved Quadraphony!
Today at the 8-track museum we heard quadraphony for the first time. I scored a Lafayette SQR-40 for 5 bucks + shipping on ebay and it works. Sometimes ebay can be pretty groovy. I am so overwhelmed. I have a pretty good quad collection, 300+, and I have never heard them. Guess I know what I'll be doing tomorrow.

Dazed and Pleased in Beantown

And Finally the Ebay 8-Tracks Arrived
I was waiting for two lots of jazz and soul.

The jazz lot had 2 Mingus albums and a Coltrane. As well as 5 Cannonball Adderleys and 3 Ramsey Lewis', but my Mongo Santamaria Soul Bag is missing from the lot, mysteriously replaced by an extra Temptations album and a Black Sabbath Bootleg. A mistake or a deceitful seller? I'll be emailing him now, to see what he says. I like the Temptations, but I really wanted Mongo.

The soul lot had lots of doubles in it, not mentioned in the description, although I suspected as much. They are almost all sealed though.

Whew. Whatta day! Whatta Happy New Year!

My New Year's 8-Track Resolutions


Got this idea from Good WIll Hunting.

1. Fix Broken Tapes.

2. Don't Spend too much Money on ebay!

3. Get a scanner.

4. Finally hear my Quads.

5. Repair Splices Before Playing the Tapes.

6. Sell stuff on ebay to pay for this habit.

7. Trade with other trackers to save money.

8. Get some radio station carts and a cart player.

9. List my whole collection online in an spreadsheet.

10. Make use of my How to Belly Dance tapes.

My First SQ Records
Today I went to Waltham Records and got a few albums. I found 2 SQ albums for $3. They are both Barbra Streisand. The Funny Girl soundtrack with Omar Sharif and Live Concert at the Forum. My first SQs and maybe I can hear them later on my new quad player! If this works, it should get me over the depressing jumble of tape which is my quad Santana Welcome album.

Ebay Items of Extreme Coolness


The Disco-Tek: a floor model 8-track and record combo with a disco ball the spins lights on the floor while it plays!

Bigfoot and UFOs 8-track!

Whipped Cream and Other Delights

One of the new* booksellers, Kari Patch, said they had a shrine to this album in her house. I think it has been there through several generations of roommates, so it doesn't really belong to anyone currently living there. Kari brought me one of the 8-tracks! It is in near mint condition which is great, 'cause my old one is a shambles. Here's to good old Herb! At Berklee College of Music which I live near, they have a Herb Alpert Music Library. Maybe he went there?


*I get to call them all new because I've been there 17 years.

A Red Letter 8-Track Day
So many 8-track happenings yesterday and today, I need to write about 10 blogs to cover them all.
First I won a Lafayette SQR-40 4-channel 8-track stereo/quadraphonic receiver on ebay for only $5.00 plus shipping because it was missed filed and poorly described. The seller's lack of knowledge is my benefit this time. Nowhere was the word quad or quadraphonic used in the title or description and it was listed under cassettes!
Muah-Ha-Ha! Also the picture was poor, so it didn't look too tempting. It powers up. Let's hope it works. I gotta figure out how to hook it up. Now I don't even want to go out for New Year's Eve.

Thrift Stores Hereabouts
We never get yard sales this time of year. I live in downtown Boston anyway, so there are never many, but I take the subway or bus to the burbs and go to them, in season. There are 2 Salvation Armies and 3 Goodwills that I visit fairly often. The one nearest my house is the main Goodwill branch for the area. Most of them rarely have any tapes at all. The out-of -the-way thrift stores fair better. When they do have them they're usually a 99c each. I was lucky a few weeks ago to score some for 50c. My best finds often come from the trash pickers who sell used books to me at my job. If they find 8-tracks they bring them to me. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's great. Luckily I started collecting in '93, when the thrift stores weren't quite so dried up, and expensive. And my ex-girlfriend had a truck, so we could go further afield looking for things. So now I have thousands of carts so it's okay if I find new ones more slowly.

I do buy stuff on ebay. Usually I buy lots, so I get a pretty good deal, but sometimes I spend too much on a tape. . It isn't as rewarding as getting a good deal. I paid twenty-something for a Velvet Underground 8-track last year...I guess I'm glad I did it, because I still haven't found any cheap ones and it's been 10 years of collecting, but I feel sorta ripped off. Someday I'll find a dupe of it cheap and recoup my losses selling it for more than that even.

I love trading tapes with other collectors best, because it's not participating in the whole American consumer culture, like shopping only at thrift stores and used places. Rambling 8-track ruminations.

My Ilk
It's Sunday and I've spent almost all day reading about people like me. I have been rereading my back issues of 8-track Mind and reading The Good Will Hunting section of The 8-Track Landfill.

This guy Gregg, in Washington state, really reminds me of myself. Sometimes I think how great it would be to have a friend close by who understood how great 8-tracks are, but who would want the competition? The way things stand, nearly every 8-track in New England finds its way to me.

He said in one entry, that he'd like to live in a town that time had forgotten where they still had 8-tracks. He would call it New Lear. I'd like to add that the next town over should be Muntzville and there should be an ongoing feud about who gets credit for the 8-track. It would really heat up around the time of the Thanksgiving high school football game between the Muntzville Pirates and the New Lear Jets.

The Unglamorous 8-Track Lesbian
Yup, that's me, and my cat, Snoopy.

In the background you can see a very small portion of my tie collection.

I am 38. My father went with cassettes when I was a kid, but I remember well walking around Strawberries (new record store) and seeing all the 8-tracks behind the plexiglass. You had to reach through the holes and drop what you wanted onto a conveyor belt that carried it to the registers. They all had huge plastic pieces attached to 'em so they wouldn't fit through the holes.

In about '92 or '93 I bought a new turntable at a yard sale which happened to have an 8-track player. It was a Kingspoint with a round radio dial that lights up orange. So, already a thrift store junkie, I figured I'd pick up a few carts. The first two I found were Hotel California and Donna Summer - On the Radio. The rest is history. I kept getting more and loved them and couldn't stop. I buy duplicates too, if the price is right.