History's Dumpster = GLORIOUS trash! Kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk and oddities of yesterday and today. Saved from the landfill of time...
34 years ago tonight in Chicago, Radio DJ Steve Dahl of Chicago rock
station WLUP put a glorious end to the disco music craze of the '70s
called "Disco Demolition Night" when he and another DJ came up with the
idea of the Disco Demolition at Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979. Dahl,
who was never a fan of disco had been fired from rock station WDAI-FM
94.7 the previous Christmas Eve when that station changed it's format to
All Disco.
That was the last straw. This meant war.
Dahl was hired by WLUP almost immediately and the anti-disco backlash had officially begun.
Fans
who brought a disco
record to the ballpark this night 34 years ago were admitted for 98
cents, a number which closely matched WLUP’s 97.9 MHz dial position. The
event took place at Comiskey
Park between games of a White Sox/Tigers double-header. Early fears of
embarrassingly low attendance were squashed when 90,000 disco-haters
converged onto a stadium that held 52,000.
After the Sox lost the first
game 4-1, during which time the increasingly rowdy fans got drunk and crazy, the real fun began. Steve Dahl wore a combat helmet and rode
around the ballpark in a Jeep. In center field a giant box was packed
full of disco LPs and blown up which left a hole in the playing
surface. People who didn’t get their Village People, KC & The
Sunshine Band and Sister Sledge records in the box used them as
frisbees and began flinging them through the air. Thousands of fans
then swarmed the field, lighting fires and starting small riots. The
bases were stolen, the batting cage was destroyed and chaos ruled.
Chicago police in riot gear finally cleared the field which was so
badly damaged that the second game could not be played. It was later
determined that the White Sox would have to forfeit the game to the
Tigers because they failed to provide acceptable playing
conditions.......
After the Disco Demolition Night promotion, disco began to lose its popularity. Rapidly.
Steve
Dahl on the other hand still worked anti-disco sentiment, even
producing a parody record of Rod Stewart's "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" (one
of the first ever "parody" type records which "Weird" Al Yankovic would later
become famous for) called "Do Ya Think I'm Disco". He recorded it as a
single on the independent Ovation Records label (one of the smaller
national indie labels of the time that was based in Chicago.)
As
for disco, it had completely left the pop charts by fall of 1980. It
was replaced by an even more tedious form of music called "adult
contemporary" and acts like Barbara Streisand (one of the very few acts
to have disco hits and survive the backlash) and Neil Diamond began
filling the airwaves along with the arena rock bands (Foreigner,
Journey, Rush, Loverboy, etc, etc.)
However, disco never REALLY
died. It went back underground to the gay dance clubs and R&B charts
where it started for most of the early '80s and resurfaced as pop with
the Madonna craze of the mid-'80s. It exists today as a specialty genre
simply called "dance music". A brief nostalgic revival in the '90s of
'70s disco brought a lot of the older music back into the
mainstream......
These
great questions and answers are from the days when ' Hollywood Squares'
game show responses were spontaneous, not scripted, as they are now.
Peter Marshall was the host asking the questions, of course...
Q.
Paul, what is a good reason for pounding meat? A. Paul Lynde: Loneliness!
(The audience laughed so long and so hard it took up almost 15 minutes
of the show!)
Q. Do female frogs croak? A. Paul Lynde: If you hold their little heads under water long enough.
Q.
If you're going to make a parachute jump, at least how high should you
be? A. Charley Weaver: Three days of steady drinking should do it...
Q. True or False, a pea can last as long as 5,000 years. A. George Gobel: Boy, it sure seems that way sometimes.
Q.
You've been having trouble going to sleep. Are you probably a man or a
woman? A. Don Knotts: That's what's been keeping me awake.
Q.
According to Cosmopolitan, if you meet a stranger at a party and you
think that he is attractive, is it okay to come out and ask him if he's
married? A. Rose Marie: No wait until morning.
Q. Which of your five senses tends to diminish as you get older? A. Charley Weaver: My sense of decency.
Q.
In Hawaiian, does it take more than three words to say 'I Love You'? A.
Vincent Price: No, you can say it with a pineapple and a twenty.
Q.
What are 'Do It,' 'I Can Help,' and 'I Can't Get Enough'? A.
George Gobel: I don't know, but it's coming from the next apartment.
Q.
As you grow older, do you tend to gesture more or less with your hands
while talking? A. Rose Marie: You ask me one more growing old
question Peter, and I'll give you a gesture you'll never forget.
Q. Paul, why do Hell's Angels wear leather? A. Paul Lynde: Because chiffon wrinkles too easily.
Q.
Charley, you've just decided to grow strawberries. Are you going to
get any during the first year? A. Charley Weaver: Of course not,
I'm too busy growing strawberries.
Q. In bowling, what's a perfect score? A. Rose Marie: Ralph, the pin boy.
Q.
It is considered in bad taste to discuss two subjects at nudist camps.
One is politics, what is the other? A. Paul Lynde: Tape measures..
Q..
During a tornado, are you safer in the bedroom or in the closet? A.
Rose Marie: Unfortunately Peter, I'm always safe in the bedroom.
Q. Can boys join the Camp Fire Girls? A. Marty Allen: Only after lights out.
Q.
When you pat a dog on its head he will wag his tail. What will a goose
do? A. Paul Lynde: Make him bark?
Q.
If you were pregnant for two years, what would you give birth to? A.
Paul Lynde: Whatever it is, it would never be afraid of the dark.
Q.
According to Ann Landers, is there anything wrong with getting into the
habit of kissing a lot of people? A. Charley Weaver: It got me out of the army.
Q.
It is the most abused and neglected part of your body, what is it? A.
Paul Lynde: Mine may be abused, but it certainly isn't neglected.
Q.
Back in the old days, when Great Grandpa put horseradish on his head,
what was he trying to do? A. George Gobel: Get it in his mouth.
Q.
Who stays pregnant for a longer period of time, your wife or your
elephant? A. Paul Lynde: Who told you about my elephant?
Q. When a couple have a baby, who is responsible for its sex? A. Charley Weaver: I'll lend him the car, the rest is up to him.
Q.
Jackie Gleason recently revealed that he firmly believes in them and
has actually seen them on at least two occasions. What are they? A. Charley Weaver: His feet.
Q.
According to Ann Landers, what are two things you should never do in
bed? A. Paul Lynde: Point and laugh.
They were fun......Too much fun....If you accidentally inhaled any of this fumy crap, prepare for an INCREDIBLE evening of light-headedness, dizziness, occasional hallucinations and sometimes nausea. They were pulled when it was found out why kids were acting weird after playing with this stuff. Not that kids were "normal" doing anything else particularly.....
The Spirograph was a drawing kit that launched a million abstract artist careers.....
In the late '80s, "Cajun flavoured" anything was a big seller......
I'm sorry, but "Nesquik" is a STUPID rebranding of this otherwise awesome mix.....
The Sharp QT-50 (1985) was a mini-portable in some pretty far out colours.......
Undisputedly the worst shaped popsicle EVER........
Sound familiar? This button came out when Reagan's economic policies were becoming apparent by the early '80s....
.....and something more recent. I don't know WHO came up with these super creepy looking mascots for the 2012 Olympics, but they have been known for giving some little kids nightmares (LITTLE KIDS?? They give ME nightmares!)
The missing piece here is probably STILL under somebody's couch or bed somewhere.......
Perfection and Superfection were games made by Lakeside in the '70s
Perfection was a game where you put the shaped game pieces into their matching slots on the game board before a one minute timer expires and the board ejects everything. If you can complete it, you can stop the timer. If you couldn't, you were left picking up game pieces everywhere for 10 minutes.
Superfection had a two minute timer and puzzle piece blocks..
Somehow, I could never complete either of them before timer blew everything up.
How many of you remember the Texas Instruments Little Professor? I had one of these.
It was an elementary level math game that displayed basic math problems. What made it so popular was electronic computing was a brand new thing in the '70s. Kids actually looked forward to doing math with this!
Before
we had all these virtually disposable MP3 players with little tiny
"earbuds", before CD players, even before cassette tapes, we had 8-Track
tapes.
8-Track tapes were actually an extension of the earlier and not-quite-so-popular 4-Track tape.
The
4-Track tape, like it's successor, was originally made and designed for
one thing: Cars. Home and portable players actually didn't come until a
few years later.
However 4-Track tapes were different
in two very big ways, it was 4 tracks on 2 programs, the rubber "pinch
wheel" was a part of the player and not inside the tapes themselves.
The 8-Track tape (usually) starts instantly with a good shove, the 4-Track slowly grinded up to speed.
But
without a pinch roller and a gaping hole in the bottom of the
cartridge, dirt, dust, cigarette ashes, careless fingers and other ick
gets in there, adding grinding friction.....
So the 4-Track was pretty doomed from the start.
However 4
Track tapes DID live on - in the radio industry, they were known as
"carts" and they were used widely in radio stations from the '60s until
digital automation became the norm in the late '90s. They were exactly
the same as 4-Tracks, only difference were the playing times were much
shorter (one tape for each song, commercial, jingle-station ID, etc.)
They were actually 2-Track, but they played at 7 1/2 IPS (inches-per-second), twice the speed of a 4 or 8-Track tape. And yes, sometimes dirt, dust, cigarette ashes, careless
fingers and other ick got in them too. Ask any former radio "disc" jockey....
The 8-Tracks were an improvement over the 4-Tracks
because they were separated into four programs (on smaller tracks),
doubling the amount of music on a tape. You could put an entire double
album on one 8-Track and it could play up to 90 minutes. plus the
cartridge was better sealed (though hardly invincible either.) In fact,
there were even adapters you could buy that would let you play 4-Track
tapes in an 8-Track machine.
And all was well and fun. For a while.....
8-Track players became standard equipment in many cars. Listen to the tape above here:
And at the time, they were also cheap to make and sell.
Counterfeit tapes like these actually accounted for nearly 1/3rd of the total sales of 8-Track tapes from 1966-1975......
Bootleggers and counterfeiters loved 8-tracks. They
could record albums onto blank 8-tracks, slap a preprinted label on
them, and sell the forgeries at flea markets and truckstops for half
the cost of the original authorized product.
Naturally, that didn’t sit well with many record companies and artists – including rock 'n roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis.
As
the story goes - this was actually printed on many stock inner sleeves
of Phonogram labeled vinyl record albums (Phonogram owned the Mercury,
Phillips, Fontana and Smash! labeled record albums in the early '70s) as
an early anti-piracy warning. It goes along the lines of this. While
Jerry Lee Lewis was getting a fill-up at a gas station, he noticed a
rack of 8-Track tapes for display. Upon further examination, he
discovered that the tapes contained his latest music – but they
obviously didn’t come from his record company (Mercury, at that time.)
“Where did these tapes come from?” he asked the gas station attendant.
“Some guy brings ‘em here each week.”
“Oh he does, does he?” With that, Lewis grabbed a tire iron and smashed the rack and bootleg 8-tracks to pieces.
The attendant freaked out, “What the hell am I going to tell the guy when he comes for his money on Monday?”
Lewis got back in his car. “Tell them the Killer was here,” he said, driving off.
(I
still wonder how the attendant tried to convince this distributor that
Jerry Lee Lewis HIMSELF actually showed up to do this.)
And some people even thought THESE were a good idea.....
Remember
those "perverts" who drove vans some parents tried to scare you about in
the '70s? They were thinking of guys who played THESE.....
But the 8-Track was plagued with problems from the
beginning. Because the tape on 4 & 8 Track tapes was in an endless
loop, rewinding an 8-Track tape was like putting toothpaste back inside a
tube. You could fast-forward, though not much faster than the actual
playback speed (you would also shorten the life of the tape by that much
more.) The tape heads of an 8-Track player would eventually get out of
alignment, resulting in "crosstalk" from the other tracks. Worst of
all, the recording companies would always fade out in the middle of a
song to jump to the next track.
It REALLY hurt if that was your FAVOURITE song.
And
blank 8-Track tapes were even more miserable. You had to radically time
every song in each program with a stopwatch for the length, meaning
your perfect mixtape will most likely be out of order, in order to use
up as much of the available tape as possible (which was always RARELY
achieved for me. I usually had anywhere from 2 -7 minutes of leftover
tape on each program.)
Stopwatches were NOT an option with the weird running time of a 76 minute 8-Track tape.....
With 8-Track tapes, you often suffered more for your music than the original artist did.
Cassettes, for all their hiss and low-fi then, were much easier to deal with.
I used to LOVE these Intermagnetics tape box sets with wall mountable and expandable, interlocking sides....
They were less bulky. And the players were getting
bigger (and smaller.) And they were getting BETTER. So began the 8-Track
tape's decline.
However, the 8-Track didn't go so quietly. New uses were attempted to salvage the 8-Track tape. Such as games.
If
you scroll immediately on the right side of the 2-XL Demo Cartridge
shown on this web site to the second cartridge, you will see the General
Information cartridge. This was the tape that was originally sent with
the 2-XL unit. I did not own many of the extra program tapes you will
also see here. And this is why this site is so exciting to me. I could
go on, but even yet MORE undiscovered nostalgia awaits here........
Here's another one, Milton Bradley's OMNI (1980)
But the writing was already on the wall. The 8-Track
was NOT coming back. No way, no how. 8-Track tape selections were
already dwindling as the cassette selections got larger. By late 1983,
they had completely vanished in all my local retail outlets.
Even the 8-Track machines themselves could get a clunky, noisy, low output cassette upgrade with these...
Made by
Kraco and Sparkomatic, the purveyors of super cheap car stereos that
complimented your very first 2nd/3rd hand Pinto/Gremilin/Pacer/Vega or
your parent's old hand-me-down station wagon. In high school, you ALWAYS
knew who the kids with the Kracos/Sparkomatics were.....
The last "new" pre-recorded retail 8-Track tape I remember seeing was Iron Maiden's The Number Of The Beast
(1982) in the $2.98 "budget" tape bin at Fred Meyer Music Market in
Lynnwood, WA. Ironically, the album was still popular and a HUGE seller
on vinyl and cassette but sold for $7.98 in those formats at that same
time, making this one 8-Track a SUPER steal - if you still had an
8-Track tape player. Which explained why this one was here at this price
I guess. I'm still kicking myself for not picking it up while I had the
chance.
The devil's 8-Track
However, both Radio Shack and Montgomery Ward
catalogs still sold 8-track players. Ward's would stop selling them by
1986. However, in the dimly lit back corners of any Radio Shack, you
could still find blank 8-Track tapes and even a player or two well into
1990.
If you still wanted pre-recorded music however,
Columbia House and The RCA Music Clubs still released new music on
8-Tracks until 1988, albeit a dwindling selection over time. The last
8-Track tape of NEW music then, was the Cocktail movie soundtrack.....
Did ANYONE even notice this?
And perhaps the very last one PERIOD was Dire Straits' 1988 compilation Money For Nothing, released in October, 1988......
But by 1988, it was pretty much Nothing For Money....
You'd think that would be it. The end. Get over it Grandpa. But the story is FAR from over.
Thanks
to the internet, it became apparent there were still little groups of
people so dedicated to the 8-Track tape, they formed a small cult
fanbase and rounded out the wild history of this most bizarre of all
recorded mediums.
And
people who had to hide their own secret love for this medium finally
began coming out in a mass that would impress Queer Nation. And
suddenly, the 8-Track tape went from "EWW!" to "AWESOME, like that's so retro!"
Grunge rock pioneers The Melvins issued an 8-Track tape of a live album in 2000.....
But then
again, you gotta have a soft spot for The Melvins. They're so outside of
the box of everyone else in rock music, they once tried to jump start
Leif Garrett's career by recording his lead vocals on their cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit". for their 2000 album The Crybaby
...and even Cheap Trick released their 2009 album The Latest on 8-Track tape
And the today's generation is even bringing new life into these things. Check THIS out!
In
fact, it's not unusual at all to find dead audio formats getting a new
reboot with today's kids, thanks to the internet and a little
experimentation. Vinyl sales are still growing and even the cassette is
making a comeback.....
Here's a MUST see DVD, So Wrong, They're Right: An 8-Track Loop Around The U.S. It follows and chronicles the 8-Track underground.....
