Because I haven’t posted anything new for a couple of years now, I’m going to delete my other blog (The Lifelong Mixtape) soon. I don’t want to lose everything, though, so I’m going to re-post some of the entries here. First up: my reminiscences around David Bowie’s 1973 album Pin-Ups.

David Bowie – Pin-Ups
RCA APS1-0291 (8-track tape)
1973

One of the things that made December 1973 memorable for me was that my parents bought me a new stereo (as such) for Christmas. It was a Juliette AM/FM/8-track system with turntable that they got from the now-defunct JAFCO (which later became Best, before going out of business altogether). The AM/FM dial display was a wonderful green, and had a particularly soothing glow at night.

My old record player, with its detachable speakers, had been slowing down over time; by the summer of 1973, it was bad enough that music on AM radio actually sounded better. So this new stereo had been at the top of my Xmas wish list.

And it was a huge improvement. The records that I owned now sounded better than ever. Not only did they play at the proper speed, but the sound quality was light years beyond what I had been used to.

Plus I had a new format to contend with: 8-track tapes. I had often seen them in locked display cases whenever we went to Sears, Pay-N-Save, or Marketime (which later became Fred Meyer), but never had any reason to look at them beyond mere curiosity.

Now I was on a quest: To decide which album would be my first 8-track tape purchase.

But, as I quickly discovered, this quest would not be a simple one. The reason? Well, a basic limitation of the format was that the lengths of the four “programs” that constituted an 8-track tape had to be more or less equal; otherwise, there’d be a huge gap between the end of one program and the beginning of the next.

This was not always a problem, if each side of an LP could be divided roughly in half, time-wise. But, not all LP sides lent themselves to such neat division (Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells comes to mind), which was a problem.

One of the less eloquent ways the labels handled this little dilemma was to fade out a song in the middle as the end of the program approached, then fade back in when the next program started. This was most likely to happen when the running order of the songs was kept the same as on the LP edition. Unfortunately, this tended to be pretty disruptive, as you’d just be getting into a song, when all of a sudden it would fade out—and then you’d hear the distinctive CH-CHUNG! of the player changing to the next program, followed by the song fading in where it had left off. Some labels would actually repeat the song in a later program, so that you’d get to hear it without interruption at some point. Which was kind of nice, but it still meant that you’d hear the same song twice in the course of listening to the entire album. If you listened to the album enough, that meant you’d get sick of that one song twice as fast. (To this day, I’m likely to skip the song “I Played the Fool” whenever I listen to Hearts of Stone by Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes for that very reason.)

Another way the labels approached the problem was to change the running order of the songs on the album so that the running times of each program would be similar (if not identical). While this practice had the potential to compromise the artist’s vision, it made for a smoother listening experience for the listener.

This is partly how I came to decide upon David Bowie’s then-new album, Pin-Ups, as the first 8-track tape in my music collection. I probably skipped over Space Oddity and The Man Who Sold The World because I already had the LPs, and Hunky Dory and Aladdin Sane because I didn’t know any of the songs. Pin-Ups, on the other hand, had “Sorrow”, which I had on 45. It also had no songs interrupted halfway through by program changes.

(Around this time, David Bowie got an episode of The Midnight Special all to himself (and special guests Carmen, Marianne Faithful, and The Troggs), in the form of The 1980 Floor Show. “Sorrow” and a couple of other songs from Pin-Ups were included. I’m not sure whether or not I saw this before or after I got Pin-Ups, but my best guess would be after—so this may have also factored into my choice.)

Pin-Ups quickly became a fixture on this new stereo of mine, aided by another distinctive characteristic of 8-track tapes: they pretty much played forever. Unlike cassette tapes, they didn’t run out at the end of a program; instead, the sensing tape that connected the ends of the loop contained within the cartridge would cause the playback head to shift to the next pair of stereo tracks. So, until you actually ejected the tape from the player, it would just keep playing over and over and over again.

So, I listened to it over and over and over again—usually in the evening, with that comfortable green glow as a visual. (One major drawback to 8-tracks: no decent album graphics, lyric sheets, or liner notes.) Sometimes, I’d set the repeat function on, and I’d listen to the same program two or three times in a row. Sometimes I’d skip programs in the middle of a song, once I’d figured out at which point a song on the next program I wanted to hear would be starting.

Of course, the more I listened to the tape, the more the running order became ingrained in my mind, and familiar like a comfortable pair of shoes. When one song ended, I knew which song would be next.

The running order of the Pin-Ups 8-track was:

1
Rosalyn
Here Comes the Night
Friday on My Mind

2
Where Have All the Good Times Gone?
Sorrow
I Wish You Would

3
See Emily Play
I Can’t Explain
Don’t Bring Me Down

4
Shapes of Things
Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere
Everything’s Alright

As it turned out, I tended to prefer the first couple of songs within each program, and considered the last song something I had to sit through before I could hear the next song I liked at the beginning of the next program. So, oddly enough, while I love the endings of “I Wish You Would”, “Don’t Bring Me Down”, and “Everything’s Alright”, the songs themselves I find to be just okay.

Still, in this form, Pin-Ups became one of my favorite albums. Even after I stopped buying and listening to 8-tracks, I regarded it as something of a classic.

When Rykodisc began reissuing the David Bowie catalog on CD in 1990, Pin-Ups was naturally a must-have. Unfortunately, I hadn’t considered that the order of the songs on the 8-track I remembered so fondly had been shuffled around in order to fit the limitations of the format. As a result, the running order of the songs on the CD, which was faithful to the original LP, sounded wrong. No, it felt wrong.

The original LP running order:

1
Rosalyn
Here Comes the Night
I Wish You Would
See Emily Play
Everything’s Alright
I Can’t Explain

2
Friday on My Mind
Sorrow
Don’t Bring Me Down
Shapes of Things
Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere
Where Have All the Good Times Gone?

So, while some of the sequences are the same, the overall order is quite different.

Unfortunately, by this point I’d long forgotten the running order of the 8-track, except that “Friday on My Mind” followed “Here Comes the Night”. To that extent, I was able to sort of get used to this “new” running order. But, as I mentioned above, it never felt quite right.

It wasn’t until several years later that, thanks to the internet—specifically, Usenet—that I was able to re-discover the running order of the 8-track I remembered from my childhood, and then create an iTunes playlist with the songs in that same order.

This was actually an incredible relief for me, since it meant that this very small part of my world had been restored to its proper place. Besides, it’s also kind of comforting to have the album end on the line “everything’s alright” instead of “where have all the good times gone?” With Pin-Ups being a covers album, it probably doesn’t really make a difference—but it feels right.

April 9, 2012

(The link to the Juliette stereo information was still active as of 4/9/12.)