blank stares grooving
I was reading this account of Tulsa’s used record stores in the 1970s and came across a passage that I thought would be interesting to non-Tulsans:
It was run by a nice older couple who looked like the last thing they should have been doing was bootlegging music next to an elementary school. While they sold new and used 8-tracks, cassettes, and reel-to-reel tapes, their bread and butter were these jukeboxes that had 8-track recording heads built in (these were not hot-wired garage collages; though I never saw these machines anywhere else, they were beautifully manufactured.) The trick was simple; you go in, find a bunch of hit songs you wanted, then put in your coins and buy a tape that was just the right length and you had your own customized 8-track tape version of a K-Tel album. I had a girlfriend who was hooked on these stupid tapes.
I like the turn of phrase “garage collages,” although I do think “garage bricolage” would roll off the tongue better. More interesting, however, is the memory of commercially produced jukeboxes with embedded tape recorders. Granted, these devices were made before the DMCA or even the Sony Betamax case, but I wonder how what non-infringing uses they could possibly have. The account doesn’t say whether or not this business was in operation before or after the 1976 copyright act - I wonder if there were provisions in the act that addressed these jukeboxes, or, since the 1976 codified Fair Use, these jukeboxes were an effort to take advantage of a perceived loophole in copyright law. (Maybe since the jukebox plays the music aloud in a public place, the user is arguably making a fair-use copy of a personal experience.) It’s not clear, either, if these jukeboxes were manufactured in the United States — maybe they were graymarket Canadian jukeboxes brought to my hometown.
