Avenue of America 8-tracks

At 4:00pm on August 15, 2012, I will be featured on Kent Davies' "Amateur Hour" on CKUW 95.9 FM which is the radio station at the University of Winnipeg.

I've never been on the radio, so I might sound like some clueless asshole Kent found on the street (although I wouldn't be surprised if that's the kind of fun he's aiming for!) If by some chance you cannot tune in due to your forgetfulness or suffer the unfortunate handicap of NOT living in Winnipeg, you will be able to download the show here.

So now that I've officially sold out, you can expect the blog entries to suffer and become a much lower quality than before. Wait... is that even possible????

Kent mentioned to me that he was interested in my collection of 8-tracks, so for this entry I figured I'd dig out three more and post them. Without further ado, here's some shitty 8-tracks by a shitty Canadian company called "Avenue of America". Not only are these shitty cover songs, the cartridge shells are shitty too. Each of them cracked or broke while I was trying to get the shitty things apart to repair them.

I think I've just set a new record for the number of times I used the word "shitty" in a paragraph.

The redeeming thing about this run of 8-tracks is the actual sound quality is surprisingly good. Whoever mastered these did a decent job, so you'll be able to hear stellar crap for a change instead of the usual crappy crap.

Avenue of America presents The Magnificent Groups
(8X AVE-3802 A)


"8X AVE-3802 A" is rock star lingo for "Cheap Imitations of The Rolling Stones"

I didn't find this tape to be all that horrible since the singer vaguely sounds like Mick Jagger. Unfortunately, the poor bastard has trouble trying to hit the high notes in "Tumblin' Dice" and the back up singers don't come close to what's on the original recording. I actually had problems identifying this song since it sounds almost nothing like what the Rolling Stones did.

Listen to Tumblin' Dice



Avenue of America presents The Magnificent Groups
(8X AVE-3802 B)


"8X AVE-3802 B" is rock star lingo for "This isn't REALLY Creedence Clearwater Revival - Haa Haa, We Fooled You!"

The Mick Jagger singer is back at it, and he's singing CCR this time around. Actually, it sounds like they got a couple of different singers to perform on this tape. It's atrocious on many levels, but there's nothing as bad as this version of Proud Mary. In my opinion, if you can't get the lyrics right, then you have no fucking business covering the song!

Listen to Proud Mary



Avenue of America presents Grammy Awards 1972
(8X AVE-3702B)


By looking at the catalog number of this tape, I'm only assuming there's another volume. But we wouldn't know that by the incredibly descriptive title, would we?

This isn't really the soundtrack to the 1972 Grammy Awards. This is a bunch of assholes who will never win a Grammy in their lives, but I'll bet the album title gave them a nice ego boost.

Anyway, I checked Wikipedia for how accurate this tape was with regards to songs that won awards. Well, there's a few of them, but I don't see anything by Simon & Garfunkel, The Band nor Neil Diamond. Not only that, they put the Creedence Clearwater Revival rendition of "Proud Mary" on this tape while it was the Ike & Tina version that won the Grammy. Therefore I call bullshit on this one. It was all just an ego boost and an excuse to make money off some dumbass who thought he was getting a kick ass compilation of his favorite songs.

We already covered the Proud Mary song on the not-CCR 8-track (and it's the same stupid recording here), so I decided to pick on the song "Homeward Bound". Honestly, I was actually enjoying this slightly oddball version of the song until I heard the drummer make a mistake, and then repeatedly make the same mistake over and over again until the song was over. Sometimes I have to wonder if these recordings were done in one take. I could imagine the producer say "Ah fuck it, that's good enough! We need to rush this tape to the factory before 1972 is over."

Listen to Homeward Bound

...and that is certainly enough for this entry. I've got tons of stuff to get done before Summer ends, so the entries will be a bit spaced apart. But don't worry, I'll be back to torture you again.