10 YEARS OF TRACKING HEAVEN

By F.R. "Russ" Forster

It seems strange to wax nostalgic about a nostalgia magazine, but 8-Track Mind was more than just about nostalgia, and that’s what gave it its astonishing staying power through the ’90s. It was about philosophy and technology and politics and consumerism and nonconformity and nerdiness and self-expression and whatever whoever was writing in to the magazine wanted to write about. It was a forum for a disenfranchised generation who were getting over their bitterness by having some cheap fun from the local thrift store that all the upwardly mobiles around could never understand. It was ironic and so very very sincere, it was tremendously funny and incredibly poignant, it was a goofy art experiment that became a gathering place for like-minded offbeats from all over the world. It was certainly not what I could have imagined it being in the beginning.

That beginning for me was in a thrift store in Cambridge, MA in 1989. Touring with a Chicago noise band, I made my usual rounds to the thrift stores to dredge out some overlooked 8-track detritus which had become my obsession of the past few years. However, this trip was different from the others: to my surprise I was not alone in my quest. I was thrust into friendly competition with a group of local hipsters, who I discovered in casual conversation were doing the exact same things with their discarded booty that I and my friends were doing in Chicago. We gabbed about Disco Bowling, 8-track parties in basements with mirror balls and scavenged fashions, our treasured punk rock tapes and the secret pleasures of Barry Manilow, and on and on and on. I had that feeling that became almost a cliché over the years in the pages of 8-TM: I thought I was the only one but now I knew I was wrong. It was my first glimpse at what would become a connected worldwide 8-track underground, and I was elated. I was also convinced that there were more of us out there, and I started thinking about ways to bring as many of us as possible out of the closet and into a common world, bound by what would come to be known elusively as the ‘8-track lifestyle.’

Back home in Chicago, I threw the idea of a magazine past several friends and they seemed very enthusiastic. We had several eventful meetings in the kitchen of my hip Wicker Park pad, and a concrete plan was launched. Many of the originals in that kitchen have drifted away over the years, like Gordon Van Gelder and Liam Hayes, but several have stayed the course with 8-TM over a decade, like Kari Busch, Douglas Hoppe, and Brendan DeVallance. We cranked out a 16-page inaugural issue in about a six-month time, using our contacts at Kinko’s and elsewhere to scam computer time and copies. The first hundred issues flew out the door quicker than we expected, so we printed another hundred, grooving on our unexpected (albeit minor) success. An 8-track performance art event at the legendary Lower Links nightclub fueled our efforts even further, and the questionnaires we handed out at that event actually became a major article in the third 8-TM of the ’90s. We were combining science and slapstick, art and garbage, the ’70s and the ’90s in ways that no one else was thinking of at the time, except our small group of compatriots in the 8-track underground.

Soon I moved to Detroit and took the magazine with me. The scope of 8-TM was expanding beyond Chicago at a rapid rate, and it shifted from being a magazine written by a small elite group to an open forum of unsolicited submission from all over the country and world. Well-written rants and diatribes and anecdotes flooded my post office box, and I became determined to give everyone who had interesting things to say their say. The magazine became the open, exciting, vital forum that it was for the next 8 years, with my role becoming more facilitator than editor in many ways. Almost everything printed in 8-TM was presented verbatim as I received it, with only the occasional spelling or punctuation or grammatical errors cleaned up to make everything more readable. My voice in the magazine became less prominent, surfacing mainly in my ‘Letter from the Editor’ every issue and my replies in the ‘Letters’ section. It was exciting to be in the backseat of a careening juggernaut which seemed to have a mind of its own after a while. Very few magazines let the readers take control so completely, but for the community growing around 8-TM this control made perfect sense. It was a kind of grand sociological experiment in solidifying a sub-culture and seeing where it takes itself.

The next big step was translating this vital, vocal community from print into film. As a budding filmmaker wannabe, I was floundering around for worthy projects when I hit on the concept which became So Wrong They’re Right. I figured I could do with film what I did with the magazine: let the movers and shakers in the 8-track underground speak their peace, show off their goodies, and entertain audiences with their peculiar brand of smart geeky goofiness. It was the oddest, most unmarketable idea for a feature film that I had come up with, and I leapt at it immediately. After testing the waters and finding great enthusiasm among the 8-track underground kingpins I wanted to interview, I convinced Dan Sutherland to jump in a van and make a 10,000 journey in a month to capture all the excitement on film before it was too late. Nine months and $25,000 later, in early 1995, a 92-minute documentary feature became the fruit of our labors. It was rejected by ‘legitimate’ film festival after festival, but was warmly embraced by the young loop of underground film festivals cropping up around that time. It even won a couple of awards, but the way I got most people to see it was to get in my van again and make another 10,000 mile loop to screen the film in microcinemas and art galleries and coffee houses around the country. Five years later it seems to have garnered a kind of cult following in hipster scenes here and there, though it has had a much harder time piercing the impermeable film/video distribution market than the magazine had piercing the small press publication market.

I was lucky to catch the 8-track underground on film at the moment of greatest fervency in the mid-’90s. In the late ’90s the mail flooding my P.O. box started to change subtly, becoming more the obsessive ramblings of boys-club collector types than the effusive outpourings of true believers. I started inserting myself more in the magazine to take up space which had earlier been filled to overflowing with eloquent unsolicited masterpieces. Many of my favorite trackers drifted away from the fold; one drifted away from this mortal coil. The thrill was gone and the 8-track underground were moving on with their lives, with no new generation of true believers to take their place. I decided that it was time for me to move on as well, and I made plans to end the magazine 3 years before I actually did it. It’s a whole new 8-track world out there, with tapes selling for hundreds of dollars over the internet and collectors jockeying for position, and I intend to walk away from it without bitterness, remembering the great and wonderful days when I was involved in a magazine which was truly exploring uncharted territory.

(The last issue of 8-Track Mind magazine, issue #100, will be a video and magazine together, will cost $15, and will be available in September, 2000. Inquiries can be made to Russ Forster, 23145 Melrose, East Detroit, MI 48021.)

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