Democracy of Sound (18 page)

While still in high school, Golden installed four-track players in cars in his west Texas hometown for several years before moving to California to work with Muntz. He had gotten his own four-track player from a local wholesaler in 1964, and, seeing an opportunity, asked for three thousand dollars’ worth of tapes and players on consignment. Soon his driveway was full of cars every Saturday, while
he and a friend installed players and sold tapes from a rack in the trunk of his car. “Everybody wanted one, you know, it was a ‘thing’ then,” Golden recalled in 2007. “I guess it was kind of like iPods are now.… For a teenager at that time, [the car] was really a domain, and because of that it was a product that people would spend money on and put in their cars.”
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The two young men were making money hand over fist, and by 1967, Muntz had noticed that the four-track trade was unusually brisk for a Texas town of 50,000 people. Golden was then a senior in high school, and Muntz offered to bring him out to Van Nuys to work in his company when he graduated. Although Golden spent his first month on the assembly line, he said, “they moved me to Engineering when they found out I knew something about the product.”
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Muntz needed a young man with a knack for electronics to help improve the four-track cartridge, which faced heavy competition from other formats by 1967. A chance meeting in early 1963 brought the Madman in touch with another tinkerer who contributed to the development of magnetic recording as a mass medium. Muntz’s son loaned a Lincoln Continental to Shanda Lear, the teenage daughter of Bill Lear, the aviation pioneer, so she could pick her father up at the Santa Monica Airport. Noticing the four-track tape on the Lincoln’s dashboard, Shanda saw an opportunity for her father, who had experimented with wire recording and car radios early in his career. Her business sense was correct; Bill Lear went straight to Muntz’s house and worked out a deal to distribute the Stereo Pak four-track tape in the Midwest.
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Lear and Muntz were two of a kind. Both were entrepreneurs and inventors who enjoyed a challenge, refused to take no for an answer, and had worked their way up from the bottom with flinty determination. Both also saddled their daughters with eccentric names—Shanda Lear and Tee Vee “Tina” Muntz. (Both women aspired to be singers.) Lear had a reputation for cutting staff as much as Muntz liked to hack away superfluous parts from a prototype, and they both had a penchant for imprinting their personal marks on everything they touched.
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Muntz went for white clothes, white décor, and a white Lincoln Continental, at least when he was not wearing red tights and a Napoleon hat to sell cars. Golden never forgot the white pool table he saw at the Muntz mansion. As their business partnership turned into a war of formats, the men showed what can happen when two ambitious and inventive control freaks collide.

Lear and his engineer Sam Auld first aimed to tweak the four-track model, dismantling and reconstructing the cartridge over numerous long nights, before deciding to start over from scratch. Lear considered recording eight tracks of sound on a single band of tape, and ran his ideas past Alexander Pontitoff, the founder of Ampex, a pioneer in the magnetic tape field. “I tried to put eight tracks on a quarter-inch tape,” Pontitoff told him. “You can’t do it. Just can’t squeeze that much information on it.” Emboldened by the apparent challenge,
Lear invented just such a tape, the Stereo Eight, and began installing the players on his Learstar corporate jets. He also lobbied the automobile companies to offer the eight-track as an option on their new car lines.
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Magnetic tape, then, was popularized by outsiders who prodded an ambivalent music industry to adopt the new technology as a recording medium. Muntz was known for his cars and televisions, and Lear for his planes. The Madman conceived of his tape player as an add-on for cars. RCA only signed on to provide music after Lear pitched a hard sell to Ford, arranging for Lear Jet to make the cartridges, and Motorola, the car stereo equipment.
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The other record companies were hesitant at first. “The remaining three of the Big Four in recorded music (Columbia, Decca, Capitol) have made no big move yet,”
Business Week
reported in 1965, “but all are watching with interest.”
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Three years later, labels looked with fear and suspicion on yet another new format—Philips’s compact cassette—much as it had the tape cartridge before it.
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Golden, for one, believes that the record industry was indifferent. “Muntz was able to license so many duplication deals from record companies during the early sixties at unbelievable prices because they … said that consumer tapes were a passing fancy and that
nothing
would ever replace vinyl records,” he wrote. “So much for corporate forecasters.”
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In any case, Ford, Lear, and Motorola brought the first effective, user-friendly tape cartridge to a mass audience. To persuade Henry Ford II, Auld installed a tape player into the executive’s Lincoln Continental.
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At a Detroit auto show in 1965, Ford showed off a car with a tape player and radio combo that fit into a conventional radio slot, eight inches wide, three inches high, and six and a half inches deep. Consumers could also get the tape player attached underneath the dashboard. The tapes—rectangular, plastic, and palm-sized—played eighty minutes of music, and Lear had tapered the end of the cartridge so motorists could tell which way to insert the tape without looking. The company planned to install as many as 100,000 players in 1966.
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That year, car buyers could order a sedan, wagon, Mustang, Thunderbird, Mercury, or Lincoln with an eight-track player built-in. The option cost $128.49. Lear built the tape cartridge, Motorola manufactured the radio and stereo speaker components, and RCA sold prerecorded tapes for prices starting at $4.95.
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While Philips had made no deals with Detroit, its launch of the compact cassette in 1964 further complicated the burgeoning magnetic tape business. The cassette was smaller than open-reel tape or the various cartridges, and Philips initially deemed its sound quality better suited for dictation than for listening to prerecorded music.
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The electronics firm offered a free patent license to any company that would maintain the same basic specifications of the original tape, allowing competitors to develop better cassettes while preserving compatibility. The press at first expected the compact cassette to be used for recording
nonmusical sounds, while the four-track or eight-track cartridge delivered prerecorded music in the car or home. These two uses eventually converged in one device, but that outcome was not apparent in 1966. The compact cassette, with its facility for both playing and recording, won out in the long run, surpassing vinyl record sales in 1983.
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In the late 1960s, though, chaos prevailed in the market. “The rise of the cassette … has added to the great buzzing confusion that characterizes the cartridge tape business,”
Business Week
reported in 1968. Lear’s eight-track had won the support of some record companies and the automakers, but the tug of war continued. Muntz won the right to manufacture tapes of 75,000 Capitol recordings in 1967, but no one system emerged as the clear favorite in a crowded field, and other companies had new formats slated for release, each supposedly superior to all the others.
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“Retailers, who must now stock the same musical selections on monaural and stereo discs, reels of tape, several types of cartridge, and cassettes, are beginning to get that hunted feeling,”
Business Week
said. “Enough, they say, is enough.”
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The great tangle of different tape formats in the late 1960s resulted in supply gaps when one medium fell into disfavor. The record companies, unsure of which horse to bet on, were willing to pull their support if one type of cartridge began to lag in sales. The
Los Angeles Times
’ profile of Muntz implied that he was gaining the upper hand in 1967, but as soon as four-track sales slipped, the record companies abandoned him and backed the eight-track tape instead. Muntz ended his tape business in 1970, eventually turning to the nascent cell phone industry a decade later. As a result, the supply of four-track tapes dried up and left consumers who had Muntz’s players in a bind.
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Donald Koven, a Canadian migrant who sold stereo equipment and tapes in Los Angeles, had difficulty supplying his customers even before four-tracks were discontinued. “It would take so long for a factory tape from the record companies to come out,” Koven recalled. “A hit record would appear, but the tape came out months later. I had to supply my customers with tapes, somehow.” Other electronics stores were making their own four-track tapes from the already available vinyl records, leading Koven to purchase quality equipment and compete with them. When record companies stopped making new four-tracks, he expanded his operation. The cost of machinery led Koven to manufacture continuously, in order to maximize his investment, and the resulting oversupply of tapes motivated him to branch out by wholesaling to other stores. “There were millions of four-track machines,” he said. “How could the public get four-track tapes? What the hell are you supposed to do? What’s the public to do? … I was forced to give my customers good service.”
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Koven was also forced to plead “no contest” when he ended up in court in 1971. California had passed a law in 1968 prohibiting the unauthorized
reproduction of sound recordings—the first state to do so after New York. Koven and other entrepreneurs in the tape field formed the Tape Industries Association of America to defend their activities, and they aimed to overturn the antipiracy statute as unconstitutional. Copyright was the federal government’s job, they said, and Congress had excluded sound recordings from any legal protection. The California state government was thus intruding on an area that Congress preempted. Their campaign would eventually reach the Supreme Court in the landmark
Goldstein
decision of 1973, which upheld state antipiracy laws, but for the moment, one aspect of the case is most relevant: pirates such as Koven responded to the record industry’s inability to cope with the technological disorder of the late 1960s in much the same way as the Hot Record Society and Dante Bollettino had done before. When consumers wanted a product, and the established industry could not or would not provide it for them, someone else stepped in and connected supply with demand.

Koven’s rationale strikes one as more self-serving than Bollettino’s. Koven had to start pirating in order to keep up with his competitors, and then he had to build a bigger manufacturing operation to stay profitable. He could not turn to the cultural preservation defense that jazz pirates had used, since he copied commonly available contemporary music. Still, the case bears a similarity to the bootleg boom of the early 1950s: periods of technological transformation and uncertainty can foster a sort of market failure, in which the official offerings of industry fall especially short of the desires of consumers. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the music business moved away from the shellac record, bootleggers pressed LPs of older recordings that stood little chance of being issued in the new vinyl format. In the late 1960s, record companies were divided in their allegiance to four-tracks, eight-tracks, and other formats, meaning that not all music was available in each medium. When one type of cartridge stopped being made, consumers could either choose to trash their now-obsolete players or turn to a pirate like Koven who would sell them the latest hit in the medium of their choice.

This clash of formats mirrors the conflict over technology and property rights in the early twenty-first century, when file-sharing networks such as Napster or Limewire made music available free of charge to Internet users in new, digitally compressed file formats such as the MP3. The record industry stuck to selling compact discs, until online services like iTunes provided a legal means for listeners to purchase audio files in the new medium. Likewise, bootleggers in the early 1950s furnished collectors with copies of old recordings that had not been released in the new format of the vinyl LP. Piracy filled the shortfall between established media and technological means.

The struggle over magnetic tape as a form of sound recording resulted from the convergence of postwar consumer goods—cars and music—when the baby
boom generation began to come of age. It is no surprise that the first version of magnetic tape to gain widespread popularity was built for a car, nor that a teenager put in touch the two men who made magnetic tape into a mass medium. When
Business Week
spoke of a “Music Maker for the Masses” in 1968, it pictured a bearded boy placing a microphone in the face of young folk-singing girl, strumming her guitar; two teenagers dancing on the beach with tapes scattered around a portable player; a girl lying down, recording the sounds of a radio; a war reporter sticking a microphone into a foxhole; a barbershop quartet harmonizing into a tape recorder; and a businessman dictating on an airplane.
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One can imagine a middle-class man purchasing a hi-fi system in the 1950s; a decade later, his son might have a four-track player installed in his Mustang, or his daughter might have taken Philips’s Norelco Carrycorder to a rock concert. New formats for sound recording proliferated in the 1950s and 1960s—first the LP, then the four-track, Stereo Eight, and compact cassette—creating a confusion not seen since the days when discs, piano rolls, and wax cylinders vied for supremacy as a vehicle for sound. In the era of new media, though, the ever greater investment companies made in producing and promoting a record was undermined by the ease of appropriating that investment with the push of a button.