Mysterious 4-track cassette

The Mystery Tape I Found

Your ads will be inserted here by

Easy Ads.

Please go to the plugin admin page to set up your ad code.

Mysterious 4-track cassette

Better call Scooby and the gang.

So, on a whim I bought a cool old Yamaha 4-track cassette machine via Seattle Goodwill’s Ebay page. Thought it would be fun to record something on some really simple hardware, plus I’m just a gear hoarder plain and simple.

I purchased a Yamaha MT100 II picked it up from the Seattle Goodwill, and took it home. In order to test it, I grabbed a handful of cassettes from the bottom of a box of junk that I have probably moved 5 times.

A completely unlabeled cassette was among them, so I popped it into the Yamaha and hit play, expecting to hear something other than what I wound up hearing.

What I expected to hear takes a little explaining. Cassettes, generally speaking, have 4 tracks. Channels 1 and 2 are for the Left and Right signals on the tape’s A-side, and Channels 3 and 4 are for the Left and Right channels on the tape’s B-side.

For the bedroom recordist on a budget, cassette multitracks like the MT-100 series used

all 4 of these tracks on a single side, so one could track instrument and vocal parts over-dub style. With some creative mixing, one could bounce submixes down and get some fairly complex recordings with a little effort

The Widow was Lost and Lonely

So, when one puts a regular ol’ cassette tape into a machine designed to work with 4-tracks of information on a single side, what happens? You get 1 side of the tape playing forward, and the other side of the tape playing backwards, all at once. This usually just sounds like a mess that is maybe interesting for about two minutes.

Usually.

Upon rewinding and playing the unlabeled tape, I was staggered to find that this dusty, chipped cassette from the bottom of a banana box already had a 4-track recording on it, not Van Halen taped off the radio from 1990 or something like that.  There’s two acoustic guitar tracks and two vocal tracks. I recorded the song to my computer, panned the guitars wide, and posted the song to my SoundCloud account for your listening “pleasure.”

Your ads will be inserted here by

Easy Ads.

Please go to the plugin admin page to set up your ad code.

The mysterious ballad is a yarling tumbleweed of a yarn, detailing a widow’s bitter revenge against the man who shot and killed her lover. Here ’tis:

I have absolutely NO idea who this person is, or when they recorded this, or how the tape even came into my possession. Total mystery. If you have a bunch of tapes laying around, than you probably get the idea that the odds of reaching into a pile of unmarked, used junky tapes and pulling up a 4-track cassette recording—in order to test out a new 4-track cassette recorder—seems a little slim. Chances are this could be somebody I know, but I can’t place the voice.

Lyrics:

The widow was lost and lonely
travelin’ through the badlands all alone

All alone

She had a bag of gold and silver
lookin for a gun for hire

She hopped the train to Dallas, Texas, and hired her the fastest in the west

They road down, trackin’ down the killer,
the man who shot her love between his eyes

Down in Misissippi
they cornered him with no place to run

The widow cocks her pistol
and shoved that barrel straight down his throat

The outlaw stabbed him slowly
she pulled the trigger six times
unloaded her gun

She took off all her clothes
made love to him
last payment made in full
mmm-hmmm

Opium and whiskey laid by the fire
as the moonlight filled the sky

I find that if you bend the phrasing of that last line it makes a nice little haiku:

Opium, whiskey
Laid by the fire as the
Moonlight filled the sky

 

Your ads will be inserted here by

Easy Ads.

Please go to the plugin admin page to set up your ad code.

Be Sociable, Share!

4 thoughts on “The Mystery Tape I Found

  1. Ale

    Hi Ryan! I´m a total fan of 4-track cassette based recorders. A year ago or so i found your site while searching for underground recordings made on portastudios. I listened to this song you´ve discovered and thought it was great. I even learned to play it. The fact that it was a mystery (and the obscure lyrics) made it all very interesting.

    Today I have found the answer to your mystery tape: the song is called “The widow and the outlaw” and was composed by a guy named Jason Bordeaux. Here´s the link to his site: http://bordeauxmusic.com/music

    You´ll find your song there (playlist track #2). Though this is a much more polished version, recorded with a whole band, and with slightly different lyrics, i have no doubt that the voice of the singer is the same. So i think the tape you´ve found belonged to him. Probably it´s the song´s very first demo.

    Why don´t you email the guy and tell him your story? I´m sure he´ll be glad.

    Cheers from Argentina!

    Ale

    Reply
    1. Bellsauce Post author

      Wow. WOW. WOW!

      Thank you so much Ale! I will contact him for sure! Things like this are what I love about the Internet most.

      I am sorry for the late response. Your comment notification wound up in my spam folder, but I found it! Unfortunately, Jason’s website seems down just now—but I will find another way to find him.

      Thank you very much for contacting me about this. :)

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>