Friday, Jul. 10 2009 @ 11:16AM
That Cheap Trick eight-track cartridge
Stephen Colbert was holding up last week? Made in Arlington. Hand to God. By mom-and-pop's
KTS Productions, to be specific -- though you'd never know it from reading recent stories concerning Cheap Trick's expensive gimmick, which'll set you back $30 should you
pre-order a copy of the band's latest,
The Latest. A
Globe and Mail story about the eight-track from last Friday's been making the rounds -- it
bounced onto BoingBoing Sunday -- but it only says that the band's manager, David Frey, "finally found a small plant in Dallas, Tex., for the retro-fit."
It took a few calls, but finally Frey's office got back to us: Not Dallas, sorry, but Arlington. Which is news to the Texas Music Office, which doesn't even list KTS Productions in
its Texas music business directory.
Turns out, Kathy and Dan Gibson may be the last of the eight-track-tape-makers -- other local CD and cassette replicators to whom Unfair Park spoke earlier this week found just the concept unfathomable, given
its demise 'round 1988. Said one old-timer out in Fort Worth, "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of." Dan and Kathy Gibson, who run KTSP, would most assuredly disagree -- and they've got Cheap Trick's business to prove it.
"I guess they just went to the Web site," Kathy tells Unfair Park, giving her first interview since news of the Cheap Trick eight-track started spreading. "Not
a lot of people do that, but they contacted
us, and we said we could help them. That was about a little over a month ago, and it was very exciting -- one of those things we'd been hoping would happen. We're trying to bring kind of an obsolete format back from the dead, bring it into the 21st century. So, yeah, it was exciting. That's one of those thing where you have to shout a little bit when it happens."