VOTD 09/07/2025

VA: Z-95 8Tracs

Purchased in a local used record store, somewhere

I'm going autobiographical again, and some eastern PA niche history. 

I always had an affinity for music. Some my earliest experiences with music were TV commercial jingles. My mother told me she was impressed I would and sing the most complicated one, such as the song for Apple Jacks cereal.

It was really about age 12-13 I started paying more attention to music, which included listening to the local rock FM stations. These were the days of what was once called AOR: album-oriented rock stations. You were just as likely to hear an album cut played as a single. Nothing typified this more than Steely Dan's LP Aja; I remember hearing every song on that album played on the radio at least once. "Peg" was the big hit, but the "real" rock stations were more likely to play "Josie" or "Deacon Blues". 

I grew up more-or-less half away between Philadelphia and New York City, a little closer to the former. The closest metropolitan area was Allentown/Bethlehem. It was at the vital age of about 13 I discovered the rock station WEZV out of Allentown.

If I'm correct about my history, WEZV pulled a literal WKRP. In that sitcom, an easy listening station changes format mid-song into a rock station. I remember telling a friend my favorite station was WEZV, and commented, "That easy listening crap?" What I remember is that every time I tuned in, I heard either Queen or Blue Öyster Cult being played. Fine by my 13-year old self. Within a year, the call letters had been changed to WZZO. Z-95. Far more rockin'.

One of WZZO's primary commercial sponsors was an Allentown head shop. I don't remember the name, but I do recall their mascot was Buzzy the Bear. I found it hilarious someone turned up in an Allentown holiday parade dressed in a Buzzy costume. 

WZZO's programming was a little more interesting initially than what it would later became. They flirted with New Wave, Jim Carrol's "People Who Died" and The Nails' "88 Lines About 44 Women" in rotation. There was a short-lived show "Power Rock" which was a Punk and New Wave showcase, the first place I heard Devo's "Social Fools". 

Those things aren't an effective way to make money though, and the programming shifted to something closer to what Pittsburgh's WDVE is now. A straight-forward classic rock station, even though some of the music was then current.

So some time around 1980, the station decided it would release a compilation of local talent. According to the notes, they received eighty demo tapes, boiling down to the four groups on this LP. That must have been a real chore, plowing through those tapes. I imagine many were quickly deemed "pass". 

Who made the cut? Mountain Jam, Jimi Gear, John Fretz and the Bounce, and P.F. and the Flyers. There's no reason at all why anyone reading this would have heard of any of those groups any more than someone in the Lehigh Valley would have heard of, say, Hector in Paris. 

I owned this LP in high school. It was exciting to think that local bands were given the chance to record and release some of their music. These things were uncommon at the time! I would later sell it off in a mass record purge I've done a couple of times, only to buy it again recently for $5. Someone wrote on a sticker: "Great unknown Allentown PA bands!".

Great is a stretch.

Oh, some of it's okay. Copies of this apparently made it farther out than Lehigh and Bucks Counties. If so, did it make the scene surrounding Allentown sound provincial? Second rate, second market?

Mountain Jam was the name I remember hearing Z-95's concert calendar and gig announcements. I think there was hope that this would be the regional band that would break into something bigger. In terms of location, the Lehigh Valley isn't such a bad place to be. You can drive to NYC or Philly, gig and drive home the same night. Mountain Jam sounds like serviceable if unremarkable folk-rock. I'd invoke the Allman Brothers, but that would suggest MJ is more interesting than they are. They sound fine, and it's probably the best produced pair of songs on the album. 

Next up: Jimi Gear. He's right on the cusp of something like Loverboy but with synth lines more closely associated with New Wave. It's all multitracked, and maybe there'd be more juice if he had a real backing band. 

John Fretz and the Bounce? Straight forward pop rock. I'm probably sounding cruel, but I found it instantly forgettable on current listening. 

The group I found exciting in high school was P.F. and the Flyers. The first of their two contributions, "Black Hole Tone Dance", grabbed my teen ears. It's the only instrumental on the LP which automatically makes me more interested. Now? Not as excited but it's definitely not bad. I remember wanting to play the piece myself. I think I would have been aware of what a whole tone scale was at the time. Maybe. I didn't exactly benefit from superior music instruction in my high school days, I learned many of these things myself. Their other song, "I Do Do That", is a kind of white-boy take on reggae. It's okay, still better than the majority of the rest of the album. 

Where are they all now? Who even remembers this LP exists? How many sit in landfills? And maybe I should be more grateful. With so few of these things documented at the time (unlike now, in which you can stream a gig live on Youtube or Facebook) shouldn't I be thankful that anything from the then-scene was captured at all?

PS the title: it's an obvious play on words, eight tracks/8 track tapes. I don't miss cassettes all that much, but 8 tracks seemed especially stupid to me. When my family was buying a new car in 1978, my father asked, cassette or 8 track? I said, PLEASE, cassette.