Will The Real Car Stereo OGs Please Stand Up?
Putting Tunes in Your Ride in the 80s Was a True Ordeal
By Jason Jones
Messenger Reporter
EAST TEXAS – I do not believe photographic honesty exists anymore. From ladies Photoshopping their waistlines down to nothing and their backsides up to… well… something, to “influencers” leaning against somebody else’s Ferrari to impress the masses with their extravagant lifestyle, it appears as if nobody is being honest with the photos they are making available to the public.
For the benefit of illustrating this article, I Googled “bad 80s car stereo install.” I was greeted by several pages of genuinely nice car dashboards from years past, none of which included even a scrap of duct tape or a few straggling wires hanging out for all the world to see.
It’s all a lie I tell you. Either that, or I was the only guy on the planet who kept his under-dash mounted car stereo from flopping around like Cookie Monster’s jaw by wedging a flip-flop sandal under it in the mid 80s.
I can tell you as an eyewitness, I was not.
It’s so easy these days. I have been around the block many times, and now know my way around car audio. I also have access to YouTube and Google, so finding a quick set of instructions or troubleshooting tips is easier than finding matching socks. Couple this with the fact that most car stereos are held in place by nothing more than a piece of pop-in plastic trim and a few screws, and wiring adapters that make it impossible to cross wires or blow fuses, and any stereo install is literally an hour out of your weekend if you go slow and take breaks.
The story was considerably different in the 80s.
When my buddies and I would get together to figure out how to install a new stereo in one of our cars or trucks, it wasn’t uncommon to hear things like “Is this going to shock me?” followed by “I don’t know. Touch it real fast and see.”
There was a limited set of choices back then. I was a Pioneer man, but a lack of funds often found me settling for “On Sale.” I owned Kraco, Sparkomatic, Jensen, Craig and Realistic (exclusively sold by Radio Shack) stereo components over the years as well, but I always kept going back to my favorite. The last Pioneer cassette player I owned was a thing of beauty and marvel. Having finally destroyed my cheap no-name cassette player, one which only had a fast-forward button, facilitating the need to flip the tape any time you wished to hear a song again, fast forward, guess whether it was long enough, flip it back, figure out you had missed it, then do it all over again, I finally saved enough money and bought my Pioneer. It was a Supertuner III model… not digital, but with an apparent tiny antenna that wiggled around enough to keep a signal sharp… supposedly… and it had an amazing feature called AMS or Automatic Music Search. I could insert a cassette, press fast-forward or rewind, and the tape would go directly to the beginning or end of a song. It’s not a big deal now. After the infinite ease of navigating a CD or streaming music it seems rather archaic. But at the time it was a huge deal.
Out here in the sticks, we did not know about, or remotely understand, subwoofers, tweeters, amplifiers, auxiliary batteries, or anything else about what makes up car audio today, even in factory applications. All we knew was 1) car stereo. 2) equalizer/booster. 3) Speakers. 4) Big roll of speaker wire. 5) Duct tape… because there isn’t a hole in the dash for that equalizer/booster. Can also be mounted with self-tapping screws, only slower. Given about 4-6 hours, any of us could experiment our way to some Boston, Aerosmith or Van Halen blasting out the open window of our car while our mullets blew majestically in the breeze.
We all have our stories. My esteemed colleague, Will Johnson, spoke fondly of his Chevy Spectrum… the one missing the passenger-side mirror. After listening to Pink Floyd’s “Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert” at an electronics store in Tyler, he purchased and installed a set of Cerwin-Vega speakers. They set him back a pretty penny, effectively increasing the value of the car by around 250%. My own speaker fiasco happened when I figured out that my home stereo tower speaker (this was a thing back in the day young people…) could squeeze behind the seat of my ‘79 El Camino. On paper it seems like a home run. It was not. But it did teeter-totter over the hump in a very entertaining manner.
Then there was my friend David. He was a couple of years older than me, and we were hauling hay one summer with several friends. David showed up in his new car one day, a giant older Buick four-door. I’m sure it had been somebody’s grandma’s car, and in any other situation it would have been quite uncool. David’s enthusiasm over his new ride, however, made the difference. His love for the giant beast made it extremely cool. It was green. Not emerald or any other pleasant shade of green, but similar to Gomer Pyle’s uniform. Olive-ish.
Yes, this is a car stereo column, so I will mention that David installed a Kraco stereo and a pair of dash-mounted speakers. The installation was actually quite beautiful. It looked like it belonged in the car. He also purchased Van Halen’s “Women and Children First” and the first trip I took with several friends felt like being in the front few rows at the Summit. It was truly cool.
A few days later, David pulled up with a fresh paint job. The car was now red. He had painted it with a brush. Like a house painting brush. In my head the masterpiece was complete. I wish I had that car today.
Alas… I shall drive home in the Ford Escape… trying to convince myself that I’m still cool and wondering if the mullet would grow back.
Jason Jones may be reached via email at [email protected]
