Eight Track Museum Opens In Catskills
The Catskills, with countless forgotten valleys and cheap real estate, is a magnet for obsessives. People come up here, buy a building, and then fill it with their treasures.
This makes for a land full of bizarre roadside attractions: there’s a museum shaped like a giant bobcat made of sticks in Catskill, a furniture store that makes spaceship cars with retro fins in Boiceville, and a “shrine to clutter” called the Mystery Spot in Phoenicia, just to name a few.
The newest addition to the list of Catskills oddities is the Eight Track Museum, a public homage to the obsolete audio format, which opens this weekend in the Delaware County town of Roxbury.
Roxbury’s new venture is an outgrowth of the original Dallas incarnation of the Eight Track Museum, which Bucks Burnett opened in 2011. The Catskills version is the dream of former punk rocker – and longtime Woodstock resident – Phil Lenihan.
Lenihan, who bought a long-vacant corner store in Roxbury several years ago and rehabbed it this summer, will run the museum in partnership with Burnett, but he is giving the Catskills location a glamour all its own.
The Roxbury museum’s prize is a rare 1969 album featuring collaborative songs by Frank Sinatra and Antonio Carlo Jobim that was released on eight-track before being recalled and destroyed (possibly at Sinatra’s request). The album never made it onto any other formats in that form, according to Lenihan – making it the eight-track equivalent of a rare misprinted stamp, prized by collectors. (Photo at left.)
The Sinatra/Jobim, as it is called, will be reverently displayed alone in its own special room in the museum.
“Like the Mona Lisa,” Lenihan says.
The Roxbury museum will also working on a timeline of the history of the eight-track, and exhibits about the format’s close relationship with the auto industry and with audio bootleggers.
Because Lenihan is camera-shy, we interviewed his co-museum-owner, Bucks Burnett, about the new Catskills outpost of the museum. Burnett will be in Roxbury this weekend at the museum’s grand opening – along with Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz of the Talking Heads and the Tom Tom Club.
2087
ellievsbear
gummygunk
andulkaphoto
discoholicmusic
