RETIRED PRAIRIE HIGH School teacher Hector Perazo is shown here at his Vancouver home among his huge collection of 8-track and 4-track cassettes. Perazo has about 60,000 8-tracks and about 10-15,000 4-tracks.
VANCOUVER – When a 17-year-old Hector Perazo first traveled to the U.S. as a foreign exchange student from his home in Argentina in 1967, his one main area of interest was soccer. That quickly changed when his American host mother gave him a Rolling Stones album.
“When I listened to the Stones, I really got into their music,” Perazo said. “In those days, if you went to the high school dances, we didn’t have a DJ or anything, we had musical groups. I used to judge the groups based on if they could play the Stones and how well.”
It was his newfound love of music in the U.S. that first prompted the teenage Perazo to get into collecting 8-track tapes. The 66-year-old retired Prairie High School Spanish teacher fondly recalls the very first 8-track tape that he and his American brother first had – The Beatles White Album.
“I always remember his (my American brother) first comment when we first listened to the 8-tracks,” Perazo said. “He said, ‘they never break, they last forever.’”
Perazo officially started his hobby of collecting 8-tracks in 1967. To date, he said he now probably has about 60,000 8-tracks in his collection. He also collects something even more rare than the typical 8-tracks called 4-tracks, which he said he has roughly 10,000 to 15,000 of. Of all of those, Perazo said many of them are still sealed.
“Those are my favorite,” Perazo said of the 4-tracks. “I think they have better sound and there are a lot of good artists from the 60s like The Beatles, The Doors, etc. The 4-tracks require a special player and it took me a long time to find one because I had never seen one before, I didn’t even know what it looked like.”
Perazo said he tends to listen to a lot of “obscure” groups from the 60s, including a group that used to open for the Rolling Stones. He enjoys finding 8-tracks, and sometimes even 4-tracks, of those different obscure groups.
Aside from music, Perazo also has several 8-tracks with some unique recordings on them, including the 1969 moon landing and one simply called “How to Survive in Your Car in Emergency Conditions.”
“A lot of them are irreplaceable,” Perazo said. “The moon landing, ones like that, I have those in a special stash of unusual tapes.”
Another huge aspect of Perazo’s hobby of collecting 8-tracks and 4-tracks is that he needed to learn how to repair them.
“For anybody who is considering getting into (collecting them), you kind of need to know how to repair them,” he said. “If you don’t know how to repair them, you might as well forget about it. When I first got into it, I realized quickly I needed to learn how to fix them so I could have them for life.”
Perazo said he often buys random 8-tracks simply for the parts when he needs to fix ones in his collection. He said the early ones have a special wheel in them that often becomes damaged and needs to be replaced, so he ends up buying a lot of tapes just for the wheel. When he purchases new tapes to add to his collection, Perazo said he oftentimes takes them apart to make sure everything is working, not wanting them to break inside the 8-track player.
When he needs to purchase some more 8-track tapes, Perazo said he typically finds them at some places in Portland and sometimes on eBay and other places online.
In addition to his own hobby, Perazo has fixed numerous 8-track tapes for different people over the years. He recalled one time when he helped to repair a tape that a grandfather had recorded of himself playing a banjo and singing to his granddaughter as she was growing up. The grandfather wanted to play the tape for his granddaughter at her wedding, but it was broken. However, Perazo fixed it and it was played at the wedding.
Perazo said he also has three or four “folding” 8-tracks, which are quite rare and only contain one or two programs.
Part of the reason Perazo’s collection of 8-tracks and 4-tracks has grown so large is because sometimes private sellers will have a large quantity of tapes for sale and will only offer them as an “all-or-nothing” sale. He recalled one guy who was selling a collection of 4,000 tapes for a nickel apiece, all of them or none.
“I ended up buying all of them because there was one in there I had never seen before,” Perazo said. “It was one of John Lennon and Yoko Ono.”
Perazo was a teacher at Prairie High School for 29 years before retiring from teaching in 2008. He said he often still misses many of the aspects of teaching, including the interaction with the students, going to all of the school sports games and teaching.
“One thing I don’t miss is the half an hour of emails before school and the half an hour of emails after school,” Perazo said, laughing. “A lot of my students still keep in touch with me. I even had one student who, as a joke, started a fan club, the Hector Perazo Fan Club, that ended up getting over 500 people joining. I always got along very well with the students. They knew I would always help them in any way I could.”
Although Perazo has been retired from teaching for eight years, he said he’s really only been completely retired for the last two years, as he was working at a drug and alcohol clinic in Orchards as a Hispanic counselor for several years.
There’s definitely no end in sight for Perazo’s hobby of collecting tapes. He said he still has dozens of tapes he hasn’t even started going through yet, and his collection is sure to only keep growing.
