Cheat to Win, The Jack
Still working my way through the stack of vinyl accumulated during five years without a working turntable.
It’s an age-old barstool debate: does the music of today suck, or have we merely aged out the enthusiasm & curiosity necessary to seek out the good stuff?
I was an ‘80s bin-flipper. Like many of us, I was quite content to spend an hour in each of the musty used record stores on the Ave, pawing through bin after bin of mushy-spined LPs, mining for gold. I rarely left empty-handed.
The depths of some of those bins didn’t change much that whole decade. New stuff would get added in front, but the stock in the rear reaches of some of those bins was pretty stagnant. The covers of many of those forgotten records are burned into my memory: Hatchet, Heep, Rogue Male.
Some dudes of my generation, like Jim and Matt, still have fingers and minds nimble enough to trip the bins fantastic. But most days it’s all I can do to get mine to cooperate to punch up a playlist on Spotify. Occasionally, however, I’ll find myself in a mood to browse. And I’m usually rewarded.
WEEK #5: Cheat to Win, The Jack. Purchased for a dollar at Black Noise Records in Bellingham, 2021. Favorite Side: Hard to say…
What initially attracted me to CHEAT TO WIN by The Jack was the cover, of course. It’s absurd, sure—the photo, but also the period in the band name and the quotation marks around the title. As much as that, though, it looked like something I ought to have seen before. A million times. Yet it was completely unfamiliar. Turning it over and scanning down to the bottom of the credits confirmed my hunch: 1985. Smack in the middle of my most active binning years.
I was intrigued enough by The Jack spend one dollar on it.
Of course I didn’t have a turntable to put it on when I got home, so I read the liner notes and dropped a casual Goog on its self-conscious ass. Not getting any immediate internet results only served to heighten my intrigue. Said notes helped in piecing together a courtroom sketch of The Jack—a vanity project from Utah whose namesake singer referred to himself in the third person and appeared on not only the front, but also the back cover.
I winced, noticing “Dear Prudence” in the track listing. On a 7-song EP. Hoping “Day After Day” wasn’t a second cover, I put CHEAT TO WIN at the back of the growing stack of records where it belonged, forgetting about it until last spring when my new turntable was again spinning proudly.
Even then, The Jack was not the first record I reached for and it wasn’t the second. It took me quite a while to work my way to the back of my own bin where I’d hidden the record from myself. Even then I was reluctant to put it on.
The actual music is precisely as appalling as you and I both expected: wind-up toy guitars, preening baroque keys and ever-rolling roto-tom drums-- all compressed beneath the awning of the pompous, over-processed vocals of The Jack. From the false endings and canned stadium crowd outro of the sprawling title track, through the gross oversinging of “Dear Prudence” and (yes) the Jackification of Bad Finger’s “Day After Day,” CHEAT TO WIN did not disappoint, at least within the greater context of disappointment.
The whole self-important mess is an outrage. But that is not the part that interests me the most. Grimly sliding the vinyl back into its sleeve, I was still curious as to how something so awful had eluded me all these years. After all, I was an active seeker of this kind of dreck through much of the 1980s. And as revolting as I found CHEAT TO WIN in 2023, it certainly aint no basement tape. The performances, production and presentation are professional (if dated). Someone spent money on this in 1985, and it struck me odd that a copy had never crossed my path.
Digging a little deeper for information on The Jack confirmed two vaguely-held suspicions:
The first was that this type of pre-Hair Age Members Only 80s puff rock is hardly extinct. I finally did find a bio and some backstock of CHEAT TO WIN (along with The Jack’s first record ROCK ELITE) on the website of a hard rock clearing house label called Metallic Blue Records. And there was so much other rank ore down that worm hole: Truce, Megattack, The Take, Cirkus. The pages just kept loading. At first, I thought it might be a parody site, like a whole catalog of HOT SAUCE COMMITTEE repros. But I believe it’s real. It exists in three proper dimensions, right here on Facebook. There are people still creating and consuming this music.
The second realization I came to in researching The Jack was that the world we live in today truly is a small one. What may previously have been referred to as 6 degrees of separation is probably more like 3 or even 2 in our triple-digit Mbps culture. Reading through The Jack’s bio (clearly penned by The Jack himself), I noticed the name of someone I ACTUALLY KNEW listed as the bass player in a later incarnation of the band, after The Jack’s relocation to LA. I didn’t know Dominic well, but well enough to take drugs with him once or twice in Seattle while The Jack was still working on CHEAT TO WIN in Provo.
Clearly, there are no remaining secrets in this life...
COMING IN FEBRUARY: You still like Devotchka?!