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The Tape from Hell – War Music

StreetJelly Big Check

Many of you have seen this past week, Frank Podlaha (a.k.a. Frankie) and StreetJelly won first prize in the 2014 Tennessee Veterans Business Association Business-Plan Competition.  Folks have been asking about Frank’s service in the U.S. Army and his time as a helicopter crew chief in Operation Desert Storm.  Here’s one of his stories…

“No shit, there I was…”  All good war stories should start like that.  So there I was, or more precisely, there we were:  Saudi Arabia, December 1990, 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, somewhere in the desert north of Hafar Al Batin, south of the Iraqi border.  My buddies and I spent our days maintaining AH-1F Cobra Attack Helicopters.  We were crew chiefs, or more accurately, helicopter mechanics and aviation crewmen.  We were getting our aircraft ready for the impending ground invasion for Operation Desert Storm.  Although at the time, it was known as Operation Desert Shield.

Frankie and AH-1F Cobra

We worked out of the back of a 5-ton Army truck converted into a small tool shop.  It was jammed packed in every corner with wrenches, sockets, gauges, you name it.  It had everything we needed to work on the helicopters.  But the one most important thing it didn’t have: music!  That’s ok, though, as we brought along our own portable am/fm radio cassette player.  I can’t remember the brand – but think of a smaller one-speaker Emerson type model.  It was physically the size of a breakfast cereal box.

Frankie,  Gulf War, 1991

Frankie, Gulf War, 1991

We had plenty of C-size batteries to run the mini boom-box, plus we had AC power whenever we stopped rolling and cranked up the generator.  Six or seven guys hung out daily in the back of this truck.  We all had various musical tastes, but for the most part we all liked the rock classics.  At the time, the best pop music could give us was “Ice-Ice Baby.”  I know!

After a few weeks of being in-country, we ran through playing all our cassettes ad nauseam.  No, there were no radio stations way out in the desert, not even the propaganda station Baghdad Betty.  “Play this cassette.”  “No, we just heard that, play this.”  “No way.”  “Don’t even think about putting that junk on.”  That’s what our musical decisions were reduced to.

Then it happened, purely out of frustration or musical despair, Mike Carper …or was it Bryan Benz, laid down the musical law and said while holding up the Rolling Stones Hot Rocks tape, “we will only listen to this cassette in this truck until we get back home!”  Ooooh-kay.  Sounded like absolute silliness to play one tape for the rest of our tour, but what the hey!

Snake DoctorsAnd that’s what we did, play that double-sided greatest-hits album over and over again in that truck.  And I mean over and over and over and over again.  FIVE MONTHS STRAIGHT!  At first, it was kind of fun, then a bit annoying.  But after a while, it was truly an adventure in insanity to see if we could really pull it off.  Days turned into weeks, weeks into months.

We repaired the tape at least five times.  Yep, you remember those old cassette players – 1 out of 20 tapes got chewed up inside.  Not a problem for us, we were ass-kicking Cobra “snake doctors.”  Surely we can repair a cassette tape.  And we did with a pair of jewelers screw drivers and a little bit of scotch tape.  We spliced that recording back together each time.

We traveled 100s of miles through the desert, perhaps 1000s.  We crossed the boarder into Iraq, entered Kuwait from its north, crossed back into Iraq.  Many sleepless nights, many long days – but we always had Hot Rocks to listen to.  The tape sounded horrible after time.  But it didn’t matter, flip it over and let’s listen to it again!
Rolling Stones Hot Rocks
There you have it, we never played another tape in the that truck the entire war.  The cassette made it back with us to Germany in 1991.  We christened it “The Tape from Hell” and eventually mounted it on a plaque.  The team gave it to Mike, our Sergeant, as a gift when he left the Army.

…and yes, I know every word on that dang album.  And to this day, I have not listened to Hot Rocks since.  ~frankie

“Drum roll please… [brrprrprrprrprr]  And now, Ladies and Jellymen, allow me to introduce… The Tape from Hell

The Tape from Hell

An Online Venue is still a Venue

A special message from Martina, StreetJelly co-founder.

An Online Venue is still a Venue

Store FrontsThe Internet has become a big part of our lives and is often viewed as one big entity. In reality it is an enormous collection of services, businesses and venues. Frequently it is free to users, but it is not free to those who decide to make it their medium of choice to conduct business or offer a service. Instead of paying rent for a physical location, virtual venues pay for bandwidth and hosting. As soon as an individual logs on to a website this person enters a space very much like a physical location. When someone walks into a concert hall or store, it is widely accepted to conduct oneself in a respectful manner and comply with a few rules. Everyone understands a customer walking into a restaurant cannot simply go up to someone’s table and scream insults at a stranger. Online venues are not really that different from conventional locations especially if they offer live video and the opportunity to chat. Live communication among participants closely resembles an actual gathering place. StreetJelly falls into this category.

We are a small company created by music lovers and musicians who pour our hearts, time and financial resources into this undertaking with the intention of making StreetJelly a pleasant, welcoming and fun entertainment venue for musicians and viewers. It is our mission to be all about the music. The musical performance is our focus of attention and the chat was predominantly designed to offer a way of communication between the artist and audience.

We would like to thank our musicians, viewers and all the volunteers behind the scenes from the bottom of our heart and are grateful for all your support and feedback. Constructive criticism and suggestions are always considered and taken seriously. However, no matter how hard we try it is impossible to please everybody and meet the entertainment needs of every single person visiting the website. We are all individuals with varying likes and dislikes and no venue on this planet will be able to satisfy 100% of the population. Over the course of the last year our staff was repeatedly confronted with some extremely rude and disrespectful treatment behind the scenes simply because we did not accommodate the personal entertainment needs of a very small group of our users. We are doing our very best 24/7 and personally go out of our way to be polite and respectful to our musicians and viewers. StreetJelly offers musicians the opportunity to showcase their music and earn some money. We do not charge for broadcasting and pay the fees to songwriter associations to enable musicians to play covers. For those of you who believe StreetJelly is not the right place, be assured we understand. We appreciate the time you spent to give us a try and sincerely wish you the best of luck in finding a venue fit for you. It neither helps us nor does it help the few who spend a vast majority of every day on the website simply to inform us over and over how much you dislike our business model. MartinaHow many people would frequent a restaurant for breakfast, lunch and dinner which serves a type of food they don’t enjoy just to tell the cook every time how much they disliked their meal?

I can’t mention enough how much we appreciate the vast majority of wonderful musicians and viewers. Many of us have even made cherished friends. For those of you we can’t accommodate it is time to move on and search for your perfect place to spend your time.

Thanks again to everyone who shares our vision of creating an online space of mutual respect and extending this respect to our staff and team of monitors who have a very ungrateful job. Hope to see you on StreetJelly very soon. This is not just a business to us, but also a labor of love.