Nothing like creating a day celebrating mediocrity in the consumer audio market. Ah, the good old 8 track. It was a very successful audio format for its day but the basic design was notoriously unreliable, tapes broke constantly and it "somehow" didn't include the basics one would expect in any tape machine: the ability to fast forward and reverse, erase and record.
Let's take a look back at something that's come to symbolize the 60s and the 70s.
The origins of the 8 track technically date back to magnetic tape used on reel-to-reel tape players developed in the 1940s. Several attempts were made in the 50s to make some kind of tape format more user friendly so that consumers didn't have to thread tapes. None of these efforts proved successful until 1963 when the Lear Jet Corporation developed the "Stereo 8".
Detailed History of the 8 Track
Anybody who's seen the attempts by satellite radio to grow their industry by partnering up with automobile companies can look back at the 8 track's commercial growth and see the same thing. Ford offered factory-installed players on the Mustang, Thunderbird and Lincolns in 1965 and the player became a staple of late 60s and 70s automobiles:
These car players typically stunk. Remember having to cram a piece of cardboard underneath the tape to "cram" it tightly into the player? That was done to get rid of the dreaded "warble" when the tape head on the player didn't align correctly with the tape. This oftentimes eventually resulted in the player "eating" the tape and also weakening the splicing that enabled the endless loop. Nonetheless, car restorers in particular value car players since no self-respecting muscle car of the early 70s would have gone without an 8 track player.
8 track "boom boxes" were developed like the Panasonic TNT Dynamite:
And yes, I owned one of these. Required 6 "C" batteries which might get you through 5-6 tapes depending on how loud you liked your music!
Another interesting anecdote about the "warble". Sit down sometime with headphones and listen to Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon". Go to the end of the song "The Great Gig In The Sky" and turn up the volume. As the song is fading out, you'll hear a definite tonal shift in the sound (it rises, then falls). For years, I thought this was due to my 8 track since it sounded like a classic warble. Nope, it was on the original recording. The story behind that is for another diary. ;)
That leads into a discussion on the other obvious limitations of the format. As anybody here who owned 8 track gear will tell you, many songs would be split up because of the switch from track to track. How this was done varied from album to album. For example, on Kansas's "Leftoverture", the song "The Wall" faded out, then the track switched, then the song faded back in. However, about 3-5 seconds of the song itself were literally hacked out. I never knew what it was supposed to sound like until years later when I purchased the CD.
Another example is "Deacon Blues" from Steely Dan's "Aja" album. This was simply a fade out then fade back in. The "problem" I had was that years later after I had replaced these albums with CDs, I always expected to hear the fade out in a certain spot, then a click. And yeah, it literally took years for that expectation to go away.
Song order was also changed to be able to limit those "split in two" songs by managing to squeeze complete songs onto one of the "tracks". The aforementioned "Leftoverture" is all over the map on the 8 track in terms of track order. "Pyramid" by the Alan Parsons Project is another and in both cases, songs were still split in two. On Elton John's Greatest Hits Vol 1, they didn't have enough material to fill the entire 8 track so they repeated one song.
I know this how? Heh heh, I own these. And they still work. I'm convinced they still work because in 1979 I found a great 8 track component player, a Pioneer Centrix:
I paid $20 for it at a used stereo equipment store on The Hill in Boulder Colorado. I could put in tapes that had distinct warbles and let them play endlessly for a couple of hours and if the tape splice hadn't been previously compromised, they'd play perfectly afterwards. You can still find these exact Centrix players on Ebay and they still cost just $20.
Since the format is an endless loop, an 8 track will keep player over and over and over until you run down your car battery (done that), you eventually memorize every note and lyric on the album, or you finally get sick of listening to the same album for the 39.5th time and you pull the tape. It's often called the "8 track rut".
Cassettes eventually replaced 8 tracks as the crappy audio media of choice in consumer electronics because they were easier to use, you could fast forward, reverse and easily record to them. They sounded worse, yeah, as crappy-sounding as 8 tracks were, most cassettes of the early 80s were worse. By 1983, 8 tracks were no longer carried in retail stores (remember those?) although the record clubs like Columbia House and RCA still offered them for another 5 years. In fact, some of the rarest 8 tracks were from those sources. I think I have the only 8 track of "Vulture Culture" by the Alan Parsons Project because of the record clubs. Alan thought it was a bootleg at first!
That being said, some artists after 1983 insisted, at least for a year or two, on having their material released in 8 track format. Bob Seger supposedly stated back then that most of his fans only had 8 tracks players so dammit, his record company better release his next album in that format.
8 tracks are still widely available in just about any antique store, flea market and I see hordes of em on ebay. Not to mention there are specialty sites devoted to nothing but 8 tracks.
In 40 years, the MP3 player will probably hold the same significance to people growing up today as the 8 track player does to at least some of their parents. I think tonight when I get home, I'll pop in Robin Trower's "In City Dreams" which is one of the few 8 tracks in my collection I never got around to replacing with CD. And remember back to owning a 73 Nova with an after-market player and big box speakers on the deck under the rear windshield. And then go tell the kids to get off my lawn.