If you are somewhere under the age of forty, then you may have no idea what 8-tracks are. Back in my day - the 1970's, 8-track tapes were one of a few music media options for the general public. Not that many people went in that direction, as far as I knew, but my parents invested in a player, and I took advantage of having such a unit in the house.
I did have a friend whose dad owned a reel-to-reel tape machine, and that looked like something straight out of an alien spacecraft. But I guess audiophiles owned such things in order to record their vinyl albums, store the records in pristine condition, then use the tapes for listening purposes.
I owned a very modest tape collection, probably tiny by most standards. I might have had about ten or so tapes at most. Over the years, some of those 8-tracks have vanished... I'm not sure where or why, but I might have simply decided to pare down this little unusable (because once I moved out on my own, I never owned a player) collection to just a few with interesting album art for display purposes. In fact, yeah, I did display a few of them for a time.
The first 8-track I ever bought was a nice Elvis hits collection, and I'm happy that that one has survived. When the Bay City Rollers (roll your eyes if you must) took the world by storm, I briefly fell under their musical spell.... hey, they were the next Beatles! Right. Other albums I picked up on 8-track were Queen's A Night At The Opera, Cheap Trick's Live At Budokan, Max Webster's A Million Vacations, and K-Tel's Music Express (a 1975 pop/rock collection), shown below. Plus the tapes shown in the image above. And maybe a few others that I just can't remember.
8-tracks were a weird invention; they were smaller than vinyl records but probably weighed more. They were hefty compared to the compact audio cassettes, which didn't peak in popularity until the 80's, when boomboxes and Sony Walkmans came along. The sound was fine to my ears, but somehow I realized that it wasn't quite as clean as that on vinyl. Now let me be clear here: I was not aware of hi-fidelity in my music - not yet. I mean, I started out playing precious vinyl records on a cheap little kids' plastic portable record player. That inappropriately weighted tone arm and massive chisel of a stylus surely carved canyons into those records. Thankfully, my aunt soon donated her old record player to my early teen cause. That was a turning point, since I didn't have to continue to scotch tape a stack of nickels onto the cheap-o tone arm so that the record wouldn't skip anymore. Not exactly a high-end system, this was serviceable and definitely a step in the right direction for a kid with only a lame paper route for earning income.
The 8-track thing appealed to me only briefly, for a couple of reasons. First, I hated that on some tapes, a "program" (there were four programs per tape, with songs distributed among them) would end in the middle of a song... the song would either cut abruptly or fade out, then BOWMP! - it would click to the next program, and the song would resume. Secondly, the 8-track player was in the family room, so there was little privacy if I wanted to crank up the Kiss or Queen. Headphones were a necessity, and since my pop hated music, he provided those so I could keep the jungle music out of his canine hearing range. I often sat for hours with the 'phones on, listening to tapes or the FM radio build into the unit. I think those 70's Realistic ear-goggles looked something like this:
But I felt more comfortable in my basement bedroom where I could kick back or jump around to my music without parental disruption. And that meant I continued building a record collection. Again, that was a modest set of music, perhaps no more than about one hundred albums in total.
Still, there was a strange charm about those clunky old 8-tracks, and that must be why I even kept some of them.
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