For short period of time in the 1970s, a “hot” new music playback medium swept the nation. Well, maybe “swept” is too strong a word. And certainly "hot" is too strong a word. But 8-track tapes did indeed catch on for a spell. The question now is, Why?
I remember 8-track tapes as being clunky, problematical, and suspect in terms of sound quality (and I was just a kid at the time!). But yes, I’ll admit, there were a good couple of months where it was cool to have a portable 8-track player in your room, where you could plug in Chicago IX or the Beatles' “red” or “blue” tapes and hear some great music without having to deal with needles and arms on record players. Plus, 8-tracks were handy for use in the car (standard cassette tapes had not yet emerged). If you were a kid in the back seat of the family vehicle, you’d carry your favorite 8-tracks with you so you could pass Abbey Road, The Best of Bread, or even The Partridge Family Album to the front seat and say, “Dad, can you put this in?”
A few years later, in August 1977, I drove off to college in my “wheels” (an old blue Plymouth station wagon cast off by my dad). Because the car had an 8-track player, I brought along my stash of tapes, including Boats Against the Current. The car’s sound system was terrible, and the tapes themselves sounded horrendous, but hey, beggars couldn’t be choosers. (And besides, the Compact Disc was still a loooong six years away from its introduction to the U.S. market.)
If you remember 8-track tapes at all, then you likely know about one other major flaw with the format. Record companies liberally reorganized an album’s songs --- original sequencing be damned --- so the 8-track’s four programs would be relatively equal in length.
If re-sequencing didn’t work, well, Plan B was to chop songs in half. Seriously. Midway through your favorite song, it would fade out, you’d hear a big “thunk!” come out of the 8-track player, and then the song would fade in again.
Not even Boats was immune to random re-sequencing and song-splitting. Arista re-ordered the track listing for release as an 8-track while also chopping two songs in half.
I haven’t listened to an 8-track tape since I sold that beat-up old Plymouth wagon after my freshman year of college, but I still have Boats on 8-track --- in fact, two of them: a well-worn copy plus an unopened copy still bearing its “2/$1.00” sticker. Here's the song listing on Boats, the 8-track; each program times in at 9 minutes, 30 seconds:
Progam 1: “Boats Against the Current,” “Nowhere to Hide”
Program 2: “Love Is All That Matters,” “She Did It,” “Take It or Leave It” (cont’d)
Program 3: “Take It or Leave It” (cont’d), “Marathon Man,” “I Think I Found Myself” (cont’d)
Program 4: “I Think I Found Myself” (cont’d), “Runaway”
What a scrambled, choppy way to listen to Boats, huh? Not surprisingly, 8-tracks died faster than we could say “Saturday Night Fever.” In fact, one of the least-surprising developments in consumer electronics history was the demise of the format. It was convenient, maybe, but ultimately a terrible idea on every other front. Even so, they did have a certain charm, don’t you think?
3 comments:
Your piece on 8-track tapes was a great read! Brought back lots of memories of songs fading half-way through and then continuing on the next side. Amazing how much we were willing to put up with to get tunes in our cars, eh?
Larry,
I had multiple 8-tracks of this that I played traveling between Louisville (home) and Bowling Green, Ky., (Western Kentucky University in the city the Everly Brothers wrote a song about), a two hour drive on weekends.
I remember the tape player in my 1973 Maverick (bright yellow with racing stripes, vinyl roof, V8, 302 engine, really great pick up speed-wise, but something I bought cheap, hence the car's yellow lemon color) --- that player used to eat my 8-track tapes, so I wound up having extra copies of most of the tapes (Raspberries, Eric, etc.).
One thing I did like on the 8-track split of "Take It Or Leave It" is that the acoustic guitar break seems longer (as it clicks over mid-song) than on the LP. But overall, the song breaks between tracks never did work well (song, click, pause, song).
Interesting memories, amigo!
Ah, I remember this well! One of my sisters actually had the 8-track version of BOATS--I even had Eric autograph it for her, at the same time as I had him autograph my copy of the LP, when he went to the opening of the Record Rendezvous at the Great Lakes Mall in Mentor, Ohio. Had to skip school that day to do it, too. Now, neither one of us knows where that 8-track is! (At least I still have the LP!)
Post a Comment