Music Was Chopped Up
Trackus Interruptus: Part 3 of my musical media timeline
To summarize the journey so far:
Part 1: Scratchy Wax — Vinyl records on a huge console record player.
Part 2: Unruly Spools — Pre-recorded cassettes on a portable tape recorder.
I loved being able to buy albums on pre-recorded cassettes and play them in my bedroom on a portable tape recorder. However, the sound quality was not great. And then when I got a car in late high school, I couldn’t play those in the car. But the car (a 1972 blue Toyota Corona with annoying carburetor issues if memory serves) did have… ta-da!… an 8-track tape player.
These days, the 8-track tape is a much maligned music playback format, and rightfully so. But back in the mid-to-late 70s, it was something of a godsend. If you wanted to listen to music in your car, you were pretty much limited to radio. To my knowledge, no one was ever able to incorporate a record player into a moving vehicle stereo system. Compact cassette tapes were still something of a new creature and hadn’t really been perfected yet (sound quality was not great) and cars did not have players for them. Cars did have 8-track players though.
There was something tactilely satisfying about shoving that large plastic cartridge into the giant hole in the dashboard¹ and having the car interior suddenly fill with music.
Here’s a short primer on 8-track tapes for those unfamiliar with the format. They were large vaguely rectangular plastic cartridges that housed an endless tape loop comprising 4 “programs” of 2 tracks each — 2 tracks in order to get stereo sound. Each program was around 10 minutes in length (though that could vary) and so the total time was the same as your average 40 minute vinyl album. At the end of every program there was a little metal strip on the tape that told the player to advance to the next program. You could also hit a program selector button on the player if you wanted to skip to another program manually. I would frequently skip programs that did not contain my favorite songs. (Here’s a cool YouTube video.)
Since an album had to be divided up into 4 programs instead of 2 sides, this made for some odd configurations. It was desirable to have each program be around the same length, because you didn’t want gaps when switching programs. Sometimes this meant the songs were in a different order than they were on the album. And other times… and here’s the kicker… it meant splitting a song in two! This would typically happen if there were long songs on an album. One oft-cited example of this is In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly. These split songs would fade out in the middle, and then the player would automatically go to the next program, which might take a few seconds, and then the song would fade back in where it left off. The record companies and manufacturers tried to put the break points where it wouldn’t be too jarring, but of course it never sounded good.
One of the first 8-tracks I bought was of one of my all-time favorite albums: Past, Present and Future by Al Stewart². The cartridge had one song “Soho (Needless to Say)” split between programs 1 and 2, and another song “Terminal Eyes” split between programs 3 and 4. In the post 8-track days, it became weird to me to not hear the disruption in those songs. Weirdly, there are two very long songs on this album (“Roads to Moscow” and “Nostradamus”), yet they choose to split the shorter songs instead — probably because they fell in the middle of each side. Which is probably a good thing, because then those two longer epics were left intact.
I amassed such a large 8-track collection³ that it was a sin to just listen to them in the car. So I had a stand-alone 8-track player in my bedroom that had a built-in amp and wired bookshelf speakers. Finally I could listen to music in my bedroom with something approaching high fidelity. Although I still couldn’t play it too loud without incurring the wrath of my parents and siblings.
There were a lot of additional problems with 8-track tapes in addition to the whole splitting-a-song-in-two issue. The sound quality started out good, but degraded over time. Eventually, you would even get bleed-through between tracks, so you could faintly hear another song playing in the background of the current song. And like all tape formats, the tape could get easily munched and mangled by the player, or stuck inside it. At this point you just had to throw the thing away.
You could not rewind, due to the nature of the endless loop configuration of the tape, which would’ve caused it to bunch up. You could fast forward, but only if the player had that control, which was not a given. Pretty much the only control you had was switching to another program. (I believe that when you did that, it would start playing from the same point as the previous program, instead of the beginning of the new program. So for example if you switched to program 4 in the middle of playing program 3, it would start playing in the middle of program 4. I could be wrong about this though.)
Despite all these issues and limitations, 8-track players persisted as the main non-radio playback system in vehicles for a very long time, probably close to two decades, until replaced by cassette players when compact cassettes got a lot better. For myself, I needed to go back to something that had better sound quality for my at-home listening…
Next: Prickly Platters
¹ This experience would be replicated a little later by switching out Nintendo NES video game cartridges, ha.
² A digression about Al Stewart, i.e. that “Year of the Cat” guy. He remains one of my favorite artists to this day, with an interesting blend of pop tunecraft and historical (or romantic) storytelling. I gathered as much of his catalog as I could on 8-track. At one store, I encountered an 8-track of Al Stewart’s Museum of Modern Brass, which I bought thinking it was my Al. This was a legitimate mistake because Al had a number of early UK-only albums that I initially didn’t know about and it surprised me when I encountered the vinyl at import record stores. This album was an interesting jazzy all-instrumental effort that included, among other things, a cover of Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale”. I enjoyed listening to it now and then as a change of pace, though it wasn’t really my thing. I suspected that this was a different Al Stewart but in those pre-Internet days, I had no way of knowing. It amused me that Al was secretly into instrumental jazz and came out with this album to confuse people. It wasn’t until literally last week that I discovered this Al was a jazz trumpeter who played with the likes of Louie Armstrong and Benny Goodman. It’s so weird being able to find out anything by typing something on your phone, but sometimes just not knowing and being able to speculate was fun. For example, being able to find out exactly the lyrics to almost any song kinda takes the mystery/ambiguity out of it.
³ I have a suspicion I still have part or all of my 8-track tape collection buried away somewhere in my basement or garage. It would’ve been nice to find that so I could take pictures for this story. Though maybe I just threw them all out when I moved out of my dad’s house.
