Unlike some other things from the past I wish were still around, like Led Zeppelin and avocado appliances, I don’t get nostalgic for days of difficult music. They could run up to 45 minutes in one shot, and you could rewind them if you liked the song, unlike the 8-tracks, which required you to drive around the block repeatedly if you wanted to hear your favorite song again.Īnd cassettes had another great unintended attribute: If you separated the two pieces of the case they came in, the edge made a very good ice scraper.Įventually CDs pushed out cassettes and digital music rendered CDs, cassettes-and record stores-obsolete. Eventually that break in the song would etch itself in your mind so that when you heard in another format without the disruption, it just threw your whole day off.Ĭassette tapes replaced 8-track by around 1980. 43. We’d shove the tape cartridge in and rock! Within a few weeks, though, the player would often develop “crosstalk,” meaning the tracks weren’t aligned with the heads of the players and we would hear some of the music from adjacent tracks intruding on “Smoke on the Water.” We’d just jam a matchbook or anything else we’d find on the floor in along with the cartridge until it stopped.īut with only 10 uninterrupted minutes, sometimes a song would have to be split between tracks. Multiply the four tracks times the left and right channels and you get-you guessed it-eight tracks. The media used for our music were 8-track cartridges, which were tapes that had four 10-minute tracks of sound on an endless loop that rolled over four times to play an album. The tape player was frequently worth more than the Chevy Nova that surrounded it. In the late 1970s, a Pioneer 8-track/FM player cost about $200. NOSTALGIA: Looking back on our nuclear childhoodsĪnd these tape decks weren’t cheap. If your 8-track player is portable, it most likely runs on batteries. JOE PHALON: The annual fall pocket harvest has started in my jacket 1.Plug in your 8-track player or put batteries in it. So we would have to attach a “tape deck” to the bottom of our metal dashboards if we wanted to hear more that the Osmonds wedged between commercials for Clearasil and Coca-Cola on the AM band.ĬOLUMN: Remembering the contributions of paperboys When I came of driving age, only the most elite of automobiles had an in-dash “entertainment center” that included the FM band. It was dreadful what we had to do to listen to music. “Dreadful” does not apply to the music, of course. If you’re not old enough to have ever paid less than a dollar for a gallon of gas, you might be saying to yourself, “Phalon, what are you talking about?” Well, I’m talking about when 8-track tape cartridges ruled our lives, and when listening to music could be a dreadful experience. A song I hadn’t heard in a long time played on my car radio the other day, and I realized just how long it had been since I’d heard it because my ears went out of synch for a moment when the song didn’t fade out briefly to shift tracks.
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