¶ Intro / Opening
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck. It's just us, neither Jerry nor Davis here, so it's short Stuff, the bereft edition.
That's right.
I want to thank NPR, capture dot Com, a website called ps Audio, a website called ever Present, and more for the research that went into the eight track cassette player or eight track cartridge itself. April eleventh is National eight Track Tape Day, so we've missed that. But if you don't know what an eight track is, it preceded the cassette tape and we're gonna get into what this
¶ Introduction to 8-Track Cartridges
thing was.
Yeah, you usually wedged in between LP record albums and cassettes because that's basically where it really popped up in the seventies is kind of where you really associate eight tracks. But it was way older than that, apparently, as far back as the forties it was essentially coming into development.
Right, Yeah, which surprised me. You might be wondering, like, why did we need eight tracks at all? And it's because at the time, dear listener, especially younger dear listener, if you wanted to play the music that you wanted to hear, you could play it on your record player in your house. You didn't have a record player in your car, you had a radio that played whatever the
heck they wanted. So all of a sudden, eight tracks came along as a mobile version away to take the music that you wanted on the road, either via your car or via these awesome portable players, of which we had. One of it was a Lloyd's. We had a deck in our conversion van, of course, but we had just look up the white Lloyd's eight portable player and that was the very one. I found it online and I might even get one on eBay. It brought back so many nostalgic memories.
That's awesome, maning you totally should of One of my friends in high school, Mitch, not dirty Mitch with skabies, but the right different Mitch.
That sounds good.
His grandma had a huge white Lincoln Continental with an eight track deck in it, and we got our hands on a Saturday Night Fever soundtrack on eight track and we just cruise around listen into that in that car. It was pretty.
Boss, skipping forward two songs at a time.
Ish. Yeah, yes, yeah, that's something I can't wait to talk about. But just when a little background on the how this worked. It was built on ancient technology from the twenties and thirties, which was magnetic film, which became real the real film, and essentially is that is tape that has magnetized metal particles on it, and when sound is converted into an electrical impulse, the tape writer translates
that into well, it's an electromagnet. It translates it into a magnetic pulse that arranges these pieces of magnetic metal
¶ Development and Early Inventors
into ones and zeros, and then the whole thing is done backwards on the on the other end when you listen to it. This is the basis of not just cassette tapes, but since eight tracks came first, this is what they were built on over time. And there are a few inventions that kind of were stepping stones that led to the eight track.
Yeah, I mean the Germans were using it in World War Two. The Allies got a hold of it, and eventually it got to the music industry and they were like, hey, we got a thing now that we can play this stuff on the road.
We think in a continuous loop.
And the very first person to achieve the version that could go to market was a guy named William Powell Lear, the creator of the lear Jet.
Previous to this, there.
Were some sort of housing and internal guts things that were worked out by various people. A guy named George Eish in nineteen fifty three came up with the nab cartridge or the fiddle fidilipak cartridge. It's also called a cart if you ever heard of like on w CARI Cincinnati or old radio stations, they had carts, music carts, That's what that was. These were built for radio stations.
It was short for cartridge slang. I guess you'd call it.
Yeah.
So that was followed up by the Month's Stereo Pack and it was created by Earl Madman Months, and he directly influenced the development of the eight track because William Powell Lero is riding around in Madman Months's car when he was playing one of the Stereo pack cartridges for him. But the thing that really kind of separated Months from everybody else, he's the first one to go directly to the record companies and say like, hey, let me license your music and put them on this new format and
let's start getting it out there. And like I said, William Powell Leer was like, this is a great idea. I'm going to build on this and create a longer playing version of it, and I'm going to call it the eight track.
Yeah, and then vinta Jet. Yeah.
I should point out too quickly, and this can't be a coincidence, but Earl Madman months was the.
Creator of that cart.
If you're a Coen Brothers fan and a fan of the movie Barton Fink, you will know that John Goodman's character name is Carl Madman munt oh really, and there's no way that's a coincidence. No, I don't know the correlation or if it was just they got they thought it sounded cool or something.
Who knows what a strange homage if it was.
Though, agreed, Should we take a break, Yes, all right, we'll be right back with more on the bygone era of the A track right.
After this.
And things job Job. So all of this was being developed in the fifties, I think as early as the forties technically, but the A Trek really came into its own in the mid sixties. And the reason why is because the Ford Motor Company said, Hey, everybody, have you
heard of these eight tracks? Well, we're going to start putting eight track players in our nineteen sixty six model cars as a high end option, and as more and more cars started featuring eight track players, eight track cartridges just became dominant as the form of how you listen to music outside of your home in a way that you controlled, unlike radio.
Yeah, for sure, they were pretty cheap. There were two to three bucks.
The most expensive on record was The Beatles' Greatest Hits, released in nineteen seventy. That was almost five bucks, four dollars and ninety seven cents, which would be nice price, Yeah, the nice price. That'd be more than forty dollars today. So that was you know, that was an expensive eight track for sure. It hit its popularity in the mid seventies. And I guess we should talk a little bit about how.
These things played.
You know, you've got the magnetic tape that you described inside on a single, and there was a little motor that pulled the tape across the audio head to make it make the sound. But you're probably if you don't know what these are, you're probably like, what is the eight tracks?
What does that even mean? Each tape had eight tracks and.
A sensing strip that told a solooid coil like, hey, a program is over, which was you know, roughly two songs and now it's time to switch over to the next track.
So when I said you could skip ahead.
Two songs at a time, if you hit the button, it would it would pop forward the two songs roughly.
So weirdly, I want to say just one thing because I don't want us to get emails. I saw it in one place that it actually had four tracks, but there were two of each of the four tracks, so they were in stereo. So two times four was eight. I only saw that in one place. Everywhere else kind of described it as eight different tracks like you just did.
But that idea out there, all right.
So yeah, so this, this whole thing what differentiates it from cassette is that it was it played continuously. It was an endless loop, right, So I guess if you pressed play, it would play the whole album over and over again until you press stop. Is that correct?
Yeah? And the point is you didn't have to flip it.
The downside of that as you couldn't rewind it or fast forward it except for skipping two songs ahead. But you couldn't go back two songs as far as I.
Know, Okay, so that was kind of one of the downsides. Another big downside is that these tracks were not like they just took an album and they cut it up into four equal amounts of time or eight equal amounts of time, I should say, right, So if one track could fit one in three quarters of a song, that three quarters of a song would fade out, it would be a click, and then when the next track started, it would fade back in. And people hated that.
Of course they did.
That's very clunky, understandably so, but that level of clunkiness really kind of gets across the just the kind of
¶ How 8-Tracks Worked and Their Rise
attention to detail that was given to eight tracks. They as far as technology goes, they were perfectly encompassed by what they looked like, clunky, giant plastic key and just clunky.
I guess yeah. I mean it was interesting.
They deserved to be popular for a while because it was such a revolution and to be able to listen to what you wanted to outside of your home. But the other limitations, you know, not rewinding stuff like that. Apparently the internal components would fail a lot of times. Like the cassette itself was very sturdy and long, lasting, but the little motor and stuff that would fail your
car was famous for eating the tapes. They had a lot of downsides, but that didn't outweigh up the initial upside of being able to take your music on the road.
No, for sure. I mean that was a big deal. Like, I never was like this eight track sucks when we were listening to Seren night Fever. So I mean it couldn't have been that bad. But I think for people who are like really into music, it was probably very annoying.
Yeah.
Well, the irony is is that the cassette tape was introduced in nineteen sixty five kind of.
Either just kind of squarely in the middle of.
Or just before eight tracks were at their zenith of popularity. But they weren't marketed, like bands weren't releasing music on cassettes.
At first.
It was just like, hey, here's a cassette, and you can record yourself at home and interview your parents about what life was like in World War Two.
Yeah, do your own story core at home. Yeah. Yeah. So people were like, I can start taping songs off the radio with these things, and essentially it just kind of avalanche from there. Cassettes took over because you could fast forward, you could rewind, and even though you had to flip the cassette the worst thing that you could possibly have to do in the world. They were way cheaper than eight tracks too, just to produce and to purchase,
so cassettes pretty quickly took over. And interestingly, this is also happening at the same time with video VHS tapes were overtaking Beta max and laser disc at the same time too.
What were you about to say, the worst thing you would have to.
Do that was an addendum to having to flip a cassette tape.
Oh okay, I thought you were going to say, if the tape unspooled some you would have to put a pencil or use your pinky finger to rewind the tape and draw that magnetic tape back into the cassette.
I always had to use a pinky because I never had a pencil, because I wasn't a nerd.
Well, I had one in my front pocket, my breast pocket.
So that what else you got? Anything else?
Uh, just a couple of tidbits. It was a museum for a little while.
There was an enthusiast named Bucks Burnett in Dallas Texas that had a museum because he collected him, and it seems like it was open for a handful of years. The largest collector now is a guy named Gary Hetzman who apparently has close to one hundred thousand tapes. He
may have more than that, because that was twenty nineteen. Yeah, and the most there's actually a very valuable one Frank Sinatra, So it's called Sinatra Joe Beam, Frank Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim, which I bet is a great record, Yeah, because they did a limited pressing. Of course, it's scarcity that makes something valuable, and they only did thirty five hundred copies of that one. And if you have one of those, you can get a few grand for it.
Apparently, why not, what are you gonna do? You're not gonna do anything to look at it, you might as well sell it.
Yeah, get one of those Lloyd's players and put that strap over your shoulder and go go down the street rocking it.
I found another player too that I would actually like. It was made by Panasonic. It was called the Dynamite Plunger Portable a track player, and the reason why is because it had like a like the handle was like on a rod coming off of it, and then it had like a well the thing that you gripped, and it looked like kind of a dynamite plunger is heat came in yellow and all sorts of great colors.
I'm looking it up because I got to see what you're talking about.
So, yeah, there was one for sale.
Yeah, okay, yeah, those are brad Man. Those are awesome.
If I got into eight tracks, I would definitely buy one of those. But I'm not into eight tracks, so I'm not going to.
Yeah, I mean, there's no reason to Like, people are
¶ Decline and Cassette Takeover
into vinyl still because of fidelity is so great. There's really no reason to buy eight tracks now unless you just want a little walk down memory lane of a sort of a creadier version of everything else.
All right, right, well, I guess since we started walking out memory Lane, we just walked away from the short stuff, right.
Yeah, I guess that means it's out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.