How many Orgers are just old enough to have had 8-tracks in their lives? Moreover, remember when cassettes were threatening a hold on the market? 8track-cassette adapters were the new thing for a while, especially in car stereos.

Funny story about 1999 and 8-tracks:

My aunt bought 1999, and I was so in love with it. One day at her house, I didn't have a casette to record the album off of her, but I did have an old Tony Orlando & Dawn 8-track. And her stereo recorded on 8-track tapes. (A rarity, as I hardly ever saw a stereo system that recorded on 8-track tapes). So, I popped in the Tony Orlando 8-track, having played it until it was at the beginning of the loop again, on program 1, his record. I had just enough space to record "1999", "Little Red Corvette", "Delirious", "Let's Pretend We're Married", "DMSR", and "Free". For a couple of years, that's the only part of 1999 that I knew.

The worse part is that, for those who know about 8-tracks, I recorded straight through the little metal piece on the tape that triggered the player to drop to the next track. (Each piece of tape was divided into 4 tracks horizontally). Most times, record companies would fade a song real quick, let the program change, then fade the song back in. But my recording went straight through, so on occasion (in LRC, and LPWM and DMSR) there were 1 second chunks of silence as the metal piece ran over the player head. It took me years to listen to those three songs, and not expect to heara drop in the audio for a brief section.

It was a bit like listening to your favorite record, and there's that one pop or scratch in a certain spot every time that stood out so much, you expect it to be part of the song no matter where you hear it.

Awesome story!

I sure remember 8-tracks. That was all I had until 1977, then I upgraded to cassette.

8-tracks were cool in that if you didn't like the song on track 1, you could pop over to track 2 or 3 or 4. But yeah, you had to be precise when recording stuff to 8-track. That's how I learned to count time, LOL.

I ditched all my old 8-tracks a long time ago. But I bought a 1978 Corvette for my dad some years back. It had an 8-track player and came with a couple 8-tracks! The Eagles was one, IIRC. Memories!

The 8-Track player I received for Christmas sucked when I was a kid; it played more than one track at one time unless you banged on the side of it. Casette tapes were an upgrade. This is how I got 8-Tracks as a kid: