As a child of the 70s and 80s, I remember exactly two eight-tracks in my family home, and they were not mine, so I have no idea what they were, only that there were two of them and we could not play them because we did not have a player. It was all vinyl, all the time, except for cassettes that we used to tape things off the radio. We skipped right from albums to CDs, and then I took the next step to digital. My dad was very excited when I gave him an iPod preloaded with a bajllion blues albums.

So instead, I give you my husband’s eight-track memory.

When I was a kid, it was very exciting when we got a new station wagon, and my mom got an 8-track installed in it. It didn’t come with the car, my mom paid extra. She listened to a lot of music, so we did too.

When I was 9 or 10, we took that car from Indiana to Knoxville and then on to Bradenton. This was the trip where, for reasons I can’t recall, we took a different route to Tennessee and my mom let my older brother, who was 16, practice driving. We got to Cincinnati and wound up completely lost. At some point, my mom said, “I think we need to turn around,” and Dale just flipped the car around the moment she said it, without looking or anything. And then he slammed on the brakes because we were inches from a flight of stairs going down to … something. A subway? A river? No idea. But I remember my mom catching her breath and going, “OK, out. I’m going to drive now.”

The rule when my mom drove was that she would pick an album and then the kids as a unit got to pick an album.

So she’d play Johnny Cash.

And then we’d all go, “Play the Beatles.”

We had one Beatles eight-track, Hey Jude. Ten songs.  She’d play it.

Then she’d play Charley Pride.

And then we’d all go, “Play the Beatles.”

So do that math. However many albums you can play on that drive—about ten hours—divided by two, that’s how many times we listened to that eight-track. As far as I can recall, it held up just fine. You hear about them wearing out fast, but that one did OK. I was more annoyed by how the tape would cut off in the middle of a song and do that little clicky thing where it changed tracks and then start up again.

I suppose it’s possible we did the same thing for the drive home, but I have no recollection of it. I can’t ever remember trips home. It’s all about the going for me.