Bob’s 8-Track Garage Sale is, according to Bob, the only live 8-track radio show on earth. The show has a narrow focus. Bob only plays music directly from 8-track tapes that he finds locally in central Iowa. If you’re in the central Iowa area, you can catch new shows every Thursday morning on 89.1 KHOI FM. The rest of us can stream them from the KHOI Archive for a couple weeks after their air date.
Bob has been running his show since 2015, and I’m delighted by his commitment to an imperfect format that was “right for its time”.
8-track tapes were one of the first portable music formats, but they weren’t designed for radio play. 8-track players don’t rewind or fast-forward, so queuing up a song for the show means playing the tape ahead of time until it reaches the right spot. Each tape has four parallel channels, so playing the right song also means keeping track of which channel a tape is queued up for. And, of course, 8-tracks haven’t been produced for forty years, so the quality can be a little dodgy.