Before the advent of CD-R mixes and Ipod, there was a great subculture known as the mix tape. I used to pride myself on the ones I would make, laboriously slaving till the wee hours of the morn. One of the earliest influences on me for the mix tape was this cool comic trade paperback called Mad Peck Studios: A Twenty Year Retrospective by the Mad Peck. A huge section of the book detailed the musical obsessions of two female superheroes, The Masked Marvel and I. C. Lotz. Basically The Mad Peck used his two heroines to write record reviews which were published in Fusion, Creem, The Village Voice, and later, Spin. What made the book really cool were all the detailed mix tapes that they had published along various themes, with song title, artist, label and running time so you could create a perfect mix tape as well. It was a mixtape manifesto. Recently one of the members of Sonic Youth published a book about mix tapes, but it was more from the perspective of designing their look.
So, with my CD player currently on the fritz in the car, I grabbed a few moldy tapes out of a box to listen to yesterday. Strangely, I can carbon date many of my tapes by what brand they are. Blue Kmart tapes are the earliest that I used to buy and were used to tape Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Star Wars radio dramatization, and this cool Beatles radio documentary where they played every song off every album with some sort of commentary or associated audio clip. Denon tapes date back to when I worked at Cat’s Records and we had a promo on them. Black Maxell tapes date to the late 80’s and early 90’s when I worked at Tower Records and was getting mucho swag from the Maxell rep. And clear Maxell tapes date from the mid-late 90’s to the early 21st Century. The first tape I grabbed was an old Denon. Sadly, it’s life expectancy had come to an end. The wheels on the tape went round and round but the tape didn’t.
OK, tape number two (a black Maxell) was slammed in. Most of my tapes were pretty normal, a compilation of whatever I was into at the moment. A great example was when I had bought a bunch of really cheap 45’s at Phonolux, so I just comp’d them all together into one big scratchy collection. Generally there were musical smash-ups of two genres which wouldn’t normally go together but which always kept my ear interested. And there were the straight theme tapes like the Balvenie Surf Mix tape which I made one night while drinking single malts. But this tape was different. This one stands apart from everything else I ever did and I had completely forgotten about it.
The tape starts off with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins off the Feast of the Mau Mau album. But not a whole song. No, instead I took grunts, groans, and screams and the occasional verse from the whole album and edited it down to a 2 or 3 minute sound collage. I’m not sure why. It is kinda cool in Cliff Notes way or as a bizarre commercial for what to expect from the Wild Man of Rock and Roll.
The majority of the tape consists of Southern Rock guitar solos from all the greats: “Ramblin’ Man”, “If You Wanna Get to Heaven”, “Free Bird”, “Highway Song”, “Champagne Jam”, “Bell Bottom Blues”, and many others. But remember, these aren’t the songs, these are only the guitar SOLOS! They’re mashed together in a sometimes sloppy but sometimes brilliant editing scheme that eliminates all the pesky mushy love lyrics and jingoistic anthems. And it lasts almost 30 minutes! I have no idea why I did this. In a “Name That Tune” way, it works. In an extended guitar solo that never seems to end kind of way, it almost works. In fact, I would almost love to try recreate it now with digital technology. The rest of the tape is more traditional with three instrumental songs from Tom Waits.
So, what kind of story do you have about mix tapes?
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