After noodling on it for a few hours last weekend, I wanted to put down my thoughts and memories for myself.
Sadly, I think I got rid of almost all of those old mixtapes. I found two tapes, made by my sister Sharon back in the early 90's, but I can't find any of the ones I made for myself. As for the ones for me, I suspect I threw them all away, or they broke and died, or melted in a car, over the years. And a ton of the tapes I made left my hands because I gave them to the ladies, or to my buddies. A well-curated mixtape was a special gift - a labor of love that took many hours of painstaking planning and execution. The song selection had to be just right for the message you wanted the recipient to receive. The song titles had to look good. The tape's title had to be right. The artwork had to be funny or shocking or cool. You couldn't have a bad version of the song, where, like, the end was cut off, or a radio ad popped up for a millisecond at the end. It had to be spot on. This was all vitally important stuff.
I have a memory of saving the playlists from those old tapes, so I'll go dig through old computer files and my filing cabinet to see. I'm a bit of a hoarder, so I'm hopeful that there are still some pieces of this stuff stashed away somewhere. If I can find them, I'll make playlists on Spotify and you can experience some of the sweet old mastery that I remember.
[*finds old mixtapes, sees that he put embarrassing music on all of them and his faulty memory was wrong about how good his tapes used to be] Err, yeah, can't find any of those! {I really will look later. It'll be a fun experiment to relive those.}
Mix tape creation had immutable rules. Well, they likely were bent and broken repeatedly, but in my mind they were very important and could not be fudged. I've probably forgotten some in the intervening years, but I'll try to recall them.
1. The first one I recall is that you couldn't have more than one song by the same band on the tape. If you chose "Even Flow," then "Once" was going to have to go on the next tape. There's too many great bands to fit into 60 or 90 minutes, you can't let one band hog that space. And anyway, it shows a lack of originality to keep going back to one band.
2. Next, you had to use every second of that tape. None of this bush league BS of leaving a minute of open space at the end of the tape. So I'd spend the extra time researching, writing down, and adding up song play-lengths so that I could arrange them all just right. And I also had a stable of shorties - good, brief tracks that you could stash into the tape to make sure that the time worked out right. You may not recall how short some classic songs are, but "Please Please Please, Let Me Get What I Want" is only 1:53, "Blitzkreig Bop" is barely over 2 minutes, "Very Ape" is under 2, and most Primus albums had some weird little ditty on there that was under a minute. Not that anyone really wanted to hear that little old man singing in the shower about pulling his pud too much, but at least it wasn't empty space!
My sister, and I have no clue where she found these, would sometimes stick just random ass boing sounds (like a spring being unsprung) into those spaces, which was funny. Otherwise, you were being kind of a jerk, making people have to fast-forward the tape, or listen to a bunch of dead air before the tape flipped itself and started the other side. Dead air is tragedy.
3. A funny rule that I always tried to hold to, and I have no clue where this came from, was that the fourth song always had to be the killer track. I never wanted to open with the best song, like maybe the third best song, to get the listener's attention and draw them in, but leave the best thing for a few tracks in, so that it laid them bare right there about 15 minutes in, and kept their attention for the rest of the tape. This was very important in my mind.
Was talking to a friend the other night who said that his money spot was the third song. Humans are a weird breed, man.
Nick Horby's fantastic High Fidelity addressed this somewhat, although Rob has slightly different rules than I followed:
“To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention ***, and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and… oh, there are loads of rules.”
4. You had to go deep as well. You couldn't just put all hits on the tape - if you were thinking to yourself, I really want to put something from Mother's Milk on this tape, you couldn't just go with "Higher Ground," you needed to dig a little deeper and unearth a deeper cut that showcased your intimate knowledge of the tunes and revealed something new and interesting to your listener. You could do a few of the clear hits, but you didn't want the whole tape to be a greatest hits album. This was also assisted by the "no dead air" rule, because if you were really wanting to add something from Pearl Jam's Ten to the tape, but didn't have much room, you might go for "Oceans," because it is short, even if it is a lesser known track.
5. In that same vein, part of this exercise was showing off the depth of your musical knowledge and the size of your music collection. So each tape was going to need a little known artist to show off your street cred. Some Twang Twang Shock-a-Boom on a rock tape, some Paris on a rap tape, some Green River on a grunge tape, some Sugar on a tape for a girl. If you just played stuff the listener already knew, then you were hopelessly lame.
6. Label art. The BBB also discussed this, although he went so far as to decorate the actual tape. I wasn't worried about that, but I would absolutely scour last month's Rolling Stone or SPIN magazines to find a cool slice of imagery that I could cut out and turn into a label. Something weird, something unexpected, something beautiful. Frequently, the artwork used for the first page of the RS reviews was a good one, with some radical reinterpretation drawing of an artist. Or random ads, like thinking it was funny to use Joe Camel, or a box of Tampax.
7. And not only did the artwork need to be on point, but I would painstakingly write out each artist and song name, with my handwriting *just so* to convey the importance of the tape. And I'd come up with some sort of clever (to a 15 year old) name for the tape, that either reflected a song lyric or something else cool I'd come up with.
For a while, we had mix CDs, and I still took advantage of that format as well. MUCH simpler, in that you just had to drag and drop a bunch of mp3s into a list and then tell iTunes to burn the disc. There was no hovering over the stop button like a helicopter parent watching a toddler testing out their walking shoes. Or, another thing I remember, was that you had to let the tape spool for a few seconds before you hit record, at the start of the tape, because there is some sort of non-recordable tape leader thing on there before it gets to the real tape section. For a while, I even still did covers for CD-Rs, and wrote song names on the discs, but then even that fell away.
Now? It's all just Spotify playlists. And its absolutely mind-numbingly overwhelming to make a good playlist with Spotify at your fingertips, because you literally could choose from eight hundred billion tracks, and the mix could be ten hours long. Like, how to remember all of the songs that you would want on there? Back in the day, you only owned a couple hundred CDs, max, so you had a good handle on the universe of songs you could use. Sure, you had to have a good handle on what was in your collection, but its nothing like now. I can barely recall the albums I've heard so far this year, much less recall the hundreds, maybe thousands of individual songs from this year.
The other day, I decided to make the wife a playlist of songs I think she'd like, new ones she may have heard, or maybe has never found. With that in mind, I think I'll just start saving songs that pique my interest as I go, and then those can be added to good playlists. 2020 goals, baby!
Anyone else out there have special rules they recall from tape making?
