I’m sure I’m not the only member of my demographic, the 30-to-45s, who received this book as a gift last Christmas:
Filled with witty insight into the mix tape’s form and social function, packed with personal testimonials and playlists and pictures, Thurston’s love letter to an all but extinct art form will double as an act of historic preservation, a museum. Many of the friends whose memories and tapes he includes are the folks who shaped the culture of our adolescence; it’s fun to see what they gave their friends and why — and of course to witness the same form of mild competition that always accompanies mix exchanges among friends. I made this, the good mix tape says. I dare you to beat it.
Part of the competitiveness among Thurston and his pals has to do with who has the earliest memories of the form. Thurston writes lovingly about his upstairs neighbor Dan Graham’s fancy new Walkman, how his mixtapes consisted mostly of punk 45s he’d transfer to cassette and string into his own unique compilations. He recalls first hearing of the concept in 1978, when Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice that his favorite Clash record was the one he had curated on a mixtape of his own. Allison Anders beats these boys by a good five years: she has memories of a roommate who made mixtapes in London in 1973.
Of course it’s fun to see how cool these celebs were at so young an age (Jim O’Rourke was listening to Jack Nitzsche when he was 15!) or to read insights that make me nod my head and think, of course (“I am no mere consumer of pop culture,” Matias Viegener writes of the mixtape’s implicit manifesto, “but also a producer of it”). But more than anything the book made me realize, Damn. I have some friends who could pound them out with the best of them.
I have a couple bags of mixes packed away in the top of a closet. I pulled them down the other night when the topic came up in conversation, and we spent one of the last nice nights of the early autumn listening to some of them — and, I admit, fast forwarding others. The collection I pulled down dates from the early 90s to the summer of 2000. (I have older ones, of course, but they’re buried in Stephanie’s parents’ basement in Washington.) The ones I have with me come mostly from my friends in the Northeast Corridor. Toward the end of the 90s we inaugurated an annual mix exchange, but some of the best tapes I dug out marked other, more personal occasions: birthdays, childbirth (including a lovely mix of lullabies for our daughter, Anna, from our friend Rachel), or the inauguration of a friendship.
Here’s the first one I got from my friend Shelley Turley, who many of us have long recognized as the undisputed queen of the mixtape form:
Though she titled it “Music to Contemplate Suicide By,” I experienced the tape as flirtatious. Those who know Shelley will recognize many of her key elements: Neil Young, Gram Parsons, Bob Dillion (sic), KISS. Years later I know that these are the fundamentals of any good Shelley mix; I also see her violate her own rules, like No Velvets and No Beatles. But the rhyme to “unmade bed” in “Chelsea Hotel,” the opening track? That one said she wanted to be my friend.
We may be ugly, after all, but we have the music. Playing through these old mixes the other night, Shelley’s tapes were still the best ones in the bag. (Sorry to the rest of my friends, but you know it’s true.) Part of it has to do with the fact that she wasn’t bound by the sounds of the moment. Her mixes almost never had new songs on them. Plus, she had the ear of a freeform DJ. She was clearly listening to WFMU long before I was.
Prior to the advent of Napster, which is about when we started making mix CDs instead of tapes, you really were confined to music you legitimately owned. Tapes were organic: you built them one song at a time, listening for the perfect transition, and you had to tape songs sometimes two or three times to get them to fit, or find a new one to finish the mix so they didn’t cut off half way through.
The documents that resulted were like little 90-minute autobiographies. They explained to your friends who you were and where you’d come from. My friend Bacon offers a good illustration:
Even the labels told a story:
Or they could play like arguments — a brief on behalf of a particular band, era, genre, a particular history you wanted to trace, a case for connections where you would least expect them. One year my friends Lane and Adriana submitted a memorable mix: he DJed one side, she the other. For some reason Lane never submitted art or a playlist, but here’s Adriana’s, which ran in some ways like a refutation or rejoinder to Lane’s, and which came with art work of her choice:
I once played this tape while wandering through Central Park on a crisp October afternoon, the sun cutting through still-green leaves with an almost psychedelic glow, and was struck by how many ways the arguments ran: Lane’s side was male, Adriana’s female (in some ways at least); his was about roaming free (the song I remember most from his side is Neil Young’s “Albuquerque”), hers was about reining it in, avoiding temptation, but still having fun with it, even if it hurt (“High Heel Blues”). The photo on the cover suggests the significance of marriage itself to the conversations the tape contained. Well, that’s how I read it, at least.
Without a doubt, the most important mix of the late 90s for me (and Stephanie too, I’d wager) was this one — the one that, in many ways, saved my life:
This was a birthday mix from my friend Farrell. It had to be from 1998 or 1999. It had several immediate effects: It solidified Built to Spill and Beulah as favorite bands (the latter for our kids, too, who sang “Emma Blowgun” in the back seat of the car throughout that fall). It proved that Farrell’s indie side and his downtempo chill side — and a nostalgic twist of post-punk — were ultimately compatible. But most importantly, it allowed The Clean’s “Anything Could Happen” to enter our lives.
In the fall of 1999 I was scrambling to finish enough of my dissertation that I could make a serious run at the academic job market. I was under, as Stephanie puts it. I could no longer afford to live in Cambridge with two kids in full-time daycare (which was costing us $2K+ per month). And the uncertainty of it all — would there even be a job at the end of the tunnel? — was enough to make me feel like I was trapped in the trash compactor scene in Star Wars, the walls closing in, an underwater creature coiled about my legs trying to pull me down.
Somehow “Anything Could Happen” was the perfect antidote to all of that. At the end of the day I’d pick up Stephanie from work and we’d drive together to pick up the kids from daycare and preschool. We nearly wore that damn tape out, rewinding to play The Clean to New Order sequence again and again and again: “Anything could happen and it could be right now. The choice is yours, so make it somehow,” or something like that, poorly recorded in New Zealand sometime in the early 80s. I think it was originally released on cassette. Years later it hits me the same way. It turns things around. If limited to three songs on a desert island, it would probably be one of them.
Someone stole that mix tape, along with a junky old boombox, from our car one night. I kept the case as a reminder, though, of how it had pulled us through. Me and Steph? Well, we made it to the end of the century. I wound up with a job. And my friends and I stopped making mixtapes in the fall of 2000 — at least that’s when my first mix CDs were distributed: undisciplined, sprawling things, without half the organicism or labor of a tape.
Perhaps the last one I made, though, was for Stephanie, in the spring of 2000, marking my completion of grad school, which felt like a new lease on life. The title refers to our first low-carb diet, which along with the stress of finishing a degree and Stephanie starting a new job caused us somehow to emerge much slimmer than we’d been in years. When I pulled this one out the other night I was struck by how many of its songs overlap with the ones from Farrell’s birthday mix the previous fall; then I realized it must have been to compensate for the theft of the original.
Like the others, this one’s autobiographical, and like Lane and Adriana’s it’s about marriage — about an heroic (and ultimately successful) attempt to keep ours intact. As much as it overlaps with Farrell’s original, it has its own stories, buried between the songs. The Clean track here — “Oddity,” my second favorite of their songs — is less about the possibilities ahead than about the miracle of survival. As much as this mix is about finishing, it’s also about beginnings — and about loops, the way one side rolls into the other when the tape runs out: Click. Auto-reverse.
I love you guys. You and SSW and those beautiful girls singing in tha back seat of your car. Again, the greatwhatsit has me lost in a sea of Nostalgia. or Distalgia: “longing for a time you never really experienced youself”
I want ALL of those tapes.
That bacon picture is divine.
or Mistalgia: “remembering a painful or difficult time with fondness, for the most part due to the music”
My dear friend Rob has a full-length memoir coming out in January called “Love is a Mix Tape” that, much like this column, details the mix tapes (one of which, I believe, I made, unless it got edited out) that have gotten him through the best and worst of times. Shameless plug: please buy it because he’s a hilarious and incredibly cleverly allusive writer. Bryan: like Rob and Thurston, you detail the very personal windows into memories and distinctive personalities that mix tapes (and now, I guess, CDs) are. thanks!
ah, shoot. i wanted to write a mix tape memoir. oh well. i don’t suppose i had time anyway.
what i’d really like to do is get my hands on cameron crowe’s mixtape diaries — sometime around _almost famous_ he talked in interviews about how he’s made a mix for every month of his life from the late 70s forward. now *that’s* an awesome archival practice.
your comments, steph and andrea, remind me that these things take on so many different layers of meaning over time, too. lane and adriana’s mix may have nothing to do with how i heard it; farrell likely had no idea how significant that tape or that song would be. there’s a certain amount that can be read into them about the people and moments that produced them, but so much of the meaning depends on how you played them — and how often, and when. when we first got that farrell tape i remember thinking that the main autobiographical referent was the belle and sebastian song (i finally learned how to spell Sebastian!) — “My wandering days are over” — which seemed to refer to Farrell’s decision finally to enter med school.
Well, if this is what we had to wait for after not getting a post from you for a week…it was worth it. Beautiful, beautiful, these thoughts about not just music.
your post made me a bit misty eyed or mistalgic….you are a beautiful writer.
LOVE this, but Janet Jackson? In the year 2000? Really?
Miss Jackson if you’re nasty!
Janet spoke to me in a dream… I was powerless over her charms. I’m sorry. Bryan, I am honored and blushing. stop it- please.
Shelley, you would have been forgiven had you selected a song by a certain single-monikered diva that came to prominence a few scant years before Miss “Wardrobe Malfunction” Jackson. Hint: she just adopted a baby from Malawi.
My earliest mix-tape memories go back to about 1985 or so when I was maybe 12 years old, lying on my bed with the stereo waiting for good songs to come on so I could hit record and enjoy them all later at my leisure. The only songs that I remember on this earliest tape are Walking on Sunshine, Spirit in the Sky, and Twist and Shout.
I’m not quite sure I’ve ever loved any music as much as I did those songs back in the day.
Then in high school it moved into those mopey girl-inspired tapes, whether inspired by the latest love-of-my-life or the newest breakup, somehow Echo & the Bunnymen and the Cure had songs that fit both situations.
Now I just go through my playlist and pull songs alphabetically. I never remember the artists, but I can at least figure out what letter of the alphabet they start with, with maybe as little as 6-10% margin of error if I’m lucky.
hey all. thanks for nice comments.
mark: my earliest mix tape making was similar. i remember taping stuff from the radio too. but even before that i remember holding up an old portable cassette player — pre-boom box, the kind shrinks used to use in old TV shows — and taping the theme songs of my favorite TV shows. and the first serious ones were, like yours, all about romance. i made a series of tapes called “night songs” for my major crush in hopes that someday they would be used as makeout music.
G-Lock: Never question Shelley’s choices.
Lilly, Lisa, Stephanie: Thanks for saying such sweet things. But I have to ask: where are all the West Coast guys today? Having some kind of Iron John jump over the fire bang on a drum parties that are so rampant down there in Long Beach? Cuz I was expecting some love, but I didn’t know it was all going to be from the ladies. Did you kill them all and bury them in the sand and start a commune?
Andrea: Your vocabulary words get better and better. Mistalgia describes my incredible longing to have been living downtown from 75-80. Except for having to fight off all the junkies.
Oh. In case anyone was wondering — they *were* eventually used as makeout tapes.
Bryan,
i had so many emotional responses while reading this. delight, envy, pride, horror, joy. but most important was the one at the end where while reading about the mixtape you made for steph after all the hardships of cambridge, i kind of got choked up. yeah, you got to me. thank you, despite that, for such a special post. this is my favorite of yours so far. or rather, would have been if only you hadn’t exposed to the world what a pavement fan-freak i was. oh well.
ps. maybe the subtext you inferred in my mixtape–my wandering days are over–was truer than even i knew at the time. i had just met rebecca. funny looking back.
Bryan, I thought your post was thoughtful on so many levels but I have been trying to piece together exactly what you guys mean by mix tape before responding.
It sounds like something other than my (rather standard by now, I admit, but no less moving for that) mix of taking three tracks from In Color and two from Dream Police and four from Heaven Tonight…
As for Jeremy and Scott, they are no doubt deep into analyzing their new fantasy basketball squads and too busy for TGW business.
i knew fantasy basketball was at the bottom of this …
Fantasy basketball? What dweebs.
Hey Bryan, no worries, I think we’re all alive. Thanks for your concern. I’ve just been a little busy today with, well, with work. Yes, sometimes I do work. Most times I don’t, it’s true, which frees me up for the really important things, like commenting on TGW.
Of course, this was a great post, especially for all us music freaks. While it’s been some time since I either made a mix tape or listened to the ones I have, those memories will always be with me. I can’t wait for Rob’s book to come out. He’s a really amazing writer, knows a hell of a lot about music, and has unimpeachable taste.
Contrary to Messrs. Moore et al., I don’t really mourn the passing of the mix tape. I love having the technology of iTunes at hand to make mix cd’s. It’s so much easier to work on getting the perfect ordering of songs, working on the segues until they’re just so. Plus, with so many songs already loaded onto my hard drive, there’s no need to pull out the records and drop the needle on track after track until I find the right one. Yes, yes, this may make it slightly less a labor of love than it was previously, but not by much I’d say. When I task myself with making a mix, I still pull out a huge stack of cd’s and rip and listen and rip, etc.
Of course, transferring analog to digital is not easy, thus (until recently) ruling out about 1/3 to 1/2 of my collection for mix cd making. In the last month, though, Jen has sorted out how to transfer vinyl onto the hard drive of her Mac using ProTools. Friday night’s Record Club was vinyl only! It ruled. I anticipate many happy hours making mix cd’s from my scratchy ol’ rekkids.
And G-Lock, as for Herself’s recent Malawian adventure, didn’t she used to lead, not follow? I was a bit disappointed that she was behind Brangelina on this one.
Sorry, I’ve been busy all day, too, as this was a crazy paper-grading weekend for me. Plus, I was formulating my thoughtful response, yet right now, after teaching a four-hour class, all I can muster is a big yes yes yes: i love the topic and your insights and i love getting mixes. However, i never liked tapes much either, so I’m with Tim–CDs have made everything so much more pleasurable.
p.s.: After being a guest at our second west-coast record club, Sara Lov decided it was so much fun that she wants to start a new franchise… It’s all very exciting. Record club is my new favorite alternative to the mix tape…
G-Lock
M hates me ever since I stole Sean Penn away from her. Opps!!
Amen, Tim. Amen!
Bryan,
John R. would like to know why you took that tape to be flirtatious.
I knew he was going to balk at that line. But jeez, John. Look at the playlist. You don’t start a mix with “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” and then just pretend innocence.
Don’t disillusion me, man.
Ruben — I couldn’t tell if you were being serious or not, but for me a mix tape has to be curated song to song: you can’t just dump stuff on it. It’s all about transitions. We had fun with tapes, too, by using tiny little snippets of things to create our own intros and intermissions.
Tim — Of course I’ve settled into mix CDs, though of late our exchange seems to have broken down, and some are calling for holiday podcast exchanges instead. I’d be sad to lose the material artifact altogether. One thing I liked about tapes over CDs is that each side could have its own character. You got to open and close twice per mix. I also like the endless loopability of it. I don’t tend to wear out mix CDs the way I did mix tapes.
Jeremy — Yes, record club is a good thing and a good source of mixes. My problem with the actual mixes that emerge from record club, though, is that they often have one or two clunky transitions or one or two bad songs. I have used record club for years, though, as a reresource for getting great songs to steal for my own mixes.
What’s “fantasy basketball”? (And why did I invite this Ruben person to be a GWer?)
i just noticed that the yahoo toolbar has a menu for “fantasy sports,” which includes basketball. don’t tell me fantasy basketball is something you all are doing on line. that’s just sick and unnatural.
Intolerance
It’s not just a D.W. Griffith movie anymore.
I was joking about mix tapes, assume you are about all things sick and unnatural.
Is anyone else keeping a list of unacceptable subjects in the GW universe?
i figured you were being facetious but also secretly hoped that somewhere out there in LA you had that Cheap Trick megamixtape in an old shoe box and would send it to me for Christmas. I would enjoy it so much more than the 2-disc “Essential Cheap Trick.”
Thanks for the holiday gift giving hint but the point is that if we all play our cards right you won’t need my mix but can fire up your own bootleg copy of “Live at the TGW Convention.”