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| Steve Zahn and Josh Hamilton in Freak "Talks About Sex" |
I made lots of mix tapes for friends in high school. I was pretty obsessive over the way I edited these things. I had a lot of little rules that I tried to follow, including my insistence that the sides of a tape should be as balanced as possible so that one side didn't run too much longer than the other side. I also hated it when I would run out of time on one side of the tape. If I even lost two seconds of the end of a song because it was too long to fit on one side of the tape, I would go back and look for ways to cut or reorganize material. My folks had a Realistic (Radio Shack brand) record player/dual cassette deck with a volume fader that came in handy for tricky edits involving songs that were close together and sound bites.
A good mix tape needs to start with a bang. It's okay to open with audio clips from movies or television shows (Plan 9 from Outer Space and Fight Club (another one of my favorite films) are great sources for sound bites), but the first full song should really kick the tape into high gear. One of my favorite openings for a mix CD that I made several years ago starts with Ceasar's final speech from Conquest from The Planet of the Apes as a lead in to Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World." In many of my projects, I would often use dialogue clips from old radio or television shows or records from my parents' collection to break things up, inserting short clips between songs. Another thing to consider is how to end side one. It's really good to end with a song that kind of "caps" the material while still keeping a listener's interest piqued enough that he/she will flip it over and continue. On a lot of my high school-era mix tapes, I would end with the "Now turn the record over" messages from old children's book and record sets.
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| Cover art from a Besslerama-related CD mix circa 2001 |
Side two of a mix tape requires another "kick start" track to get things going and the last song for side two should be some kind of long, winding track with a fade-out ending, if possible. Including a track listing with the tape was always a must for me, but cover art was kind of an optional thing. It kind of depended on how I felt about a project. Here's a true story about all this: About a year ago, I ran into a guy that I hadn't seen in over 10 years. One of the first things he mentioned to me – after all those years – was a mix tape that I had made for him over a decade ago. The guy used to work in a record store in downtown Dayton (which is long gone now) and right after Kurt Cobain died, I gave him a mix tape of some rare Nirvana and Cobain stuff. I made some special cover art for the cassette box using overhead transparency plastic to create a kind of 3-D hologram effect on a portrait of Cobain. The guy told me that he still has the tape to this day and he still thinks the artwork is really, really cool. It was pretty amazing to have that kind of recognition after all that time.
Following the advent of recordable CDs and related technology, cassette tapes became more or less a thing of the past. These days, I really feel like creating good, old-fashioned mix tapes is now something of lost art. But affordable media, sound editing software and graphics editing packages do make it pretty easy to create some great mix CDs. Mix CDs are just a little different from mix tapes, particularly because you don't have to break things up between two sides of the media. I made several good mix CDs that were tied to our old "Besslerama" web site, including a special compilation that was given out as an award to a regular site visitor who, as part of a contest on our site, had accurately predicted the date and time of our daughter K.'s birth.
I still have most of my more elaborate mix tape and mix CD projects spanning my high school years through to recent years. Each one of these compilations is like a time capsule of sorts and the selection and arrangement of material in these collections always brings out a lot of feelings when I listen to them. Some of the collections I have are about 15 years old, but I still get each one of them out about once a year , playing them through at least once or twice. It kind of helps me remember where I've been so I can gain some perspective on where I'm going.
I think it's probably time for me to make an official mix tape "soundtrack" for greekish.org. I'll write again with some details soon.
