This past week I was doing some cleaning and organizing and I found a box full of old mix CD's. Part of me was like "ugh more cd's to file away" another part of me was like "cool I haven't seen these CD's forever, I think there are some songs on them I have I don't have on my computer". The CD's were made in that beautiful window of time between blank CD's becoming really cheap and affordable and me getting an Ipod. It appears from the dates on the CD's that this was pretty much between 2001 and 2003.
Many of these mixes are filled with well known favorites. Some have radio hits of the day. Some are just compilations of random songs that I got from here or there and I wanted to have them on a CD somewhere. Some stuff is just from CD singles and such and I wanted them on a longer format CD because I didn't want to have a CD in my car or at work with just a couple songs. The CD's are really fun to go back to because they are a sort of time capsule of where my mind was at in those few years. You can see the same artists and songs popping up over and over again. I was obviously obsessed with The White Stripes because there are everywhere. Radiohead was also big on my hit list in those days. It was also during this time that I first started ripping vinyl and so you can see some what some of my early vinyl rip favorites were.
So I thought I'd rip these CD's and share them over the coming months. Even back then I liked coming up with goofy names for the compilations. There were however some with very boring names like Hip Hop mix 1 or the even more clever hip hop mix 2. you could probably guess what my collection of 80's metal tunes was. So part of the fun in prepping these for the blog was renaming some of the boring titles. Also to perk them up a big I grabbed some images from the internet and threw them on the files so there is some visual representation of the collection. I did cut corners and didn't do any titles or text over the images. I'll save that extra labor of love for any knew comps that I release.
So today I thought I'd start with one entitled "Halfway To Crazy Mix". That is the actual original title. I didn't rename that. The tracks go like this:
01 Fish (Reprise) - King
02 Six Blade Knife - Dire Straights
03 Let Down - Radiohead
04 Cakewalk Into Town - Taj Mahal
05 Ballad Of A Thin Man - Bob Dylan
06 Half Way To Crazy - Jesus And The Marychain
07 Heaven Help - Lenny Kravitz
08 Hallelujah, I Love Him So - Peggy Lee
09 Stairway To Heaven - Led Zeppelin
10 Happy Phantom - Tori Amos
11 Ingrid Bergman - Billy Bragg and Wilco
12 Fat Babies - Lyle Lovett
13 In My Room - The Beach Boys
14 The Emperor's New Clothes - Elton John
15 Fools - King
16 The Lost Children - Michael Jackson
17 Sweet Child O' Mine - Guns and Roses
18 California Stars - Billy Bragg and Wilco
19 Signal To Noise - The Cure
20 Stuck On You - Elvis Presley
21 Anyway - Dynamite Hack
You'll notice even from this first selection that I broke one of the basic rules of a mix tape. I had more than one song by the same artist. I did that a lot on these mixes. I think that was because I didn't have my whole CD collection ripped to hard drives and I what I could rip was limited to the amount of disc space I had. I think I also wasn't even working with MP3's in many cases. I was ripping uncompressed AIFF files to my computer which took up a lot of space and so I could only fit a certain amount of songs. I think my methodology was to take a disc and rip the highlights and after having ripped a bunch of highlights from different CD's I then mixed and matched. So what you get is a lot of the same artists showing up on the various mixes and even on the same mix. Oh well, that's just the way it was.
Before closing out I thought I'd comment a little on the music. Part of the joy of these CD's has been listening to songs I hadn't heard forever. Just yesterday I was listening to one of the mixes and my son was commenting that he hadn't heard this song or that song forever and he had forgotten about it. These discs were the soundtrack to his younger years. On this disc the Billy Bragg songs were really nice to hear again. It was also nice listening to Taj Mahal. That falls into the category of one of the first records I ripped from vinyl. Many of the songs off that Taj Mahal record were played to death 7-9 years ago. Favorite lines in "Cakewalk" is "I spend my whole day stealing chickens, mama from the rich folks' yard" and "I woke up this morning feeling so good I laid back down again. Throw your big leg over me mama, I might not feel this good again." Good stuff.
So that is the first installment. If you have any questions about where the tracks came from or any comments please post them.
Enjoy!
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