The MixTapes of My Life

I mixed my way from the '60s to the '90s

Photo by Steven Weeks on Unsplash

The first mix tape I ever made was on reel-to-reel tape in 1969 for my sister’s 16th birthday at the Elks Club in East Brunswick, New Jersey. It featured healthy doses of Motown, the Monkees, The Beatles, the Beach Boys, and (to be rebellious) John Lennon’s “Ballad of John and Yoko”.

Following that, I started making party tapes for my fraternity, Sigma Delta Chi, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. SDX wasn’t actually a fraternity; it was a professional society but we had a house for some of the brothers so we had parties. The parties were themed… “Greaser Night” for oldies, a “Beach Party” (with sand) for surf music, a “Psychedelic” party, and more.

In the 70s my wife and I lived in an upper flat on Newberry Blvd. in Milwaukee. It had a big dining room and comfortable seating and I had a good sound system. And we all liked to drink. So we started having parties and soon I was cobbling together mix tapes again. These were pop-driven with a brew of what I owned from the present and an occasional visit down memory lane (“One Toke Over the Line” might segue into “Baby Workout” by Jackie Wilson).

By this time, I had started an audio-visual company with a friend and we had 4-track tape decks to make soundtracks, so now I had the added capability of “mixing” fade-outs and fade-ins between pieces of music. I still have some of these reel-to-reel tapes, but no machine to play them on!

In the early 80s, a company called Fostex developed a cassette recorder that had four tracks. No more hauling the giant reel-to-reel player to the domicile!

From that point on, I made tapes for our parties that took up maybe ten cassettes, with the evening starting slow, building to a danceable frenzy, and back down to a conversational level for late at night. This lasted for the next ten years, until the 80s turned into the 90s, and I lost interest in pop music and as we were raising a son, there was lest thought about “having a blast”.

But it was a blast, and I still have the tapes to prove it! Here is one from Mixcloud…..

https://www.mixcloud.com/brien-lee/8-5-85-mixtape-party-mix-1985/