About Jon Reed's Mixes and Liner Notes
JR notes: I made my first music mixes by propping up a transistor radio against a tape recorder. The sound quality was unlistenable; I played them constantly. Eventually, I upgraded my stereo with paper route money and started making mixes for my friends. The "metal basement" mixes I did right before college, which featured the best underground hard rock from the '80s, are still staples of my music collection. Twenty years on, those tapes are getting pretty ragged, but I've managed to track down most of the good stuff on CD, which has led to a new era of music mixes.
To me, mixes are about saving extraordinary songs from ordinary records. There are some notable (and very special) exceptions, but I've always felt that rock and roll is more about individual songs than albums. And I've always wanted to pluck the best songs off mediocre albums and surround them with others that are worthy of their company. In many ways, I can look back on my entire life as a series of affairs with one song after another. Though in recent years, the (near) death of rock and roll has changed all that. But it's also lended an urgency to my efforts.
So I've made my way onto eBay and archived as much of the music I care about as possible. To my shock and surprise, most of the music I care about is available on CD, though some of it is very hard to come by. But two years later and many dollars poorer, there are only a handful of essential recordings I have not been able to obtain on CD. So the new era of mixing has officially begun.
The best part of making mixes is the tough judgment calls that you have to make when eighty minutes turns into ten and you only have room for a couple more songs. And then you realize that one of the songs you picked just doesn't flow with the rest of the mix. So I started doing liner notes for some of my favorite mixes. Of course, I would never give these to any of my friends, because we all know that CD burning for fun and profit is illegal. But the fun part is the liner notes, where I get to make my case for the songs I selected and comment on the scope of an artist's work.
So if you're a fan of the overlooked or forgotten hard rock of the '80s and '90s, or if you are partial to artists with extensive bootlegs and rarities like Tori Amos, you might find these liner notes pretty entertaining, and in some cases, objectionable. No doubt you will disagree with some of the mixing decisions I made, but if I turn you on to an obscure track that you hadn't heard about before, then the whole project was worth it.
No, I don't sell any of the mixes I list on my site. But all of the material is available on CD, or it wouldn't have made the cut. So you can find it all, though some of it may cost you a pretty penny on eBay.
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