Brad called me Saturday night from Duluth, MN where Bro Hymn by Pennywise was playing while he was shooting pool, and earlier in the day I had finally spent a gift certificate that I had for CCS on a new skateboard. All of this got me reminiscing about the old punk rock days in Jr. High, High School, and College.

It was a snowy day here in Denver on Sunday, so while I helped Angie clean up the house and hung out with my little buddy Elliot I put some of my old mix tapes on in the background.

For some reason there are a lot of good bands in my collection that didn't ever seem to make it onto a mixtape, and I can't say these mixes represent everything I was listening to at the time (I was listening to a lot of hardcore, classic punk, and also branching out into some jazzy mo'wax type of stuff at the time too).

These mixes are a good representation of my day-to-day tunes though, and they remind me of the great times that I had with friends going to shows, discovering new bands, trying to decipher lyrics in a pre-internet world, and relating the words and emotion in the music to everything in my life.

The mixes posted online are straight off of the original tapes, so in some cases the sound quality isn't all that great. Remember that some of the source material was off of 7" vinyl, copied cassette tapes, and poorly produced demo tapes. On one of the mixes, I know that there are two songs that fell victim to the tape being eaten in my Walkman. The only editing that I have done is normalizing the volume somewhat so there are no tracks that are much louder than others. Maybe someday if I'm feeling really motivated, I will re-record the mixes for better sound quality.

I know there are more of these mixes somewhere - some were given away to friends and girlfriends back in the day, and some of them have been lost in numerous moves, but if I happen to come across any more, I'll try to post them here too.

Enough with the sappy stuff and on to the music...

Click on the mixtape names to see the full track listing and a link to download a .zip file of all the tracks, plus a playlist file. After unpacking the .zip file, just double-click on the .m3u file to play all the tracks in order.

My web host miraculously found me some more storage space, so I shouldn't have to take any of the mixes down for the time being. Enjoy!

Human Debris »

I made this mixtape in college - probably around 1998 or so. I think that it has a pretty good selection of different sounds over its 38 tracks.

The Melting Pot »

This is from probably 1997 or so. There's more hardcore stuff on this one than on most of the other mixes.

Summer Days & Skateboard Craze »

I think Reed and I made this one at my house during summer break - either the summer of '95 or '96.

The Mix Ripper »

I think Ryan Logan made this mix tape that was widely circulated among the friends. Sorry about the 5 unknown artists/tracks - I didn't have a tracklisting for this mix, so I only added what I know.

I'd Rather Not Be Here (Disc 1) »

I made this two disc mix back in college sometime. There's a lot of tracks from other commercial punk compilations, and stuff from other mixes but oh well...I was lazy. It's still good though

I'd Rather Not Be Here (Disc 2) »

Same description as above, but a different disc...