Since the mid-90s, I've worked at a radio station called LIVE 105 in San Francisco. Starting in like 1999, I had a few mash-up/remix semi-hits playlisted, like my copycat version of Fatboy Slim's "Satisfaction Skank" and my techno remix of Eminem's "Without Me." Finally, in June of 2003, my Program Director asked me to do a half-hour mix show every weeknight from 6-6:30pm. I considered the complete loss of my already meager social life and said, "errr, howabout just Fridays?!" Thank God I did.
The Sixx Mixx ended up taking over my life, requiring hours and hours of work every Thursday night from June, 2003 - December 2005. I played other people's mashups, and the show functioned as a launching pad for rough-draft versions many of my bootlegs, that often later became kind of popular. "Boulevard of Broken Songs," for instance, was not even really a mashup originally, just the final 4 minutes of Sixx Mixx 59, on October 1, 2004.
The Sixx Mixx generally aired Fridays from 6:00pm - 6:30pm, with two exceptions in the Fall of 2005: a pre-Halloween show that I mixed live from Six Flags in Vallejo from 6:00 - 10:00pm (although we were like 15 minutes late thanks to horrendous traffic), and the Dean Gray special edition (#107) during which I aired most of the American Edit project over the course of an hour (with a break for commercials in the middle).
Under pressure to make changes at LIVE 105, my program director wanted to clear the programming schedule of specialty shows, including the Sixx Mixx, starting in January 2006. And thus it came to an end, which was pretty much fine by me since a) the show was a real bitch to produce and b) I'd had a good run.
Since mid-2005, fellow alternative stations KJEE Santa Barbara and 91X San Diego had been repeating the Sixx Mixx on a week or two delay; after its departure from LIVE 105 they continued to air classic episodes as well as sporadic new mixes I would produce as my schedule allows. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I wasn't able to produce as many new shows as either station liked, and neither are currently airing classic or new episodes at this time. So, for the first time in 4 years, no Party Ben mixes are currently airing anywhere in California. Well, it was a good run, right?
Now that LIVE 105's Sixx Mixx playlist pages seem to be gone, I'm working on a playlist archive here at partyben.com. Please be patient. For now you can actually download a lot of the old mixes at fan sites like these:
- Here's a site with a lot of them, I don't know anything about it, but it appears to be fucntioning.
- This site is from Canada and includes the weird "Sixx Mixx Tributes" that I don't understand because they have nothing to do with the Sixx Mixx but they kind of took the name for some reason. But, whatever.
- Here's a couple more with playlists even.
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MUSIC: LONG MIXES
