It was a radio show! Want to know more? Read on!
From the early '90s until 2007, I worked at a radio station in San Francisco called LIVE 105, doing various dumb stuff like handing out stickers at concerts at first, and eventually ending up in the production department, making ads and station promos and whatnot. It was a simple step to start screwing around with the music too, and starting around 1999, a few of my goofy remixes and mashups made it into rotation on the air. Anybody remember my copycat version of Fatboy Slim's "Satisfaction Skank" or my techno remix of Eminem's "Without Me"? No? Well, people liked them at the time. In June of 2003, program director Sean Demery asked me to start 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 on Fridays?!" Thank frickin' God.
The show was basically inspired by the hyper mixes of 2manydjs, except for a more mainstream alt-radio audience, and included other people's mashups, goofy remixes, wacky covers, and new music I thought deserved a spin. Perhaps more importantly for me, the show also functioned as a launching pad for rough-draft versions many of my own tracks that would sometimes, later, become kind of popular. "Boulevard of Broken Songs," for instance, was not even really an individual mashup originally, it was just the final 4 minutes of Sixx Mixx 59, airing on October 1, 2004.
The Sixx Mixx generally aired Fridays from 6:00pm - 6:30pm, with a few exceptions: 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 a full hour (with a break for commercials in the middle). I also produced a Nine Inch Nails / Queens of the Stone Age special to air the day of the bands' Bay Area show, which was then delayed a few months, so I aired the mix as part of Subsonic for the rescheduled concert.
Guest DJs on the Sixx Mixx included DJ Zebra, Lionel Vinyl, McSleazy, Go Home Productions, and Adam Freeland.
In early 2006, under pressure to make changes at LIVE 105, my program director wanted to clear the programming schedule of specialty shows, and that included the Sixx Mixx. By that time, I had created about 112 shows, give or take, so I felt like I had a good run; plus, I was excited to have my Thursday nights back.
For a while in 2005, fellow alternative stations KJEE Santa Barbara and 91X San Diego had been airing week or two-old episodes; after its departure from LIVE 105 they continued to air classic shows as well as sporadic new mixes I would produce as my schedule allowed. This continued through much of 2006.
Even now, three years after the show's final airing on LIVE 105, it's often the first thing people mention to me when they meet me, and the support from fans of the show was always amazing. I didn't even have a web site when the show started airing and even when I did, bandwidth limits made offering mp3s a problem. On the infamous "Sixx Mixx Saturday" I attempted to corral fans and friends into offering all the shows for download, but my web site listing all the links was overwhelmed. In the near future, I hope to remaster and rerelease all the original shows, perhaps as a podcast, so please stay tuned for that. In the meantime, try this link to a Canadian site that seems to have most of them available.
|
MUSIC: LONG MIXES
