mixtapemonday

Like everyone else, I made mixtapes throughout the 1980s and 90s. And like everyone else, I pretty much gave it up as MP3 technology became prevalent. When I stopped making mixtapes, it was like giving up keeping a diary. (Not that I actually kept a diary regularly.) MP3 playlists are an equivalent, I suppose, but they’re ephemeral—there’s no physical object, no homemade J-card, no permanent record of what momentarily caught your enthusiasm. If the MP3 (and the discrete, skippable CD track before it) atomized music and destroyed the ideal of the cohesive album, then the podcast may be resurrecting it. An unholy confluence of nostalgia and neophilia—to wit, the advent of free, easy-to-use audio editing software—leads me now to resurrect my mixtapes, and page through my old diaries again. These are not rips from the original tapes; these are all-digital reconstructions of the content, replete with crossfades, volume-levelling, and a few subtle tweaks. These are my old mixtapes the way I always wanted them to sound. This is the way my head sounded, once upon a time.

Another mix from the college days, assembled track by track from vinyl 45s and LPs on the old stereo in the living room of the concrete shoebox I shared with the Magazine Man (then still in the blush of his Magazine Youth).

To decipher my hen-scratch handwriting: the sidebar reads mostly current (spring/summer ’88) singles, plus album cuts, older stuff, & other miscellaneous groove thangs

Side One is subtitled The sad state of the 45, & other stuff.

Hazy Shade Of Winter – The Bangles Devil Inside – INXS It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) (edit) – R.E.M. Shooting Dirty Pool – The Replacements Freeway Jam – Jeff Beck Pump Up The Volume – M/A/R/R/S True Faith – New Order Rev It Up – Casual Gods Walk Through The Fire (Nile Rodgers remix) – Peter Gabriel No New Tale To Tell – Love And Rockets I Melt With You – Modern English

(I overused the word “stuff” then. Still do.)

The title, of course, is a goof: the People’s Voice, the People’s Choice, using the broad, dictionary definition of “popular music.” It’s funny now to look at it, twenty years on, in terms of which songs have become standards—or at least get played on the radio.

A technical note—I did some digital butchery on the REM track; the 45 single remix omitted a good portion of the first verse, presumably to tighten it up for radio play. That version does not seem to be available digitally, so I chopped it up myself.

The case of the “True Faith” 45 is even stranger; in the pressing that I have, two lines are excised from the chorus, like so:

I used to think that the day would never come I’d see delight in the shade of the morning sun My morning sun is the drug that brings me near To the childhood I lost, replaced by fear I used to think that the day would never come That my life would depend on the morning sun

…which, if possible, makes even less sense than the actual lyrics. It still baffles me why this was done (and it’s a hacky, very noticeable edit, too), but I’ve made no attempt to replicate it here.

As far as notes on the songs go: I started writing an essay for this entry and then, while searching Barbelith for something else entirely, discovered that—holy shit!—I already wrote one, three years and more ago.

Easiest Mixtape Monday ever.

Listen Now:

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We mustn’t discount differences in cultural context, even transatlantic ones, when gauging differences in reaction to popular music. If I remain fond of The Levellers, for instance, it’s probably because they remained relatively obscure in the States and in any case hit the scene only after I left college, thus sparing me the ghastliness, as described by my British friends, of attending a school disco and witnessing a great faceless throng of young people all bellowing “THERE’S ONLY ONE! WAY! OF LIFE!” in perfect unison and with perfect lack of irony. (Also, I still like to play this one live, in fat sliding dropped-D chords with a heavy strum.)

Who would have thought, in a supergroup whose members include Richard Thompson, that the sweetest and most soaring bits of pop-rock bliss in the catalog should come from the pen of the guy who cut his teeth in the determinedly-unlistenable freakshow of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band? It’s like finding out that Morton Feldman was ghostwriting for Johnny Mercer.

“500 Miles” is one of those songs that becomes a standard simply because it refuses to go away. It’s in the same company as “I Melt With You” or UB40’s “Red Red Wine”—songs that get rediscovered ever four or five years, leading to a renewed ripple of airplay, maybe a single re-release, a flurry of licensing: they’d never monster hits, but they’re always just there, at the edge of cultural consciousness, bubbling under. I read with amusement that a re-recorded comedy version of “500 Miles” hit Number One, which the original never managed.

I remember Television’s eponymous reunion disc was greeted with some disappointment upon release, on the grounds that it lacked the aggression of the band’s earlier work. Now, I love Marquee Moon as much as anyone—but even then it was clear that Television were interested in far more than simple attack dynamics; and even a cursory listen to Tom Verlaine’s solo catalog (especially the all-instrumental Warm and Cool) gives a roadmap for understanding Television the album. The oblique lyrics, the fractured street-life fairy tales, the brooding romance are all accounted for; the relative polish of the production still serves the songs; and Verlaine’s singing is better than ever, taking an octave down into Bowie-slash-Iggy Territory.

But the biggest change—and the real revelation—is in Richard Lloyd’s role. For all their virtuosity (and I never bought the comparisons to the Grateful Dead, by the way: I always thought the band’s twin-guitar work was modeled pretty obviously on the Allman Brothers), TV always worked within a pretty traditional lead guitar/rhythm guitar paradigm, with Lloyd hammering out chordal riffs while Verlaine squalled above, or occasionally vice-versa. Television, though, finds the riffing sparse, with Lloyd’s and Verlaine’s guitars in a weaving conversation of arpeggios, single-note figures, and spacious, ringing partial chords, while Fred and Billy keep the grooves tight.

Some found it anticlimactic: I thought it was a fulfillment of their promise, a re-imagining of the two-guitar rock band as a democracy of voices. As some of Lloyd’s statements about his recent projects show, his voice can be pretty, um, eccentric, and there’s a palpable sense of freedom to his work here as he’s cut loose from the straitjacket of keeping strict time. It’s thrilling listening still—detailed without being dense, expert without being masturbatory. And I dig that this song is so in love with the act of making music, of strumming that B minor chord with wildly impassioned delight.

“Bulldozer” was the A-side of a one-off vinyl 45 on Bob Mould’s old Singles Only Label (SOL). The B-side, “Carny,” is even better, but in all m y efforts to find a digital copy I’ve been SOL indeed. Anybody’s got an mp3, give me a holler in the comments.

To say that the next three songs taken together constitute a set of inquiries into country music modes and methods would be to vastly overstate both the argument (such as it is) and the smarts of the guy (me) presumably making it. Still, there’s something here. Country & Western is something of an alien tongue to me, and I never thought it was part of my musical DNA (remember, I grew up in the Northeast, the one part of the nation where C&W never really took root, and well into my adult life there were no commercial country radio stations in my listening area)—but there’s something in me that responds to, say, Eddy Arnold or Red Foley or Merle Travis, to the point where my own songwriting drifts instinctively towards country blues territory.

I dig the way that Bruce Cockburn turns “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” inside-out to show the black, poisonous heart of the frontier myth—but more than that I think I dig the sound, the spectral pulse of the tremolo guitar, the high-tech/low-tech alchemy of the Leslie conjuring up that restless ghost.

I hate the formulation that Thing X is Thing Y on steroids: but I will say that inside the hard-hitting, absurdly overpowered “We’re Not In Kansas,” hurling its lumbering bulk around like 2007-season Barry Bonds, there’s a sprightly country rave-up as natural and likeable as 1993-season Barry Bonds. (We picked up this Big Country album—on cassette, no less—during our honeymoon in London, as it had no US distribution at the time.)

Sometimes I wish I hadn’t separated Workout Wednesday out into its own blog, because, Lyle Lovett’s “Stand By Your Man” dovetails into something I wrote there about gendering in popular music. When this track first came out—even before Neil Jordan used it as the closing theme for The Crying Game—it was used as evidence of Lyle’s status as a country iconoclast; it was simply assumed that he was subverting the song—one critic (can’t remember who) referred to this cover as a “bizarro transvestite version.”

But how bizarre is it, really? Lyle sings the song absolutely as written, with all pronouns intact. And in looking at those lyrics, I’m seeing no intratextual evidence that the narrator—the implied “I” of the song (implied because the song is entirely constructed in the second- and third-person) must be a woman.

Q: Yeah, but what kind of man sings a line like “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman”?

A: Any man with working eyes and a functional capacity for empathy.

Assuming that the narrator must be a woman just because you first heard a woman singing the songs seems incredibly reductive and limiting to me (although maybe that’s because I heard Lyle’s version first, and to date have still not heard Tammy Wynette’s). Indeed, a male narrator opens the song to all kinds of interesting angles. Maybe he’s an omniscient observer, or a sympathetic bystander (also possibilities with a female singer)—a Hollywood-style Gay Best Friend, even. Or maybe he’s the cheating husband himself, obliquely acknowledging the damage he’s done and the pain he’s caused, even as he begs for forgiveness and love. I think I like that one best.

Then it’s two from the mixing board of Daniel Lanois. I still get a kick out of the reconciliation of opposites in the Gabriel track—the African drumming with the Highland pipes and the crunch guitar, the naked emotionalism of the mid-period solo records with the verbose nonsense of the Genesis years… and melody for days to take us out.

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There are people—some of them my age—for whom music did not exist before Nirvana. I don’t imagine there are many who’d say the same about the Backstreet Boys, although in truth they cast just as long a shadow—the pop yang to grunge’s rock yin, each predicated on a rejection of the other.

The dire state of commercial music through the late 90s and early oughts found its origins, I think, in this parting of the ways and the purist absolutism that followed. A tiresome obsession with credibility led rockers to shun gloss and prettiness altogether, embracing a Dogme-like indie aesthetic of studied, hookless apathy, while pop’s ever-shinier surfaces became an end unto themselves.

Much of my relative optimism about music these last few years comes from a burgeoning syncretism—a rapprochement between the pop and rock sides of the equation. There hasn’t been such an exciting time for thoughtful lovers of muscular, melodic, cannily-produced contemporary music since—well, since the pre-Nirvana days of the early 1990s, from which the music on this tape is drawn.

The full title (Just Play Another Chord If You Feel You’re Getting Bored) comes from a line in a U2 song, though the song itself is no great shakes, and does not appear here (although another one does).

What interests me, on this side, is the various strategies for coopting modernism into traditional experiences of music, or vice versa. Suzanne Vega’s 99.9f ° pointed one way. Production stylings in acoustic pop (as exemplified by Joe Boyd) had by convention aimed for a certain transparency; even when the ornamentation was fairly elaborate, the overall effect was quote-unquote “natural,” i.e., presenting and preserving the illusion of live performance. Mitchell Froom’s production of Vega (soon to be Mrs. Froom, now the ex-Mrs. Froom) drew attention to its own artificiality but rested always on strong bones of songcraft. Froom was doing similar work with both Richard Thompson and Los Lobos at this time; he seemed to be on a one-man crusade to forge a new aesthetic for singer-songwriter records, while hearkening back (in spirit, if not in sound) to Roy Halee’s underrated work with Simon and Garfunkel, which was always both experimental and pristine. Purists howled, then and now—Thompson’s fanbase, in particular, is bitterly divided about his Froom-era albums—but that’s what purists are for. (Froom’s lonely war goes on, although these days it’s Jon Brion who seems to be leading the charge; his obsession with weird vintage keyboards gives his productions a particularly Froomy sound.)

Dead Can Dance give another angle on the intersection of folk musics and modern production. This 16^th century saltarello was what I heard in my head when Fiddlin’ Katy played the last tune in her medley, by the way.

A few old-skool Barbelith folks may find some of the sequencing here familiar: in the early days of the board, I participated in a mixtape swap, and my contribution drew pretty heavily from past comps I’d made for personal use. That was 1999 or 2000: the fact that I recycled these transitions, six years on, should give you some idea of how pleased I was with them in the first place.

That’s the aforementioned Richard Thompson wailing away behind one J.M. Stipe on that Golden Palominos track, by the bye.—and he’ll be back on Side Two.

You know, this isn’t even my favorite version of “Oh Well.” Besides the epic original, which morphs gorgeously into a spaghetti western soundscape, there’s a live recording of the Rumours-era Mac tearing through the main theme, Lindsay Buckingham’s guitar like an air-raid siren and Mick Fleetwood just going apeshit crazy. This take is pretty silly, really, with its wall of voodoo drum machines and its air of tossed-off fanboy slapdashery. Like Harry Nilsson’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” it’s a profoundly unnecessary cover—and all the more fun for it. (I note that Jimmy Page has also covered this. That doesn’t surprise me—there’s more than a little of “Oh Well” in “Black Dog.” That Jimmy Page—he knows a good riff when he steals one.)

I almost crashed my car the first time I heard “Creep.” I was leaned way in, trying to figure out if the singer could possibly be serious, and then I thought my radio was exploding. None of us knew if this Radiohead had a future, but from that moment we knew this song, at least, was a stone-cold classic.

The first Nick Cave song I ever heard, I think, was the Live Seeds version of “The Mercy Seat,” over WZBC, on a drive home from a hard day working at The College. I’d never heard anything like it before, and I suppose I never will again. I went right out and picked up The Good Son and fell in love with it, the gorgeous piano balladry along with this tumbling, incantational gospel mess.

I made this tape shortly after D and I were married. That summer, we took a road trip with her Dad, and this tape was in the deck. he listened, impassive: then, in the middle of “The Witness Song,” he turned to me and said, “So this guy’s sort of a 1990s Jim Morrison?”

It was then that I knew he hated it.

Hey, it’s, if not the best rock song ever written about reincarnation, then certainly one of the top three!

This J-card was created with Microsoft Frontpage, by the way. And say, what are those gray shapes behind the song titles? Let’s squash down the image aspect ratio and see…

Oooh. Artsy-craftsy!

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No found-sound interludes on this side, thank God.

This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds) – Peter Gabriel with Laurie Anderson Elizabeth Green – Hex No Myth – Michael Penn Russian Autumn Heart – The Church Ana Ng – They Might Be Giants Can’t Help Falling In Love – Lick the Tins I’m Not Scared – The Raindogs Rough Boys – Pete Townshend Shotgun Down The Avalanche – Shawn Colvin Here’s Where The Story Ends – The Sundays Free World – Kirsty MacColl (What’s So Funny About) Peace, Love, and Understanding – Elvis Costello

I’ve always had a streak of—not poptimism exactly (I’m too fond of the received lexicon of Big Rock Gestures to ever adopt a hardline antirock stance)—call it an acknowledgement of pop (or, for that matter, rock) as a broad church, or simply a weakness for the shiny, the sweet, the hooky. So it’s surprising to me, on relistening to this old tape, how much stillness there is. It’s not a full-on sugar rush: it winds into some quiet places—aggressively static in spots.

Side Two, especially, starts off that way—but it perks up pretty quickly, thanks to some good advice from my old friend The Magazine Man: in early 1990, while this mix was still a work in progress, I played him what I had so far. It was late at night, and we were driving somewhere; he rubbed his chin and said, “I like it, but it’s a little…somnolent, isn’t it?” Having pointed out the problem, he was also quick to offer the solution, loaning me his copies of Lincoln and the Some Kind Of Wonderful soundtrack, which nudged me right back on track.

I namechecked the Raindogs over at my other podcast page. The band never had enough good material—the songwriting on the debut record got pretty threadbare, and by the time Border Drive-In Theatre came out, they were recycling old songs by Mark Cutler’s early band the Schemers—but “I’m Not Scared” is a genuine lost classic, and probably the only cut that really used slumming fiddle genius Johnny Cunningham to best effect, fully integrating the blues-rock and Celtic sensibilities. (Johnny sat in with We Saw The Wolf, and recorded several tracks with them, but that was before I joined the band: I never met or played with him, more’s the pity.)

I don’t know why there are two Pete Townshend tracks on this mixtape. I’ve long made it a policy to use only song by any given artist on any given mix, with the quasi-exceptions that (a) solo artists may appear alongside their former bands (though not on the same side) and (b) sideman work doesn’t count, except when it does. (See, Nick Hornby didn’t make this shit up.)

In any case, I’m also wondering why I can’t find a YouTube clip of the video for “Rough Boys,” with a clearly intoxicated Pete failing to use his indoor voice with young toughs and future Big Country rhythm section Tony Butler and Mark Brzezicki, who are doing their best to ignore him. Did I hallucinate this?

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This got heavy play for a number of years—the sepia-faded ink of the J-card attests to hours lying in direct sunlight on car seats and on picnic tables, right next to the boombox—but listening to the cassette again, I wonder why I liked it so much. The title is terrible—a feeble play on the Sire Records “Just Say Yes” series of samplers—and the content in choppily-assembled. There are false starts and cut-offs and tape his á go-go; the nicest thing about making this reconstruction in fact, was the chance to smooth out those transitions.

That J-card is a little hard to read: here’s the tracklisting for Side 1:

Fascination Street – The Cure Between Something and Nothing – The Ocean Blue A Friend Is A Friend – Pete Townshend Sign O’ The Times – Prince She’s A Mystery To Me – Roy Orbison Call Me Blue – A House Now I’m Talking About Now – The Swimming Pool Q’s Blue Ballet – Anne Bourne She Divines Water – Camper Van Beethoven Pulling Mussels (From The Shell) – Squeeze Glamour Boys – Living Coloür Over The Moon – Luka Bloom

Notes:

I’ve written before about the difficulty of finding these songs in the single or radio mixes in which I first heard them. “Fascination Street” is a case in point. As you can hear in the video, the single mix delays the entry of the band, building tension while the bass plows through that indelible riff. It’s a far superior version, I think, but my efforts to find an mp3 were for naught.

I’m a sucker for this kind of song, this ridiculously tiny subgenre (“Waterfront” is another) where a small, everyday event—a night on this piss, a stroll along the quayside—is invested with shattering significance. It’s a mystical view of the world—or maybe a phobic one; the little things are too much to get a grip on.

I was quite taken with The Ocean Blue for a while. their first album gave me echoes of Boy; but they never made their October, just kept recycling their wide-eyed twee-rock stance—but that trick only really works once. “Between Something…” is still a great song, though, and shows up in a later Workout Wednesday mix.

The Iron Giant is one of my favorite movies of the last ten years, but, y’know, it really could’ve used a couple of Pete Townshend songs. (Or something: there’s a frightening number of YouTube clips reconfiguring the movie as a power-ballad music video.) I faded the long piano coda of “A Friend Is A Friend” to replicate the original single mix.

Hey, speaking of U2: It’s Roy Orbison does Bono doing Roy Orbison! I have mixed feelings about Bono’s belated discovery, post-Joshua Tree, of traditional rock songwriting forms. On the one hand, it led to hackwork like “Love Comes To Town” and the whole of the last two albums. On the other hand, this. Hm.

Johnny wrote a great post about A House, and what he says stands: but if anything, this partiuclar mixtape actually builds to, is built around, “Call Me Blue.” It’s killer, not filler.

The Qs were an odd case. To hear “Now I’m Talkin’ About Now,” you’d think they were Tangerine Dream fronted by June Tabor. In truth, they’re a lot more guitar-based and maybe a lot less interesting: Anne Richmond Boston only sang a handful of songs—it’s really Jeff Calder’s band, and his voice is simply not that good. Boston left and rejoined the band, and has never found a breakout vehicle for her big Britfolk-diva pipes.

I first heard Anne Bourne when she played for Jane Siberry. She contributed this song to Windham Hill’s new-singer-songwriter comp Legacy: as far as I know, it’s the only solo pop side she ever cut. That’s Jocelyne Lanois on ambient guitars, by the way.

I clipped the outro from “She Divines Water” and tried to recontextualize its disintegration into a chaotic sample-collage—not entirely successfully. The sound clips before “Glamour Boys” point toward where my use of found sound would lead on future mixtapes. To wit: It got pretty ugly, pretty fast—but I’ll deal with that when the time comes.

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So I promised I’d tell you about the criminal acts to which I was drawn by my love for music. I’m not talking about the compilations and dissemination of these mp3s, although that is, if the RIAA is to be believed, a criminal act worse than killing the Pope. No, I’m talking about theft. And not a one-time, casual deal, here; I mean long-term, systematic pilferage.

I worked at The College for nigh on nine years; and like most colleges, it had a radio station. It wasn’t even a proper broadcast station—it piggybacked its signal on the campus electrical lines, so you could only hear it on a plugged-in radio (and not, say, in your car or on a Walkman). The production studio and offices were tucked into a forgotten, untrafficked corner of the student union.

The radio station, which had only a tiny budget, couldn’t afford much in the way of new music acquisitions, and survived on contributions. A couple of times a year, they’d take delivery on huge cartons of castoff CDs and vinyl culled from the libraries of local commercial stations—promotional copies that the other stations had received gratis from the record companies (the station at The College was not large enough to rate this courtesy), but which didn’t suit their formats, or failed to log a certain number of plays within a certain time period, or whatever. In any case, these records were usually a couple of years old, and on the obscure side.

And there were hundreds of them. Periodically, the station at The College would find itself overloaded with contributions, and would clear the decks and raise some funds by holding the music-fiend equivalent of a bake sale, selling the unwanted records for three to five bucks a pop from a card table in the lobby of the student union. An ethically questionable enterprise, that, to say the least, given that every piece had PROMOTION ONLY – NOT FOR RESALE stamped on it; but this was only the beginning of my depravities.

My job took me frequently to out-of-the-way locations on campus, and I would occasionally get back to the dark corner by the radio station. One time, I found a pile of LPs and 12-inch singles, meticulously sorted-through, with the leavings free to all comers. And one time I found a pile of vinyl that had not yet been sorted, and helped myself anyway. And one time I found the door to the production offices had been left unlocked, and whiled away an afternoon among the bins of CDs. And then I moved to a job that allowed me access to master keys for all campus buildings, and that was that for the slippery slope.

I justified it all kinds of ways, as any employee who pilfers from the workplace does. It was a supplement to my meager wage—they practically owed it to me; they’d gotten the CDs for free anyway, and would most likely have discarded them anyway; they never miss them—these kids didn’t know what they were sitting on; it’s a victimless crime; the station was only on the air for a few hours a week anyway, and most of what got played came from the DJs’ personal collections. Now, any of these things might have been true, strictly speaking—but none of them actually excused my behavior.

That said, I ended up with a shedload of great records—some of my favorite records of the 90s. Pink Elephants. New Fast Automatic Daffodil’s Body Exit Mind. Sixteen Horsepower’s Low Estate. Stan Ridgway’s Partyball and the Ridgway/Wall of Voodoo comp Songs That Made This Country Great. That Ride CD single. A Not Drowning Waving compilation. Some mid-period Julian Cope. David Baerwald’s Triage. A couple of mindblowing Axiom compilations. Lots more.

And I really do have a hard time feeling bad about it all. It was wrong, yes. But the wrongness is abstract, and the pleasure of the music is very real. Maybe my sociopathic tendencies are unreconstructed.

Or maybe it’s just that the notion of theft, as it relates to music, has been so cheapened by the copyright cops. Some of the tracks on this mixtape come from CDs that I stole; most of the rest come from CDs I borrowed from the public library, from which I recorded a single copy of a single track for personal use. According to the RIAA, the two are morally equivalent—one’s just as bad as the other. When reasonable acts are criminalized, maybe criminality loses its stigma.

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There’s no date on this one, but from the songs I’m think late 1998 or early 1999. It began with an idea about transcendence, of losing yourself in the rush of the music—the uplift, the extension of the song form. It runs out of steam before the end, but I still like it a lot.

“Pink Elephants” is the one original composition on Mick Harvey’s two albums of Gainsbourg covers. He opens the second disc with it, positioning it as a bridge between the two records.

The Verve were a one-hit wonder here in the States, but Jesus, what a hit.

“Leave Them All Behind” is a genuine out-of-body experience. That wall of guitars! Those Who’s Next keyboards! The rhythm section, playing relentless variations on that closing one-chord vamp! That acoustic guitar breakdown! In the fall of 2000, when I got my car—my first car with a decent sound system—I brought this CD single to the dealership when we passed papers, so this was the first song I played on the stereo. I played it just last night, in fact, driving the darkened streets, and san a high harmony above the other two, and goddam it if I didn’t almost levitate—still, after all these years and all these miles.

Loz thinks there’s not enough Kula Shaker on these mixtapes, so “Hey Dude” is for him.

So I’m thinking about U2 (no surprise; for a good chunk of my twenties, I seemed incapable of thinking about much else), and how, for such a huge band—for a long time, the biggest band in the world—and with twenty-five years of great songs behind them, they’ve been so seldom covered. I’m thinking it’s because the compositional forms, the overall effect of the songs, are so of a piece with the idiosyncrasies (not to say the limitations) of the band’s musicianship, and the force of their personalities. When Luka Bloom does “Bad,” say, it just sounds wrong—no disrespect to Luka’s immense talent: it’s just that the band and their songs (especially their early songs) are simply one to a nearly insurmountable degree.

With “Love Is Blindness,” though, U2 may have finally written a genuine standard. Cassandra’s version makes a powerful case for that. I’ve also seen Daniel Lanois play this live, and his reinvention of the song is totally different, if no less radical.

Next week: Side Two, and true stories of my criminal career.

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(subtitled These Carnival Days)

Someone (okay, it was Loz) complained about the presence of Kula Shaker on this mixtape, which set me again to thinking again about the fundamental differences in the pop landscape between the UK and America that made 1990s Britpop—so epic in the scope of both conquest and backlash at home—nothing but a minor ripple here. In the States, bands like Kula Shaker and the Stone Roses are seen as footnotes, one-hit wonders, amusing but slight.

And I was thinking again about the perfect storm of culture and demography and geography that allowed this to happen. In brief:

1990s America = big country, lots of bands; localized media (radio and newspapers); one-and-a-half weekly newsstand publications devoted to pop music (Billboard is mostly read by industry professionals, and Rolling Stone is neither a true weekly nor a true music magazine); a fistful of good monthlies; no national TV shows devoted to pop.

1990s UK = smaller country, fewer bands overall; nationalized media (BBC radio, and the London papers and the Grauniad are read all over the country); at least three ubiquitous newsstand weeklies (Melody Maker R.I.P.); a double fistful of glossy monthlies; Top Of The Pops (and earlier The Old Grey Whistle Test). Add to that ubiquitous public transportation and the influence of John Peel (whose like we in the States have never seen). So the UK musical scene is smaller overall, but the apparatus surrounding it is exponentially larger. And there you have the ingredients for the rise of a musical monoculture, with an interest in self-promotion and a mighty loud voice to do it with.

The price, of course, is accelerated burnout. All those music papers have to fill the pages week in and week out. The Beast must be fed. So you get bands signed to majors who’ve never played a single gig, who reach media saturation on the strength of a couple of singles, and are already has-beens (or have broken up) by the time they release the first full-length album.

And all that remains are the songs they left behind. (Or not even that: I mean, I know who Pete Doherty is, but I’ve yet to actually hear a Libertines song, or to meet anybody who has.) And beyond that, who cares?

So, anyway: a Kula Shaker track. And not just one: all the songs on the record flow into one another, so there are snippets of the preceding and following tracks edited in there, to give me smooth fades. (That’s the voice of Sheila Chandra doing konnakol at the top, by the way.)

Jennifer Kimball was the Art Garfunkel of The Story—the non-writing, non-playing half of a folk-pop vocal duo. You’ve heard her voice in hundreds of commercials since then, but this is an early songwriting attempt from just after the group split. It’s another one from the Respond compilation.

This mix came together pretty organically from the pile of songs I had lying around. Not sure what’s up with all the ocean imagery, but I’m pleased with the way it turned out. It also seemed very important to me to put Ani DiFranco and Bob Dylan right next to each other—she the next wave of acoustic pop, he the grandfather figure—and equally important to use a Dylan song that sounds both futuristic and ancient, like a scratchy blues 78 found in a time capsule and reinterpreted by an ensemble of Andromedans, some time after the Sun goes cold. And yeah, Sting (speaking of backlash): but I still get a catch in my throat when out of that litany of words, with no chorus to speak of, his voice suddenly rises to sing, “I loved you in my fashion.” Sue me.

The mix falters a bit towards the end, I’ll admit. The Natalie MacMaster song is—well, it’s amusing but slight. It’s fun to hear her sing, and she should do it more often—she handles the massed backing vocals perfectly well—but it was probably a mistake to have her speak the verses; that Cape Breton-by-way-of-Lake Wobegon accent kills any sexiness stone dead.

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Now this, my friends, this is the sound of dadrock triumphant. Blindingly tasteful, some raucous (but not too rough-hewn) moments rubbing up against the sweet production values, all of it sounding like nothing so much as a really good afternoon playlist at a really good triple-A station. And, to be fair, that’s pretty much what I was shooting for, and what I was listening to at the time. It’s a grand listen for those long morning commutes in the early spring, when you want to sing along and maybe get a little teary-eyed.

Kick off with a little film music; I discovered film composer Zbigniew Preisner at the same time that I discovered his greatest collaborator, director Krzysztof Kieslowski, with The Double Life of Veronique. The gorgeous bolero that Preisner wrote for Three Colors: Red was later used in a British Airways commercial. The soundtrack album for Red has several variations on the piece, recurring in bits and pieces; but the two versions that bookend this mixtape actually come from the soundtrack CD for Three Colors: Blue. The films are all interconnected anyway…

I first heard “Teenage FBI” on a mixtape I got from godlike peninsular genius Grant Balfour. (That mixtape is also the source for the spoken-word snippet bridging “Orphan Girl” and “Hitchin’ A Ride”: the unmistakable voice of Harry Dean Stanton, reading the opening of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I love that you can hear the ice tinkling in Harry Dean’s glass. It’s the little things.)

I once shared a stage with Faith Soloway, at an open mic at the old Kendall Café. This would’ve been twelve years ago, I think: I was workshopping songs with Andy Nagy, early on in my association with We Saw The Wolf. Faith had just moved out from Chicago and was starting to establish herself on Boston’s singer-songwriter scene. I remember I liked her a lot, and I remembered her name, and I’d always smile when I heard one of her songs on WERS’s now defunct “Coffeehouse” show. She’s doing musical theatre now. This song came from a benefit compilation of 02134 pop-folk types, and as far as I know has never been issued elsewhere. It’s a great indie-rock tune, a real standout on the comp and in Faith’s body of work, I thought.

Gillian Welch, who wrote “Orphan Girl,” is a tough nut to crack. Her Americana, like all the best Americana, has a deep heart of weirdness; its religiosity is the flipside to its nihilism—its stories of empty people fucking themselves up in an empty land. In her own solo recordings and especially her performances, she practices a relentless and self-conscious purism, a stripping-down of songs to their most basic elements. This song is a neo-primitive variant on “Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” and while on one level I imagine Welch might think Emmylou’s version is unconscionably prettified, the very spaciousness (not to say spaciness) of Lanois’s production highlights the yearning of that God-shaped hole without overstatement, making the song terribly moving.

Continuing in that vein, I will myself admit that on many levels I find “Hands” to be hammy, overblown hoo-hah, but am still capable of tears on hearing the bridge—“In the end, only kindness matters”—if only because, as I grow older, I more and more believe it to be true. Morrissey would almost certainly agree with me, having said elsewhere that “It’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate / It takes guts to be gentle and kind.” Penelope Houston, who started off fronting Bay Area hardcore legends The Avengers before making a series of progressively prettier and gentler solo records, might have something to say about it, too.