mixtapemonday

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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