mixtapemonday

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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