mixtapemonday

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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