V05- Re-Introduction

.....Sorry for the delay. The last one and a half years were hijacked by three projects that were fun (for me anyway): the Halloween compilations, the hypothetical Cramps box and the list of about a hundred musical acts that should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by now. However, the original reason for writing this blog was to reproduce the liner notes to a series of compilation cassettes I put together in the mid-1990's. For the third cassette (Volumes 5 and 6) I found myself circulating them among folks who came in late. I had friends who had heard the first two and passed them to people I'd never met. That was fine with me (in fact it was flattering, if unexpected), but it made me feel a need to explain myself. I handed the cassettes out with no markings other than the series title (the name of this blog) and the name I gave to each side or 'Volume'. I had no idea how many copies each recipient ran off or loaned out. I did know what was on them, though, and some of it was pretty strange. I decided it would be a good idea to write an original introduction and since this blog has spent so much of the last year off-topic it actually works as an overdue manifesto for music fans who've stumbled across this blog in that time. I'm often surprised by the number and variety of international readers who've found me through non-English language search engines. I should apologize to them now for my love of puns and wordplay; it must cause Google's automated translation software to shoot out sparks occasionally.

.....The introduction below was written in late 1994, so the references to my collection are out of date. I lost track of U2 and R.E.M. after the late 90's, but I've picked up a lot more Dylan and Mitchell since then. Of course, none of that changes the overall line of thought. Here goes:

....."Because I also compile theme-based tapes, I have resisted the temptation to get too 'cute' about the playlists for So, What Kind Of Music Do You Listen To? . They are meant to be a random selection from an anarchic, kudzu-like collection, emphasizing those odds and ends that might not otherwise make it onto a single-artist or theme-based collection. For the most part this is still true, although the repeated excursions through clicketing piles of jewel boxes have served to remind me how much of my collection is taken up with genuinely popular pop music. Every album by Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, The Byrds, R.E.M., U2, Bob Dylan (up to '70), Joni Mitchell (up to '74), Cream (in fact, every Clapton project up to '75), The Monkees..., Elton John (up to '88), Pink Floyd, The Police, NoMeansNo, The Clash and the Who and probably others. That's a lot of music to skirt around and it starts to become conspicuous by its absence. A sampling really isn't representative without it, although avoiding it so prejudiciously has unintentionally given it greater definition. (There's an old joke that goes 'How do you make a statue of an elephant?'; 'It's easy, just start with a thirty-ton block of marble and chip away anything that doesn't look like an elephant.')

....."Anyone who knows me well enough to have these notes probably already knows that I was a disc jockey at a college radio station. When I joined I had already developed a taste for seeking out the fringe of pop music and my access to the station's scratchy old vinyl allowed me to hear things I had only read about. (There's a dirty joke in there somewhere.) Being on air also encouraged me to listen to programming as critically as I would to individual songs, both on our own broadcasts and those of the big stations. What I learned is that if money can't buy happiness it can at least buy you bad taste by the truckload. The largest commercial stations played the shittiest, most derivative, lifeless, boring crap I had ever heard in my life, frequently, punctuated by what seemed like endless advertisements. Their means to avoid maintaining a coherent train of thought was to discourage anyone else from doing so and then getting lost in the crowd.

....."I decided to make a conscious effort to develop the skills to program artists and styles not commonly thought to go together. At the time I was doing this the direction of commercial stations was to be so tightly and strictly formatted that many of these artists would not be played on the same station as one another, and some would not be played at all. On a good night I succeeded and I had a lot of good nights. The purpose of this, the motivating force for me, was to let people in on a secret I had discovered: that we had been conned, that we had been lied to. Commercial radio had told us that all music fit into fewer than a half dozen distinct categories and that the one (note the singular) that you were allowed to listen to was dictated by the color of your skin or your annual salary. Why? Because that made it easier for the actuaries to set the advertising rates. Really.

....."I don't have any demographics to satisfy besides my own quirky need for the unfamiliar and novel in pop music. That's why these tapes sound the way they do. Even this one, despite the fact that it's 'radio ready'. That's a term coined to describe catchy songs that have much in common with songs that have become hits; they could very likely have become hits themselves if not for the fact that they were recorded by persons arbitrarily deemed unmarketable. Thus, they remain eternally 'ready' for airplay they'll never get. Some of these songs actually were charting singles, but many more could have been had they been heard. And of course there's a few that never would have made it past my personal hit parade anyway. Enjoy."