V05-T05 Scumbag

.....This track has two giants and I'm not going to shed much light on them that you couldn't find from a hundred other sources, so I'll just give the posting then go right into my old liner notes.

Volume 5: DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL (YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE IT'S BEEN), track 5

• 06:00 "SCUMBAG" (John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Frank Zappa)
• performed by John & Yoko and The Plastic Ono Band with Frank Zappa and The Mothers
• original source: 2LP SOMETIME IN NEW YORK CITY Apple/Capitol SVBB3392 (US) 06/12/72
• and my source: 2CD SOMETIME IN NEW YORK CITY Capitol/EMI 07777 93850 2 7 (US) 05/90
• NOTE: the disc surfaces on the CD's have the same catalogue numbers as the 1987 CD release, CDP 7 46782 2 and CDP 7 46783 2

.....From 1994: "Speaking of not getting on the radio...

....."Lennon and Zappa used to be college radio staples and mainstream pariahs. Lennon became some kind of weird martyr to people after his murder, but the hypocrites never bought his records while he was alive. Ringo was the Beatle with the most solo hits until about 1974, when Wings took off. John's records hardly sold at all. And how often do you hear "POWER TO THE PEOPLE" or "TIGHT A$$" on 'classic rock' stations, as opposed to "INSTANT KARMA" and "IMAGINE"? Hell, when was the last time any Frank Zappa was played on those stations? Rhetorical questions, I know.

....."Think of it as the first safe sex anthem (a scumbag, after all, is literally a condom). And sing along. It's easy-- there's only two words."

.....The only thing I could add to that would be the full credits. Although the first LP of the set was mostly recorded with Elephant's Memory, the second LP was mostly recorded live at Fillmore East in New York on June 6th, 1971 with The Mothers (and not, as the packaging says, The Mothers Of Invention, which was Zappa's band in the sixties). Other recordings from that night and the previous one formed The Mothers' album LP FILLMORE EAST-- JUNE 1971, which had been released the previous fall. The tracks on the Lennon/Ono set have the same personnel plus John on guitar and vocals, Yoko on vocals and studio overdubs of Klaus Voorman on bass. The Mothers personnel were:

• Frank Zappa on guitar and vocals
• Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan on vocals (these are the former Turtles I mentioned in the post for "SKEET SURFING"; after this they worked with T. Rex and formed Flo and Eddie)
• Ian Underwood on woodwinds and keyboard, plus vocals (a longtime Zappa collaborator)
• Aynsley Dunbar on drums (who's kind of the Forrest Gump of rock drummers)
• Jim Pons on bass and vocals (another ex-Turtle)
• Bob Harris on 2nd keyboard and vocals (a Turtles associate)
• Don Preston on mini moog (a prolific session player)

.....The manic nature of this track demanded that it be followed by a change of pace (literally), a palate cleanser. I'll be back in a few days.

V05-T04a "...It's smooth sailing..."

.....

.....Tito Larriva of the Plugz (see the previous post) played the character Ramon in David Byrne's movie "True Stories". Ramon claims to receive radio waves and refers to himself as Radiohead (and yes, that's where the band got their name). While the guitar-heavy "I'M A CADILLAC" naturally leads into "HOMBRE SECRETO", and that song's British mid-60's origins as a cover of "SECRET AGENT MAN" seem like the reasonable relations to this next track, I think that knowing about Larriva's contributions to both "Repo Man" and "True Stories" may have prompted my choice of this interstitial and the song that follows it.

Volume 5: DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL (YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE IT'S BEEN), track 4a

• 00:18 [excerpt from "ODORONO"]
• performed (nominally) by The Wh♂
• original source: LP THE WHO SELL OUT Track Records 612 002[mono] or 613 002[stereo] (UK) 12/15/67
• and my source: CD THE WHO SELL OUT MCA MCAD-31332 (US) 10/88

.....The actual vocal used is obviously not one of the Who; it's a woman's voice over a string section singing, "It's smooth sailing with the highly successful sound of Wonderful Radio London", one of the more succinct and to the point Radio London jingles of the many on the album. Radio London had American financial backers who would supply them with custom jingles recorded by a professional service called Production Advertising Merchandising Service, better known by the acronym on its packaging, PAMS. The female vocalists on staff as of 1965 included Judy Parma, Camilla Duncan, Jean Oliver and Tinker Rautenberg, although I doubt that there are any surviving records specifying who was used on this particular recording. The station broadcast from a ship anchored off the coast of England to provide a commercial model to compete with the government owned BBC. It only existed from shortly before Christmas 1964 to mid August 1967, just two months before most of the recording was done for the Who's album. Actual Radio London jingles were edited onto the beginnings and endings of songs and faux ads recorded by the Who. Things like jingles, commercial sponsorship, programming to meet public demand and DJ's as well known as the records they played were all foreign concepts in UK radio prior to that. It was all as much an American import as Andy Warhol's ideas about pop art, something central to the Who's identity at the time.

.....From my notes in 1994:"The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album is widely touted as rock's first concept album. The concept at work there is that the album is supposed to simulate, in your living room, the experience of attending a concert by Billy Shears and various other performers. You can see what they're getting at on the first two tracks, "FOR THE BENEFIT OF MR. KITE" and again on the title track's reprise, but most of that album doesn't give that impression at all. And what's with the barking dogs in the trail off groove? Is that a 'concert experience'?

....."Let's not kid ourselves. The first side of LP THE WHO SELL OUT leaves absolutely no question as to what you're listening to: a radio station that plays nothing but the Who, even in its advertisements for Odorono deodorant, Medac pimple cream and Heinz Baked Beans. Unfortunately for the band they hadn't accounted for the fact that in American slang to 'sell out' means betraying your ideals for commercial reasons, while they meant to say that they had greater popular support than the 'safer' performers. They lost sales due to negative criticism of the title, but worse, they lost the recognition they deserved as innovators of the format."

.....The American sales actually weren't that badly impacted. They were experiencing a meteoric rise in the U.S. following what was their only top ten hit at the time, "I CAN SEE FOR MILES" and a literally explosive appearance on the Smothers Brothers' television show. It could be that American audiences correctly read the title as self-deprecating humor. In England, however, it became the band's lowest charting studio album, not counting soundtracks. In the U.S. it charted higher (at 48) than their previous album (at 67). Their first album didn't chart in the U.S. at all. Their next album, a shabby compilation deceptively packaged as a live album without the band's knowledge or consent, made it to 39, lending credence to my suspicion that an original album riding a hit should have made a greater impact. By comparison, most of their albums, including many of their compilations, were in the top ten in England since the beginning as they would be in the U.S. starting with 2LP TOMMY in 1969. As for what was the earliest concept album, that depends on how strictly you define a concept album. Operas predate rock operas, of course, and themed albums predate even the LP format, since the word album refers to bound sets of 78's. In the rock idiom, the first might be the Beach Boys LP PET SOUNDS, followed closely by the Kinks' LP FACE TO FACE in 1966. After that it was kind of a free for all, with the first high concept rock album probably being the Moody Blues' LP DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED, released between Sgt. Pepper and Sell Out.

.....This interstitial introduces the next track, which was roughly contemporary to the Who album.

V05-T03 Hombre Secreto

.

.....I first saw the movie "Repo Man" in the theater and fell in love immediately. It's one more reason the human race has to thank Mike Nesmith. He's credited as an executive producer, which usually translates to financing a project rather than any hands-on participation, but though the punk music dominating the soundtrack and nihilism dominating the characters are both outside of his usual modus operandi his trademark dry humor is all over the dialogue.

Volume 5: DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL (YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE IT'S BEEN), track 3

• 01:48 "HOMBRE SECRETO" (P.F. Sloan, Steve Barri; Spanish translation by Tito Larriva)
• performed by The Plugz
• original source: VALP MUSIC FROM THE ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK "REPO MAN" San Andreas Records/MCA SAR 39019 (US) 1984
• and my source: the same

.....Sloan's co-writer, Steve Barri, was actually credited on the label as "S.B. Lipkin", his real name. I used his professional name because it's more widely recognized (and to be fair, Sloan's name is a pseudonym, too). Below are my notes from 1994.

....."What? No Japanese? Well, these compilations wouldn't be complete without a foreign language number in there somewhere. Of course, you may know this in English as the Johnny Rivers song 'SECRET AGENT MAN'. Being a long time fan of the TV show 'The Prisoner' (and its antecedent 'Secret Agent', with which Americans associate the song), those opening chords always catch my ear. I think there's a Lou Miami recording of this out there. In English, I mean.

....."The Plugz are a fine example of L.A. punk's dirtiest little secret-- i.e., that it isn't any more homegrown than the rest of the rock in L.A. Just like in the big commercial rock world, the best 'L.A.' punk bands weren't from Los Angeles; they were from San Francisco or Mexico. At first the only clubs to play in were in L.A. and the minute clubs opened elsewhere bands stopped making the haul to L.A. to perform. When the mass media types no longer saw punk bands in Los Angeles they assumed that there couldn't be anything going on in the 'lesser' towns and declared that punk was dead. Michael Nesmith, on the other hand, decided to look beyond the end of his nose and decided that it was not. He backed the production of 'Repo Man' (for which Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton will be forever grateful), whose soundtrack album was probably the first mass-marketed example of the fourth phase of punk (hardcore). The CD finally came out nearly ten years after the movie."

.....Shortly after the movie was released The Plugz renamed themselves the Cruzados and signed to Arista. They had previously released their own records. The new identity didn't last very long and the Cruzados also ended their existence with a movie, 1989's 'Road House'. They actually appeared on screen for that one, part of Tito Larriva's extensive list of film credits. The line-up for this particular track was:

• Tito Larriva- vocals
• Steven Hufsteter- lead guitar
• Chalo 'Charlie' Quintana- drums
• Tony Marsico- bass

.....None of the selections give individual producer credits, although the project was produced by Peter McCarthy and Jonathan Wacks. I'm not sure if they had any direct involvement with the recording since there are two other Plugz tracks on the soundtrack with different personnel and were likely recorded earlier than "HOMBRE SECRETO". Actually, the whole album is killer, as is the movie, and both are heartily recommended in their entirety.

V04-T16b "...and I hope we passed the audition."

.....Finally, the end of cassette two.

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 16b

• 00:13 [excerpt from "GET BACK", ad lib by John Lennon]
• performed by The Beatles [nominally]
• original source: LP LET IT BE Apple PCS7096 (UK) May 8th, 1970
• and my source: CD LET IT BE Parlophone CDP7 46447 2 (US) 1987

.....The full text of the quote at the end of the song "GET BACK" is, "I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we passed the audition". Actually, the working title of the album was also GET BACK, until the tapes were eventually selected and packaged as LET IT BE. Maybe a little timeline is in order.

1. In 1968 the Beatles take five months to record the double album nicknamed "The White Album" (THE BEATLES). Much of the time was spent writing and recording separately.
2. Jan. 1969 the YELLOW SUBMARINE album is released. One side contains songs used in the movie, some of them old outtakes, the other side has George Martin's soundtrack instrumentals from the movie.
3. Jan. to May 1969: In order to work more collaboratively as a band, the Beatles began recording jam sessions of oldies: rockers, R&B and blues like "BLUE SUEDE SHOES", "BYE BYE LOVE", "LAWDY MISS CLAWDY", etc. Eventually they were inspired to write original songs together again. Sessions were filmed for possible use in a documentary and the music was produced by George Martin and their engineer, Glyn Johns. The project was called GET BACK, as in "Get back to your roots".
4. The album version of "GET BACK" was recorded January 27th. The single version and its B-side were recorded on the 28th. Then, on the 30th, the famous rooftop concert was filmed. It would turn out to be their last public performance and ended with the song "GET BACK" followed by Maureen Starr (Ringo's wife) applauding, Paul McCartney thanking her ("Thanks, Mo!") and John Lennon goofing around with the theme of returning to their early days by giving the quote I repeated at the top of this list. That snippet was later grafted on to the end of the studio version for the album.
5. Apr. 1969 the 7" version of "GET BACK" b?w "DON'T LET ME DOWN" is released in UK. (May in US.)
6. May 1969 the GET BACK album is completed. For a cover photo, the band recreates their pose from the photo sessions that yielded the cover to LP PLEASE PLEASE ME in 1963. Unfortunately, returning to an earlier, simpler approach to playing and recording created an album that sounded much rougher and more raw than the band felt comfortable with and they cancelled its release.
7. Jun. 1969 the 7" version of "THE BALLAD OF JOHN AND YOKO" b/w "OLD BROWN SHOE" is released in UK and US.
8. Jul. to Aug. 1969 the LP ABBEY ROAD is recorded with George Martin "really producing" (his words). He apparently didn't care for the GET BACK experiment.
9. Sep. 1969 Lennon, Ono and Clapton go to Toronto for the live debut of Plastic Ono Band at the end of an otherwise 1950's nostalgia concert with Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and many others. Two weeks later LP ABBEY ROAD is released.
10. Oct. 1969 the 7" version of "SOMETHING" b/w "COME TOGETHER" is released in UK and US.
11. Jan. 1970 the song "I ME MINE" is recorded and a second version of LP GET BACK is proposed and rejected.
12. Feb. 1970 the LP HEY JUDE, a collection of non-LP singles and two songs from A HARD DAY'S NIGHT is released in the US only.
13. Mar. 1970 the 7" version of "LET IT BE" b/w "YOU KNOW MY NAME" is released in UK and US.
14. Mar. to Apr. 1970 Phil Spector is hired to remix existing unreleased tapes to salvage the GET BACK project. He radically remixes a 1968 recording of "ACROSS THE UNIVERSE", leading many fans to believe the band had recorded a new version. He also uses the 1970 song "I ME MINE", but the majority of the material comes from the year-old GET BACK sessions.
15. May 1970 the film and album, both named LET IT BE, are released. There's also a derivative US-only 7" of album tracks "LONG AND WINDING ROAD" b/w "FOR YOU BLUE".

.....And that's the over-simplified account of the events. I left out the ugly legal tangles and television appearances. The excessive studio behavior (during the "White Album" sessions there were 70 takes of "HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN") inevitably led to the band's desire to simplify. The problem was that they weren't the same persons, the same musicians or the same band they were in 1962. It was as though the accelerated lives their fame brought them provoked a mid-life crisis at age thirty. Having got that out of their systems they went back home to their wife (Martin) and created one of their best albums. McCartney cited the release of the LET IT BE album in court documents regarding the dissolution of the Beatles as evidence that the band's direction and business decisions were being harmful to his career. It's not that bad, even if Martin was a better judge of the band's strengths than Spector had been.

.....My reasons for closing with this clip? Like most of these selections it was mostly instinct at the time. In retrospect, I knew that one mix tape is an impulse and two is a proposal. The second implies a series not implied by the first. Of course, when I made the first one I had no delusions that I could distill the character of my music collection to 90 minutes. By continuing the format I had insinuated that the was no time limit being imposed. Therefore, distilling the character of my collection becomes, theoretically anyway, a legitimate objective to pursue. And it would be an objective that would take more than four cassette sides to seriously address. This blog reaches its first anniversary this week and the past year, if you've been reading it, has been the audition. And if you come back, I guess that means "we passed".

V04-T11 Paper Balloon Bomb

.....Most volumes in this compilation series include cover songs and every other one (or thereabouts) may have a non-English cover of an English language original. This is the rare occasion of a foreign language original.

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 11

• 02:59 "PAPER BALLOON BOMB (Junnosuke Kawaguchi, Hiroto Kohmoto)
• performed by The Blue Hearts
• original source: LP TRAIN TRAIN Meldac Records MEL-50 (Japan) November 23, 1988
• and my source: CD BLAST OFF! Juggler Records JTD-2 (US) 1991

.....I'm going to default to my original 1994 liner notes for this one:

....."I don't know if Blue Hearts are supposed to be any relation to Purple Hearts, a pill of choice among British mods in the 1960's, but the band seems to understand the value of properly abused amphetamines.

....." Japanese pop music generally is almost the worst in the world. (Indian pop beats it, at least.) Most of the charting acts are openly groomed, corporate-sponsored 'idols', their careers laid down in print before they've even touched an instrument or used a microphone. Typically, the Japanese think nothing of this. No one even bothers pretending that musical prowess enters into the equation. The Blue Hearts are a glorious exception. Other tracks show they've spent a lot of time listening to the Ramones. That's a sure mark of someone who has learned to play by trial and error (the best way, really). The CD comes with lyrics in Japanese and English, so if you're really interested in a translation it's no problem.

....."The only other release from Juggler Records that I could find was JTD-1, a six song compilation of Blue Hearts' singles. Both of these CD's are in the cut-out bins, but make great listening despite the language barrier."

.....Okay, it's 2011 again. After 17 years, some updating is in order.

1. J-pop is still around, of course, but while Japanese radio may still sound like the second half of any given season of American Idol played at the wrong speed, the internet has given the beleaguered Japanese public so many other choices that it's debatable if even half the population has even heard this year's domestic top ten. And Indian pop has improved considerably, mostly in the last decade.
2. The two principles in The Blue Hearts dissolved the group a little more than a year after I made this compilation, then formed High-Low. In the past decade they reorganized again as Cro-Magnon, at least according to Wikipedia.
3. For the moment, the offer stands regarding the lyrics. I recently confirmed that I still have the same copy of the CD.
4. I still haven't found any other titles on the Juggler label.

.....In the next entry, punk by way of Sun Ra.

V04-T10 Defreeze Walt Disney

.....[yaaaawwn...] So, is it February yet? Where was I? Oh, yeah. "A whole different kind of tribute" to Disney.

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 10

• 01:30 "DEFREEZE WALT DISNEY" (Steve Westfield, Dave Montovani)
• performed by Pajama Slave Dancers
• original source: [see below] LP BLOOD, SWEAT AND BEERS Restless 72234-1 (US) 1988
• and my source: the same

.....First things first; while the album listed above is definitely the source I used for the compilation tape, the recording sounds very much like an earlier release by the same band on their own label with a different line-up. After using this track I discovered the two LP's released on their Pajamarama Records label, CHEAP IS REAL (PR881, 1985) and PAJAMA BEACH PARTY (PR883, 1986). Of the 18 songs on BLOOD, SWEAT AND BEERS, seven come from the 1985 album and four came from the 1986 album. However, between the 1985 album (where "DEFREEZE WALT DISNEY" originally appeared) and the 1986 album the band changed their drummer and bass player. The 1986 personnel are the ones also credited on the 1988 album. A subsequent Restless album, 1989's HEAVY PETTING ZOO, was followed by long stretches of few releases, mainly live recordings and re-recordings of songs like these from the 1980's. The question I can't seem to answer is whether the version I used is a re-recording with the second line-up or the 1985 recording with the original musicians going uncredited. For the sake of argument, the 1985 bassist was Jim-Joe Greedy and the drummer was Jon Long. In 1986 the bassist was Scott Blood and the drummer was Dirk Futon.

.....The song itself is about the persistent rumor that Walt Disney was cryonically frozen at the time of death until a cure for whatever killed him (it was lung cancer; the stress of trying to breathe induced a heart attack) could be found. Despite a total lack of any physical evidence even suggesting he was frozen there have been numerous people who, for almost four decades now, have claimed to "know" that his corpse is being kept in a secret chamber somewhere and was not cremated in the 1960's as public records indicate. This tenacious belief as been the subject of parody by everyone from "Robot Chicken" to "iCarly". I'd have to rewatch the first "Shrek" movie to see if it includes any allusions to the rumors, but most of its swipes at Disney are more specifically aimed at Michael Eisner.

.....The reason for defreezin' is, according to the song, to revive the Disney corporation and that "he sure was a nice old geezer". Ultimately, however, it was turning away from Walt's preoccupation with nature documentaries full of fabricated 'facts' and whites-only feature films that saved the company. While Walt was driven to animate only European fairy tales (Cinderella, Pinocchio, Snow White, etc.), from the mid-1980's on the animation drew on traditional stories from Europe (Beauty And The Beast, The Little Mermaid) and everywhere else (Mulan, Hercules, Aladdin, Brother Bear) as well. And the steady money really comes from Disney's cable channel, which has always had a more varied mix of ethnicities than the broadcast networks but without that fact ever being an issue. Walt was anything but "a nice old geezer" and I'm guessing if he could be revived today that an afternoon watching Euro-, Afro- and Sino-American kids interacting innocuously on a channel named for him would give him a cardiac arrest, stroke and aneurysm before sundown. Call it Stravinsky's revenge.

.....Speaking of other ethnicities, we're going to be turning Japanese in the next post. And no, it's not about the Vapors' song.

V04-T09 September Song

.....I've used a large number of covers over the course of this compilation series, but this one has nearly half a century between the original and the recording here.

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 8

• 04:18 "SEPTEMBER SONG" (lyrics: Maxwell Anderson, music: Kurt Weill)
• performed by Lou Reed
• original source: VALP LOST IN THE STARS A&M SP9 5104 (US) 1985
• and my source: VACD LOST IN THE STARS A&M CD5104 (US) 1985(?)

.....If Americans know Kurt Weill at all it's probably for the song "MACK THE KNIFE" from the musical "Threepenny Opera", written in Europe with Bertolt Brecht. When the Nazis began rising to power Weill's productions became targets of their vandalism and he immigrated to the United States in 1935. Soon after, he met Maxwell Anderson. In Anderson, he not only found a new friend in an unfamiliar country, but potentially a prolific collaborator. They each bought a house in an artists' enclave in upstate New York and began working, but Weill was increasingly being offered lucrative work on Hollywood soundtracks he would have been foolish to pass up. He spent the last third of his relatively short life (1900-1950) in America and his only two collaborations with Anderson form bookends to that period. The first musical was "Knickerbocker Holiday"(1938), the source of the song "SEPTEMBER SONG". The second musical was a musical adaption of Alan Paton's "Cry The Beloved Country" that they called "Lost In The Stars"(1949), the source of this album's title track.

.....Producer Hal Willner made something of a cottage industry out of tribute albums, beginning in the early eighties and continuing into the past decade. Following this one and SGT PEPPER KNEW MY FATHER, a non-Willner production using post-punk British musicians in 1987 to recreate the Beatles' album track by track for its twentieth anniversary, there was a flurry of artist tributes on small labels like Communion on which current alt-rock acts acknowledged their (sometimes obvious) debts to then-under-exposed acts like Captain Beefheart, Syd Barrett and the Velvet Underground. After the flurry came the deluge. I have actually lost count of the number of reggae-only tribute albums there are to Pink Floyd (I think it was four when I stopped paying attention). Willner's were almost always superior. He had an uncanny knack for matching just the right performer to the material, usually a performer you never would have thought to consider yourself but who, in retrospect, seems perfect. For instance, on the 1989 Disney tribute STAY AWAKE he paired Sinead O'Connor with "SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME" and Tom Waits with the Seven Dwarves' "HEIGH-HO", both adapted from "Snow White". At the time Lou Reed recorded this he had been working professionally for 20 years (almost 30 if you count the singles he made as a teenager) and almost never recorded covers. (Just after this was an ill-advised remake of "SOUL MAN", but that's rarely heard outside the soundtrack album of the same name.) Whatever possessed Willner to enlist Reed to interpret musical theater was something that can't be adequately described by trite phrases like "thinking outside of the box". It requires not only an intimate familiarity with the material to be covered but also with the panoply of artists available from which to choose (and then persuade to participate).

.....Say, I mentioned a tribute to Disney earlier. There's a whole different kind of tribute coming up next.

V04-T04 Journey To The Center Of A Girl

.....If I remember correctly, I had put together a 90-minute cassette retrospective of The Cramps shortly before I had worked on this second pot luck style tape. When trying to condense my favorite artists into portable form, I generally included A-sides and rarities on the list first. Then I arranged the songs chronologically, determined which years were underrepresented, and filled them with B-sides, album cuts and soundtrack or benefit contributions until the total playing time reached the closest increment of 30 minutes. That determined how many 60 or 90 minute cassettes to use. The technology is outdated now, but the basic idea translates well. In the case of the Cramps, I felt that two 90 minute cassettes would necessitate too many album tracks. To make a long story short(er), I reluctantly left this song off and regretted it almost immediately. I mentioned in earlier posts that songs I intended to use went AWOL, and I now have no doubt that while I sifted around for replacements I must have grabbed this hoping to turn disappointment into opportunity. Under the circumstances, it worked better in the mix than I had any right to expect.

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 4

• 04:49 "JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF A GIRL" (Ivy Rorschach, Lux Interior)
• performed by The Cramps
• original source: LP STAY SICK Enigma 7 73543-4 (US) 1990
• and my source: CD STAY SICK Enigma 7 73543-2(US) 1990

.....I'll just quote from my old notes:

"This, like the Dead Milkman track, is an item that is not at all a rarity. (In fact, I distinctly remember this as the A-side of a 12" promo single which I personally played on the air. However, I can't find any indication that it was released as a commercial single.) I just threw it on because I've always liked it, it fits thematically with what precedes it and I didn't have what I wanted to use. It's also on the Enigma label, which is not bias on my part but possibly not coincidence either. Before Enigma started having financial epilepsy it had a great roster (the Mute artists, Devo, Mojo Nixon, ... etc.)

"A good label is well rounded, with some kind of focus but also dabbling in a little bit of everything. 'Everything' might as well include The Cramps, since there aren't too many bands who represent their particular slice of music's pie. There aren't too many with female leadership (Ivy) or a consistent, uncompromising sound. Like myself, they are fervent record collectors; their early albums and singles contain numerous obscure covers. Unlike me, they can be very scary in person, especially to someone unfamiliar with their frequent 'psychobilly' motifs and thrill-junkie perspective. (Lux was a long-time pen pal of John Wayne Gacy. For real.)"

.....A few years after I wrote those notes I got to see them live in a club setting. I had to trudge through a snowstorm to do it. There were three opening acts, including Guitar Wolf. When the Cramps finally took the stage, Lux commented that we had to be crazy to go through that weather for a club date and hinted that they were going to make it worth it. Boy, did they. They were unbefuckinglievable. Several times that night Lux's energetic delivery caused a mike stand to snap; by the last encore he had built a scarecrow out of their broken parts, stripped down to a thong and dressed the scarecrow in his clothes. This February, it will be two years since he passed away and the world is poorer for it.

V04-T01 A Door Is Ajar

.....A new year, a new volume. Let's dive in, shall we?

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 1

• 00:40 "A DOOR IS AJAR"(Traditional, arranged by Kronos Quartet)
• performed by Kronos Quartet
• original source: CD WINTER WAS HARD Elektra/Nonesuch 79181(US)1988
• and my source: the same

.....According to my notes from 1994:

"This is not an excerpt-- this is an entire and complete track which closes what I think is Kronos' third album for Nonesuch. I've used it to open part four because I think that it's far more appropriate-- this is essentially what is heard when someone has just entered a car, and that implies that a journey is about to begin. What most intrigued me about this track (typical archivist) is the credit-- 'Traditional'. Is this not the new folk music?

"The person who actually wrote the exact words used labored in corporate anonymity and is not credited anywhere in owners' manuals or other company publications. The car's manufacturer probably never thought to copyright the recording. The process of establishing a claim of ownership (let alone pursuing it in the courts should someone 'steal' it) would probably cost more than exclusive ownership would generate. Even though it doesn't create a profit, the recording is played over and over, heard by millions, recognized instantly.

"Is this not the new folk music? Also curious is how this could be 'arranged' for a string quartet.

"This was supposed to kick off a theme of car songs, but many key selections were missing from my collection, so I did some stream of consciousness reprogramming."

.....The next track suggests where the car theme might have taken us.

V03-T16 Technical Difficulties

.....This last track for Volume 3 is an apt way to end this year:

Volume 3: A KINDER, GENTLER ZERO TOLERANCE, track 16

• 01:00 "TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES" (no author listed)
• performed by Don Pardo
• original source: 2LP TELEVISION'S GREATEST HITS TVT 1100 (US) 1985
• and my source: the same

.....He's known today for the years he spent as an announcer on "Saturday Night Live" but Pardo was a seasoned veteran when he started on that show. He was only rarely used to his full potential, as when host/musical guest Frank Zappa arranged for him to duet on the song "I'M THE SLIME". Brief spots like this were used at the end of each side of the TVT double album. Actually, this particular one only went by the title "TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES" on the interior label. On the exterior jacket, it went by the title "PLEASE STAND BY". Either way it served as a method of mitigating the necessary pause to flip the cassette to side four.

.....Hopefully next year I won't have to deal with the problems I had last spring, especially as I hope to be busier. More tomorrow.

V03-T12a (excerpt Dead London)

.....Spoken word interstitials can be like peanuts sometimes...

Volume 3: A KINDER, GENTLER ZERO TOLERANCE, track 12a

• 00:17 (excerpt DEAD LONDON) (H.G. Wells, adapted by Jeff Wayne)
• performed by Richard Burton
• original source: 2LP THE WAR OF THE WORLDS Columbia PC2 35290 (US) 6/78
• and my source: 2CD THE WAR OF THE WORLDS Columbia C2K 35290 (US?) 1986?

.....According to the novel, the line I wanted to use was, "...slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.", or the nearest equivalent from the George Pal movie adaption. At the time I was putting this compilation together I was using a versatile analog receiver that could juggle input from multiple sources in multiple formats and I wanted to take advantage of the fact that that included using the audio portion of VHS recordings (this was pre-DVR), especially as I was developing a thread of film-related music. I was nearing the end of that side of the cassette and wanted to switch gears slightly one more time and needed a bridge/interstitial. I had recently recorded the George Pal adaption of "War Of The Worlds"(1953) but couldn't find the VHS tape, but remembered having the Jeff Wayne project on CD. Better known as a producer, Wayne took three years to construct a musical adaption of the 1898 novel using artists he had worked with, including Justin Hayward (of the Moody Blues), Phil Lynott (of Thin Lizzy) and others. The full story came to light in 2005 with the release of the 6CD/1DVD collector's edition, Columbia/Legacy CECD96000 (aka C7H 94427 1 2 or UPC#8 27969 44276 0). Had it existed at the time, I could have used the expanded box as a source for the paraphrased recording of the above passage. The three discs of outtakes includes all of the spoken material without music. As it happened, I wasn't able to isolate the phrase I wanted from the musical bedding and other dialogue. Seconds later, at the very end of a track called "DEAD LONDON", I found the excerpt I eventually used bookended with the second's pause I needed to fade in and out without jarring the listener. The exact phrase I used was, "Directly the invaders arrived and drank and fed, our microscopic allies attacked them. From that moment, they were doomed." It actually seemed like a more fitting link from a "Rocky Horror" spin-off (since Frank and company were alien invaders) to our next track.

V03-T11 Little Cat

.....I used to be frustrated by the fact that I couldn't find more information about the child star who recorded this number, although the last time I aggressively researched him was probably 1994 when I compiled this tape. Now, with the advent of some of the most powerful databases on the internet, I've learned that IMDB, Allmusic and Wikipedia are also completely clueless as to this boy's identity. The best I can guess is that he may have grown up to be the lead singer of the Dutch pop group Jonz. Or maybe not. I'm still frustrated, of course, but feeling far less inadequate about it.

Volume 3: A KINDER, GENTLER ZERO TOLERANCE, track 11

• 02:18 "LITTLE CAT (YOU'VE NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD)"(Nick Lowe)(additional arrangements by David Bedford)
• performed by Jonas
• original source: VA2LP ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS: THE [OMPS] Virgin VD2514 (UK) 4/86
• and my source: VACD ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS: THE [OMPS] Virgin CDV2386(UK) 1987?

.....Taken from Colin MacInnes' novel, "Absolute Beginners" was a period film documenting Britain's belated recognition of teenagers as a demographic and subculture. It may seem strange today, but a century ago the concept of the teenager was just being introduced. Prior to that it was presumed that children turned into adults with no intermediary stages. It's been mentioned elsewhere, and is repeated early in the film, that Americans invented the teenager. That's certainly true in the case of mass media fictional characters, where youths saddled with adult responsibilities (Little Orphan Annie, Tintin, et al) gave way to hormone-crazed and judgement-impaired balls of energy like Andy Hardy and Archie Andrews. The population bubble that followed the end of World War II would later turn teens from a curious sociological phenomenon into a serious purchasing power in any industrialized economy.

.....Composer Nick Lowe is no stranger to teen idol pop. About a decade earlier than this recording he was invited to join the newly launched Stiff label but was in a contract that prevented him from doing so. To avoid the penalties which would stem from breaking the contract, he tried to prompt the label that he was signed to into firing him. To this end he submitted songs like "BAY CITY ROLLERS, WE LOVE YOU", knowing that their star was on the wane in England. What he did not know was that they were just becoming huge in Japan, where the song became a hit. Of course, he eventually became a notable performer and producer at Stiff, albeit with a renewed respect for the power of pop. He's also apparently a student of the period. The movie takes place in 1958, and the song's subtitle is taken from a 1957 speech by conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, often paraphrased as it is above, quoted here: "...most of our people have never had it so good." The speech sought to bolster his fellow conservatives with positive signs of post-war recovery, which was also a significant topic of the film.

.....Rereading my original liner notes, they seem mostly still relevant:

"Another soundtrack selection, this one a little more off the beaten path. Also, you may find the soundtrack to the movie Absolute Beginners in bargain bins (and it really would be a bargain) but this track would not be on it. The US album has the songs that are featured as production numbers in the movie. The UK version contains the US version plus a second, shorter LP with Gil Evans' instrumental score and the full unedited studio versions of songs heard only in snippets or in the background of the movie. This song, for instance, is heard playing on radios. The joke is that the main character (and the audience) know that the singer was a snotty, unkempt schoolboy just months before this song became a hit and in fact watched the boy's manager 'discover' him (at an audition) and dress him in flashy clothes as an acceptable counter to "that American Negro music". Even though the movie takes place in England (1958?) it perfectly describes the state of pop music in the US, circa 1959-1962: the real rockers were dying in plane crashes (Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, et al), serving in the army (Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley), in jail (Chuck Berry for tax evasion), blackballed due to scandal (Jerry Lee Lewis for marrying his teenage cousin) etc, etc. A teenaged music marketplace was created in the mid-fifties out of babies born after World War II. Rock music caught the record industry by surprise, since 'race music' and other folk forms were deemed commercially unviable and pigeonholed in a manner that would have kept them so except for the size of the demographic base demanding it. The response was (and has been ever since) to mass produce lightweight, uninspired substitutes for soul and imagination (and in this case, sex). Thus, Paul Anka, Neil Sedaka, Connie Francis, Pat Boone and others reassured parents everywhere that a clean-cut young man was in the White House setting a fine example and that rock and roll was just a bad dream. The 'little cat' was that music, the music that came between Alan Freed and the Beatles and which was the rule rather than the exception in England.

"What sold me on this song was the chorus (listen closely):

'Boom, baby; Boom, baby; Boom, baby, boom;

'Baby, boom; Baby, boom; Baby, boom...' "

.....Well, here in 2010 I don't have much to add to that except that the 25th anniversary of the movie is looming and I'm hoping that we see a decent 2-DVD with the extras not seen on the shamefully skimpy and improperly transfered 2003 DVD. (Seriously, if the selling point of a movie is music and visual spectacle, why bother releasing a home video version at all if you're not going to pay any attention to the quality of the sound or color?) In addition to a mountain of detailed period production designs that must exist (the Criterion edition of Brazil would be the standard to live up to) both DVD and Blu-ray formats could accommodate the digital format premieres of some of the music from double album and spun-off singles that didn't make it to even the extended UK CD. There were two Gil Evans instrumental takes on "ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS" and "NAPOLI" which I'm sure jazz completists would appreciate. More importantly there was Laurel Aitken's "LANDLORDS AND TENANTS" and Ekow Abban's "SANTA LUCIA" from scenes key to the plot. That doesn't even count material that didn't make it to vinyl, such as a wedding song played on steel drums. The anniversary is in April and I'm not getting my hopes up, since the 50th anniversary of the book seemed to slip by quietly unnoticed last year.

.....More trouble for London tomorrow.

V03-T09 Elvis' House

.....Jello Biafra once wrote a lyric about parasitic Elvis-fetish merchandise being sold in Memphis, (if memory serves me): "His disciples flock to such a fitting shrine, sprawled across from his Graceless mansion; a shopping mall, filled with prayer rugs and Elvis dolls."

Volume 3: A KINDER, GENTLER ZERO TOLERANCE, track 9

• 05:40 "ELVIS' HOUSE" (Christopher Ewen,Anthony Kaczynski, John R. Rolski, Michael Smith, Perry Tell)
• performed by Figures On A Beach
• original source: LP STANDING ON CEREMONY Sire 9 25596-1 (US) 1987
• and my source: the same

.....If Figures On A Beach are remembered for anything now, it's for being a big chunk of Christopher Ewen's resume before joining/forming Future Bible Heroes. They only released two albums, this being the first, but several singles and EP's over about ten years. The second eponymous album was released in 1989 on vinyl and again the following year on CD. This first album didn't ship on CD until 2008 (after being made downloadable in 2006). That is a shame. Not only does it have the only one of their songs made into a MTV video ("NO STARS", according to their sparse website) but it has this brilliant piece of encroaching paranoia and detachment. In the ten years following Elvis' death (in 1977) there were numerous songs about him, such as Dead Kennedy's "A GROWING BOY NEEDS HIS LUNCH" (quoted above), Frank Zappa's "ELVIS HAS JUST LEFT THE BUILDING" and Mojo Nixon's "ELVIS IS EVERYWHERE". Worth looking out for is the Residents' chilling and heart-wrenching album THE KING AND EYE, in which an Elvis sound-alike tells a demented fairy tale to two children that is clearly based on Elvis' own life, interspersed with songs from his catalog (mostly Lieber and Stoller compositions) that take on radically different meanings in the context of the story without changing a word of the lyrics.

.....With all that Presleyana in the air at the time, it was unavoidable that his home, which he called 'Graceland' would come in for scrutiny. It was the world's only lasting physical manifestation of his personality. There's the Paul Simon song and album and a priceless scene in Spinal Tap which was recalled (intentionally or unintentionally?) in the U2 film "Rattle And Hum". "ELVIS' HOUSE" suggests that while a prison with bars of gold may still be a prison, it doesn't preclude the possibility of it being something worse. If anything, it resembles the Roxy Music song "IN EVERY DREAM HOME A HEARTACHE", in which we lose our soul in increments as we cede control over our lives to our material possessions, and become their possessions.

.....The second half of Volume three starts Monday and we turn our attention from the 'rebel' theme we've been following and instead focus on some of the little things in life.

V03-T07 Punk Rock Girl

.....Well, you tell me: how many college radio hits do you know that name-check Minnie Pearl?

Volume 3: A KINDER, GENTLER ZERO TOLERANCE, track 7

• 02:39 "PUNK ROCK GIRL" (Dead Milkmen)
• performed by Dead Milkmen
• original source: CD BEELZEBUBBA Enigma D2-73351 (US)1988
• and my source: the same

.....Before we go any further I'd like to point out that the lyric that identifies a Beach Boys' song as "California Dreaming" is not the mistake so many people tend to think it is. Of course the song was written and performed originally by The Mamas and The Papas, but in the mid-1970's the Beach Boys recorded an album of covers called 15 BIG ONES that acted as a stop gap measure to deal with Brian Wilson's songwriting slowing down to a trickle. Apparently it worked for them because they spent the next decade padding out albums with rock standards. In 1986, right before Wilson left for an overdue solo career, they released "California Dreaming" as an A-side on Capitol 5630. That would have made it likely to have turned up on a jukebox in a California Pizza Company restaurant. (And it is 'Company', not 'Kitchen', the chain better known outside of California.) It would be just as likely that after spending so much time frittering away any relevance they may have had that nobody outside of California was aware that they had released that single, hence the assumption that the Dead Milkmen had screwed up.

.....I chose this song for a few reasons, primarily for the scene in the shopping mall music store. At the time this album came out I had stopped doing seasonal work at a chain music store in a suburban shopping mall. Despite getting along with my coworkers the experience was everything you'd expect-- soul-crushing, depressing, frustrating and sufficiently traumatic that I have not tuned to a top 40 radio station in over 25 years. Before working there I had the misfortune of trying to shop there. When Iggy Pop had his greatest commercial success, the album BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, I went in to see what in his back catalog was available. When I asked the clerk where his albums were, he clearly was trying to avoid admitting that he didn't recognize the name. "So that's in Comedy, right?" I told him that I was certain it should be in rock and offered a few album titles, hoping that might jog his memory. "Uhhh... let me check in Jazz." I just walked out.

.....A year or two later I was working there for Christmas and needed money for college. Most seasonal help is just cut loose but that year there was a part-time opening. Part of being a regular, year-round employee was taking a 'product recognition' type test. It was fairly basic stuff; if a customer asks for this artist or that style of music, what section is it shelved in? I got a nearly perfect score, but I didn't have any illusions that there would be a reward for that. It seemed more likely, given my experience of the parent company, that the test existed so that local managers could tell which of the clods they hired was shelving cassettes without looking at the sticker codes. What really shocked me was when my manager told me that, while my score confirmed to him that I was a good resource in the store, the parent company tended to count higher music knowledge scores as a negative when it comes to promotions for office positions. Their reasoning was that if someone knows too much about any one topic, even if it was their own merchandise, then they were not dedicating their full attention to The Company and its policies. They were convinced that nobody could know too much about more than one topic, since apparently they could never manage it themselves. There was nothing I saw while working for that company, nor read about it since leaving, that contradicted what he told me that day. In fact, a few things confirmed it.

....."We asked for Mojo Nixon. They said, 'He don't work here.' We said, 'If you don't got Mojo Nixon then your store could use some fixin'!'"

.....Next up, bats, turtles and cows.

V03-T06 Mike Beck In Science Class

.....Here I get to combine my love of comic books with recordings again.

Volume 3: A KINDER, GENTLER ZERO TOLERANCE, track 6

• 0:49 "MIKE BECK IN SCIENCE CLASS" (Lynda Barry) [excerpt from "I REMEMBER MIKE"]
• performed by Lynda Barry
• original source: VACD FIRST WORDS Gang of Seven 74144-22000-2 (US)May,1992
• and my source: VACD RADIO EDITS Gang of Seven 74144-1992-1 (US) Late 1992

.....This disc was the first release on the Gang of Seven label, devoted to spoken word recordings. After Will Ackerman sold the Windham Hill label to BMG, he made plans to launch a new label that wouldn't be saddled with the narrow-focused reputation from which Windham Hill briefly prospered. However, one stipulation of his lucrative sale was that he not participate in a competitive business for at least three years. Interpreting that as meaning a new-age label, or even more broadly any music label, he began the label as a spoken word venture. It would have been interesting to see if he could build a different aesthetic brand identity from WH by using the selective issues of spoken performers and then transfer that identity to a stable of musicians (after the three years had lapsed) and retain the same audience. We'll never know because the label lasted about a year and a half.

.....FIRST WORDS was a label sampler introducing a prospective roster of 14 artists, including some known quantities in spoken performance: Spalding Gray, Tom Bodett, Nora Dunn, Wallace Shawn and my choice for the mix tape, Lynda Barry. She was represented there by a 5+ minute track called "I REMEMBER MIKE", but I was considering isolating a snippet as an interstitial when I compared my choices to pre-edited excerpts on the radio promo RADIO EDITS, circulated sometime between the label's sixth release in September and the seventh in January 1993. I decided that the edit "MIKE BECK IN SCIENCE CLASS" stood up as a self-contained, if brief, track in its own right. The full track was eventually used on Barry's own full-length disc THE LYNDA BARRY EXPERIENCE, released June 1993. There should also be more of her work accessible through npr.org (check the links to the right).

.....Tomorrow we flip the gender dynamic of this track to bring you a guy intrigued by an outsider girl.

V03-T03 The Man Who Invented Himself

.....Many of the recordings I used for this series of compilation tapes were rare at the time that I used them. Of course, since all of these recordings, including the ones created for broadcast or promotional purposes, were mass produced, 'rare' is a relative term. If you manufacture a David Bowie title in quantities less than 50,000 that item would be considered somewhat rare because his international sales are typically in the millions. That same number would make an appropriate first pressing for a band on a small, privately owned label. Of the recordings used here that I would think were hard to come by, many have since been reissued (or issued) on CD. While their original format issue is still technically rare the newly pressed sources often ship in even larger quantities than the originals. By contrast, the recording used below may have actually become more rare since I compiled the tape due to very unusual circumstances.

Volume 3: A KINDER, GENTLER ZERO TOLERANCE, track 3

• 02:59 "THE MAN WHO INVENTED HIMSELF" (Robyn Hitchcock)
• performed by Robyn Hitchcock
• original source: LP BLACK SNAKE DIAMOND ROLE Armageddon ARM 4 (UK) May, 1981
• and my source: CD BLACK SNAKE DIAMOND ROLE Aftermath AFT CD 1 (UK) 1987

.....In March 1980 The Soft Boys finished the recording sessions that would be pieced together to form their last original studio album, UNDERWATER MOONLIGHT. That spring, a Virgin Records employee named Richard Bishop set out to launch his own label, Armageddon, and The Soft Boys would put any future releases on it. As it turned out, their recordings from that point on fell into four categories: songs released as Soft Boys singles; songs packaged with earlier outtakes to fill out a Soft Boys posthumous album; songs retroactively credited to guitarist Kimberley Rew for singles; and songs retroactively credited to Hitchcock for much of his first solo album and parts of a later compilation, INVISIBLE HITCHCOCK. These were mostly released over the course of the next year and a half, after Rew had tracked down a pre-Soft Boys bandmate from his old band The Waves. In his absence they had become a rock-and-country cover band called "Mama's Cooking" with an American female guitarist. They needed Rew's writing skills, so he agreed to join on condition that he play guitar and the American woman sings his songs instead of him. And "Katrina And The Waves" was a much better name.

.....In January 1995, the year after this tape was assembled, Rhino Records put out the first US release (on CD; keep reading) of BLACK SNAKE DIAMOND ROLE, the first Hitchcock solo album. The liner notes by Grant Alden answer some questions and raise others. On page 2 he states "Sessions began simply, just Robyn and Morris [Windsor] on drums"... and quotes Hitchcock:"So 'THE MAN WHO INVENTED HIMSELF' and 'ACID BIRD' were just Morris and me. I think the first thing we did was 'ACID BIRD' on a four-track machine that Pat Collier had." Then on page 3 Alden mentions,"Additional sessions took place on a barge, where Richard Branson [founder and head of Virgin Records] had installed a 16-track studio." Hitchcock: "Morris and I did 'THE MAN WHO INVENTED HIMSELF' in the middle of the night, on the barge... Howie, our roadie, came along, and there was about an 18-inch gap between the barge and the quay just out by the bow... Howie managed to fall in... so he took his trousers off and dried them over the piano." These two unrelated statements place the song both when "sessions began" and also "additional sessions". The Barge also turns up in the liner notes for INVISIBLE HITCHCOCK as the source of the songs "GIVE ME A SPANNER, RALPH" and "MY FAVORITE BUILDINGS" in June, 1980.

.....Songs that eventually made it onto BSDR included some that had been part of the Soft Boys' live set in the fall of 1980. It isn't so surprising then that each of the other band members show up in some capacity on the solo album. To this day they appear on each other's recordings, and their split early in 1981 was far from acrimonious. It was more due to exasperation with the music press in England, who at some point decided that The Soft Boys weren't wearing the right brand of shoes and shouldn't eat lunch at the cool kids' table. After they broke up their records caught on in the US, especially among upcoming musicians who routinely name-checked them and covered their songs. Unable to foresee that in their future, they had their post-band projects already prepared when their split was announced. In April 1981, the 7" Armageddon AS008 (UK) single for "THE MAN WHO INVENTED HIMSELF" was released followed in May by the BSDR album. (Although the title song doesn't appear on the album, it does exist; a live recording by The Soft Boys surfaced in October on a posthumous album.) The album version of "THE MAN WHO..." features a saxophone part by prolific session man Gary Barnacle and muted piano. However, during the long gestation period for the album it went by several working titles before release, the last of which was ZINC PEAR, for which there was a test pressing with a slightly different track selection and a different mix for "THE MAN WHO...", one without the saxophone overdubbing and the piano clear as a bell. Being a test pressing it wasn't available commercially but wasn't a secret either. When the album was reissued on the Aftermath label (on vinyl in 1985 in Germany and on CD in 1987-- which says 'Made In England' but may also have been made in Europe for UK distribution), it still carried the saxophone mix. The 1995 US Rhino CD I mentioned earlier replaced that track with the original mix from ZINC PEAR. [NOTE: When that Rhino CD initially shipped, it came with a circular blurb sticker that announced "U.S. Debut!" While the album had never before been released here in the CD format, it was briefly available on vinyl from Relativity in 1986. Having never heard a copy of that particular pressing, I can't say which mix was used. I'm also not certain that it was made in the US and not Canada, which would absolve the blurb sticker.]

.....Subsequent reissues of the album on Sequel and Yep Roc, as well as the appearance of the song on compilations, have all utilized the ZINC PEAR piano version, making the saxophone mix relatively rarer with every new release because it makes up a smaller percentage of the total versions available to an increasing audience. Of course, I learned all of this only after I made the compilation tape. I only knew that the CD was more difficult to find than later solo albums. I could have used any other song on the album, I just liked the breezy feel of this one. I've also yet to find why the sax overdub was used in the first place. Was it dubbed over the Barge recording because a wet pair of pants muted the piano? Was it even the same take as the ZINC PEAR mix? Chime in on the comments if you have any insights on this.

V03-T01b Romp, Romp, Romp

.....Youthful rebellion is much like bacteria: large in quantity, diverse in quality and constantly reproducing, spreading and yielding new mutations. And like bacteria, when someone sets out to eliminate it they either chose a method potent enough to hurt themselves in the process or else some weaker method that leaves only the stronger and more destructive strains of the bacteria surviving.

Volume 3: A KINDER, GENTLER ZERO TOLERANCE, track 1b

• 03:28 "ROMP, ROMP, ROMP" (Sport [Mike Murphy])
• performed by The Skels
• original source: LP HOW DO YOU LIKE IT HERE NOW? Mystery Fez REC 1297 (Canada) 1988
• and my source: the same

.....First of all, this band has absolutely no relation to the band currently known as The Skels who specialize in Dropkick Murphy-style Irish pub punk and who are based in New Jersey. This earlier, New York-based band broke up at about the same time that the current band formed (c.1995). It's individual members are all on either Facebook or MySpace: John Borghardt, Jim Colford, Bill Hafener, Willy Liguori and Sport (Mike Murphy). This song comes from what I believe was the first of three albums, portions of which appear on the compilation CD EVIDENCE OF A STRUGGLE 1988-1994, also on Mystery Fez and released in 1995, after this mix tape was recorded.

.....On repeated listenings (and fortunately this song lends itself to repeated listenings) you may notice that with every chorus the singer calls for a different style of once-demonized music. Not only that, but he exchanges them in the chronological order in which each was scapegoated as The Cause Of All Our Problems; rock, metal ,punk, hip-hop. And every one of these music styles seemed to disappear off the radar when the next Cause Of All Our Problems came along. It is interesting to note that in my own experience, whenever I've played this song, which contains not one lyric that would read as a joke on paper, and observed people's reactions I have never encountered anyone who did not laugh or at least smile at some point during this song. I can't tell if they found it amusing for the same reasons but in most cases they definitely taste of a 'moment of recognition'. That's something really essential for sarcasm or 'tongue-in-cheek' humor to work. Volume 1 cast the widest possible net, but volume 3 presents what an electrician would call a "gate" and cleaves closer to my personality. Later on this side there will be an extended mood of playfulness and passing "ROMP, ROMP, ROMP" is in my estimation the minimum for going forward since the humor is often more subtle from here on out.

.....Tomorrow, more on Warhol, nursery rhymes and hypnosis.

V02-T16 The Dust Blows Forward...

.....If you were one of the lucky few to be given one of these compilations, and assuming you didn't recognize this final song on Volume 2, you may have wondered just how old this recording was or how bad the condition of the record from which it was taken. The recording is younger than I am and it was recorded from a CD.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 16

• 01:53 "THE DUST BLOWS FORWARD (AND THE DUST BLOWS BACK) (Don Van Vliet)
• performed by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band
• original source: 2LP TROUT MASK REPLICA Straight STS-1013 (US) 10/69
• and my source: CD TROUT MASK REPLICA Reprise 2027-2 (US) 11/89

.....Many of the liner notes that I wrote for this series of mix tapes became hopelessly out of date and I've been rewriting them on this blog. This particular track was not as obvious a choice for a 'closer' as the two tracks that began each side/volume were 'openers'. In fact, it's only the second track on the first side of the double LP from which it was taken. My choice to use it for this purpose was ultimately instinctive and I put some thought in after the fact to work out (for my own peace of mind, mostly) what was driving those instincts. I'm going to quote those thoughts below, unedited, and then fact-check myself immediately after that (and remember this is 1993):

.....This man could fill a book. You still might not understand him after reading it, but you'll hate putting it down.

.....Captain Beefheart is an infuriating artist, the sort who, along with Syd Barrett, Nico, Lord Buckley and others will often be the first names on your tongue when someone asks you why you don't like Air Supply (no, that's pretty dated; say 'Vanilla Ice' instead). "If you don't like what they play on the radio, then WHAT DO YOU LIKE?" they always ask.

.....And sometimes, if I'm feeling charitable, this is what I'd say:

....."I like Captain Beefheart."

.....Now, I'm not stupid. I know that if I say this to one hundred people that less than half a dozen of them will buy one of his albums and most of them will make the mistake of trying to dance to it. But if even one person 'gets' it, it will be worth it. Of course, their first reaction will be to wrinkle their nose and check the sleeve/jewel box to make sure they didn't pick up the wrong item. Then they'll check their sound system, headphones, etc. It was only because I found some of these songs mildly amusing that I gave them repeated listenings and found, to my amazement, that taken collectively they can be revelatory. In the case of Beefheart in particular, more so than the others I mentioned above, you should find that he doesn't simply have a perspective on things that's slightly different from the rest of us, but that his perspective is nearly independent of ours. With some effort you can catch a glimpse of it; it's a mad world where objects are interchangeable with circumstances (and vice versa) and words are more powerful than what they are chosen to describe.

.....About this recording specifically: it was produced by Frank Zappa, probably in someone's living room. (The Captain had already been lied to and cheated by a number of producers and labels and was fitfully uncomfortable around studios.)

.....This track was taped from CD; the scratchy sound in the background, periodically interrupted by a crackling >thwippp< , is the sound of a needle in the trail-off groove of an old record. Both Beefheart and Zappa frequently listened to blues 45's and 78's. It acts as a metronome on an otherwise a capella track. Maybe the intention was to lay the vocal part over an instrumental background afterwards and that proved too difficult due to the record's "background noise". I'd like to think that it was more the result of two genuine record lovers who wanted to convey to listeners the sound that most recalls their true passion-- and mine.

.....and it's 2010 again. O.K., in order:

1. "This man could fill a book." Several, in fact, since I wrote those words. Only a handful are really good, the best being Zoot Horn Rollo (Bill Harkleroad)'s "Lunar Notes"(1998); Mike Barnes' "The Biography"(2002); Kevin Courrier's contribution to the 33 1/3 series, a volume about this very album, TROUT MASK REPLICA (2007); and there's been a lot of anticipation for John (Drumbo) French's "Beefheart: Through The Eyes of Magic", released earlier this year. He also wrote the excellent liner notes for the GROW FINS boxed set of CD's.
2. Air Supply was dated then, and Vanilla Ice is dated now.
3. The phrase, "where objects are interchangeable with circumstances" should probably read, "...with events". The idea was that if solid tangible things and experienced activities were both nouns (linguistically, at least), that they could be equivalent in some other sense as well. That is, you could sprinkle a bus ride on your corn flakes. Or you could reach a higher shelf by standing on ceremony. In the Captain's world, those sentences would make perfect sense.
4. I don't know where I might have read about TROUT MASK REPLICA being recorded in someone's living room, but the album was famously demoed in a suburban house that was converted into a giant studio by Zappa and the Magic Band. By the late 1960's the experimentation in using multi-track recording on pop music had made it the rule and not the exception to record each instrument independently and then incorporate the mixing stage of production into the creative process. They bought a house in Woodland Hills, CA and wired the individual rooms. The musicians moved in and the lines between living, working and creating began to blur resulting in an extreme form of cabin fever. Some people never left the house for months.

.....Well, I'm starting to feel a bit of that cabin fever myself. Tomorrow is a day off. I'll be doing another recommendation. Then beginning next week I'll be posting Monday through Friday in order to work in more research to update the notes as well as doing a little home maintenance.

V02-T15 Feelin' Existential

.....The rhythm guitar introduction on this track, although at a slower tempo, felt like it fit comfortably after the previous track. It also serves to take the listener back down to their baseline standing pulse rate.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 15

• 02:53 "FEELIN' EXISTENTIAL" (Mojo Nixon)
• performed by Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper
• original source: LP FRENZY Restless/Enigma 72127-1 (US) 1986
• and my source: CD FRENZY/GET OUT OF MY WAY! Restless 72127-2 (US) 1987

.....The CD, in case you're wondering, has a different title because an EP had been added as bonus tracks.

.....The liner notes I wrote in 1993 are still relevant, as far as I can see, so I may just rely on them here:

....."From the man who told us that 'Elvis Is Everywhere'. This is from the previous (second) album, coupled with an EP on disc. This is considerably less manic than most of his stuff, which sounds like Ernest T. Bass (an old Andy Griffith Show character) turning into a drunken, menacing street preacher. On this same album, for example, there's an excellent rant entitled 'Jesus At McDonald's' ".

.....Tomorrow, Volume 2 concludes and I once again turn to the original liner notes. A bit more of them, actually.

V02-T14a The audience participation portion of our program

.....Iggy Pop once said something to the effect that there are no bystanders or casual observers at his concerts. If you are there, you are engaged and participating, whether you want to be or not. He makes eye contact (as lighting allows), scans the room, sings directly to (or at) audience members, whatever it takes to make it beyond doubt that you are not going to experience the performance from an objective vacuum. We're all in this together, we all have a stake in each other's experience. And unlike many performers, Iggy always seems prepared to roll with it when the audience shows up with the prior intention of getting very much engaged.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 14a

• 01:00 [dialogue in lieu of "I Wanna Be Your Dog"] (Iggy Pop)
• performed by Iggy And The Stooges (and the audience)
• original source: 2LP METALLIC 2XK.O. Skydog 62232-1 (France) 1988?
• and my source: CD METALLIC 2XK.O. Skydog 62232-2 (France) 1992?

.....I had already established a precedent of spoken word pieces on these tapes and knew that if I used more of them sparingly but consistently they'd have the desired effect of pacing the music as well as occasionally adding indirect commentary. Use them too frequently and it feels as though I'm trying to make a gimmick substitute for ideas; use them too little and it feels as though the few I did use were mistakes.

.....I also wanted to have balance in the sense of using both music from my collection that I loved and music from my collection that was just there and deserved a little validation. This track fits both bills, but posed a new problem. I had set a ground rule for myself that I would not repeat artists. With less than ten minutes to go on the tape I had already decided that there would be further volumes and I could not imagine a series like this with no actual Stooges songs. To compromise I decided to consider this dialogue to be an interstitial introducing a contemporary song of theirs and consider all interstitials generally to be exempted from the 'no-repeat' rule. Seeing as how some of them are five to ten seconds long, that seemed reasonable.

.....The history behind this recording is extremely convoluted and I'm not likely to do a decent job of disambiguation with less than 24 hours of preparation. What I can provide is a quick chronology:

• In Oct. 1973, The Stooges play the Michigan Palace and this track is recorded by a friend of the band.
• In Feb. 1974, The Stooges return to the Michigan Palace and play what turns out to be their last show.
• Later in 1974, Ray Manzarek has dissolved the post-Morrison version of the Doors (they put out two albums that seem to have vanished from their label's memory) and begins recording with Iggy and guitarist James Williamson. Although Manzarek does release a solo album at this time, it doesn't include anything from these demos, which Manzarek has never released. Desperate for money, Pop and Williamson bring a boxed filled with random unmarked reels of Stooges outtakes to Greg Shaw of BOMP! Magazine.
• Iggy voluntarily entered a mental health facility to end, or severely curtail, his substance abuse problem. Long time fan David Bowie is reportedly his only visitor.
• In spring of 1976 the album METALLIC K.O. is released in France on the label Skydog (SGIS 008). It claims to contain the last Stooges show, but is actually one half of the Oct. 1973 show and one half of the Feb. 1974 show. Later, Pop and Williamson record the album KILL CITY for Shaw, who is still sifting through the reels of Stooges demos and opting to release them as singles. Bowie opts to escape the drugs, insanity and human parasites in Los Angeles by going to Berlin. He offers to take Iggy and they make a brief stop in France to record demos and begin recording Iggy's IDIOT album and Bowie's LOW album at Chateau d'Herouville. They finish both at Hansa Studios in Berlin.
• In 1977 there is a deluge of Stooges material, including the new KILL CITY and Stooges singles from BOMP!, two new albums each from both Pop and Bowie and METALLIC K.O. has sold so well in the US as an import that American pressings are made by a label called Import (IMP 1015). Bowie tours as Iggy's pianist and live selections are released the following year as T.V. EYE LIVE.
• In 1978, Skydog releases an EP with more of the Feb. 1974 show (SGIS 012).
• c.1988, the double album METALLIC 2XK.O. is released, including the 1976 LP, the 1978 EP and more of the Oct. 1973 show. This is where I came in.

.....Tomorrow, one of the tapes Grew Shaw found in that box.