V04-T08 Love Is All Around

.....At the time I put this tape together I was sorely tempted to pair this song with the completely different song by the same title by the Troggs. I'm not sure why I didn't; it may have been because I had just used one original hit from the 1960's and four sides into a compilation series that emphasizes the obscure it would seem unusual to have two so close together. You'll see that not everything I chose to use was rare or unusual. Avoiding the popular or commercially successful music in my collection wouldn't be genuinely representative of what I was listening to any more than using it exclusively.

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

• 01:46 "LOVE IS ALL AROUND" (Sonny Curtis)
• performed by Hüsker Dü
• original source: B-side 7" SST 051 (US) August 1985
• and my source: CDEP EIGHT MILES HIGH/MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL SST CD270 (US) 1990

.....My original notes from 1994 still look relevant:

"Anybody who doesn't recognize this as the theme to the Mary Tyler Moore Show, hold out your hands to be slapped. Bonus points, however, to any who know that the connection between the fictional Mary Richards and the late Hüsker Dü is that they were both based in Minneapolis. Extra bonus points and a big wet kiss to anyone who recognized the style, which is pretty obscured here, of the song's author, Sonny Curtis. Yes, it's the same Sonny who wrote 'I FOUGHT THE LAW', better known from records by The Bobby Fuller Four and The Clash.

"Poor Minneapolis; so much talent, so little focus or cohesion. What is the Minneapolis sound? Hüsker Dü? Prince? Garrison Keillor? Is there some common unifying bond or trait amongst those three that I'm missing? I doubt it.

"Anyway, this track has made the rounds. This and another Hüsker Dü single were compiled onto a four-song 10" EP which in turn was reissued as a CD. All four songs are also found on an indispensable Various Artists CD called SEVEN-INCH WONDERS OF THE WORLD."

.....Now back in 2011, I've added a link to a fan-generated Hüsker Dü Database that provides descriptions of the various formats and configurations in which this recording has been made available. The reference to a Minneapolis sound came from a tendency in the late 1980's to promote upcoming bands by associating them with established bands who've come up through the same club circuit. In some cases the comparisons were valid; scenes would develop with a large number of musicians in one area forming and reforming bands by exchanging members and playing a handful of venues to, by and large, the same audiences. Inevitably they would share the same references and musical vocabulary. Today, with new groups promoting themselves nationally (and internationally) online, I'm not sure the concept of regional sounds has any relevance anymore.

.....Tomorrow, another love song, but with an international touch.

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-T12b Animaniacs

.....Meet "our microscopic allies".

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

• 01:08 "ANIMANIACS" (music:Richard Stone, lyrics:Tom Ruegger)
• performed by Animaniacs
• original source: CD STEVEN SPIELBERG PRESENTS ANIMANIACS Kid Rhino R2 71570 (US) 1993
• and my source: the same

.....Any children's show that includes the line "there's bologna in our pants" in the opening theme song is a sure-fire hit. With me, anyway.

V02-T07b Batman

.....I expected people to recognize the tune but not necessarily the band.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 7b

• 01:27 BATMAN (Neal Hefti)
• performed by The Who
• original source: EP READY, STEADY, WHO! Reaction 592001 (UK) Nov. 11, 1966
• and my source: CD RARITIES 1966-1972 Vols. 1 and 2 Polydor 847670-2 (UK) 1991

.....Like most bands appearing on the BBC's "Ready, Steady, Go!" television series, The Who recorded their music at the network's studios a few days in advance and then lip-synched to themselves on the show. That was mid-October, 1966. Their management intended to release an EP of the studio recordings to coincide with the airing but ran into legal hassles. It would take less time and mean fewer headaches to actually rerecord everything from scratch and rush release it, which is what they did. It's not surprising that some fans came to assume that the Reaction EP was taken from the show anyway, despite switching out some of the songs for others.

.....On the show they appeared to be playing "BATMAN", "BUCKET T", "I'M A BOY" and "DISGUISES". They also goofed around to Cliff Richard's song "SUMMER HOLIDAY". There are incomplete bits of the instrumental "COBWEBS AND STRANGE". The finale was intended to be a medley of their own "MY GENERATION" in a medley with Elgar's "LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY", but for some reason the Elgar was replaced with "RULE BRITTANIA". The medley was too much of a pain to reproduce and "I'M A BOY" had just been an A-side and was likely still in stores, so those two were dropped and replaced with "BARBARA ANN" (to indulge Keith Moon's surf music fixation) and yet another version of "CIRCLES", probably to undercut the sales of earlier versions being released under different names by an ex-producer they were fighting in court.

.....In 1977 The Jam used "BATMAN" to close side one of their first album IN THE CITY. Considering their retro Mod image in the midst of height-of-punk London, this was clearly a nod to The Who and not to the Batman TV show. When The Jam broke up (really so that Paul Weller could form the even more retro Style Council) in 1982, The Who released what would be their last studio album for the foreseeable future and gave the first of many 'farewell' tours. In 1983 their old label in England released a matching pair of 'rarities' LP's to cash in on the tour. They were actually the non-album singles prior to the ODDS & SODS album, which may all have lapsed out of print at the time but were circulated in large numbers when originally released. The CD I own that combines the two albums was manufactured in 1991 and then imported to this country, which means I probably bought it shortly before making this mix tape. That would explain it being on my mind and at hand. (NOTE: The title of the previous volume of this tape series, "The Pitchfork Approach", was only half joking.) A quick trip to Amazon suggests that finding a copy might get expensive. In 1995 most of the EP (minus "CIRCLES") showed up as bonus tracks on the mono mix CD of the album A QUICK ONE. On the plus side, it includes an unused outtake of the "MY GENERATION"/"LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY" medley. That CD was supposedly rereleased a few years later in stereo but with identical packaging. Caveat Emptor.

.....Did I mention something about "height-of-punk London" just now? Hold that thought until tomorrow.

V02-T01 "Good evening, record lovers..."

.....When this first compilation tape was being planned I had no idea that it would be the first of a series. Although each side of the tape was conceived as its own volume, roughly the length of an LP, I wanted to remain conscious of how it would be experienced. It would have two beginnings and two ends, and I wanted those terminal points to be flagged appropriately with listeners welcomed in and ushered out. The intro to Volume 1 was one of the most famous introductions in the world, not only to the work from which it was taken, but for many children it was their introduction to 'grown-up' music. I was hoping to capture that feeling of discovery when everything is still new and more importantly when there was no need for everything to be immediately familiar. Too many adults find it threatening to their egos when they're forced to admit that they don't know something. Children spend most of their time being lectured, being expected to not know things. Finding something unfamiliar is just another part of their day. They don't get defensive about it the way adults do. I was hoping that the first intro would put people into a state of mind where the unfamiliar was a chance for personal expansion and not a threat of personal impugn. But that was the first side. The second side was time for something completely different...

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?" track 1

• 00:50 [excerpt from "MORE TELEVISION INTERVIEWS"]
• performed by Monty Python's Flying Circus [Graham Chapman]
• original source: LP MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS BBC Records REB 73M (UK) 1970
• and my source: LP THE WORST OF [~] BBC Records BBC-22073 (UK) [reissue of above, prob. c.1980]

.....This was the first album from Monty Python. It was also the only one owned by the BBC and therefore left out of subsequent campaigns of catalogue reissues. At the time I put the tape together there had only been one CD pressing, one extremely rare one in the very early days of the technology and while I've never heard it, it reportedly sounds pretty poor. Entirely in character for the BBC, they were tone deaf to the very considerable demand for this material. It remained out of print on CD until the late 1990's. (For those unfamiliar with the history of the comedy group, the only reason anyone is able to see the show today is because someone working inside the BBC warned Terry Gilliam in advance while he worked on the second season that episodes from the first season would be recorded over later that day. The reason was that the BBC wanted to save money on film/tape. Gilliam bought blank film with money out of his own pocket and switched it for the Python masters and did the same for the rest of the series. Most shows were not so lucky.)

.....Because the rest of this album contains the dialogue of sketches used on the first season of the show, many people erroneously believe that it was made by lifting the soundtrack right off those episodes. It was actually recorded separately but under similar circumstances. The first season of the show was shot with a small studio audience and so was the record (hence the audience laughter you can hear on this track-- it's not canned). As the show got more ambitious and was written more as a stream of consciousness than a loose collection of collegiate-type sketches, that approach was no longer practical. But it made selecting material to rerecord for an album a relatively simple procedure. Even so, the cluelessness of the BBC prevails as ever. The famous Parrot Sketch is listed as the track "Pet Shop" and the Crunchy Frog Chocolate routine is listed as "Trade Description Act". People who would have bought the album on the strength of those bits might have passed on it not realizing that it contained them. In fact the track used here is the first minute of the second side of the album, leading into a routine better known as "It's The Arts" or "Arthur 'Two-Sheds' Jackson", but labeled simply "More Television Interviews". The final straw for the Pythons might very well have been this simple piece performed solo by Chapman with the audience. They always submitted material in advance for the BBC when doing the show; Chapman's military officer conducting a stereo test was the only truly new material for the album. That script, plus minor rewrites to the sketches to compensate for the lack of visuals, were already in the network's hands when Pythons, producer and audience entered the studio. Only during the recording process did they discover that it was being recorded in monaural. The script, as originally conceived, got its humor from the self-important officer being ultimately superfluous. As it turned out, he exposes the defective bureaucracy at the BBC. Subsequent albums were produced by the group with engineers and released by Charisma in the UK and by Buddah (and later Arista) in the US.

.....The obvious reason for wanting to use this excerpt is that it explicitly refers to the start of side two (of the record). The other less obvious reason is that it is the contrast to the opening of the first side, which sat you down and set you at ease before introducing you to the program. Having made it through that side, if the audience is still listening, if they took the initiative however minor to flip the cassette and set aside the next forty-five minutes, then they must be aware of the sentiments, the humor, the sense behind the flow or progress of the track selection. They are 'in on the joke' in a way; they know that the 'stereo' isn't working and that the powers that be don't seem to be aware of it. Now when something flies at them out of left field that surprise is something they can welcome, not something to be managed or endured.

.....Coming up, I've got a few more choice covers to get out of my system, we'll push the range back to the 1960's (my collection includes CD's with material recorded c.1900 but is mostly from the last fifty years), a few more punk singles and even some things that should be easy to recognize.

V01-T11 Mr. Rogers

.....Yes, it's another cover. No, it's not the last (not by a long shot). And, yes, it's the second punky deconstruction of a childhood memory in a four-song string of childhood memories. I couldn't pass this one up though, because I knew one of the members and because this spot on the playlist was the most comfortable fit.

Volume 1: THE PITCHFORK APPROACH, track 11

• 02:48 "MR. ROGERS" (Fred Rogers)
• performed by PBS
• original source: B-side, 7" Troubled Youth Records TR-001 (US) 1986
• and my source: the same

.....First I should explain the name. In the late 70's there was a British punk band who called themselves "GBH", short for the criminal charge of "grievous bodily harm". American police use different terminology, so the meaning is lost on many people over here. To slightly nerdy northeasterners, it meant WGBH, Boston, Massachusetts' Public Broadcasting System affiliate. Because that channel produced or co-produced a great deal of programming syndicated for the rest of the network, the station's call letters became synonymous with national public television. Ergo, the name "PBS" was an acknowledgement of the band GBH.

.....Having recorded a pop-punk original for the A-side ("Girl Of My Own"), recording a b-side alluding to the network would have been too good a joke to resist. The theme to the "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" show (minus the instrumental introduction) would be instantly recognized no matter what they did to it, for those 'of a certain age' at least. Because they worked so prolifically for children, Fred Rogers and his free-form jazz pianist John Costa are usually underestimated as composers (Rogers wrote the songs, Costa the subtle vamps and mood music). A good rule of thumb is that when people will gladly sing along to something you wrote that they haven't heard themselves in decades and they remember all the words, you're a good composer. The new arrangements work for me, too, and lest you think that I'm letting personal bias interfere with my judgement, I should point out that Robert Christgau placed this single at number 22 on his list of top singles for 1986. It beat out Bruce Hornsby's "The Way It Is" at number 23. (From The Village Voice, March 3, 1987)

.....Speaking of punky deconstruction, it continues on the next track but veers away from television. And to switch things up a bit, it's our first medley.

V01-T10 Bubblegum Music

.....So many years later I can't remember exactly if this song, with its opening line about "the B-Splits on the TV" was chosen to follow the Dickies cover in the previous post, or if the cover was chosen to lead into this:

Volume 1: THE PITCHFORK APPROACH, track 10

• 03:03 "BUBBLEGUM MUSIC" (Alex Garvin)
• Performed by Pianosaurus
• original source: CD GROOVY NEIGHBORHOOD Rounder CD9010 (US) 1987
• and my source: the same

.....Yes, they are toys. Pianosaurus is a band that plays exclusively instruments that were manufactured to be children's toys. What has made this one album endure for as long as it has is that the idea of playing toys is treated as any other operating parameter for a band. If the intention had been to garner attention using the novelty of toy instruments and had always been a gimmick, it would have grabbed some attention briefly and then faded when the novelty wore off. Instead they set ground rules as one would for any experiment. They used functional instruments. They could not custom design anything-- it must be mass-produced and marketed to children, something that any kid or their parent might buy for purposes of unstructured play. They could not used "child-sized" professional quality instruments (such as quarter-size violins). Also, they could not simply make horrific, arhythmic noise and try to convince people it was "jazz". They had to create recognizable, hummable pop songs. The album is actually full of them.

.....Before posting just now I did a term search for the band and came up with numerous listings, nearly all for the above album. A Facebook page lists two homemade live cassettes preceding it, this debut album and a second title which remains unreleased. There are several references to Garvin disappearing just before it was completed and vague speculations about "mental exhaustion" and being "M.I.A.", with open inquiries to his whereabouts. "If you have seen this man..." sort of things. They couldn't have been looking too hard. He's listed on the faculty of the Peekskill Extension Center of Westchester (NY) Community College. It's part of the state university system.

V01-T09 Tra-La-La/The Banana Splits Theme

.....I've mentioned before that the nature of this compilation tape is to make a continuous listening experience from selections representative of my... heterogeneous music collection without choosing items so similar as to create themes where none was intended. Having introduced a poppy television theme (in the previous post), I needed something that could naturally follow a television theme without being a television theme.

Volume 1:THE PITCHFORK APPROACH, track 9

• 01:56 "BANANA SPLITS" [aka "TRA-LA-LA"] (Ritchie Adams and Mark Barkan)
• performed by The Dickies
• original source: A-side, 7" A&M AMS 7431 (UK) April 21,1979
• and my source: CD GREAT DICTATIONS A&M CD5236 (US) 1989

.....According to the Dickies' website, this song went on to become their biggest hit, selling in excess of a quarter million copies. I didn't know that at the time that I added it to the compilation, it just seemed like the route to take. And if you're going to take that route, you might as well be driving a Banana Buggy, n'est-ce pas?

V01-T08b Come On Get Happy

.....What song would be introduced with an interstitial about selling your soul to become a famous musician?

Volume 1: THE PITCHFORK APPROACH, track 8b

• 01:05 "COME ON GET HAPPY" (Danny Janssen, Wes Farrell)
• performed by The Partridge Family (i.e., David Cassidy, Shirley Jones and various session musicians)
• original source: television theme song [second version from seasons 2-4, 1971-1974]
• and my source: CD GREATEST HITS Arista ARCD-8604 (US) 1989

.....By several accounts the television series "The Partridge Family" was clearly inspired by the real-life story of the Cowsills, a family of teens and pre-teens who charted in the late 1960's with a number of pop and light rock songs. But the project was only approved so that it could be a vehicle for a Broadway singer, Shirley Jones, when Hollywood could no longer pay for movies made from Broadway musicals (blame "Finian's Rainbow"). Her stepson, David Cassidy got the part of her on-screen son and soon became a teen heartthrob. It was in later years that the public learned that his spin-off solo career was not entirely a product of the producers' conniving. Even as a teen, Cassidy's real objective was to be a rock musician and saw the TV series as a means to that end, despite the difference in musical styles. He believed that once he had a platform from which to be heard that he could create his own music. It wasn't until the show (and concurrent record album projects) had begun production that he learned that the music and vocals were to be recorded by anonymous professionals and that the cast would merely lip-synch on the show. He convinced the music director and producer that he could genuinely sing (he could, for their purposes, and would get better with experience) and began recording his own vocals, if not his own songs. When he felt he had written enough material for a solo act, he fought to leave the show. Eventually he discovered that although the show created a built-in audience, it was a built-in audience for The Partridge Family. After spending years playing music he didn't care about in order to play the music he loved, he had alienated the very audiences who would have listened to him and cultivated audiences who only wanted something else. Welcome to hell.

.....Having added a kitsch theme song to the mix I had opened a porthole in a submarine as far as the compilation tape was concerned.