MIX MASTER INCORPORATED
Way back in the summer of ’96, somebody in the house recorded the “Homerpalooza” episode (The Simpons Seventh Season) on VHS tape. I can’t remember if it was the original airing on 19 May, or a repeat aired that August. I can recall from the linear notes that on 23 August 1996, I used one of our old Emerson radio-tape stereos to record audio from the video; I had to hold a microphone up to the television speaker to do this. I also copied audio from my VHS copy of Wayne’s World. I used the decent mono sound bites in a two-hour compilation of my favorite heavy tracks, a compilation called Shadows: Incisions.
Since then I’ve wanted to do the same thing for a CD mix. I could have recorded bites in the microphone tradition from the audio tape, but I figured it would be better to simply wait for the Seventh Season and find a way to make a clean digital recording.
In regards to the mix itself: several ideas compete in my head. From the get-go I wanted something covering both high school and the US Navy, basically a period soundtrack from 1992 to 2002; a “life soundtrack” I may have referred to in past reports. That’s a nice round decade to work with, but lately my period of choice grows somewhat more nebulous. I’m dipping back to roughly 1990 or 1991, when Dan Cox played Appetite for Destruction around me. And I’m tempted to cut clear up to 2003 or 2004. This makes me consider an installment series, based on my experiences and my overall perception of a period in life.
Which leads me to another consideration. From the beginning I did not intend to make a “Greatest Hits” set, or to arrange it in chronological order by publishing. The music is supposed to evoke particular times in my personal life, and I did not necessarily hear everything released in a given time, nor heard something other people liked. For example, The Dead Milkmen’s track “The Puking Song” was published in 1988, and I did not hear it until 1996, and I doubt anybody has ever played it on daytime radio, even in a big city. So “The Puking Song” will go on a disc covering the thoughts and feelings I had in my senior year of high school-as opposed to my senior year in elementary school.
This also means film and television bites. I have Top Forty Hits planned, like Green Jellö’s “Three Little Pigs” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. But only because those tracks have especially striking memories or relevance to my life at that time. I’m just as inclined to stick Meatloaf or King Missile stuff that hardly anybody at my age at that time would bother listening to. Not out of any sort of pretentious rebellion; rather to keep in tune with my dictum of life relevance.
On that note, I’m also trying to find stuff satisfying the evocation without treading into redundancy. I want Guns ‘n’ Roses Appetite for Destruction represented on the first disc. But “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Paradise City” appear on a million compilations made by a million other people. That shit gets played on the radio constantly, even in the height of the Britney Spears and Limp Bizkit era. So I think I’ll go with something like “Mr. Brownstone”, a track just as memorable and well made, but without all this pop crap association around it. It still gets radio play, but I’m not worn out on “Mr. Brownstone”, and I’ll bet most people who make mixes of their own are less likely to put this sucker on in favor of the more well-known tracks.
Also, in opposition to the aforementioned track suggestions, I am trying to avoid too much stuff with too much nostalgia (TAFKAMH suggested I title the set “Too Much Nostalgia For Crazy Brian”). I want to capture my sense of the period without reliving it. “Three Little Pigs” is okay, but not in conjunction with Ugly Kid Joe’s “Neighbor” or especially UKJ’s cover of “Cats in the Cradle”. To a point I cannot avoid this: just about everything I listened to during my first six months in boot camp already had heavy nostalgia attached to it, especially the Tori Amos and Nine Inch Nails stuff. I was homesick in January 1997, you see. Nevertheless, I can avoid “November Rain” and “No Fair Fights” and “Something I Can Never Have,” and so-on.
Finally, I’m trying to move away from the old habit of filling large chunks of space with the same artist, or consecutive tracks from the same album. I dropped fat chucks in the past because it sometimes made sense. I could not reconcile a night-time cruising mix without significant amounts of Nine Inch Nails. Since I don’t own a lot of different albums to begin with, NIN tended to be the only familiar music able to provide certain atmospheres I wanted at certain points. Moreover, certain albums contained blocks of music throbbing with useable emotional ups and downs. Prick has a three-track whammy-“Other People”, “No Fair Fights” and “Animal”-which makes for a fabulous dip-and-peak, especially for the middle of a given disc. Tori Amos’s first album Little Earthquakes contains four or five songs right off the top of my head which remind me of my last few months as a civilian kid, especially in regards to my feelings for Nailbunny.
I could get away with this on a two-hour cassette tape back in 1996 or 1997. I’ve heard too much music since then to cheat it out by over-representing one artist over another. And a lot of those blocks amount to heavy-ass nostalgia, something I just said I am trying to avoid.
I originally thought all this might amount only to a three-disc set, but upon closer examination, I could easily spin out five discs, each covering a successive period. Discs one and two will cover the most time, because I didn’t start collecting albums until the spring of 1994, and a lot of stuff prior to that date sort of runs together in my head anyways. Indeed, disc one will consist largely of material I did not own at the time, but instead heard on the radio or from other people’s collections. And I consider the years between 1994 and 1996 a distinct phase from 1990 to 1993, or 1996-1998. And so I return once again to the idea of an installment series.