Mix Tapes I Have Known #3: "M------," 1994

Ah, cassettes. They still seem fashionably retro to me, a spot I realize CDs in general probably occupy for everyone under the age of 30. The box of mix tapes dating from my pre-millennial youth still sits in the garage, a bit dusty and cobwebby, but full of strange memories. Here's another dive into the navel-gazing world of nostalgia:

The tape: "M------"

Year created: Spring 1994

Who it was for: Let's pretend the wife doesn't read my blog. This one was for an old girlfriend, who we shall call "M" here as frankly we're all old and married and have kids and stuff now. But once upon a time, I was a worldly college senior and she was a dimple-cheeked freshman, I was full of ego and she was extraordinarily kind, and we hooked up for a few short weeks. Time was the enemy, though - we got together about 6 weeks before the end of the school year, and I was off to New York City for a big fancy internship with "Billboard" magazine and she was off to New Orleans. Can you keep a relationship that's just started going when you spend an entire summer apart?

The answer, of course, was "no." Although I wrote her often (real letters, no email then!) and we tried, we drifted apart over those three months. When we all came back to school in the fall, she had another boyfriend and that was that. The summer of 1994 is an exceedingly strange time in my mind, even now -- all by myself in the biggest city in the world, the universe full of potential and every detail of sprawling Manhattan etched in my mind.

I sent her this tape as summer began, trying to hold on to things.

Track listing:

SIDE A

1. To Sir With Love (Michael Stipe and Natalie Merchant) 2. Swimming In Your Ocean (Crash Test Dummies) 3. May This Be Love (Jimi Hendrix) 4. Into My Life (Colin Hay Band) 5. All I Want (Toad The Wet Sprocket) 6. Gentleman Who Fell (Milla) 7. Bottle Of Fur (Urge Overkill) 8. The One I Love (R.E.M.) 9. Somebody (Depeche Mode) 10. Different Light (The Bangles) 11. When I'm 64 (The Beatles) 12. That's All (Genesis) 13. Stay (Amy Grant)

SIDE B

1. The Best Is Yet To Come (Frank Sinatra) 2. That Feel (Tom Waits) 3. I Would For You (Jane's Addiction) 4. Bent Out Of Shape (Replacements) 5. Tear In Your Hand (Tori Amos) 6. Do You Love Me Now? (Breeders) 7. Within You (David Bowie) 8. That Voice Again (Peter Gabriel) 9. Wink (Blue Mountain) 10. Luna (Smashing Pumpkins) 11. All Apologies (Nirvana)

What this says about my music tastes at the time: Actually, I'm not as embarrassed by this one as I am by some other mix tapes I made. Kurt Cobain was recently dead and so was grunge, and there's a nice mix of pop, alternative rock and out-of-nowhere clangers. I was getting to be a bit more eclectic in my tastes, I think.

What was I thinking? But then again, there's an Amy Grant song here. Amy freakin' Grant. I honestly don't even know how that got on there.

This song could totally be taken the wrong way: "This one goes out to the one I love / this one goes out to the one I've left behind / another prop has occupied my time." - R.E.M., The One I Love

Seriously, I think I overdid it: "Love" is in at least four song titles and most of the songs here are on that topic. Considering we were only dating a few weeks, I probably came on too strong.

Clever left-field choices: You can't go wrong with a dash of Tom Waits, and I love the jaunty feel of the Sinatra song kicking off side 2. I've always thought Crash Test Dummies were rather unfairly maligned as one-hit wonders, and "Swimming In Your Ocean" is a nice little gem off their "God Shuffled His Feet" album.

Totally obvious choice: I think I used "That's All" by Genesis on at least 75% of the mix tapes I ever made. I love that song, but yeah, kind of a cliche. And ending with "All Apologies" seemed quite poignant just weeks after Cobain's death, but might be a bit forced now. Still, overall, I rather like this tape and what it was about the wide-eyed boy from Mississippi I was then, off to New York City for a summer that - cliches be damned - kind of changed everything for me.

Mix Tapes I have Known #2: 'More Damn Music,' 1997

...So where were we? Last time around in my excavation into my box of mix tapes of ye olden pre-iPod days, I looked at a tape from 1992. The thing about mix tapes is -- usually -- you made them fervently trying to impress some gal/guy you were all emo about. Usually, of course this didn't work and the tape ended up a monument to your own insanely overwrought passion of the moment. This tape from 1997 didn't end in tears, though - two years later I ended up marrying the recipient. Mix-tape score!

The tape: More Damn Music from your California Hippie Dude

Year created: 1997

Who it was for: My future wife Avril, all the way over in New Zealand. Around this time, fall 1997 or so, I'd gone and abruptly moved away from Mississippi back to my native California, got a job at a tiny newspaper in the San Joaquin Valley, was living in a concrete bunker of a back-alley apartment with psychopath rednecks in the front unit, and in just a few months time Avril would get a green card and come from New Zealand to live with me. So a rather transitional time, in other words... I think this tape, one of many we exchanged back and forth across the Pacific Ocean, was a kind of long-distance reassurance and valentine if you will, in hopes that after many years living far, far apart we two might finally get to try out a proper relationship...

Track listing:

SIDE A
1. #1 Crush (Garbage)
2. Normal Like You (Everclear)
3. Amy [Amphetamine] (Everclear)
4. I Will Buy You A New Life (Everclear)
5. Boogie Chillin' (R.L. Burnside)
6. Heaven Beside You (Alice in Chains)
7. I Do Not Want This (Nine Inch Nails)
8. Sappy (Nirvana)
9. Mystifies Me (Son Volt)
10. I Turn Around (Elvis Costello)
11. Bloody '98 (Blue Mountain)
12. The Passion of Lovers (Bauhaus)
13. Sheet Kickers (Guided By Voices)
14. License to Confuse (Sebadoh)
15. Life Worth Living (Uncle Tupelo)
16. Talk Show Host (Radiohead)

SIDE B
1. Fire Maple Song (Everclear)
2. Glycerine (Bush)
3. Devil's Haircut (Beck)
4. My Son Cool (Guided by Voices)
5. Motor Away (Guided by Voices)
6. My Valuable Hunting Knife (Guided by Voices)
7. Positive Bleeding (Urge Overkill)
8. What Goes On (Velvet Underground)
9. Try (Michael Penn)
10. Chottie See (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan)
11. Who You Are (Pearl Jam)
12. Find The River (R.E.M.)
13. Something's Out There (Freedy Johnston)
14. Feel So Different (Sinéad O'Connor)
15. Short on Posters (Guided By Voices)

What this says about my musical tastes at the time: It was the waning days of grunge, and I was mightily into Everclear and Guided By Voices judging from the four Everclear and five (!) GBV songs I included. The music of your late college years is pretty much the music you will always love, and very little here embarrasses me overly 14 years on.* Neither Everclear nor Guided by Voices have ever really equalled their mid-1990s peak, though.

What was I thinking? *OK, well, except for the Bush song -- the bargain-rate version of Nirvana, they were pretty lame even when they were cool for about 10 nanoseconds. If you couldn't find Nirvana, couldn't find Stone Temple Pilots, you got these guys.

This song could totally be taken the wrong way:
"He'll keep you in a jar / And you'll think you're happy" - Nirvana.

Aw, that's sweet: "Why must it always be the less I see of you, the more I care?" - Elvis Costello

Clever left-field choices: There are some more obscure acts here -- I always have loved alt-rock also-rans Urge Overkill, who I think were very underrated, and Michael Penn continues to be one of the most unfairly ignored singer/songwriters out there.

Totally obvious choice: Well, like I said, it was the age of grunge. I might as well have made the tape case out of flannel, this is such a totally 1997 sort of production.

Mix Tapes I Have Known #1: YO YO MA, 1992

Ah, the mix tape. The lovely artifact of the 1980s and 1990s where you painstakingly, pre-digital, grafted together a dozen or two of your favorite songs into some kind of deeply deep emotional statement that was, most typically, aimed at showing the subject of said tape how awesome you were.

Now that we slackers of that generation have grown up these have become the object of fetishistic nostalgia galore , and why not? They're snapshots of the person you were at the time you made it. Often, I tried to make copies of the mix tapes I made for people because they made awesome car listening, so now I can scavenge out our one remaining cassette player and listen to them on occasion. Here's the first of a trawl through my aging, decomposing Mix Tapes.

The tape: "YO YO MA"

Year created: 1992

Who it was for: "Yo Yo Ma" (I think I just liked the oddball sound of that cellist's name as a tape title) was made for one of my California friends, either John or Sun; unfortunately 18 years on I'm not entirely sure who for but I think this one was for John. Many of my tapes were sent from my college home in Mississippi to my old high school chums out West, cries from the heart of Dixie aimed at showing off what I thought were my impressive tastes; these were vaguely homesick missives, from a stranger in the South to the place he came from. Good god, I'm just as pretentious now as I was then.

Track listing:

SIDE A
1. Hello, I Love You (The Cure)
2. Little Earthquakes (Tori Amos)
3. The Fly (U2)
4. Progress (Midnight Oil)
5. A Campfire Song (10,000 Maniacs)
6. Anchorage (Michelle Shocked)
7. We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful (Morrissey)
8. Only You (Yaz)
9. Getting Better (The Beatles)
10. The Boxer (Simon & Garfunkel)
11. So. Central Rain (REM)

SIDE B
1. Strange Angels (Laurie Anderson)
2. She Goes On (Crowded House)
3. We Are The Champions (Queen)
4. Mayor of Simpleton (XTC)
5. I Can't Dance (Genesis)
6. Dome (The Church)
7. Tomorrow (Morrissey)
8. My Finest Hour (The Sundays)
9. Always On My Mind (The Pet Shop Boys)
10. In Your Eyes (Peter Gabriel)
11. Songbird of Love (The Hurlettes)

What this says about my musical tastes at the time: This is a pretty middle-of-the-road selection of early 1990s alternative rock standards -- The Church, Tori Amos, The Cure, etc. At the age of 22 or so, I was fairly proto-emo at the time, hence the TWO Morrissey songs included here. I did have what I like to think were some cool choices even back in '92 -- Laurie Anderson, XTC (who remain one of my favorites today) -- mixed in with the requisite U2 and REM stuff.

Totally obvious choice: Like 99% of mankind, I used Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" on a mix tape. In fact I used it on several of them. It is an awesome song and deserves its mixtape stardom, though. Most disturbing is that this song of everlasting love and devotion is on a tape that I made for a dude.

Clever left-field choices: The Sundays were a short-lived and delicate girl-alt-pop band back in the day, and "My Finest Hour" is a lovely little number. "The Hurlettes" were a made-up band from a snippet of an old high-school play I put on the end of the tape, so you can't get much more obscure than that.

What was I thinking?: Now, I'll stick up for Genesis any day, even Phil Collins-era Genesis, but why on earth I chose the goofy try-hard novelty number "I Can't Dance" from one of their worst albums is beyond me. And I also like Queen, but the insanely overused "We Are The Champions" wouldn't be in my top 20 Queen songs at all.

Hasn't dated so well: The mawkish earnestness of 10,000 Maniacs, whom I only occasionally listen to today; ditto Tori Amos, who put out an utterly superb debut album with "Little Earthquakes" and has faced diminishing returns ever since then.

'Hey, um, so, I made you a mix tape...'

So the faithful Subaru is off at the panel-beaters' for a few weeks getting repaired from teen driver trauma, but they were kind enough to give us a loaner vehicle to use in the meantime. I ain't car-picky, so as long as it gets us around, fine, but I was a bit aback to realize it lacked a CD player. I do need my music to drive; without the sounds of Bowie and Neil and Wilco and the like I cannot navigate, it's a proven fact. But the loaner does have a tape deck, so I reeled into the way-back machine and dug my box of cassettes out of the garage to hold me over. Took me a while to remember the whole rewinding-fast forwarding business, but it all came back.

Strange, to go back to a medium that was once so ubiquitous, but has been gone a good 10-12 years now. I grew up on cassettes, rather than vinyl; clunky and awkward and prone to breakage a medium as tapes were, they were the first sound to me. What I have left of my tape collection now as the clock nears the year of 2010 isn't much, about 30 "mix tapes" and a dozen or so bizarre comedy tapes friends and I made as teenagers. The mix tapes haven't been played in several years now, but through the 1990s the mix tape was where it was at, brothers and sisters. I'm in weird time warp as I drive around a country I never imagined I'd be living in when I made most of these tapes, listening to the music I loved in '92 and '95 and so forth.

I doled out many a mix tape to girls and women I adored, like any sensitive '80s/'90s lad. Most disappeared into the void of vanished hopes, although heck, I've still got quite a few tapes I made for my darling wife, shipped all the way from Mississippi to New Zealand back in the day. I'm glad now of the ones I remembered to keep copies of. Mix tapes were great because you turned them into found art, customizing the labels and carefully parsing the song mix for the proper effect (should I segue from Peter Gabriel into Concrete Blonde or the other way around?).

Revisited today from the perspective of a *cough cough* nearly-40 something dad, it's weird to hear these little time capsules of my musical taste. In the 1990s I was heavy into Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Everclear, Sebadoh, Jane's Addiction and the like. Certain songs tended to pop up a lot on different tapes; you can use Elvis Presley's "Hurt" for anything, darn it! But there's also at least one tape with an embarrassing amount of Phil Collins-era Genesis. One of my prized tapes is from a long-since vanished high school love, who gave me a mix of Crowded House and Roy Orbison songs that still kind of tingle with an strange and nostalgic energy. The girl is gone, and where I'm at is great, but it's fine to have a little piece of gone history to listen to now and then. I even made a few mix tapes for my male friends, which might indeed have taken the concept of "bromance" a hair too far, now that I think about it.

You can make mix CDs now with the click of a few buttons and I've done that, but the tape had a tactile, creative thrill that was its own, the pushing of stop and start recording buttons, the clipping out of collage art to make quirky covers. The car accident kind of sucked, but it's good to have a reason to dig my mix tapes out of oblivion for a spell.