Out of the Blue Mix

Looking over the playlist for the Out of the Blue Mix, I see that it's very heavy on slightly off-the-wall '70's songs. I didn't mean for that to happen, although I'm not sorry it has.
A lot of good music was released in the 1970's, and even though I spent a good part of the decade working in records stores, I freely admit to ignoring much of it at the time. I was deeply involved in the New York punk/new wave/no wave scene, and I was drawn to a certain type of music - starting with the Velvets and the Stooges and the Dolls and extrapolating out from there. I wasn't nearly as narrow-minded as a lot of my friends - I did champion Abba and Steely Dan - but still, a lot of music fell through the cracks.
Thanks to Ipod Shuffle, I have been exposed - or re-exposed - to a lot of the music which I had ether dismissed or ignored previously.
I love the fact that, after all these years, I'm still finding music from 30 or 35 years ago that's capable of exciting me. Three examples of that stand out in this mix:
Everyone knows Steveie Wonder, everyone is probably sick of his most popular songs - Superstitious, Living for the City etc.  In the 70's he was one of the best selling artists in America. I saw him open for the Stones in 1972, and I appreciated him, but as he more more deeply into fusion, (and he won more and more Grammys) I lost interest. I came across "Journey to India" on the subway a few months ago and was surprised to hear him doing music that made me see him in a whole new light.
I was familiar with Wishbone Ash from listening to WBCN in Boston when I was in high school. I thought of them as a competent folk rock band slightly less interesting then the Richard Thompson/Ian Matthews  bands like Fairport Convention, Mathews Southern Comfort and Plainsong. But I heard "Time Was" recently and was blown away by the way the song moved from an early '70's folk pop gem into a vicious guitar face-off over a sly shuffle beat, and then back into a CSN/Bread soundalike.
Dust was a favorite of Creem Magazine. They were American heavy metal, and I think their drummer may have later played with the Ramones. I vaguely remember Chris Gray, the guitarist in Jack Ruby, playing their album, Hard Attack when it came out, but I don't remember anything about it.
"Thusly Spoken" kept coming up on my Ipod over the summer, and every time it did, I thought it was something that had been released in the last couple of years. Certain things (the lyrics!) betray the song's origins, but in many ways, it's much more modern than any of the accepted sacred texts that we've all been listening to for the last 30-40 years.
There are some other '70's things sprinkled in with the above mentioned gems - some disco some Krautrock, a song by Television, as well as some modern stuff that, in one way or another references the '70's. As I said, I didn't set out to build a mix around the '70's, but the experience has convinced me that there was a lot more going on than what we were listening to below 14th St at the time.

Here is the mix:
Out of the Blue Mix

Here is the playlist:
1. Music Of Life - Cerrone
2. Voyage To India - Stevie Wonder
3. Jolene (remix)
4. Move Me No Mountain - Love Unlimited
5. Don't Beat Around The Bush - The Salsoul Orchestra
6. Like Tears In Rain - The Bamboos
7. Things Get Better - Delaney and Bonnie
8. I'll Be There - Sun Kil Moon
9. Snake Charmer - CFCF
10. Castle In The Air - Eloy
11. Friction - Television
12. Time Was - Wishbone Ash
13.Thusly Spoken - Dust
14. Rattler's Hey - Belbury Poly
15. Sweet Love - The Commodores
16. Paris Nights/New York Mornings - Corinne Bailey Rae
17. Renegade - Kings Of Convenience

(Photo by Joseph Szkodzinski)

Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture

I've been making mixes for about three years now. Every once in awhile I go back and listen to an old one, and compare it to whatever I am currently working on, just to see if I can perceive any change in my mixing style and to see if, in any measurable way, my mixing skills had improved.
It's a little discouraging to note that I haven't seen any noticeable improvement, either in song choices or transistions or in segues, over the course of the three years. Which is not to say that I'm not happy with my mixes. it's just that I've always bought into the idea that one should always be growing, always be improving. But maybe that's bullshit. I'll have to think about that.
Anyway, even if I can't discern any growth in my mixing skills, there are no that I can't listen to, and I think I work equally hard on all of them.
However, every so often I make one that I really, really like. I would say it's mostly about song selection. Sometimes the songs I have chosen just sound, to my ears better than others.
I think "Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture," is one of my favorites, and one of the best I've done. From the opening notes of Marvin Gaye's acapella rendition of "Mercy, Mercy Me," to the closing notes of the same song,  every second of this mix is strong. It moves seamlessly from one genre to another, building in intensity but never flying out of control.

The Playlist:
1. Mercy Mercy Me - Marvin Gaye 
2. Wake Up Everybody - John Legend/The Roots
3. Round and Round - Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti
4. Aquarius (Let The Sun Shine In) - Celia Cruz - Celia Cruz
4. Lotta Love 6:49  Nicolette Larson (Remix)
5. Empty Room - Arcade Fire
6. Palm Road - Wolf Parade
7. Juveniles - The Walkmen
8. Living In America - Dom
9. Major Tom (Coming Home) - Shiny Toy Guns
10. Satellite of Love - Color Of Clouds
11. What Would I Want? Sky - Animal Collective
12. Renaissance Fair - The Byrds
13. Change of Time - Josh Ritter
14. A Town Called Obsolete - Andreya Triana
15. Ailleurs - Benoît Pioulard
16. Ghosts - Laura Marling
17. Circle - Swan Dive
18. Sink / Let it Sway - Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin
19. Sundown Syndrome - Tame Impala
20. My Hopes and Dreams - jj
21. In the Sun - Damon & Naomi
22. I'll Keep it With Mine - Dean & Britta
23. Dear God - The Roots & Monsters of Folk
24. Mercy Mercy Me - Marvin Gaye

The Mix:
Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture Mix

Summer On the Lake

There are many ways to spend a summer vacation. As a kid, I spent several summers at a sleep away camp. There were a couple of years of daily Little League baseball. There was a trip to Nantucket. The memories from these summers are still really strong.
However, by far the most profound memories of summer for me have to do with the two summers my family spent in a ramshackle cottage on Lake Champlain, down a long dirt road off Route 9 near the town of Keeseville, NY, so hard to find that when my father wrote a piece about it for the New York Times Travel Section, readers who got lost accused him of making it up.
My mother, brother, two sisters and our babysitter Elsie Higgins moved up there from our home in Warrensburgin early July and stayed for two months, My father would come up on Thursday night and go back to Warrensburg on Monday morning.
We slept on a screened-in porch on stilts six feet off the sand of the beach that seemed to stretch off forever in either direction, falling asleep to the sound of moths banging against the screen mixed with the whisper of  waves lapping the sand.
Lake Champlain, which is famous for it's rocky unwelcoming shorelines and clifflike drop-offs, was incredibly calm and shallow here. I could walk out 50 or 75 yards on the soft sand and the water would barely come up tpo my thigh.
The house satt on the beach, the sand was our front lawn. Our nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away.
It seemed like the sun shone every day. At night I would fall asleep reading the swollen and sun-faded Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magzines someone had left there in summers past.
I remember thinking to myself that that time, that place was the best time and place I would ever experience.

The Playlist:
1. Live With The Seasons - Teenage Fanclub
2. Summerlong -  CFCF
3. Fourth Of July - Aimee Mann
4. After the Fireworks We Walked to the Rope Swing - Sumner Mckane
5. Wedding Day - Alejandro Escovedo
6. Gauzy Dress In The Sun - Richard Buckner
7. Popsicle Orange - The Sorcerer
8. Strawberries - Asobi Seksu
9. Blue Canoe - Blue Mountain
10. On A White Lake, Near A Green Mountain  - M83
11. Hidden Lakes - Shearwater
12. Tianchi Lake - The Mountain Goats
13. Endless Sunset - Delorean
14. Nightswimming -  R.E.M.
15. I Just Want to See You Underwater - Here We Go Magic
16. Moon River - Bill Frisell

Summer On the Lake Mix

Tim Hardin

My first exposure to Tim Hardin came on my second weekend at Windham College in Putney, Vt, in the fall of 1971. I was a miserably lonely freshman with no friends and nothing much to do. A friend of mine, Michael, who worked for a sound system company that rented out PA's for concerts throughout New England, called me that Saturday and said he was doing a Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen show at Windham that night, and did I want to help him unload, set up and then hang out. Which, given my lack of friends and feelings of isolation, I was happy to do. (If for no other reason than that all the other students who seemed to have easily slipped into collegial familiarity with their dorm- and classmates would see me hanging out with rock stars and be very envious.)
Michael arrived in his rental truck full of PA equipment and we began to unload. He mentioned that Tim Hardin was opening the show. I was vaguely aware of Hardin as a New York folkie who had written "Reason the Believe," the flip side of "Maggie May," Rod Stewart's huge hit the year before, as well as Bobby Darin's comeback hit, "If I Were a Carpenter." (I guess I was a music geek even back then.)  But honestly I could just as easily have confused him with Tim Buckley, who probably had more FM cred at the time.
Commander Cody and his band and hangers-on arrived and immediately started partying. I had seen them a few years before at a People's Park benefit in Berkeley, CA, but I was moving away from  that 2nd generation Bay Area hippy music, and I was mainly interested in them because there were a couple of very pretty, long haired, long dress-wearing hippy chicks floating around blowing bubbles and smiling beatifically. (Cody himself was an overweight, mustached man who didn't say much and didn't dance very well)
Sometime after Cody and his band arrived, while Michael and I were pushing speakers around and uncoiling cable, a slight, shaggy-haired, slope-shouldered guy slipped through the back door, carrying a guitar case and a small Fender amp.  He didn't speak to anyone, just walked by us, and then up the stairs to the performer's dressing area in a roped off section of the student union. I figured that was Hardin, but he didn't make that much of an impression. I went back to plugging in powers cords.
Later, after we had finished, Michael and went upstairs to the dressing room area. Commander Cody and his whole entourage were at the far side of the room, laughing and partying. Hardin, clearly separating himself from everyone else,  sat in a folding chair near the stairs, leaning over his Gibson SG, which was plugged into his Fender Vibrachamp amp, softly strumming chords, not looking at anyone, not saying anything, obviously feeling dark and miserable.
That image of him has been frozen in my mind ever since, if only because, wallowing in my own loneliness-induced depression, I believed I understood perfectly how he was feeling.  I  wish I had spoken to Hardin at the time, but I didn't. Way too shy, and frankly, his obvious misery was so palpable it created a negative force field around him that screamed, "Stay away!"
I don't remember his performance at all, but I've held onto the picture of the sad, pinched face rock star hunched over his Gibson SG ever since.  He seemed to me to be the epitome of the haunted, tortured artist, and I'm sure I subconsciously adapted a bit of that into my own attempt at creating an artistic persona in the years that followed.
Given my fascination with what I observed about Hardin that night, I'm not sure why I didn't listen to his music. It probably had something to do with my dislike of anything that smacked of the singer-songwriter. I was angry that James Taylor and Carole King and Cat Stevens were riding high, and I took great pleasure in skewering them any chance I got. I was into the Allman Brothers and the J Geils Band, and headed rapidly towards Lou Reed and the Stooges and Alice Cooper.
So while that snapshot of Tim Hardin the artist stayed with me, his music remained unknown. And I went my way, eventually dropping out of Windham and making my way to NYC to become part of the '70's punk movement. Hardin remained a touchstone, but only for what he represented.
It was no surprise to me when I read, some years later, that Hardin had died of a heroin overdose. I was saddened to hear the news, especially since I had already taken a few steps down that slippery slope, but not surprised.
Fast forward more than 15 years, and I read an admiring review of a Tim Hardin greatest hits package. The critic pointed out that Hardin had written some of the greatest songs of the previous 25 years.: "Reason the Believe," "If I Were a Carpenter," "Lady Came from Baltimore," "Red Balloon," "Black Sheep Boy," "How Can We Hang On to a Dream?"
I bought the compilation and  quickly realized that Hardin was indeed a brilliant songwriter. (Not to mention a moving, expressive singer.) Listening to his songs unroll, one classic after another, led me to the conclusion that Hardin deserved  a place in what Stephen Holden and others call the Great American Songbook, along with songwriters like Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern.
A few years ago, one of my favorite American indie bands, Okkervil River, released an album called Black Sheep Boy, which opened with a very short version of that brilliant Hardin song. This only reaffirmed Hardin's current relevance. The song fit perfectly with Okkervil River's post modernist take on family, love and (un)happiness.
In many ways, Hardin is America's Nick Drake, without the sympathetic fan-based hype. Both Hardin and Drake were intensely shy, intensely private, intensely (I think) unhappy men, whose outlet for their misery was their songwriting. Drake's imagery was more poetic and mythic, while Hardin's writing reflected his love of American blues and Southern folk songs. But ultimately, the power of the music is the same.
My image of Hardin, going back to that Saturday night in 1971 remains, still clear and still tragic, but it's now buttressed by the evidence of his songs, painful and beautiful in their stark honesty.
I highly recommend any one of the several compilations of Hardin's music. Rather than posting any of his songs here, I put together a mix of covers. I've always felt that you can tell a lot about the quality of a song by the nature of the different versions that have been recorded. In this case, the covers run the gamut, from the Carpenters to Okkervil River. It upsets me a little that most of the covers date back to the 60's and '70s. Still that doesn't detract from their power to shine a light on the genius in the songs themselves.
The Mix:
Tim Hardin Cover Mix

The Playlist
1. Hang On to a Dream  - The Nice
2. Black Sheep Boy - Okkervil River
3. If I Were A Carpenter - Bobby Darin
4. Reason to Believe - Carpenters
5. You Upset the Grace of Living Whe...  - Heidi Berry
6. The Lady Came from Baltimore - Scott Walker & Reg Guest
7. How Did the Feeling Feel to You - Karen Dalton
8. Don't Make Promises - Beau Brummels
9. You Got A Reputation - The Byrds
10. Reason To Believe - The Dillards
11. If I Were a Carpenter - The Four Tops
12. Black Sheep Boy - Scott Walker & Reg Guest
13. Red Balloon - Small Faces

14. Misty Roses - Colin Blunstone

'70's Mix

I rediscovered this mix of '70's music I put together a few years ago, and I enjoyed it so much I decided to repost it.
No playlist, just music.
Enjoy.

(The opening track is actually from 1981, byut it's so similar to the artist's '70's music I chose to pretend it was released a few years earlier than it actually was.)

'70's Mix

Now That's What I Call Softcore!

My passion for what I call Softcore - West Coast soft rock and dance music spanning the '60's, '70's, '80's, '90, and '00's,  has been revitalized, not sure why. It's not like it ever left, but it was definitely dormant.
Anyway, here is a mix of new and old Softcore, inspired by John Sebastian's  "Theme from 'Welcome Back, Kotter'." Jim Lewis, a friend of mine who lives in Austin, Texas, recently produced an album by the great singer-songwriter Michael Fracasso. When he emailed me some songs from the album, he mentioned that one of the songs (my favorite, as it happens) was written in 10 minutes, in the studio, while waiting to begin recording. That reminded me that Sebastian said, after "Welcome Back" had become a huge hit, that it had taken him less than an hour to compose.
Honestly, "Welcome Back," doesn't hold up that well. Maybe I've heard it too often. However, it's a bonafide member of the Softcore Hall of Fame, and deserves to be a part of the mix.
More interesting to me are Paul Westerberg's "Dyslexic Heart," Looking Glass's "Jimmy Loves Mary-Anne," (the far-superior follow-up to their hit, "Brandy,") and Monsterbuck's "Felicity."
The playlist:
1. "Lalena"  Donovan
2. "Stand Tall"  Burton Cummings
3. "Felicity"  Monsterbuck
4. "Come On Get Higher"  Matt Nathanson
5. "Make You Mine" Breakbot
6. "Out In The Country" Paul Williams
7. "Sundown, Sundown" Calexico Feat. Valerie Leulliot
8. "Welcome Back" John Sebastian
9. "Southbound" Lake Heartbeat
10. "You Take My Troubles Away" Rachael Yamagata & Dan Wilson
11. "Wolves"Josh Ritter
12. "Jimmy Loves Mary-Anne" Looking Glass
13. "Temptation Eyes" The Grassroots
14. "Dyslexic Heart" Paul Westerberg
15. "Lucy"Julian Lennon & James Scott Cook
17. "The Senile Rings" Alsace Lorraine
18. "Flying On The Ground Is Wrong" Buffalo Springfield
19. "Blue Moon"  Big Star

The Mix
Now That's What I call Softcore!

End of Winter Mix

Just in time for Spring (actually a little late), here's a Winter Mix, based on the great Stone' song, "Winter," from the under-appreciated Goats Head Soup.

Winter Goats Head Soup The Rolling Stones
A Week Without Sunlight  So Close To Life Moonlit Sailor
Dragon  The Amazing The Amazing
Silent snow   London Town The Magic Theatre
Sleeping In Our Clothes   Hold This Ghost Musée Mécanique
Angel Echoes  There Is Love in You Four Tet
Run Out  Seek Magic Memory Tapes
Into The Light  no 3 jj
Take Me Higher   CQ  OST Mellow Feat. Alison David
Lewis Takes Action   Heartland Owen Pallett
Our Lips Are Sealed   Fun Boy Three Fun Boy Three
Have You Never Been Mellow   Back To Basics (The Essential) Olivia Newton John
Home Life   Rook Shearwater
Les Furies   Shape of the Shape Starless & Bible Black
Sure been a cold cold winter: Winter 2010 Mix

Alex Chilton

My memory tells me that I first heard about Big Star in a review of #1 Record by Ellen Willis in the New Yorker. But after Alex Chilton's death last week, I went online and accessed the New Yorker's archives, and I didn't find any record of that review.
In any case, I remember very clearly buying the album at a record store in Kenmore Square on a visit to Boston in the winter of 1972.
I also remember being instantly hit over the head with the album's obvious brilliance. Songs like "Ballad of El Goodo," "13," "When My Baby's Beside Me," just knocked me out. Which was interesting because I was in the throes of falling in love with the Stooges, Lou Reed and the Velvets (I had a pre-release copy of Transformer which I played incessantly, even though the sound quality was horrendous) and Alice Cooper. I had moved out of my hippy phase and was beginning my obsession with the music and literature and movies that would lead me to start a band and move to New York a year or two later. (On a more destructive - but also more simply illustrative level - I was moving from psychedelics to heroin.)
I had never been a Beatles fan, in fact, I was pretty much a Beatle hater, a chooser of the Stones in the Stones - Beatles debate which, charmingly, still raged at that time. And the primary reference for Big Star was definitely the Beatles. They were by far the best power pop band I have ever heard. Not the first - that was probably the Raspberries, but Chilton's root in 60's garage rock and more importantly, Memphis soul music, gave the band a third dimension that most Beatle/Byrds style bands could never approach. (Not to mention the fact that neither Chris Bell and Chilton were mainstream enough to ever be easily identifiable in terms of one band or one genre.).
Flash forward a couple of years and Chris Gray, the guitar player who moved to NYC with me, and I are deep into the creation of Jack Ruby, our "punk" band. Our most obvious roots were the Stooges the Velvets, Black Sabbath and conceptually, Ornette Coleman and Philip Glass. And while neither of us would ever write a song a la anything on #1 Record, we were both fans of fractured pop music. We (along with George Scott, who would join the band in its second generation, after original members Randy Cohen and Boris Policeband left) were lovers of AM radio, 45 RPM singles, jukeboxes and one hit wonders. We all recognized that Big Star  (and for us, that meant Alex Chilton - I have since come to see that not only Chris Bell, but Jody Stephens, Andy Humell and evern Ardent Records' founder John Fry, had a lot to do with the sound that came to define Big Star) was a vitally important band that spoke to us in the same way as our more obvious influences. Chris and I saw Big Star at their (I believe) only NYC gig, in the winter of 1973-1974, at a half empty Max's Kansas City. Bell had left the band, and neither Chilton nor his rhythm section seemed particularly into the gig. My central memory of the night was that Max's was extremely cold. But I also remember that they played most of the songs I loved from #1 Record. And we knew that even phoned-in gig by Big Star was something to be treasured and remembered.
During that same time period, Chris and I wrote a song called "Neon Rimbaud," an obvious reference to punk rock's (in other words, Patti Smith's) favorite poet. The lyric reflected my obsessions with Nietzsche, Camus and pop culture, and, musically, was tumbling, bar chord extravaganza that referenced Hawkwind and Black Sabbath as well as the Velvet Underground. For us, what made the song interesting was that we turned it into a medley with a very punk rock, amelodic version of the Chilton's Box Tops' "Neon Rainbow," There was no way I could come close to singing as well as Chilton did, and Chris had no interest in playing chiming guitar parts, but we could express our admiration for Chilton and his cohorts indirectly.
Unfortunately the song never got recorded, so there is no way anyone will hear it, which is too bad, because it was one of Jack Ruby's best songs. However this discussion  does give me a chance to reprint some of my lyrics:
Yesterday, or maybe was the day before
My mother died, but I don't care no more
Nietzsche couldn't 've said it better
Soon to be a major motion picture
Which I don't wanna see
and then... Neon Rainbow:
"But in the daytime
Everthing chnages
Nothing remains the same
People will close the door til the night time comes...."

There was no question that the Chilton/Big Stars influence was felt strongly in the '70's in the middle of New York's punk rock explosion. I remember working at Bleecker Bob's in 1977, and all the whispering that went on when a jaundiced, grimy but obviously beautiful blond walked in. ("Chilton's girl friend, Chilton's girlfriend," mumbled as only a bunch of punk rock record store dweebs could mumble.) The sneers we normally wore were replaced with looks of awe. Chilton himself was a rarely glimpsed rumored NYC resident, already - this was before the release of Big Star 3 - a legend. We knew his girlfriend was as close as we were going to get.

Truthfully, I never liked much of Chilton's post-Big Star output. I got what he was doing, I think, but I found the songs to be either incredibly sloppy, unformed, or just not very good.
However, Chilton never lost that rock and roll attitude, even when he was denying the power of the reality of that attitude. He didn't define the punk or post punk or indie rock that copied his music, but in so many ways he was the archetype. It is such a cliche to say they don't make them like that any more, but in this case I think it's true. And it's a shame.

Big Star - When My Baby's Beside Me

Sunday Morning Brunch Mix

Here's a mix for a beautiful Spring Sunday morning. Not too NPR-ish I hope. No playlist, you'll have to trust me.
Sunday Morning Brunch Mix

Slow Dance

One of my music-related hobbies is inventing names for genres of music that either have no name or whose name leaves me cold.
A couple of years ago I coined the term "softcore" to signify the modern version of '70's soft rock (or yacht rock or Pacifica, as it has been variously referred to).
I would be lying if I didn't admit to hoping that my genre names would catch on, and Pitchfork and Hype Machine and Stereogum would introduce bands with my genre name as a descriptor.
Well, it didn't happen with Softcore, which is a shame, because it's the perfect name for a genre that clearly needs an identity.
But I have moved on, and so I am pleased to introduce a new genre - Slow Dance - to you. Slow dance is what used to be referred to as Chill - dance music for the end of the night (or early or late morning, depending on your drug of choice). Slow Dance, however,  is more all-encompassing, since it includes older music, as well as music outside the boundaries of what would be called dance music (i.e. Robert Wyatt's "Shipbuilding" by the Orchestre National de Jazz).
I just created a new mix that fit this name, full of old and new music that make you groove but sure enough keep it smooth.

SLOW DANCE MIX
The playlist:
1. Shipbuilding - Orchestre National de Jazz Around Robert Wyatt
2. Will - No. 9
3. You've Got the Love (xx Remix) - Florence and the Machine
4. Close to Forever - Hatchback Colors of the Sun
5. The Contemporary Fix (Bjorn Torske Remix) - Lindstrom
6. The Adventures of Pippi Longstrom (Diamond Cut Remix) - Fear of Tigers
7. Green Eyed Love (Classixx Remix) - Mayer Hawthorne
8. Full Moon (Applblim and Komonazuk Remix) - The Black Ghosts Dubstep (Remixes)
9. Norway - Beach House Teen Dream
10. Feel It All Around - Washed Out Life of Leisure
11. Distort Yourself - Sorcerer Neon Leon
12. I Regret the Flower Power - Quiet Village Black Sunshine
13. Never Ending Romance Disaster - Anoraak Nightdrive With You
14. En Hand I Himlen (Sound of Arrows Remix) - Jonathan Johansson En Hand I Himlen
15. Swayin' to the Music (Slow Dancing) - Johnny Rivers Anthology 1964-1977

The Mix:
Slow Dance Mix