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Recently found a shitty high-bias C90 that I compiled in Spring/Summer 1988 (!). This would've been my first year at Syracuse; every Thursday cashing my meager paycheck and legging over to Record Theatre in the little mini-mall behind M Street, catching the Centro bus home to South Campus with a handful of 45s for the weekend... spending the odd visit home haunting the 12" single racks at the old Newbury Comics in Natick and thumbing through my older brother's record collection. I was in a heavy pure-pop phase—this was middle-to-top-of-the-charts stuff, then, and many of the tunes on this comp are still radio fodder, sixteen years later.
My mix tapes tended to be a bit spotty, in those days, as they weren't particularly planned out—they grew organically, by a process of accretion; that's why they took me months to finish. I was transferring choice cuts to tape as I was buying the records, the comp growing as the stack of 45s by the turntable got higher. This one, though, has a couple of stretches where the sequencing really works, where it builds and sustains moods—a bit of a breakthrough.
The title scrawled on the J-card of this effort is Vox Pop.
Lead off with "Hazy Shade of Winter," The Bangles. The more I think on it, the clearer it seems that this is one of the best covers ever recorded. It keeps the best of Simon & Garfunkel's original and ditches the worst—the bitterness and menace are intact, but without the self-pity of the third verse. And it's just brilliantly put together—everything calculated for sheer excitement: the intro with the floaty voices and the snowbells and the Edge-style guitar lick explodes into the riff, heavied up and swirling across the stereo field, and then hard drum slap comes in. Utterly propulsive, two verses, pull back for the middle eight, then BIG STONKING GUITARS AGAIN and it builds and builds and builds and BANG! WHACK! Stop on a fucking dime and dude! I am so ready for whatever's next...
...which is "Devil Inside," INXS. Back off with a slow sizzle on a sideways rewrite of the "Time the Avenger" riff. Vaguely doomy lyric—we're dancing in the dragon's jaws again.
"It's the End of the World as We Know It (& I Feel Fine)" R.E.M. Hey, the implicit theme becomes explicit. Overfamiliarity has made it hard to remember just how propulsive and unhinged this sounded when it first came out. A kick in the guts and a manic grin. This is a 45 RPM edit, by the way, cutting the bit in the first verse where it sounds like it's modulating into the chorus.
"Shooting Dirty Pool," The Replacements. Pleased To Meet Me is my favorite 'mats album for the same reason that some people hate it—it's their tightest, most focused record; the band's sound, often a blunt instrument, is refined to a stiletto. "Shooting Dirty Pool" is the 'mats doing Thin Lizzy—a hard-rock riff-o-rama that actually sounds like a bar fight, and not just because of the breaking-glass sound effects—the wasted swagger of the lead vox, the squawky backups, the roaring back-and-forth of the guitar solo, the sudden drop-out of the instruments, the barely-controlled drum break (Mars sounds like he's pounding on a garbage can—from the inside, while being rolled down a flight of stairs)—it's not a mess, exactly, but it sure ain't pretty.
I've written at length elsewhere about the charms of Jeff Beck's "Freeway Jam"—from swagger to swagger, all testosterone and feedback.
"Pump Up the Volume," M/A/R/R/S. Another record so shattering in its day, and so hard to understand, these days, what all the fuss was about. It wasn't just Ofra Haza's voice—it was the vertigo of hearing your musical context shift every fifteen seconds in a rush of pirated riffs and meaningless catchphrases. It was the light-bulb of understanding that the production itself could be the star of a record. It was the tipping-point moment of knowing that music would never be the same, and that soon everything would sound like this.
"True Faith," New Order. I never did the clubs and the discos, and I was never a dance-music anorak—but shit, I did own quite a few New Order twelve-inches. This was another 45 edit—and a pretty odd one, as it cuts the chorus from six lines to four, by the weird expedient of cutting lines 4 and 5, leaving in the reference to drugs, but cutting the reference to childhood, not to mention ruing the rhyme scheme entirely. I still can't figure that one out...
"Rev It Up," Casual Gods. This was a side project by Jerry Harrison from Talking Heads. Great guitar riff, monster funk groove, but there's a mild letdown in Harrison's vocal, which is—how shall we say—a bit pale. This isn't like the Heads' cover of "Take Me to the River," where Byrne's very lack of funkiness was a part of his charisma; Harrison plays the soul-man stuff straight, to the best of his limited ability, and piles on the colored-girls backing vox to compensate. He should've let one of them sing the lead.
"Beds Are Burning," Midnight Oil. It still amazes me that this was their American breakthrough—Garret's vox are at their most reptilian here, and there are the musique concrete SFX bits and the impenetrably Australocentric lyrics to contend with as well. I thought (and still think) "The Dead Heart" was a better song, as such, but you can't argue with a chorus like this one.
"Walk Through the Fire," Peter Gabriel. This was B-side, a remix—remake, really—of an obscure track tossed away to the soundtrack of the film Against All Odds. I wanted to like this one more than I actually did. You can see what producer Nile Rodgers was trying to do here, and on paper it sounds like a good idea—treating the sparse, dubby original as an unfinished work, and build up layers of guitars, keyboards, and drum machines over it, turning Gabriel's apocalyptic imagery into a party-at-ground-zero anthem a la Prince—or even Oingo Boingo. Problem is, Gabriel's dread is all too real, and his refuge is not hedonism but mysticism; his approach and Rodgers's simply don't intersect. That said, I was listening to this tape on 11 September of this year, and the chorus "Walk through the fire / through the dust and ashes / while the building crashes..." caught me by surprise, giving me long, nasty shivers.
"No New Tale To Tell," Love & Rockets. A year or two before "So Alive" took them overground, the erstwhile BauhausTonesOnTailBubblemenJazzButcher boys put out this insidiously catchy, unashamedly goofy, mock-sinister little slice of heaven. Flutes, wah-wah pedals and monkey noises, people—that's what I call rock'n'roll.
"I Melt With You," Modern English. In 1988, this song was undergoing the first of its periodic revivals. It took a long time for this to become an FM-radio staple and acknowledged classic; the process started here. Still thrilling, still hugely romantic, still the perfect balance of tough and tender. That Ebow break, and the way the bass comes in just a bit too early in the breakdown. Yeah.
There's Side One. The rest of the tape (despite having The Godfathers' brilliant and unjustly-neglected "Birth, School, Work, Death" for a Side Two opener) suffers a bit as the material gets stretched thin and the mood falls apart. Still, a pretty good 45-minute stretch there. |
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Thanks Mr Smagghe...