Several years ago my friend Mindy offered both of us a writing challenge. The topic was making a mix-tape for a person one doesn’t know. We both wrote fictional stories around this notion, and even though they were fictional, I believe the seeds of both stories contained nuggets of tragic truth. I know mine did. Creating mix tapes, especially during my teens and twenties was a passion for me. They were important for personal use and for connecting with friends. Plus, they are legendarily supposed to be some sort of powerful romantic audio love letter that can and will win the heart of a crush. It makes for a magical idea, but I’m not so sure of its actual effectiveness. It never stopped me from daydreaming about this possibility.
Mix tapes (or the modern equivalent – CD, or more likely, streaming playlist) were always important to me. I have always made them. It has been going on for even longer than I’ve been buying music. They used to come along fast and furious. I could and have cranked them out for myself to listen to in the car, or Walkman or to simply catalogue a moment in time. In 1986, on a school night, for no apparent reason, I created a tape for my own enjoyment titled October 18, 1986 (the rainy evening it was born), and it included three songs named “Shame.” This became an annual tradition for a few years – all containing at least one song titled “Shame” (that’s a lot of shame), and then was reborn as a CD series after receiving a kidney transplant on an October 18th. Mostly though, these mixes have been made for friends, co-workers, classmates, and relatives. I’m not sure why, other than my near psychotic need to share my love of music. What better way is there than sharing the actual music? It’s much more effective than my efforts to write about it. Perhaps all of this has been practice for the dream scenario mentioned above (and sadly rarely ever implemented) – the mix tape for a crush or a girlfriend.
During this Covid-19 pandemic home time, like so many, I’ve been purging junk that is taking up space around my place. I’ve been browsing through a giant stack of old spiral notebooks, mostly dating back to 1991-93, full of writing - old record reviews, short stories, several drafts of a mission statement of sorts for the fledgling This Wreckage ‘zine, a disturbing number of lists of personal single and album rankings - my own strange version of Billboard countdowns, and a few sketched out song lists for potential mix tapes. Unfortunately, there is no sign of a playlist for a particular mix tape that I made that has become legendary in my mind. It’s a mix I made for a girl, where I laid everything bare. A collection of songs that were able to break my heart and thrill me with shivers. If only I could hear that collection again. Sadly, I do not remember what exactly wound up on that Maxell cassette. I have some ideas and some pretty sures, but with too much alone time on my hands, I have become obsessed with the notion of recreating this long forgotten mix.
Nineteen Ninety One was a really difficult year for me. I had to drop out of college and move back home to the isolation of the Oregon coast, due to my mom’s serious health issues that would lead her down the road of undergoing long distance kidney dialysis (the closest clinic was at least an hour away from our home) and seriously declining health, leading to her unfortunate passing nine months later. Plus I had my own related health problems (genetics!) that landed me in the hospital for about a month, due to a botched surgery. Let’s just say that recovery was slow and painful. It felt like the table my life resided on had been flipped over suddenly, leaving me blindly searching for some sort of solid ground to stand on. So, I did what I had mostly done up to that point in life, I shoved all the pain, fear, and uncertainty down into my gut and tried to rebuild some sort of foundation to stand on.
The following year found me back at my High School-era job making pizzas, shuffling through life, creating a handful of Xeroxed ‘zines with Wil and trying to get them some exposure, and then eventually returning to a different school in Seattle that fall for three months. Why three months? Well, in December, I found out that I needed another surgery, so at the end of 1992 I packed everything up and moved back home, which honestly didn’t feel like much of a home anymore.
For much of my late teenage years and into my twenties, I battled depression. I always chalked it up to the tumultuous times that young adults are always told about, you know, never fitting in, not cool enough, no love life, no taste for partying, spending most of my time alone, etc. No big deal. Swallow it down. Rinse and repeat. Hold onto my nature of being quiet and even keeled. Yet, this time, after dealing with another major surgery, things were different. I began to talk more, I began sharing my thoughts, and my insecurities. I became an open book. Once I returned to work at the old pizza joint, I remember being a 21-22 year old, working with a lot of 15-16 year olds, and I felt like a complete and utter failure. Many of my friends were closing in on their college graduations and here I was in the local teenage hangout asking about the town gossip from a boy who was still a year away from shaving once a month. That kid became a proxy therapist for me as I blabbered on and on about how life sucks and why. I could no longer hide my depression - my total sense of loss. Everything bubbled up to the surface.
Now that I had become an open wound, a raw nerve, I began to yearn for my life from two-plus years prior. I missed the idea of possibility, potential, and hope. I started to reach out to the few people I knew from school, which included a young woman who, during my dark years away, had become to mean the world to me. I couldn’t get her out of my mind. She became some sort of ideal who inspired me to become a better person. I can see it in those This Wreckage mission statement rough drafts I tossed recently. There was a desire to broaden my horizons, connect with people, and to offer a place for open expression. It was about this time the mix-tape plan hatched in my head. I would mail it to her and it would be a compilation that laid out the story of my scrambled emotions and yearning heart and to let her know how important she is.
This is where things get hazy. I have a feeling that I opened the tape with the solo live rendition of Mark Eitzel’s “Firefly.” I had been obsessed with that whole album (Songs of Love Live), and that song in particular for a nearly couple of years by that point. Though, Eitzel’s sad sack “Thanks for coming” that opens the song, or the “I’m always fucking this part up” apology during his guitar bridge, have become repeated jokes over the years within the small circle of my friends. It’s the warbles and imperfections of his soaring repeated howls over his loss (“Where did you go?”) of a loved one has made people I’ve shared it with laugh, albeit uncomfortably. It’s a heart wrenching song that never fails to send debilitating shivers down my spine. That temporary notion of fireflies was strong in those times, and I think I likely bookended things and closed the tape with the Magnetic Fields’ beautiful “100,000 Fireflies.” Long before Stephin Merritt graced most of his songs with his droll baritone, and every album would be based on some sort of gimmick, his songs were sung by the folk-sounding Susan Anway, whose voice managed to infuse the words with a simple melancholy. I purchased the 7” single for this song during the height of my love of loud, fast, abrasive music (industrial, hardcore, noise). However, this quiet, fragile, unique sounding song about the bittersweet nature of love couldn’t have been a more perfect representation of my mindset.
“I went out to the forest and caught
A 100, 000 fireflies
As they ricochet 'round my room
They remind me of your starry eyes
Someone else's might not have made me so sad
But this is the worst night I ever had"
Elsewhere, I’d like to imagine that I put on
something by the Field Mice whose
plaintive uncomplicated songs are the type that no one
is supposed to like, because it's too hard to admit their sheer vulnerability
have such much emotional power. I’m afraid the spare plea for physical contact
of “It Isn’t Forever” was the choice I may have made for this collection. It’s a song that begs to be heard, while
alone, late at night, when the last thing in the world you want is to be alone. “It Isn’t Forever” alternates quiet verses of
longing with loud abrasive instrumental passages that, like the title, display
the all too often fleeting nature of intimacy.
I must have also put on the majestic and invigorating love song “Sunshine Smile” from Adorable, because it was this girl’s electric eyes that captured my initial attention, dropped my jaw, froze me in place, and placed about 100,000 fireflies ablaze in my stomach. I cannot hear this song without thinking of her. Speaking of which, I would’ve been remiss if I hadn’t have placed Ride’s crashing single “Taste” onto this tape. Again, the chaotic burst of pure energy that drives the song, Laurence Colbert’s unbelievable rollicking attack on the drums, and the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ that come in about 30 seconds into the song make for the exact representation of what was going inside my mind and body every time I was anywhere near her presence, and for long after. It doesn't hurt that "Taste" was released not long after that first time I was awestruck by her. It became my constant adrenalized soundtrack to guide me through her presence.
There’s a chance I may have doubled down on the Mark
Eitzel pain, when he moonlighted for a few songs as the vocalist for the
creative instrumental band Toiling
Midgets. The turmoil and
self-flagellation that he goes through in the searing “Golden Frog” can only
end with a repeated conclusion to himself “you were weak.” A feeling that I often felt of myself then
and now. The anthem of someone who is
often too afraid to take chances in order not to disrupt whatever tiny
fragments of comfort remain.
A good balancing follow-up to that abasement could’ve
been “Awesome Sky” from Boston punk rockers Moving Targets. I'm about 87%
certain that this amazing instrumental was near the end of side A of the mix. Despite being absent lyrics, this song may
have encapsulated my emotions better than all of the other soul-baring lyrical songs
included. Its restless energy, its
earnest search for that glimpse of an 'awesome sky' that keeps getting
momentarily obscured by something. Once we reach that triumphant sight (what a
chorus!) the song reaches incredible heights like a stellar sunset poking out
between clouds or over a magnificent horizon.
Yet like the sun disappearing, the song quietly runs out of steam and
disappears. Gone for good. Leaving us astonished and inspired.
It’s difficult to know how I filled all 90 minutes of this
tape. Could I have gone for it and
crammed it entirely with spirit shredding content? Was I that willing to be exposed? Perhaps I threw on something such as Concrete Blonde’s delectable wizened
cover of Leonard Cohen’s remarkable
“Everybody Knows,” to keep the thread alive but not so damn direct, or the
surprisingly groovy and tender love song to planet Earth: “Living in the Rose,”
from the normally political and intense New
Model Army – a song that would’ve been brand new at that time. I had to have included something from the Sundays too. They were and are one of my all-time
favorites who wrote a ton of the types of songs to fill this brand of mix-tape. I imagine that I would’ve snuck the
stunningly beautiful and brief b-side “Noise,” an ode to silence and solitude
on there as a tasty set up for their second album highlight “Goodbye.” The first single to follow up their flawless
debut is indescribably pretty as it builds to a satisfying and dramatic climax,
before ending with the inevitable cold send off to her now former lover. A dose of reality crashes into the dreams of
heaven. That was it. A goodbye wasn’t needed in this case. It was over before it had a chance to begin.
These songs I’ve mentioned are merely educated guesses as to
what made it onto that tape. I remember
dubbing it on a lazy music filled sunny spring afternoon. I distinctly remember being abuzz from the
emotional impact the lovelorn songs had over me after completion. I remember feeling completely despondent, yet
alive with an unidentifiable sense of accomplishment. This recorded cry for attention was likely a
terrible mistake, but I knew I had to do something. I was bursting with love to give and utterly
incapable of believing the notion that I could ever receive that kind of love in
return. I could not and still cannot imagine
it, so the whole thing was an exercise in futility.
By the time autumn of that year came around, I had gone back to bottling everything up. I nearly stopped speaking entirely. An overwhelming sense of loss and emptiness swallowed me. A callus formed around me creating a numbness that still encompasses me to this day. I have been smashing frustrations, disappointments, sadness, and illness into my gut for so long that there is no room for anything else. The bubbling over anxiousness, excitement, passion, and most important, anticipation that filled that mix tape and the reason behind it stand as a symbol for everything I feel I’m missing. I think the idea of recreating that grouping of particular songs, despite the sorrow attached to them, is a tiny spark of life buried deep within my clouded mind fighting to get out.
I’m not sure it can.
