1. "Summer's Cauldron/Grass"
   Skylarking
   XTC
   read about this song
   
   
2. "Cemetry Gates"
   The Queen Is Dead
   The Smiths
   read about this song
   
   
3. "As It Was When It Was"
   Brotherhood
   New Order
   read about this song
   
   
4. "My Biggest Thrill"
   Happy Head
   Mighty Lemon Drops
   read about this song
   
   
5. "Kundalini Express"
   Express
   Love & Rockets
   read about this song
   
   
6. "Cities in Dust"
   Tinderbox
   Siouxsie and the Banshees
   read about this song
   
   
7. "Gunning for the Buddha"
   Big Night Music
   Shriekback
   read about this song
   
   
8. "Give It Time"
   Giant
   Woodentops
   read about this song
   
   
9. "Friction"
   Greetings from Timbuk 3
   Timbuk 3
   read about this song
   
   
10. "Radio Head"
    True Stories
    Talking Heads
    read about this song
    
    
11. "Heartache"
    The Blind Leading the Naked
    Violent Femmes
    read about this song
    
    
12. "Beauty and the Beatitudes"
    Hermitage
    Waxing Poetics
    read about this song
    
    
13. "Groovy Tuesday"
    Especially for You
    The Smithereens
    read about this song
    
    
14. "White Lines, Blue Sky, Black Top"
    Land of Oppotunity
    EIEIO
    read about this song
    
    
15. "Angels"
    Blast of Silence
    Golden Palominos
    read about this song
    
    
16. "Angels"
    Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams
    BoDeans
    read about this song
    
    
17. "Graceland"
    Graceland
    Paul Simon
    read about this song
    
    
18. "Reflecting Pool"
    Big Plans for Everybody
    Let's Active
    read about this song
    
    
19. "Fall On Me"
    Lifes Rich Pageant
    R.E.M.
    read about this song
    
    
20. "Beatle Boots"
    This Ain't No Outerspace Ship
    Love Tractor
    read about this song

Track 1
"Summer's Cauldron/Grass"
Skylarking
XTC

Okay, so this is really two tracks, but don't you think XTC deserves it? Beside, on the album, they purposely blended the two songs together, so trying to separate them is just awkward and unnatural; playing one of these tracks without the other just sounds wrong (they did a similar trick with two other tracks on this album, "Ballet for a Rainy Day" and "1000 Umbrellas"). And it underscores the dual nature of this band: although Andy Partridge is the primary singer and songwriter and responsible for "Summer's Cauldron", there are always at least a few tracks by bassist Colin Moulding, who here contributes "Grass".

There were two controversies surrounding this record's release in the U.S., one from conservative Christians and one from the fans of the band. See, there was this song called "Dear God", which questions the existence of God while simultaneously chiding him for the terrible state of things here on Earth just in case he does exist, and although it wasn't included on the original vinyl and cassette releases in this country, by the time the album was released on CD (this was in the very early days of CDs, where only guaranteed hit records were automatically released on CD; other releases had to achieve a certain level of sales before they were deemed disc-worthy), the song had become relatively popular thanks to a video that got regular airplay on MTV's alternative music show, 120 Minutes. So the American record company, Sire (also home to the Smiths and Echo and the Bunnymen), replaced the track "Mermaid Smiled" with "Dear God", hoping to spur new sales and even some re-sales to completists who already owned the album or tape.

The thing is, "Dear God" isn't nearly as good a song as "Mermaid Smiled", and so the purist nuts (like me) who knew and loved the album from its original release were irritated that the disc tampered with what we already believed was a great record. But most of us bought the CD anyway, and were sated a few years later with the release of the Rag and Bone Buffet CD, a collection of rare tracks, demos, and outtakes that included the MIA "Mermaid Smiled".

It would have been easy to include almost any song from this record somewhere on this mix. "Earn Enough for Us" and "Dear God" would have been the familiar choices, and "Another Satelite" has always been one of my favorite XTC tracks (although I actually like the demo version on Rag and Bone Buffet better than the Skylarking version), but this combo, which opens XTC's disc, were a good fit for the opening of this disc. I guess I don't have much else to say about these selections except that if you aren't already familiar with XTC, go out and buy something of theirs immediately (Skylarking is great, but so are Oranges and Lemons, Nonsuch, and the Apple Venus discs).

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Track 2
"Cemetry Gates"
The Queen Is Dead
The Smiths

Ah, the Smiths. I was able to hold out until the second track, but just barely. The "Cemetry" in the title is not a typo, and I have no idea why the band chose to spell it that way except that it's pretty close to the way Morrissey pronounces it in the song. This is a disarmingly cheery song about meeting a friend to go read poetry in the cemetery together on a sunny day, and it's full of literary references to Keats, Yeats, and Wilde (Morrissey's idol). It's the perfect anthem for bookish teenage loners obsessed with death. Like me.

It was unbelievably hard to pick just one track from this record for this CD. Almost every song is a Smiths' classic, including "Frankly Mr. Shankly", "I Know It's Over", "Bigmouth Strikes Again", and "There Is a Light that Never Goes Out". But this was one of my favorites, and it also played nice with its neighbors.

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Track 3
"As It Was When It Was"
Brotherhood
New Order

Okay. So in the early to mid 80s, the cutting edge of British music was divided into two camps, both of which were reacting to the overly hairsprayed keyboard bands that dominated the then-popular New Wave movement in Britain. The first faction was interested in a back-to-basics guitar revival, led by Johnny Marr and his Smiths, while the second was a more dance-oriented movement led by New Order that included the drum machines and electronic paraphenalia of New Wave but also used guitars and cast a darker shadow than the New Wavers. Interestingly enough, both of these movements had their epicenter in Manchester, specifically in a club called the Hacienda, which was owned by members of New Order.

New Order was born from the ashes of Joy Division, a seminal post-punk band that was forced to disband when their singer, Ian Curtis, committed suicide. Actually, they didn't really disband; the remaining members renamed themselves New Order, drew straws to decide on a new singer (guitarist Bernard Sumner lost), added a keyboardist, and carried on with an already-scheduled tour of America where they introduced audiences to the new group.

Brotherhood was actually seen as a sellout by longtime fans; it included guitars more prominently and was generally more compact and guitar-oriented that their previous releases. But personally this is my favorite New Order record, probably because it was the first record of theirs that I owned (I've noticed that, in general, the first record I own by an artist tends to remain the one I have the deepest connection with). I have all the earlier ones now, and I like them, too, but I still like this one a little bit better. Most fans would agree, however, that this is their last great record; Technique and Republic were far too unfocused to rank with their early work, and though 2001's Get Ready was a nice comeback from a band that had been out of commission for almost a decade, it's doesn't hold a candle to Brotherhood.

"Bizarre Love Triagle" would have been the obvious choice to include on this disc, since it is probably the group's most well-known track, but it's actually one of my least favorite songs from the record (that's not to say I don't like it, though——this is a great album when taken as a whole, and most of the individual compositions deserve to be part of it). I don't have especially strong feelings about "As It Was When It Was", but it worked better than any other song from Brotherhood sandwiched between the Smiths and the Mighty Lemon Drops. It doesn't really showcase the keyboard/drum machine ethos for which the band is known (there are a lot of songs like this on Brotherhood, which may be why the diehards didn't take to it), but it's a fairly representative New Order track nonetheless.

Interestingly enough, in the late 80s, about five years after Manchester first became a musical mecca thanks to the Smiths and New Order, the city would host another musical revolution, one that saw the previously opposing sounds of dance and guitars come together in the music of bands like the Happy Mondays, the Inspiral Carpets, and most importantly the Stone Roses, who we'll hear lots more about later. Around the same time, the Smiths' Johnny Marr and New Order's Bernard Sumner, along with the duo from the Pet Shop Boys, attempted their own fusion in the form of Electronic, whose eponymous debut came out around the same time as the Stone Roses' first release. And while Electronic is a fascinating historical document, it does tend to come off as more a lab experiment than a true collaboration between two great songwriters, and it pales in comparison with the other music being made in Manchester at that time.

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Track 4
"My Biggest Thrill"
Happy Head
Mighty Lemon Drops

The Mighty Lemon Drops were often compared to Echo and the Bunnymen, especially on this record, their debut, and frankly, if Echo and the Bunnymen had released an album in 1986, a track from that record would likely have taken this slot in the mix. But they didn't, and so I have to fill this void with their imitators. My friend David Jessup (who was one of the few popular kids at the private school I was forced to attend from grades 7 through 10 who I could stand and who could also stand me) gave this to me for Christmas, selecting it more or less at random from the college music top 10 list in the back of Rolling Stone, which he knew I used as a source for new music. And truth be told, I loved it at the time——I listened to little else for several weeks after I got it.

A lot of the stuff on this album holds up pretty well, but this band began a quick slide towards mediocre pop after this record. Their sophomore effort, World Without End, is mostly tolerable, but after that their releases become a desperate chase for the mainstream that was painful to watch and even more painful to listen to. It wasn't that the music was necessarily bad, it's just that it became increasingly clear that the band had no artisic center, no vision——it was all about the money. And that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, even if the music's not all that bad.

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Track 5
"Kundalini Express"
Express
Love & Rockets

The great thing about "alternative" music back in 1986 was that it really was alternative, a broad category that included pretty much anything that didn't fit into the neat little divisions like pop/rock, R+B, jazz, or country. The college charts, where most of the so-called alternative acts got their exposure in the US, would often see an amazingly diverse mix of artists sharing space together. In any given month, you could easily have relative unknowns like DIY country-blues artist Michelle Shocked, socialist-oriented English rockers Easterhouse, and southern pop masters Let's Active; more mainstream artists like Talking Heads, R.E.M., and Timbuk 3; and a mishmash of groups trying to re-integrate guitars into the slick production and synthetic electronica that was so prominent in the early 80s like my next three selections, Love & Rockets, Siousxie and the Banshees, and Shriekback.

Love & Rockets are one of the stranger entities to emerge during the latter half of the 80s. Despite being composed of three-fourths of the uber-goth group Bauhaus (the fourth, singer Peter Murphy, embarked on a reasonably successful solo career), they managed to sound almost nothing like their former band, instead exploring the dense, layered buzz of glam rock and Beatles-inspired psychedelia drenched in crystalline acoustic guitar washes. Express was their second effort, and it finds them much more focused than on their debut, Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven. Express got a lot of attention from college radio stations, which set the stage for a couple of minor hits on their next record (they would also have a hit in the grunge era, but by then the band had really begun to become musically disorganized).

"Kundalini Express" is probably the most representative track from Express, combining the oddball philosophical/spiritual messages that are sprinkled liberally throughout the record with the driving rhythms, chugging bass, and serpentine guitar lines that show the band wearing their glam fetish on their sleeves. But the band manages to sell it, making what could have been painfully awkward lyrics come off as sincere, thoughtful, and humorous. For the record (possible pun intended), the original album/casette release is a much stronger work, leaving out the moody, meandering songs "Angels and Devils" and "Holiday on the Moon", which are bonus tracks available only on the CD release and which inexplicably appear at the beginning and in the middle what had been a very well-sequenced record, instead of at the end where they belong. If you've only ever had access to a modern CD version of the record, try programming out those two tracks and see if it doesn't improve the flow. A second CD release tries to correct these problems by restoring the original order of the tracks and placing the b-sides last, but for some reason it also moves the "Ball of Confusion" cover to the end (on the original American release, it was track 5, and it seemed to fit very nicely there).

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Track 6
"Cities in Dust"
Tinderbox
Siouxsie and the Banshees

Siouxsie and the Banshees is one of those groups that, even if they were never successful, would still be notable for serving as a crossroads for so many other bands and projects. Fronted by Siouxsie Sioux, the only stable member of the band throughout its decades-long history, the group's former members were at one time or another also members of groups as diverse as the Sex Pistols (Sid Vicious), Adam and the Ants (Marco Perroni), the Cure (Robert Smith), the Glove (Robert Smith, Steve Severin), the Slits (Budgie), and the Creatures (Siouxsie, Budgie), just to name a few.

Tinderbox finds Siouxsie and company in a similar place in their career as Love & Rockets with Express: after years of success in their native UK and cult status in the US, this record finds them hitting a stride, making the move toward more mainstream success, and preparing for their next two records, both of which would score them hits in the Lollapalooza era. It's also pretty much the only Siouxsie record that I really love (besides the nearly-impossible-to-find-on-CD covers record Through the Looking Glass——their take on Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" is brilliant, and their versions of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" and the Doors' "You're Lost Little Girl" are almost as good in their own ways as the originals); it finds that nice little niche between the teetering-on-the-edge-of-disaster guitar madness from Robert Smith's stint with the band on Hyaena and the technocentric sound of what would become their biggest sellers in the US, Peepshow and Superstition. And although the album makes a cohesive whole, if you had to pick a single, "Cities in Dust" would undoubtedly be it. Sure, it might have been more interesting to pick one of the darker, more punk-inspired tracks, but "Cities" is such a great song that it would be criminal to leave it off of any best-of list from 1986.

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Track 7
"Gunning for the Buddha"
Big Night Music
Shriekback

Shriekback is a tough band to figure out. For a while, their ecletic mix of jazz, funk, synthesizers, and that peculiar dark humor tinged with menace that only the British are capable of, led to a growing fan base that seemed to indicate they were on their way to becoming one of the most important bands of their time. Unfortunately, founding member and bassist Dave Allen left the band after Big Night Music, leading the remaining members to produce the epicly awful Go Bang! in a misguided attemtpt to become full-fledged pop stars (the record included a KC and the Sunshine Band cover). By the time the band reintegrated Allen and rebounded with Sacred City, grunge had taken over the airwaves and Shriekback's moment of opportunity had come and gone.

Big Night Music is easily their most successful record, both critically and commercially, although it lacks any apparent singles. It is a record whose dreamlike, reptillian slithers you can get lost in; late at night, with the lights turned low and the music turned loud, it can be almost hallucinatory. It's like being lost in a swamp where everything around you is alive and predatory, and you know you could be sucked under with one misstep, but you find it beautiful all the same.

It was really had to choose a song for this spot because, stylistically, Big Night Music is all over the map and it's a daunting task to pick one song to represent the whole work. "Black Light Trap", the album opener, is anchored by a sinister funk bass that is punctuated by the devil's own horn section for the choruses ("Running on the Rocks" is a sister track, employing many of the same devices); "The Shining Path" prowls like a panther in a moonlit jungle, adding a section of French lyrics at the end for that extra touch of ominousness; and "Pretty Little Things" is suspiciously cheerful, but fun nonetheless. And that's just the first half of the record: "The Reptiles and I", "Sticky Jazz", and "Cradle Song" continue to expand Big Night Music's sonic palette. This is one of those discs that, if Shriekback had never existed and it was released for the first time this year, would still sound ahead of its time; no one ever really tried to follow the trail that Shriekback blazed on this album, and it still sounds as innovative now as it did back in 1986.

"Gunning for the Buddha", a track I selected as much for how good it sounded after the Siouxsie track and its running time as anything else, is saturated with soothing island instruments riding the rolling wave of a laid-back bass line. The relaxing rhythms bely the somewhat disturbing content of the lyrics, which find two "philosophical assassins" on the trail of the buddha, who eludes them by hopping from body to body, including a beetle and, somewhat improbably, former president Jimmy Carter. I think it's supposed to be an anthem in support of passion and action as opposed to the passive acceptance that characterizes the buddhist philosophy, but whatever. The lyrics aren't any more or less abstract and obscure than most of Shriekback's work. They were just a weird band. But for this record, they were weird in a really good way.

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Track 8
"Give It Time"
Giant
Woodentops

And now we come to the Woodentops' Giant, the best pop record from this era that no one in America has ever heard of. This is really the band's sophomore effort, but it is technically their debut——the first record was a collection of the increasingly successful singles that the band released in the years before Giant, and it was released only a few months before this record. However we want to label this album it is without question the group's best work. Their third (second?) and final studio album, Wooden Foot Cops on the Highway, was given a push by their American major label, but it just wasn't as good and the group disbanded a few years after its release without ever building on the moderate success they'd acheived in Japan and in their native England.

I really wish I had more to say about this band to help place them in context, but there's not much more I can give you. Trying to describe their music is difficult: lightly strummed acoustic guitars mingling with the shuffling backbeat of wire brushes on the drum kit; a rich, warm electric guitar to carry the melody; subtle enhancing touches by organs, harps, violins, trumpets, and other orchestral elements on almost every track; a deep, round bass for the bedrock; and floating above it all, singer Rolo McGinty's stammering tenor. I just can't give you a sense of the charming intimacy of the songs, which nonetheless are so deep that they could easily expand to every corner of an opera house with the fullness of their sound. The Woodentops existed for so short a time and without any real connection to any movements in British or American popular music that it's hard to say anything except that this is really an amazingly unique record. The best I can do is point out parallels to other quirky artists like Jonathan Richman, They Might Be Giants, and early Belle & Sebastian, but these still don't really do the band justice.

"Love Affair With Everyday Living" is personally my favorite track, but there are great songs with great lines all over this record. "Everyday Living" barely edges out "Good Thing" ("Sometimes you try harder for me than I try for myself"), "Everything Breaks" ("Everything I touch breaks in my hands"), "So Good Today" ("When we laugh, we laugh at the same time"), and this track, "Give It Time" ("You're never out of town/But you're never at home"). It was really hard not to put "Everyday Living" in this slot, but "Time" made a better transition between British oddballs Shriekback and American oddballs Timbuk 3. And it's a pretty great song in its own right.

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Track 9
"Friction"
Greetings from Timbuk 3
Timbuk 3

Most of you will remember Timbuk 3 from their 80s zeitgeist one-hit wonder single "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades", which will either annoy you or spark nostalgia in you depending on how recently you've heard it and in what context. But "Future", from their debut outing Greetings from Timbuk 3, is actually a pretty good song that has suffered from being overplayed, especially when it was on the charts back in 1986. Yeah, the chorus gets a little annoying sometimes, but the good things about the song reflect the strengths of what is an incredibly well-made record that has stood the test of time much longer than I ever thought it would. When I went back to listen to this record again while selecting tracks for this mix, I was surprised at how good it still sounded. I figured that the drum machines, twangy voices, and 80s production would render this all-but-lifeless after 15 years, but instead I was pleased to discover that the production was very rich and full. Combine this great sound with the witty (if sometimes a little preachy) lyrics and solid, catchy songwriting, and suddenly it wasn't so hard to figure out why I loved this album so much all those years ago.

In truth, I could have selected almost any song from this record for this mix——I was even briefly tempted to put "Future" on here——but "Friction" won out, as has often been the case, because it fit in well with the two songs that surrounded it (the lead guitar here has a tone and timbre that is the Texas cousing of the lead guitar in the Woodentops' "Give It Time"). It has quickly become one of my favorite tracks on this mix, and I have a feeling I'm going to be listening to Timbuk 3 a lot more often in the future.

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Track 10
"Radio Head"
True Stories
Talking Heads

By the time they released True Stories, the Talking Heads were already well-established at this point in their career, both politically and commercially, coming off successes with their live album/film Stop Making Sense (filmed by future Oscar-winner Jonathan Demme) and Little Creatures; the first record rejuventated the group and exposed the band's work to a wider audience, which in turned paved the way for Creatures, their first platinum-selling studio album.

True Stories mines the same pop vein as Little Creatures, but despite yielding a hit single, "Wild Wild Life", the record was generally panned by reviewers and didn't sell as well as Creatures. That may have been in large part because of its association with a film of the same name directed by Heads' frontman David Byrne, which was thrashed by critics as a vanity project. This wasn't the soundtrack to the film, although all the songs are featured in the film; rather, in a typically Byrnes-ian twist, it is the Talking Heads' versions of the songs that appear in the film (the true soundtrack features the songs as they are sung by the actors in the movie). True Stories actually stands up pretty well with Little Creatures, which has become a pop masterpiece, but Byrne's increasing quirkiness, the album's label of "concept album", and it's lack of a follow-up single to "Wild Wild Life" meant that a lot of fans who had just become acquainted with the band on their previous two releases never gave this one a chance. And that's a shame, because this record really does deserve a place in the canon of pop music (unlike its successor, Naked, which documented the conversion of the band into a David Byrne solo project and which is appropriately left off the list of essential Talking Heads works).

For some reason, I remember very distinctly the purchasing of this album. Actually, I remember having it purchased for me by my grandfather at a record store owned by a couple who were our next door neighbors at one point. The store had put up a big display at the front, so that when you walked in the door you were assaulted by the red, black, and white of the cover. I was hesitant about buying it even though it had been on the college charts for a couple of weeks already because at that point I was loathe to buy anything by any band that had ever gotten airplay on commercial radio stations. But I thought it was something the my granddad might not hate, and he was paying so I didn't lose anything if I didn't like it, so I went with it. I remember when he put the tape in the casette deck (I was still a year or so from the Great CD Conversion that all serious music fans had to deal with at some point in the late 80s) and the first song, "Love for Sale", came on, I was wincing, thinking, "It's so loud——he's going to make me stop playing it" (listening to the song now, I can't exactly remember why I thought it was so raucous——I mean, it's a big, bouncy rock song, but it's still pop that wouldn't have sounded at all out of place on the radio with it's album-mate "Wild Wild Life"). But he didn't make me turn it off, god bless him, just as he wouldn't make me turn it off any of the dozens of other times I would play music in his car when he was coming to take me out to dinner on a weeknight at NCSSM or picking me up for the weekend. He heard pretty much everything on this mixtape and then some for the two years I attended a boarding high school only half an hour from him, and though he would occasionally complain about it, he complains about a lot of stuff that doesn't really bother him that much. I'm not saying he liked it, but he understood that it was important to me, and was willing to tolerate it for my sake.

I wasn't at all tempted to put "Wild Wild Life" on this mix, even though that's the song people would most likely be familiar with. Though it's not really a bad song, it's competing with some of my favorite Talking Heads' tracks, and in the end, I couldn't resist "Radio Head", which, in addition to being one of the catchiest tunes on the album, also has the historical distinction of being the source of the name for Thom Yorke's Radiohead (one of the few bands of our time that can match the Talking Heads for innovation and weirdness). "Radio Head" is a song about a person who is so in tune with the person they're in love with that they can hear the other person's thoughts in their head. But not in a creepy, stalker way; rather, in a really goofy, lighthearted way. It's a fun little song, and it's nice to know that Radiohead, often seen as purveyors of arty gloom, have enough of a sense of humor to name their band after something as childishly gleeful as this song.

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Track 11
"Heartache"
The Blind Leading the Naked
Violent Femmes

It might seem a little weird to follow the Talking Heads with the Violent Femmes, but there's actually a pretty direct connection here. After two albums of pretty minimally produced songs, the Femmes brought on Jerry Harrison, keyboard player for the Talking Heads, to handle the production chores for The Blind Leading the Naked and bring a much slicker sound to their music. As a result, this record is overflowing with horn sections, drum machine-like percussion, and processed guitar and bass. They even take a stab at gospel in tracks like "Faith" and "Love & Me Make Three", which were likely advocated by singer Gordon Gano, who was moonlighting in a real gospel band called Mercy Seat.

It won't come a shock that this radical change to their sound, especially when paired with the suspicion that it was part of a bid for a larger mainstream audience, turned off a lot of their longtime fans, but it really shouldn't have: The Blind Leading the Naked is packed with all the biting humor, plaintive teen longing, sexual tension, and sly playfulness of the band's previous efforts. The Femmes used Harrison's procudtion to add a broader range of colors to their palette, but the artistry is the same. I don't think that anyone would argue that their debut, the eponymous Violent Femmes, is their masterwork, but The Blind Leading the Naked is tied for second with Hallowed Ground, their sophomore release.

And there are a ton of good songs on here: I don't know how you can call yourself a Femmes' fan if you don't consider "Old Mother Reagan", "Breaking Hearts", "Special", "Good Friend", and "Two People" to be among the best songs they have ever done, and I have a special place in my heart for "I Held Her in My Arms" (despite the sax, which seemed to irritate a lot of people). I don't know exactly why I settled on "Heartache" for this mix, but it's a good transition song that illustrates the difference between the classic Femmes and the more layered studio sound created by Harrison. The guitar is electric, the bass sounds a tad artificial, and the drums sound flat and electronic, but it works for this song about as well as the acoustic guitar, unornamented bass, and tight snare of their earlier sound would have. Plus, I don't know how many times I've been up late at night working on a project that's way overdue and that still won't ready for days no matter how hard I work when I've had the lines from the bridge run through my head: "I've been working 25 hours a day/I don't want to live this way." Preach it, brother Gordon.

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Track 12
"Beauty and the Beatitudes"
Hermitage
Waxing Poetics

Part of the reason I decided to do these year mixtapes was to expose people to music that they might not have previously heard, so that if you were someone who liked R.E.M. or Siouxsie and the Banshees during this period, you might get curious enough about lesser known bands like Love Tractor or Shriekback to give their music a try. Unfortunately, some of the bands I've chosen are just plain out of print at this point, meaning that even if what I've written piques your interest, you'll never be able to hear the song for yourself because it's just not available (I would be willing to bet that some of these bands are even hard to track down on peer to peer networks).

Waxing Poetics is, of course, one of these bands. Hermitage is their debut album, and it got some decent airplay on college radio and the video for "If You Knew Sushi" even made it onto 120 Minutes for a spell. They were based in Virginia, around Norfolk and Richmond, but they also had strong ties to Chapel Hill, where I first saw them play. Their sound, especially on Hermitage, was fairly unique. You could hear some of the Athens sound in their music (R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills was actually one of the producers on this record, along with North Carolina legend Mitch Easter), but Waxing Poetics were more pop-oriented without being derivative, occasionally sounding like the Connells, the Pressure Boys, and other local favorites from the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area. Their later albums didn't capitalize on the promise shown in Hermitage (they instead went for a darker, bluesier sound), but this record remains a classic of its time for those lucky enough to hear it. Five years later, Chapel Hill was inundated with a slew of bands trying to pick up where Hermitage left off, but none of them did it anywhere near as well as the Waxing Poetics, who by that time had released two other albums and all but vanished from the music scene.

I picked "Beauty and the Beatitudes", as usual, because it worked in between the two songs that surround it. Given different placement on the mix, I could have easily chosen "If You Knew Sushi", "Living Chairs (Going Through the Walls)", or "Walking on Thin Legs", each of which is a standout track. I really wish there was some way I could share this album with you; Hermitage remains one of my favorites from this era, and the fact that it's now out of print just only compounds the injustice of it not receiving the wider exposure it deserved when it was originally released.

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Track 13
"Groovy Tuesday"
Especially for You
The Smithereens

Believe it or not, in 1986 MTV actually used to play videos pretty much around the clock, as opposed to the three to four hours you get nowadays, most of which is just the same tired R+B/rap/formulaic pop that they've been playing for years and years and years. But it's not like the music they played back then was any better then than it is now; for the most part it was safe radio hits. Aside from 120 Minutes, a two hour (duh) show that featured alternative videos that aired at midnight on Sunday, you'd be hard pressed to find anything on the channel that wasn't in the Kasey Kasem's Top 40 that week as well.

But for a brief period in the summer of 1986, they gave Dweezil Zappa, son of Frank Zappa and brother of European Vacation star Moon Unit, his own show in the afternoon where he could play whatever he liked. And what he liked was the more guitar-driven stuff that was usually featured on 120 Minutes, so for once fans of alternative rock didn't have to wait until the wee hours on Sunday to see videos by their favorite artists. I remember tuning in and thinking the show was going to be a joke until I saw the first video he chose that afternoon: the Screaming Blue Messiahs' "Wild Blue Yonder" from their debut album Gun-Shy, one of my favorite records from that time (after I finish the commentary for the songs that did make the cut, I'll explain why it and a few of my other favorite records from 1986 aren't represented this mix). Right after "Wild Blue Yonder", Dweezil showed the Smithereens' "Blood and Roses" from their first record Especially for You. After that I was hooked; I knew the show couldn't last because it was just too far out in left field for the teen morons that have always made up MTV's core audience, but enjoyed it while it lasted.

Anyway. The Smithereens are a 60s throwback, a straighahead rock-pop outfit that borrows liberally from the Beatles, the Stones, the Byrds, etc. They're like R.E.M. without an agenda or any drive to innovate, with a little more appreciation for the late 50s tunes that are considered the beginning of rock and roll. The Smithereens often employ R.E.M.'s trademark jangle (which they in turn stole from the Byrds) but also incorporate layers of harmonies in the backing vocals and suffuse the whole thing with an air of optimistic innocence that is characteristic of the Beatles' early recordings. "Groovy Tuesday" isn't necessarily the best song on Especially for You, but then again it's really hard to rank the songs on this album because the songwriting is remarkably consistent throughout. It's really a shame that the Smithereens couldn't continue to build on the triumph of this first effort, but as their career progressed, they put out increasingly lackluster efforts that sounded more and more desperate to recapture the magic of this perfect gem of a record. Oh well. They're not the first band this has happened to, and they surely won't be the last. But at least we have some really great songs to remember them by.

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Track 14
"White Lines, Blue Sky, Black Top"
Land of Oppotunity
EIEIO

EIEIO is a band that I'm betting very few of you have ever heard of and even fewer have actually heard, but when I started to make this mixtape, I realized that their debut album, Land of Oppotunity, may well have been one of the most important releases this year. You see, by combining the twang of country music with the bluesy rock of the Rolling Stones, EIEIO became part of a quiet revolution that began in 1986 and bubbled over into a full-fledged movement when Uncle Tupelo released their seminal No Depression, an album that almost brought alt country into the mainstream. They weren't the only ones; 1986 also saw the release of Still Standing from Jason and the Scorchers, Lyle Lovett's self-titled debut, the Rainmakers' first album (also self-titled), records from the Golden Palominos and the BoDeans (who we'll discuss shortly), Dwight Yoakam's Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., and Steve Earle's debut, the blistering Guitar Town. Each of these records helped turn a floundering country music industry back towards its roots in the raw sounds of Hank Williams Sr. and exposed a generation of young musicians to the power of country music when you took it out of the studio and let it stay up until 2 a.m. getting drunk at a Replacements show.

EIEIO may well have been the least known of this bunch, but they also may have been the best, at least on this album. They were hard to figure out: their songs were decidedly country-influenced, both lyrically and musically, but they pulled off the twin guitar attack of Keith Richards and Ron Wood (or Brian Jones, or Mick Taylor) better than anyone else in the genre, even modern day country rockers Drive-By Truckers. They had L.A. haircuts and jackets, but their jeans, boots, and bolo ties were all Nashville. You got the feeling that even their record label wasn't sure how to market them, and that's likely one of the reasons they were never able to get the recognition that many of their peers garnered in the mainstream music press. They broke up after releasing the disastrous That Love Thang, their sophomore effort, which gave yet another unnecessary demonstration of what can happen when an artist spends too much time in Hollywood and starts believing their own hype (Ryan Adams, I am gazing fixedly in your direction). Still, Land of Opportunity is a classic, and "White Lines, Blue Sky, Black Top" is a classic road song that shows the ease with which EIEIO straddled the boundaries between rock and country.

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Track 15
"Angels"
Blast of Silence
Golden Palominos

The Golden Palominos are a fascinating little band: a rotating cast of established stars like Bob Mould of Sugar and Hüsker Dü, Michael Stipe of R.E.M., John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of Public Image Limited and the Sex Pistols; up-and-comers like Syd Straw and Matthew Sweet; and a semi-stable group of four or five lesser known musicians anchored by drummer Anton Fier (who had brief stints with both the Feelies and Pere Ubu). Each song on their first few albums was contributed and sung by a guest star (sometimes a song would be contributed by one artist and sung by another), but the sound was remarkably coherent despite the wide range of vocal styles and songwriting approaches.

Blast of Silence (subtitled Axed My Baby for a Nickel) is probably the most consistent album releaed by the Palominos, although it lacks the star power of some of their other releases (Michael Stipe, their most famous contributor, is absent from this effort even though he contributed lyrics for two songs and vocals for three on the release prior to this, Visions of Excess). Syd Straw handles the vocal duties on many of the songs, including two compositions from Little Feat member Lowell George and a contribution from dB and honorary R.E.M. member Peter Holsapple (his dBs bandmate Chris Stamey played on both Visions of Excess and Blast of Silence). Despite the avant garde reputation of the Golden Palominos and the rock pedigrees of the contributors, this record has a strong undercurrent of country twang that runs through most of the songs, making them part of the mysterious explosion in country-rock releases that became precursors to the No Depression alt country movement that would blossom five years later.

I knew I wanted to include one of the songs Syd Straw sang on because she has a really great voice and she's unlikely to appear on any of the year mixtapes that I will do subsequent to this one. "Diamond", the song contributed by Peter Holsapple, was my initial choice, but I had already decided to use the BoDeans' "Angels" to follow-up whichever song I chose from the Palominos and I couldn't resist the urge to put two completely different songs that happen to share the name "Angels" back to back. And the Palominos' "Angels" was co-written by Straw and Fier with regular guitarist Peter Blevgrad, who were the core of the band for this album, so it's probably a more appropriate choice anyway. It also happens to be a damn good song.

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Track 16
"Angels"
Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams
BoDeans

If only the BoDeans had been able to languish in relative obscurity for two or three albums, they might have had time to solidify their indentity and become one of the best rock bands of the decade, the northern plains answer to the rural southern gothic of R.E.M. This record, Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams (the title is cribbed from the Rolling Stones' "Shattered"), was a promising start, contributing yet another left field release to the coincidental critical mass of country-influenced rock releases that found their way onto record store shelves in 1986. They were virual unknowns when they were signed by Slash Records, mostly playing weekly gigs at the bars in the hometown of Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams was produced by T-Bone Burnett, who just coincidentally happened to be a part-time member of the Golden Palominos. The record has very clean production but with an earthy, rootsy feel that is perfect for the subtle touches of country that work their way into the song structures. The critics loved it, rightly so: the songs were eminently hummable, and thanks in large part to the singers' voices, the BoDeans sounded like nothing else. (Kurt Neumann, the more familiar-sounding of the two, sounds a little like a more ephemeral Jackson Browne. As for Sammy Llanas...well, he's really hard to describe——it's what you would imagine an angry midget on helium would sound like. But somehow their voices worked for the band, solo or in harmony, adding that unique touch that made them stand out.) They tried to pull a half-assed Ramones, listing the band members as Bob, Guy, Beau, and Sammy Bodean, but that gimmick didn't last long——I think they were treating it as a bad joke even before the album hit stores.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to cult status: music magazies like Rolling Stone and Spin drooled over them, and even non-music magazines like Time and Newsweek devoted a page or two to the band. This didn't really help them sell tons of copies of Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams, but it did make the band and their record company start to believe that if they could just tinker with the BoDeans formula a little bit, they could sell lots and lots of records and get their songs on mainstream radio. For their next record, the group reduced Llanas' singing time, choosing to make Neumann's more traditional (but far less interesting) voice the official voice of the BoDeans; added more ballads and keyboards; and in general wrote material that was more accessible to a mass audience. And I guess it worked: the resulting effort, Outside Looking In, earned them an opening spot on the American leg of U2's Joshua Tree tour and was so well-loved by Rolling Stone that they were declared Best New Band (even though Rolling Stone knew full well that they weren't really a new band; they were just new to the morons who listened to top 40 radio).

But that record also sucked: the songs were bland, overproduced, and totally lacking in the charm that makes Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams such a pleasure to listen to. I bought it, and I tried to love it because I loved the first one so much, but I knew it would never work when I was playing it for my lame-ass roommate Alan at NCSSM: the worst song on the record, a sappy, treacly, radio-friendly ballad——I think it was called "Runaway Love"——came on, and Alan, who up until that point had hated everything I had put on the stereo, said, "I really like this." And that was the end of the BoDeans for me. I listened to their next release, Home, but it was even worse than Outside Looking In, and I never bought another record by the band. Maybe they did eventually return to their roots and fulfill the promise of this first beautiful album, but I'll likely never know.

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Track 17
"Graceland"
Graceland
Paul Simon

I don't have anything against Simon and Garfunkel. Like most people my age who didn't grow up with them, they have nevertheless been a constant presence in my musical explorations, a background noise that I encountered time and again as I got to know the most fertile period of the generation that came before mine, the 60s. Their soundtrack made The Graduate into a better movie, I still remember what a fuss their Central Park concert caused back in the 80s, and I am genuinely moved by many of their songs. Having said that, I don't actually own and Simon and Garfunkel records, nor do I own any of their solo works.

Except Graceland, Paul Simon's mid-career masterpiece that may well outshine anything he did in his folkie days with Garfunkel, no matter now important those are in the history of rock. After the initial wave of praise and success generated by this record, there were a slew of accusations that Paul Simon hadn't fairly credited a number of his co-creators, most notably the African musicians with whom he played. The group Los Lobos, who were critically but not commercially well-known, even claimed that the song they work with Simon on, "All Around the World (The Myth of Fingerprints)" was a fully written song that Simon merely laid his own vocal melody and lyrics on top of but which he then claimed was wholly his own creation. We may never know the whole truth about its authorship, but Graceland will always remain an undeniably great album, and no matter what his collaborators might have contributed, it certainly would not be the record it is without Paul Simon's touch.

The title track is very representative of the album as a whole: lyrics that deftly weave larger themes into the personal stories of individuals; a catchy pop melody inflected with subtle ethnic, usually African, touches; and Simon's voice anchoring it all. No matter what your taste in music, it's hard to deny the perfection of this record and this song, and it would have been a crime to leave it off this mix.

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Track 18
"Reflecting Pool"
Big Plans for Everybody
Let's Active

Let's Active started out as a trio, but by the time their second full-length, Big Plans for Everybody, was released, it was really a showcase solo project for legendary producer Mitch Easter (in addition to working on albums by groups as diverse as Game Theory, Dinosaur Jr., the Waxing Poetics, the Connells, Superchunk, Suzanne Vega, the dBs, Love Tractor, Pavement, and Wilco, Easter also produced R.E.M.'s first three efforts along with fellow southern pop icon Don Dixon).

It's really hard to describe this record. It's been a favorite of mine almost since the minute I started listening to it, but it's a hard record to sell. Easter's voice borders on elf-on-helium, but it really works in the context of the songs, which are a mix of the southern rock leanings of R.E.M.'s Reckoning and the 80s pop-rock of Game Theory, all tinged with an indefinable gothic sense of loss. It was a great record for an overly thoughtful kid from the south who always dreamed of leaving home but knew he never would.

This is one of those albums that works so well as a single entity that it's hard to pry any of the songs away from its brothers to use on a compilation like this, but "Reflecting Pool"'s graceful catchiness is a good transition from Paul Simon's world pop sensibilities and to the Athens, GA sound of R.E.M. and Love Tractor. Every now and then you can still find this CD lurking in the used bins of the better independent record stores; don't hesitate to pick it up if you get the chance.

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Track 19
"Fall On Me"
Lifes Rich Pageant
R.E.M.

Most people have a story about the first single they ever bought or the first concert they ever saw, and more than a few of us also doctor that story so that we look as cool as possible given our current tastes. I honestly don't remember the first single or album I ever bought, and I would love to tell you that my first concert was R.E.M.'s show at Duke's Cameron Indoor Stadium in support of Lifes Rich Pageant with Let's Active opening. But it's not technically true. I did attend that concert fairly early on in my show-going history, but it wasn't really my first, because I had seen INXS and the Del Fuegos on INXS's Listen Like Thieves tour at the Cumberland County Civic Center a mere six months earlier (actually, I also saw Alabama there when I was younger, but I was dragged along by my mom; I never owned an Alabama record and all I remember about the concert were the gigantic cigarette advertising banners on the stage behind the band). INXS isn't such a bad first concert (I still think their work on the Swing, Listen Like Thieves, and Kick is really solid), but for someone like me, an R.E.M./Let's Active first show combo is pretty hard to beat.

It was the first concert I went to unescorted, so I think I get some partial credit. For INXS, my mother had insisted on coming, and even though she maintained an appropriate distance, there was never a real chance of getting into any trouble. At the R.E.M. show, I was dropped off and picked up, which didn't really give me much opportunity to do anything stupid, but still, I was in there by myself, free to be who I wanted even if only for a couple of hours.

"Fall On Me" was R.E.M.'s first near-hit, the song that could have been what "The One I Love" from 1987's Document became to their career. It is not coincidentally the most commercial-sounding track that the band had yet made on an album that was self-consciously constructed to be a more accessible effort after the slow southern swamp of Fables of the Reconstruction (they even hired John Mellencamp's producer). This was an ominous sign of the awful things to come on the overly commercial Green and Out of Time, but on Lifes Rich Pageant, the loud guitars and 4/4 beats were a welcome blast of rock from a band that was in danger of meandering too far afield from their bar band roots (I'm not knocking Fables——it's one of my favorite albums——but it was nice to see them return to earth after the more ethereal works on Fable). Michael Stipe's voice is still a ghostly echo, buried under Peter Buck's Byrds-like guitar work, but for the first time in R.E.M.'s career, Stipe's voice on Pageant has a clarity that was missing from the opaque murmurs that had characterized his style on previous efforts.

The subject matter of the lyrics is also much clearer. Whereas Stipe's politicaly leanings were veiled and enigmatic on earlier records, Stipe for the first time delivers an unmistakably activist message, referencing pollution, the plight of the native americans, political prisoners in totalitarian regimes, and our nation's own corrupt political system. "Fall On Me" is a prime example of this, tackling acid rain and the industrial interests that dirty our skies. It might sound a little more heavy-handed today that it did when it was originally relased because most of us have grown weary of Stipe's holier-than-thou preachiness (which has worn especially thin given the diminishing quality of the band's output in recent years), but back in 1986, when U2's overtly political arena rock set the tone for college radio acts, the lyrics were relatively subtle.

It would have been fun to include the rollicking "I Believe" with its non-sequitor lyrics ("I believe in coyotes/And time as an abstract") or the understated beauty of "The Flowers of Guatemala", but "Fall On Me" was the first R.E.M. single to get real attention from commercial radio and MTV, and as such it deserves a place here for its historical importance. It doesn't hurt that it's a pretty good song, too, a fine representative from the band's early period.

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Track 20
"Beatle Boots"
This Ain't No Outerspace Ship
Love Tractor

Love Tractor was another Athens, GA, band who unfortunately disappeared from the stage just as R.E.M.'s success was shining the spotlight of the music industry on the small southern college town. I'm not sure if they ever would have achieved the crossover success of the B-52s or R.E.M., but it would have nice to see them get a shot. Their vanishing act (a temporary but lengthy one, as it turns out——the band returned with a new record in 2001 after a thirteen year absence) was still three years away, and seemed almost inconceivable given the frequency of their tours; it seemed like they were playing the Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill or one of the other clubs in Durham, Raleigh, or Charlotte every other week. However, unlike R.E.M., who I have seen three times live, the stars never aligned to let me see Love Tractor, despite several failed attempts. The closest I ever came was while I was still at Davidson and I was going to go see them at a Charlotte club with my friend Pete. I was actually at his house and we were getting ready to go to the club when we got a call from one of Pete's friends: the guitarist had broken his hand and the show was canceled. Soon after, the band members went on their extended hiatus from the music industry.

This Ain't No Outerspace Ship was Love Tractor's first full album with vocals, and it's also their best. Legend has it that when the band started out, they were too poor to afford the gear they needed for a vocalist, so their first three albums were mostly instrumentals, with the occasional wisp of a vocal floating through a track here and there. Who knows if it's true, but given the strength of this album, you wish they had given singing a shot a little earlier, because while their previous efforts are certainly good, they aren't compelling in the same way that this record is. I always think back to David Byrne's quote in the liner notes for Stop Making Sense: "Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily." (Another favorite line of mine from those notes: "People will remember you better if you always wear the same outfit.") I think Byrne meant it as an insult, implying that we're too much of an ADHD culture to concentrate on something as abstract as music for longer than 15 seconds without the anchor of language to keep us from drifting off to some other activity, but no matter what he meant by it, it's true, and the comparision between Love Tractor's wordless albums and their later lyric-filled efforts are proof of this (although the band never forgot its instrumental roots, always including at least two or three tracks sans vocals on every release).

Anyway. Enough about David Byrne. This is supposed to be about Love Tractor. "Beatle Boots" is a great song, but I could have chosen almost anything from this record. "Small Town" and "Outside With Ma" are odes to rural life that are on par with John Mellencamp's "Small Town" or Whiskeytown's "Jacksonville Skyline", while "Cartoon Kiddies" and "Amusement Park" are just plain fun. "Rudolf Nureyev" and "We All Loved Each Other So Much" are the two instrumental offerings, and they are probably the most beautiful songs on the record (hell, they're probably the most beautiful songs Love Tractor ever wrote). The songs all slide into that perfect guitar-driven pop groove that chugs irresistably along, but they also have that touch of melancholy that turns these tracks from merely excellent to brilliant (the opening lines from "Beatle Boots", sung over a thoroughly danceable beat, are great examples of this: "Well I heard you singing out of key on your way home last night/Does this mean that you're hurting down inside?"). Love Tractor would never again put as many perfect songs on a single record again, although that's likely due to the fact that their output over the past 15 years has been limited to only two successors to This Ain't No Outerspace Ship's legacy, Themes from Venus and The Sky at Night. Any of these three discs is well worth picking up, but This Ain't No Outerspace Ship will always remain the band's pinnacle.

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