Valentine's Day Mix Tape

Probably the most popular Valentine's Day gift after flowers and candy is the mix tape. Or mix CD, but compact discs are a lot less personal than old-fashioned cassettes, collected with favorite songs from various sources.

Here's a 14 song virtual Valentine's Day mix tape, split into two seven song sides. These are either songs I've recently posted here or deep links to other places on the internet. Side A is mostly my stuff and side B is mostly linked elsewhere. I had to end with "Whole Wide World", because that's one of my personal theme songs. My jam, as the kids say.

Side A:

1. Baby Lemonade - How Deep Is Your Love?(Bee Gees cover)
2. The Chevelles - Lost in Love(Air Supply cover)
3. Marshall Crenshaw - Cynical Girl
4. The dB's - Big Brown Eyes
5. Donovan - Wear Your Love Like Heaven
6. Flying Color - I'm Your Shadow
7. House Of Love - I Don't Know Why I Love You

Side B:

1. Jennifer Gentle - I Do Dream You
2. Nada Surf - Always Love
3. Rogue Wave - Every Moment
4. Todd Rundgren - I Saw The Light
5. Teenage Fanclub - Your Love Is The Place I Come From
6. Tracey Ullman - They Don't Know
7. Wreckless Eric - Whole Wide World

Four little words

..that everyone loves to hear on Valentines Day

pitchers and catchers report

Hooray baseball!

Early Easter eggs

After many years of no Mitch Easter releases, there have been two so far this year: a Sneakers reissue, Nonsequitur Of Silence, and a brand new solo album, Dynamico.

The Sneakers reissue has been out for a couple of weeks now, and features both of their original eps (Sneakers and In The Red) plus nine bonus tracks, mostly from the long out-of-print 1992 Racket cd. Sneakers, for the uninitiated, were the late-70s band that included two future dB's, Chris Stamey and Will Rigby, as well as Easter. The first ep (engineered by Don Dixon) was mostly Stamey with a backing band, and the second was a Stamey/Easter collaboration. The Racket bonus tracks were recorded by Chris and Mitch in the early 90s on vintage 70s equipment. dB's or Let's Active fans who haven't heard the Sneakers or don't have Racket should definitely grab this disc.

I have Racket, so I haven't picked up the new Sneakers reissue, mostly because I've been too busy digging Mitch Easter's new solo album Dynamico. This is his first album of new material in nearly 19 years (Imagine if Scott Miller stopped making music after Game Theory's Two Steps From The Middle Ages, didn't form the Loud Family, and hadn't done anything until now. 19 years is a long time), it sounds like the logical followup to the last Let's Active album, Every Dog Has Its Day, with the same crunchy guitars and twisted hooks that made Mitch famous twenty plus years ago. The album isn't officially out until March 14th, but it's available from right here, right now. And like Jesus said (Jesus Jones), there is no other place I want to be!

I've had the album for about a week, and in classic Let's Active fashion it took awhile to sink it, but now I can't get enough. All 14 tracks are great, but early picks to click include both songs available for download ("Sudden Crown Drop" and "Time Warping". links below) and "Dusky Lair" (speaking of Scott Miller, am I tripping or does that intro sound like "Rise of the Chokehold Princess"?). After all this time, it's great to have Mitch Easter back!

And next month, he's coming to San Francisco. Mitch Easter will be at the Rickshaw Stop on March 29th with Magic Bullets and the Bye Bye Blackbirds. And all ages are welcome so bring the kids. There's a link on his web site where you can email song requests, where I've requested my favorite Let's Active song, "Waters Part", but I think that's usually part of the setlist. Here's the video of "Waters Part"from youtube.

The last time I saw Let's Active live at the Berkeley Square, I'd just seen an magazine intervew with Robert Plant where he raved about Every Dog, calling Let's Active "the new Moby Grape". Mitch must have taken that interview to heart, because at that show, they encored with Moby Grape's "Hey Grandma" followed by the Move's "I Can Hear The Grass Grow". That was the last show on their Spring 1989 tour and may have been the last Let's Active show ever.

Mitch Easter mp3s (from Dynamico)
Sudden Crown Drop (125records.com)
Time Warping (mitcheaster.com)

Sneakers mp3s (from Nonsequitur Of Silence)
Ruby (recidivism.org)

The police in different voices

For me, the Police were a prototypical "high school band". Their four years in the spotlight (1979-1983) coincided exactly with my high school years, and I think of their last four albums in tandem with my freshmen, sophomore, junior, and senior years.

The month I graduated from high school (June 1983), the Police put out their last album Synchronicity, which I took as the symbolic end of my high school era. After that, they broke up and I pretty much stopped listening to them.

At least voluntarily. I still hear their music on the radio and in the checkout line, but I don't own any of their music on that newfangled compact disc format, and haven't felt the need to pull out my cassette of Ghost in the Machine. Their "regatta de blanc" sound hasn't aged that well for me, and their lead singer is (as the Brits would say) kind of a wally.

Still, when I found out the Police were kicking off Grammys last night, I figured I should reconcile my high school self by tuning in to see them. At the very least it would build up my DVR buffer, so I could watch the Simpsons commercial. They played "Roxanne", their first international hit, and it was a great performance. With all the baggage associated with the Police, it's hard for me to remember that they used to be a pretty decent band. When Stewart Copeland started banging his drumkit before the first chorus of "Roxanne", it was like the first time I heard that song, in the summer between middle school and high school.

I changed over to Fox and the Simpsons after T.I. and Pink (two people who weren't even born when "Roxanne" was a hit) gave a lifetime achievement to the Doors, another band inexorably tied to high school for me. Apocalypse Now came out during my freshman year, and I liked "The End" so I bought the first Doors album, followed in succession by the second thru fifth albums. Jim Morrision had already been dead for ten years then, so I thought they some obscure band that only Francis Coppola and me knew about. My "Doors phase" ended abruptly in the summer of 1982 after I read Danny Sugerman's No One Here Gets Out Alive and found out that Morrison was kind of a drunken loser. Say it ain't so, Jim!

But even after nearly 25 years of Doors detox, I still like some of their music.. In this interview from pitchfork today, David Brewis of Field Music talks about playing a Doors tribute band, which I think might work. In their standard live setup, FM has a guitarist, a keyboardist, and a drummer, but no bass player. Just like the Doors.

By the way, Field Music's new album Tones of Town which I plugged a few weeks ago, is now officially out, so pick it up. It doesn't sound like the Doors or the Police.

some band on some TV show

four three years ago

four youngsters from Liverpool

and now here they are

2006 Metamix

Continuing my "Friday On My Mind" five-song playlist tradition. Here are the five best tracks I discovered on other people's 2006 end-of-year mixes. My "2006 Metamix" if you will.

1. Chris Brown - I Won't Ask Why
2. Jonathan Coulton - Skullcrusher Mountain
3. Figurines - The Wonder
4. David Mead - Chatterbox
5. Don McGlashan - Harbour Bridge

Artist links go to artist info and track links go to mp3s. The Chris Brown is from 125records and the Figurines song is from their site. The other three are hosted at esnips by me.

I may add a writeup for each track but don't have time right now. The comments are open (even anonymous ones) in case any original compilationists or fellow recipients of these compilations feel like giving their own writeups.

High def hockey jams

February has to be the worst sports month of the year. The period between the football and baseball seasons just doesn't have a lot going on unless you're either a basketball or hockey fan.

Even though I wrote about the 1975 NBA Championship last week, I'm not much of a basketball fan. I'm only interested in college hoops during that one year each decade when my alma mater makes the NCAA tournament, and have less than zero interest in the NBA because of their thug mentality and the perpetual crappiness of our local side.

And interest in hockey usually waxes and wanes through the course of a season, waxing during the Stanley Cup playoffs and waning during most of the regular season, but since I got HDTV and started getting Sharks games in high def, I've been catching every period of every game.

Hockey is a sport that doesn't televise well on regular TV: everything moves so fast, it's hard to follow the puck, and the center-ice camera misses most of the action. In high definition, it's like being right there at rinkside. You can follow the puck and the action away from the puck, and there are all sorts of interesting angles to keep you interested. Ice hockey was invented for HDTV.

This week our San Jose Sharks had back to back home & home games with their main Pacific Division rivals, the Anaheim (no longer Mighty) Ducks. These teams have been 1-2 in the division for the past few years, and entered the NHL around the same time, and the two cities (San Jose and Anaheim) are mirror images of each other -- second cities in a large metro area that are derided as faceless suburbs by their famous northern neighbors. As a NoCal-SoCal rivalry, Sharks-Ducks is right up there with Giants-Dodgers and A's-Angels.

The two games this week were a split, with the Ducks winning 7-4 in San Jose and the Sharks winning 3-2 in Anaheim. I watched nearly every period, except the final period on Tuesday after the Sharks fell behind 6-1. I can't remember ever watching an entire regular season game in the pre-HDTV era, but HD hockey vs. non-HD hockey is like day vs. night.

Almost everything is better on HDTV. I saw the New York Dolls on PBS Soundstage last weekend, and the Dolls (esp. Johansen and Sylvain) were not better in HD. Every rule has an exception.