Back when I turned 30, I thought I’d make myself a little gift: a couple of mix CDs with 30 songs: one for each year I was alive, and to make it a little harder, one from each year I was alive. Then I thought I’d play it for the guests at my birthday party.
Here was that list:
1970 – The Jackson Five: ABC
1971 – Van Morrison: Tupelo Honey
1972 – Stevie Wonder: Superstition
1973 – Marvin Gaye: Let’s Get It On
1974 – Bob Marley and The Wailers: No Woman No Cry
1975 – Bruce Springsteen: Thunder Road
1976 – Steely Dan: Kid Charlemagne
1977 – Elvis Costello: (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes
1978 – Earth, Wind And Fire: September
1979 – The Knack: My Sharona
1980 – Talking Heads: Born under Punches
1981 – Squeeze: Tempted
1982 – Roxy Music: More Than This
1983 – Spandau Ballet: True
1984 – The Smiths: Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now
1985 – The Cure: In-Between Days
1986 – New Order: Bizarre Love Triangle
1987 – 10,000 Maniacs: The Painted Desert
1988 – Pixies: Gigantic
1989 – The Bangles: Eternal Flame
1990 – Matthew Sweet: I’ve Been Waiting
1991 – My Bloody Valentine: Soon
1992 – Bettie Serveert: Under the Surface
1993 – The Breeders: Cannonball
1994 – Portishead: Wandering Star
1995 – Bjork: Hyper-Ballad
1996 – Underworld: Born Slippy
1997 – Yo La Tengo: Sugarcube
1998 – Boards Of Canada: Aquarius
1999 – Aimee Mann: Deathly
2000 – Stereolab: Outer Bongolia
The trouble with making lists is the stuff you missed. All those other words and tunes of which you could not get enough, that wormed their way inside your head and made you press the rewind button over and over, or made you laugh and bring you close to tears like the songs listed above – they couldn’t fit on the CD. Like the Eraserheads’s “Alapaap,” Liz Phair’s “Stratford-on-Guy,” Neil Young’s “Powderfinger,” Cyndi Lauper’s “Time after Time,” the Joe Boxers’ “Just Got Lucky,” Galaxie 500’s “Fourth of July,” Current 93’s “Frolicking,” Prince’s “Kiss,” The Five Stairsteps’ “Ooh Child,” Pink Floyd's "Fearless" (or "Astronomy Domine," or "One of These Days"), Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good,” Tears For Fears’s “Head over Heels,” The Clash’s “The Guns of Brixton,” The Incredible String Band’s “A Cellular Song,” Everything But The Girl’s “Get Me,” Alex Chilton’s cover of “Let Me Get Close To You,” Modern English’s “Melt with You,” Spiral Starecase’s “More Today than Yesterday,” Dub Narcotic Sound System’s “Ship to Shore,” Ray-An Fuentes and Tillie Moreno’s “Umagang Kay Ganda,” The Cardigans’s “Daddy’s Car,” Bryan Adams’s “Heaven,” The Fall’s “No Bulbs,” Anita Baker’s “Been So Long,” Tom Waits’s “The Heart of Saturday Night” (or “Temptation”, or “Jockey Full of Bourbon”), Oasis’s “Wonderwall,” Dianne Reeves’s “Better Days,” American Music Club’s “Why Won’t You Stay,” The Police’s “Voices inside My Head,” Seona Dancing’s “More to Lose,” David Bowie’s “Five Years,” NRBQ’s “What Can I Say,” Yes’s “Heart of the Sunrise,” Fotheringay’s “The Sea,” Yoko Ono’s “Listen, The Snow Is Falling,” Superchunk’s “The First Part,” Sarah McLachlan’s “Elsewhere,” De La Soul’s “Eye Know,” Apo Hiking Society’s “Mahirap Magmahal Nang Syota Nang Iba,” Rickie Lee Jones’s “The Horses” (or her version of “My One and Only Love”), Dinosaur Jr.’s “Get Me,” The Eagles’s “I Can’t Tell You Why,” PJ Harvey’s “To Bring You My Love,” Richard Dworsky’s “A Morning with the Roses,” Katrina and The Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine,” Tuck and Patti’s cover of “Like a Lover,” The Chemical Brothers’s “Chemical Beats,” Prefab Sprout’s “Cars and Girls,” Luna’s “Slide,” Aphex Twin’s “3,” Jane Monheit’s version of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android,” Paul Simon’s “Hearts and Bones,” the Trees’ “The Garden of Jane Delawney,” U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” (or “Bad,” or “New Year’s Day,” or “Sunday Bloody Sunday”), Cowboy Junkies’s “Song for Elvis,” Roxy Music’s “More Than This,” Cassandra Wilson’s cover of “Harvest Moon,” Fiction Factory’s “Feels Like Heaven,” The Brand New Heavies’s “Brother Sister,” Led Zeppelin’s “Since I’ve Been Loving You” (or “When the Levee Breaks”), John Cale’s “Paris 1914,” Orchestral Maneouvres In The Dark’s “If You Leave,” the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine,” or The Magnetic Fields’ “100,000 Fireflies.”*
And because this was a party, certain genres of music simply wouldn’t work. The music couldn’t be too “noisy” or “experimental;” thus, no John Zorn, no Cryptopsy, no Coil, no Merzbow, no Swans, no Ghost. No Bach or Shostakovich or Feldman.
The starting point of 1970 imposes some rather strict limitations**: no early ska, no Cole Porter-era tunes. Dusty Springfield’s “No Easy Way Down,” Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” the Supremes’ “Reflections,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her,” The Velvet Underground’s “Stephanie Says,” Billie Holiday’s “I Thought About You,” The Troggs’s “A Girl Like You,” Smokey Robinson and The Miracles’s “Tears of a Clown,” or Nat King Cole’s “Red Sails in the Sunset” couldn’t be included. No Miles, Sinatra, Coltrane, the Rolling Stones, Dylan, Mingus, Ella Fitzgerald, Louie Prima, James Brown or Bill Evans when they really really counted.*** And God, no Beatles.
I think it’s time to burn some new mix CDs.
*As much as I would have loved to stuff my list with obscure funk or some underground punk or something, I can’t. My tastes, ultimately, are fairly indie-mainstream (and sometimes unapologetically embarrassing – I don’t apologize for “Eternal Flame”): mostly Matador circa 1995 or so. And all I know of hiphop is only really book knowledge, which is even more embarrassing. My forced immersion into Public Enemy and the Wu-Tang Clan didn’t work.
Somewhat frightening to me is the idea that there seems to be no Filipinos on the list, with the exception of Joey Santiago from the Pixies! Not sure what that means. (Kim Deal, by the way, is the only person that appears twice – not sure what that means either.)
**I also toyed with the idea of limiting the songs to what I was actually listening to during that year, but that would have been extremely embarrassing and/or unlistenable: horrible pop-jazz in the mid-‘80s, dopey disco in the late ‘70s, “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” in the early ‘70s. Plus my memory just isn’t that good: what were you listening to in first grade? (I’m fairly positive it was “Rubber Duckie,” then at some point I moved on to the theme from “Voltes V,” and then, much later, when I became really conscious of music on the radio, “My Sharona,” “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” and “Another One Bites The Dust.” I was a real late bloomer – to put this all into perspective, the first full-length album I ever bought was The Police’s Synchronicity.)
***Okay, that’s not completely true. “Brownsville Girl” from Dylan’s Knocked Out Loaded is fantastic. So is “Beast of Burden” (was that from Some Girls?). And I have a soft spot for some of Sinatra’s disastrous forays into ‘70s singer-songwriter territory, with his atrocious covers of “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and “Mrs. Robinson.” And yeah, Interstellar Space is great, and so are parts of Get Up With It. And I think “The Payback” was from 1972. Have I listed all the exceptions yet?