Supermix 11: Rise

Created spring 1992

Side 1:
Now We’re Getting Somewhere – Crowded House
She’s So Young – The Pursuit of Happiness
Double Vision – Foreigner
Little Bit O‘ Soul – The Music Explosion*
Red Rain – Peter Gabriel
Heading for the Light – The Traveling Wilburys
Dirty Blvd. – Lou Reed
Ages of You – R.E.M.
5:15 – The Who
I Get Around – The Beach Boys*
Wake Up My Love – George Harrison
Human Hands – Elvis Costello and the Attractions
Feet Don’t Fail Me Now – Utopia*
Can’t Stand Losing You – The Police

Side 2:
Dinner Bell – They Might Be Giants
Sowing the Seeds of Love – Tears for Fears*
It’s Only Love – Bryan Adams
Evil Woman – Electric Light Orchestra*
Frankly Mr. Shankly – The Smiths
Rise – Public Image Limited*
Domino – Van Morrison
Rock and Roll Girls – John Fogerty*
If There Is Something – Tin Machine†
Strawberry Fields Forever – The Beatles
Vicky Verky – Squeeze
Dead Man’s Curve – Jan and Dean*
Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway) – Billy Joel

*Artist’s series debut †Unavailable on Spotify

What makes a Supermix great? The obvious answer is the quality of its songs, the coherence of its sequence. But just as important is the circumstances of my life at the time of its creation and my heaviest listening of it, the memories it conjures for me. In light of that, Vol. 11 is one of the very best: It’s the sound of the summer of 1992, which by all measurements has to be considered one of the best periods of my life. I spent a month on a program in Oxford, England, studying theater and traveling through Britain and France. I made some fantastic (albeit short-lived) friendships, and hallelujah at last, I scored my first girlfriend. I don’t think I’ve ever felt better about my life and myself than I did that summer, and I bet not a month has gone by since then that I haven’t wished I were back there.

In fact, all told, 1992 was an awesome year for me. Little Shop of Horrors was my greatest theatrical triumph, friendship was coming easily to me both in and out of school (even if I wasn’t a ladies man, I had no trouble accumulating girls as friends), and I’d even developed a sort of honored status at my school as the smart, cynical iconoclast who knows a shit-ton about rock & roll and does “real” community theater on the side. (I haven’t mentioned the school theatrical productions I took part in, because ugh.)

And I graduated high school that spring. Yes, I’d completed only three years, but the province of Quebec has a unique system in which students graduate after 11th grade (or “Grade 11” in Canadian parlance), then attend two years of a junior-college type institution called CEGEP. (It stands for something in French.) One advantage of my all-boys high school is that it had a special Grade 12 program, open to students from all over Montreal who were planning to attend university outside the province, whether in the U.S. or elsewhere in Canada. So effectively, I graduated in the spring, then went back to the same school in the fall. (Though the Grade 12 students held a lot more status and perks than the rest of the student body—most notably the fact that starting my year, or class and our class alone welcomed the school’s first female students in its 80-plus year history. More on that later.) My grandparents flew in from Florida to attend my 11th-grade graduation, and there’s a photo from the ceremony that I cherish (but can’t locate): Me standing between them, my arms around them, a look of confidence and newfound maturity spreading across my face, the pure joy of Jewish grandparents on theirs. These were my last two grandparents (my dad’s parents); within three years one would be gone and the other would have lost most of her mental faculties. I didn’t have much in common with these working-class children of the Depression—I wish I’d appreciated them more at the time—but I loved them, and I know they were good people who cared more about the happiness and health of their family than every other conceivable thing on earth combined. It makes me unspeakably happy to imagine that moment, when they were with me at the very peak of my new sense of belonging and security.

Then there was Oxford. In hindsight, I owe my parents a lot of appreciation for trusting me to go on this adventure, for letting me spend the summer acting when they’d continually told me it was not a practical life goal. It was indeed an adventure: In a mere four weeks, I played Hamlet, I tromped around that insanely charming college town, I went to dance clubs with my many new friends, I traveled the British countryside, I ate a ton of weird British candy bars, and I enjoyed my first romantic relationship

I’m not going to mention her name, because it’s an unusual name and I want to respect her privacy, and it somehow seems silly to give her a fake name. All you need to know is that she was smart, cute, sweet, and talented (a fellow acting student), a California girl. And there’s a magic to the beginning of our romance: We were sitting together one night in my dorm room, growing closer, and I made a move; she demurred, citing a recent heartbreak while telling me how much she adored me nonetheless. She left, and I was alone—as always, I thought. Until, an hour or so later, she knocked. I opened the door, she told me she couldn’t stay away, and it began. Since then, I’ve relived a version of this night literally dozens of times: A woman tells me she likes me, she values me, she might even think I’m handsome, and she knows I deserve love. But she just doesn’t want to be with me, for any number of vague reasons, all of them seeming to be convoluted or convenient ways of saying “I’m just not attracted you.” Every single time, remembering Oxford, I hope she’ll come back, and she (almost) never does (offhand I can recall only one instance when she did). But this girlfriend was different—she was indeed attracted to me, and she came back.

It was a glorious few weeks with her, as she made me feel genuinely desirable and I experienced a peace and confidence I’d never known, and have rarely know since. The pure joy during the bus trip when she sat on my lap, or the “Holy shit!” feeling I had every time we passed another sexual milestone. Just a couple years ago, we reconnected after decades out of touch; she had faced some serious challenges in her life, but she was as lovable, kind, and impressive as I remembered, her tiny gestures over dinner bringing back an almost unbearably painful wave of nostalgia. I met her husband, I met her kids, we looked at old photos. I cherish the memory of her, the knowledge that my first was such a wonderful person.

And of course, Supermix 11 was the soundtrack of that romance and of that summer, listened to again and again on the mini boombox I wisely made room for in the backpack I brought for the summer. It displays my musical tastes flowering into respectable rock idiosyncrasies: All time classics by the standbys of the Police, the Who, and Peter Gabriel, some killer ‘60s pop from the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean (I’ve still only surfed once), more dips into the modern-rock world (great tunes by the Smiths and Public Image Limited), curios from the likes of Utopia (Todd Rundgren’s new wave band; look up that video on YouTube), and very little regrettable cheese. (I can do without that John Fogerty song, but you can’t deny that hook.) That Elvis Costello song is a bit of a deep cut, which I consider it one of his most purely romantic, perfect for my summer of love. “Dinner Bell” is from They Might Be Giants’ then-most-recent album, the brilliant Apollo 18, which shows the band at their most melodically clever. And the title—Rise—is spot-on for my life’s trajectory at the time. (I recall that I considered calling it Now We’re Getting Somewhere, and while I realized how goofy that sounded, it would have been just as apropos.)

Several years later, I played the original tape of Supermix 11 during a road trip with some college acquaintances, and I was extraordinarily proud when they commented how they thought it was excellent. It’s the sound of my life at its best, and its sound and sequence will live in my soul for as long as I live.