Supermix 1

Created January 1990

Side 1:
Radio Radio – Elvis Costello and the Attractions*
Leave It – Yes*
I’ll Be You – The Replacements*
Rhythm Section Want Ad – They Might Be Giants*
Sister Disco – The Who*
Jet Airliner – The Steve Miller Band*
Special – Violent Femmes*
Panama – Van Halen*
Busload of Faith – Lou Reed*
Another Nail for My Heart – Squeeze*
Bye Bye Love – The Cars*
Sultans of Swing – Dire Straits*

Side 2:
Carry on Wayward Son – Kansas*
Next to You – The Police*
I Don’t Remember – Peter Gabriel*
Tin Machine – Tin Machine*
The Apartment Song – Tom Petty*
Exhuming McCarthy – R.E.M. *
Rock the Casbah – The Clash*
And We Danced – Hooters*
Let My Love Open the Door – Pete Townshend*
Nitro Burning Funny Cars – The Dead Milkmen*
Only the Good Die Young – Billy Joel*
The Happiest Days of Our Lives/Another Brick in the Wall Part II – Pink Floyd*

*Artist’s series debut

Much of the genesis of the first Supermix (retroactively labeled Supermix 1) is detailed in the introduction to this project. Briefly, I was developing a passion for rock & roll, and combined with my lifetime collector’s mindset (and the habits of teens of the late ‘80s), I decided it was time to make a mixtape.

The initial idea was to compile one and only song from each of my favorite musical artists, recorded onto a blank cassette tape (a familiar hobby for Gen X teens). I more or less achieved that, though clearly I considered a musician’s solo and band work to be separate artists (e.g., the inclusion of both a Who song and a Pete Townshend solo song), and I recall being disappointed that I was unable to fit in a song by XTC (they show up on Vol. 2). I managed to sequence it perfectly into a 90-minute collection, drawn from various years of rock history, and listened to on a near constant loop for the next several months. It was a glorious mix, full of the sounds that were going a long way to make that one of the most pleasurable times in my life. (Seriously, my first year of high school was better than all middle school and elementary school combined. We’ll get to the second year.)

While some of these artists had drifted through my transom years before (for some reason folk-punkers Violent Femmes seemed to be universally known at my middle school; fellow dorks had turned me on to the brilliantly moronic Dead Milkmen; and I’d stumbled upon They Might Be Giants via a Dr. Demento MTV special), the bulk I’d discovered in only the preceding year via my newfound habit of listening to the local classic rock radio stalwart, New York City’s 102.7-WNEW (widely credited as having created the Classic Rock format, and later to become my brief place of internship during a college summer). Today, the classic rock format is regarded as excessively limited and hidebound (the Beatles, the Stones, Zeppelin, the Eagles—that’s about half the playlist), but WNEW was surprisingly expansive at the time. Those same go-to names were the backbone, but it’s also how I learned about Squeeze, the Replacements, and the Clash, bands that are hard to come by on your modern classic rock satellite station (I think; like many people, I hardly listen to any radio these days). Better yet, the station made sure to regularly feature new offerings by these acts (whose members, let’s recall, were probably still under 50), so it didn’t feel like I was wallowing in the past—familiarizing myself with the canon was putting myself on the vanguard of something still vital and exciting. Listening to WNEW was opening my mind and my world to a creative world more intriguing, more mature, and flat-out cooler than any body of art I’d yet come across in my young life.

WNEW also played Elvis Costello (I’d recently purchased his new album, Spike, thanks to their heavy rotation of “Veronica), though he’d first caught my attention on TV, when I watched the Saturday Night Live 15th anniversary special and saw a clip of his notorious musical-guest moment, interrupting himself seconds after he started performing, impromptu ordering his band to switch to the unauthorized-for-air, media-critical “Radio Radio.” The clip cut off five seconds after the song switch, but that was enough time to hear the song’s indelible keyboard riff, six notes that completely fascinated me. It led me to borrow multiple Costello CDs from my local library, and purchase EC’s greatest hits mostly sound-unheard. “Radio Radio” quickly became my favorite song by my favorite artist, and while I’ve lost most of my Costello ardor in the past few decades (I haven’t enjoyed any of his new efforts since the ‘90s, and I’ve now seen him deliver disappointing stage performances three times), his earlier body of work has never stayed absent from this collection for long. It’s fitting that my first and most beloved Costello tune is Track 1 on Side 1 of Supermix 1.

In fact, I’m very happy to say that now, more than 36 years later, I still find Vol. 1 to be an accurate and enjoyable summary of my musical tastes—not just at the time, but representative of my entire life. Today, there’s not a song here I don’t enjoy, and many remain among my favorite songs of all time. (Trivia note: Brief 1980s sensation the Hooters appear on this mix—their sole contribution to the entire series. And Pink Floyd, never my favorite of the rock pantheon, wouldn’t return till more than 100 volumes later.) I listened the shit out of this cassette over the ensuing months, and yes, I still own it (I played it at my birthday party last summer, which means yes, I still own a cassette player). I’m proud of the first Supermix; I think it reflects extremely good musical taste for a 14-year-old with limited social skills. It’s an extremely fitting start to the lifelong project these mixes have become.

BEST TRANSITIONS: “Radio Radio” to “Leave It” (nailed it off the bat!), “Tin Machine” to “The Apartment Song,” “Exhuming McCarthy” to “Rock the Casbah.”