Supermix 2
Created May 1990
Side 1:
Bitchin’ Camaro – The Dead Milkmen
Don’t Stand So Close to Me – The Police
Just What I Needed – The Cars
D.I.Y. – Peter Gabriel
Father Christmas – The Kinks*
Dear God – XTC*
Private Eyes –Hall and Oates*
No Myth – Michael Penn*
Something to Hold on To – Trevor Rabin*
(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding – Elvis Costello and the Attractions
You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet – Bachman-Turner Overdrive*
I Can See for Miles – The Who.
Side 2:
I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band) – The Moody Blues*
The Finest Worksong – R.E.M.
Sleeping with the Television On – Billy Joel
Don’t Let’s Start – They Might Be Giants
Cold as Ice – Foreigner*
You Got Lucky – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Dreamworld – Midnight Oil*
Down Under – Men at Work*
Glamour Boys – Living Colour*
Mexican Radio – Wall of Voodoo*
In Quintessence – Squeeze
Lies – Violent Femmes
Strawman – Lou Reed
*Artist’s series debut
It was May of 1990, and I was winding down my first year of high school—and my best year of school thus far. I didn’t much enjoy being a kid—I was a small, sensitive boy with ambitious parents and an assertive older sister—so it was hard to feel like I had any control over my world whatsoever. Plus, I was creative and performative—I recall as early as kindergarten wanting to engage in the dramatic arts, but I found few opportunities. (Neither my elementary school nor my middle school offered any theater program, and while I was shipped off to sleepaway camp every summer, it wasn’t until I was 13 that I went someplace that had a theater program beyond “we’re doing a play.”) Typically, Childhood Noah felt like he had no status, no power, and very little importance.
Freshman year changed that. While puberty had not yet arrived (nor had any facility with romance, though arguably I still haven’t achieved that), I did, at last, find a sense of belonging. I scored a major role in the school’s fall play (the fairy Puck in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I loved and feel I excelled at), I was a member of the school choir that performed throughout our New Jersey area, and I made real friendships, some even with upper-classmen. (That did not thrill my sister, as I recall; she was a senior in the same high school, and I could detect her discomfort at her “little brother” poking his way into what she considered to be her world.)
I was advancing from childhood to adolescence at a rapid pace, and my discovery of rock & roll provided an exhilarating soundtrack. So four months after I completed the first Supermix, naturally, I got the hankering to do another one. That resulted in Supermix 2: As with Vol. 1, I would allow no more than one song by each artist, and while I’d permit performers from the first edition to return, it would be via different songs. (Why would I repeat a tune? There were so many other selections to enjoy in that endless expanse of rock & roll I was discovering day after day.) I’ve maintained that rule—to this day, 106 volumes in as of this writing, no song has appeared on more than one entry. (I have, however, included multiple versions of the same song by different artists—the original and a cover version, for example—but that wouldn’t occur till much later, and it’s happened only rarely.)
Nearly half of the song here (12 of the 25) are by artists absent from Vol 1, including XTC (who just missed inclusion earlier), Bachman-Turner Overdrive (prefiguring my soon-to-be-logical love for Canadian rock & roll), and the Cars. The latter are represented by “Just What I Needed,” which is not only still my favorite Cars song, but arguably my all-time favorite song by anyone ever. (The only thing I don’t like about it is that it’s hard to karaoke.) We also have the series debut of Hall & Oates, my favorite band when I was in elementary school; I do recall, for whatever reason, they were rarely played on my beloved WNEW classic rock radio station, and I would wonder if perhaps this vestige of Uncool Non-Rock Guy Noah was worthy of my fandom now that I was Cool Rock Guy Noah. So props to young me for, perhaps atypically, caring less about what I should listen to and more about what I wanted to listen to. (For the record, today I find nothing at all uncool about listening to Hall & Oates.) Also, Vol 2 marks the sole series appearances of Trevor Rabin (the guitarist for Yes; this was his minor solo hit, and it still slaps) and Wall of Voodoo (“Mexican Radio” is a novelty tune that holds up, IMO).
The mix also includes “No Myth” by Michael Penn, the singer-songwriter’s first single and his commercial peak. I first heard this song on WNEW on a Sunday in late January, the morning after I went to a synagogue youth group dance and enjoyed my first kiss. Obviously, this is a powerful memory, especially since the song’s chorus lyric—“Maybe she’s just looking for someone to dance with”—ended up feeling very apropos. I’d met the girl that night at the dance, and left possibly feeling better than I’d ever felt in my life to that point. Alas, I’d see her again only once more briefly, sans kissing. It was the first of many, many songs that would become attached to bittersweet romantic moments of my life, and it still affects me very potently today.
I enjoyed listening to Vol 2 nearly as much as I enjoyed the original, and it made me realize I’d developed a hobby that might stay with me for a long time, no matter what changes would happen in my life. And as I’d learned shortly before I made this mix, there were major changes in store for me in the very near future…