Supermix 3

Created Fall 1990

Side 1:
Suffragette City – David Bowie*
Don’t Cry – Asia*
Pictures of Lily – The Who
We Want a Rock – They Might Be Giants
Lift Me Up – Jeff Lynne*
Don’t Stop Believing – Journey*
Secret Journey – The Police
Hey You – Bachman-Turner Overdrive
Brother of Mine – Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe*
Get Up – R.E.M.
No Self Control – Peter Gabriel
Hello I Love You – The Doors*

Side 2:
Up the Junction (live) – Squeeze
If You Love Somebody, Set Them on Fire – The Dead Milkmen
The Story in Your Eyes – The Moody Blues
A Little Is Enough – Pete Townshend
Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song) – Billy Joel
Valerie – Steve Winwood*
Get Off of My Cloud – The Rolling Stones*
Kiss Off – Violent Femmes
Head Above Water – Hall and Oates
This and That – Michael Penn
Blues Before and After – The Smithereens*
Hello Again – The Cars
Layla – Derek and the Dominoes*

*Artist’s series debut

My family moved at the end of the summer of 1990. My father received a massive job opportunity—the presidency of the Canadian division of the pharmaceutical company he’d given his career to—and we relocated from suburban New Jersey to downtown Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Make no mistake: Being a teen in a city is very different from being a teen in the suburbs, and Canada (especially Quebec) is way different than the United States. Furthermore, I went to the wrong school:  I was a sports-hating theater geek who readily made friendships with the opposite gender, but I began attending an all-boys, athletically focused, arts-neglectful private school, complete with antiquated uniforms. (The why of that is not worth going into right now.) It was a difficult transition.

The upshot is that I was slow to make new friends, and I found myself with a lot of free time, which meant I threw myself into my newfound music fandom all the more. I was still finding most my new music via the radio (no more WNEW, but Montreal had CHOM, which was more than serviceable), and perhaps out of a sense of guilt, my parents were very generous with my allowance, enabling me to aggressively keep building that CD collection. Living in the downtown of a major city and not having many local friends, much of my leisure time involved supporting the local economy, primarily at record stores, comic-book shops, video arcades, and movie theaters. A rare weekend went by when I didn’t buy a stack of comics and at least one CD.

Naturally, I got to work on the next Supermix very early into that schoolyear. My love for classic rock continued, as I embraced ever more artists from the pantheon of greats. (There is no universe in which I wouldn’t have learned to love the Rolling Stones or David Bowie, no matter what might have occurred in my life.) Speaking of the classic rock pantheon, this edition marks the one and only Suerpmix appearance of the Doors who, at the time, were just one shade below the Beatles and the Stones on the list of legends. (That was the same year that dull Oliver Stone biopic came out; every summer, there was one kid at my summer camp who seemed to regard Jim Morrison as a poet on par with Keats or Shelley.) A couple years later, I’d turn hard against the Doors as dull and pretentious—there’s really no such thing as being a rock geek without having a healthy dose of teenage rock snobbery—though now that they’ve faded a bit from the public regard, I can appreciate them for what they are. (Not a whole lot, but still.)

Another thing to note here is the mix’s final song: “Layla” by Derek and the Dominoes. (A brief Eric Clapton project from the early ‘70s.) It’s highly unlikely you’re unfamiliar this song: Nothing screams “classic rock” more than that guitar riff, and you know that piano outro from Goodfellas (a movie that came out that fall, in fact). Throughout the history of the Supermix project, I’ve always been cognizant of sequencing, perhaps no more so than picking the perfect song to end each collection with. And in those early days, I always wanted the last song to be something I thought of as, for lack of any better terms, “big and sad.” Something veering on epic, something emotional. In its sound, in its bifurcated structure, and in its subject matter (about Clapton’s pining for his friend’s wife), “Layla” felt like a massive cri de coeur, and at the time, that more than anything else was what music was about for me. I’ve always been an emotional person, and I was a particularly emotional kid—especially that fall, as my life was being upended, as I was discovering a new world far beyond the radio dial, as I was growing into a new body. (I finally hit puberty two weeks into starting the new school, which was about as lousy timing as I could help for; my body has never really been my best buddy). I was learning how I felt about this world I was living in, this life I was leading, and music was my way of processing it. There’d be much, much more to come.