The Velvet Underground – Rock & Roll

Some of my fellow Still in Rotation contributors have started up a new site called Raised on the Radio and they invited me to put together a playlist for the Twisted Mix-tape Tuesday feature. Just to make it more fun, every week there’s a new theme. This week the theme is anything goes so I got to choose my own theme.

I can be a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to creating a playlist (or a CD or tape, back in the day), so half a dozen ideas that popped into my head were rejected after I was unable to settle on five songs. I decided on songs in foreign languages partly because that limited the number of songs I knew and made it easier to keep it to five.

The name of the site and the idea behind it reminded me of this Velvet Underground song. Such a classic, and so true.

Then one fine morning she puts on a New York station
You know she don’t believe what she heard at all
She started shaking to that fine, fine music
You know her life was saved by rock & roll.

I grew up outside of New York City and the station we listened to was WLIR. I didn’t realize how lucky we were to have that station until we moved up to Maine half-way through my high school years. There were some pretty glaring gaps in our classmates’ musical knowledge, at least to our way of thinking, though they seemed happy enough.