I was down in New York mid-week, a quick overnight trip, and I’m still thinking about it. Normally when I go into the city I stay at my sister’s in Brooklyn if I’m going out at night or, like last month, just meet up with friends in the day and head back home before it gets too late. This time my husband was coming with me to see a play and he’s allergic to my sister’s cat so we needed to find a hotel. It was my frustration with the hotel situation that prompted me to think of the LCD Soundsystem song earlier in the week but now, after being there for 24 hours, I’m in love all over again.
I left in 2000 because my job was awful. I had an abusive boss who yelled at us constantly, I was just scraping by, and at the end of the work day, I’d trudge through crowds of tourists outside our Times Square office, then take the subway for an hour to my apartment in Bay Ridge. I liked Bay Ridge fine but living that far out in Brooklyn meant I didn’t do as much in Manhattan as I would have liked.
This time we stayed in Manhattan. The play let out at 9:30 and then we went looking for dinner. After dinner we walked back to the hotel, and walking through Times Square wasn’t awful like it was when I was dodging people looking up while I was trying to get to the subway. It was a spectacle, tacky and flashy, but beautiful all the same. It was a warm summer night and it was perfect weather for being out. I absolutely love, love, love being outside at night in New York in the summer. I don’t even mind the smells.
It’s hard to imagine living there now, right now, with the kids at their ages and the impossible cost of living. We couldn’t afford it, plain and simple. But I miss living there, being immersed in it and having everything just outside your door.
I know lots of people who don’t like New York. It’s too loud or busy or overwhelming. It’s hard to explain exactly what it is that I love so much. There are problems, I’m not blind to them, but there is still this pulse that I haven’t felt in any of the other cities I’ve lived in. I see it in some of the scenes captured in this video.
Hey! Kids! I’m in the crunch phase of a project at work and it’s the end of the school year, there’s a lot going on. Still, I did drive to work today and I did listen to a tape in the car so here we go. This Tape Deck Tuesday was just one of the cassettes where you wanted to have some albums on tape for the car or Walkman and not because you were creating some masterpiece.
Side A:
The Replacements
Let It Be/Stink
Side B:
The Replacements – Stink
Pylon – Gyrate
I’ve already written about Let It Be so I’m going with the Pylon track. Also because I just finished reading No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes, an oral history of City Gardens in Trenton, NJ. I was only at City Gardens once, to see Pylon in 1989. It was right before I graduated from college and I think now what lucky timing because if they had come through just a few days later, I would have left the area and missed the tour.
It’s no surprise that I first learned about Pylon because R.E.M. covered Crazy and talked about them a lot back in the mid-80s. I love that song. I had to know more. I can’t remember if I bought Gyrate or Chomp first but I have them both still, complete with the DB Records order form inside to order more great stuff! No matter which album I had first, I became a devoted fan. Some of the songs are just fun. “Precaution” comes to mind. Or “Read a Book.” You should see the way my kids look at me when I sing “Turn off the tv! You can learn more try to do without it.” Others are bit more nuanced, even if Vanessa is kind of shouting the lyrics as much as she is singing. Some of my favorite song lyrics are Pylon lyrics.
Speaking of books again, I really enjoyed the City Gardens book. If you had never been there, or weren’t aware of its legendary status, I’m not sure it has a lot of appeal. There are recollections of shows from band members who performed there as well as staff and club regulars. Since I was only there the one time, I didn’t really have much knowledge of the scene back then but I liked how each chapter/year began with a list of that year’s top 10 hits. Nothing could have been further from those top 10 than the stories that follow the listing. I’m not even a fan of most of the hardcore bands that are featured but I can appreciate how City Gardens was an oasis for kids in the area.
1989 was a period of time when Pylon was active in their on again/off again way. They had yet to put out Chain but a CD had been released that was a selection of songs from their two early albums. I loved the show. It was a small crowd, which always hurts a little, but on the other hand, I had plenty of room for dancing. Now rock & roll now!
My show may not have made the cut for inclusion in the book but I’m very glad that City Gardens existed and that I got to see Pylon there. I still have the t-shirt I bought that night and I consider it to be one of my most prized possessions. Sorry to say I have no idea if Jon Stewart was working the bar back then.
This past weekend was my 25th college reunion. I did not go. I never will.
I hated it there. It had been my safety school and I arrived with every intention of transferring after getting good grades for a year. Oh but plans can fall through as so often they do. After two rounds of transfer applications to at least a dozen schools, my choices weren’t better so I stayed put. While I had almost nothing in common with the vast majority of the students there (shallow, immature, young Reaganites looking to have the party experience they’d been too sheltered to have in high school), the university’s location in the Philadelphia suburbs was great. I could hop a train and be in the city in less than half an hour, I could ride my bike past centuries-old farms and enormous old houses, there were good record stores, and I had my work-study job at the costume shop.
The costume shop was my saving grace. I had auditioned for a play once during my freshman year but I discovered that because the university had a Master’s program in theater and they opened up their shows to anyone in the greater Philadelphia area, Equity actors even, I didn’t stand a chance of being cast as a middle-aged woman when plenty of actual middle-aged women (with much more experience) were also auditioning. My sophomore year I qualified for a work-study job so I went to the financial aid office and looked through the book of available jobs. There were two jobs at the theater, the box office or the costume shop. I looked into both but decided I could make more money in the costume shop and it looked like more fun anyway.
I was a dresser. The dresser is the person who gets all the costumes ready before the show, puts all the costumes in strategic locations backstage and helps the actors make those quick changes off stage. The rather less glamorous parts of the job included doing all the laundry and ironing and any mending the costumes required during the run of the show. You needed to be a jack of all trades in this small shop; wig maintenance, shoe repair, hat reshaping, hairstylist, always ready with a safety pin or a glue gun. Because I was pretty good at sewing I was allowed to help make the costumes prior to the show as well.
This was the real deal. The shop was run by a designer who drew what all the costumes would be and when we didn’t have something suitable in storage, we would build it from scratch. No Butterick or McCall’s patterns here, we would make patterns with muslin based on her specifications. We had several dressmaker’s dummies and an industrial strength iron and steamer, six or seven fancy Swiss sewing machines, a serger, two big padded and muslin covered tables around which several graduate students spent their days hunched over sewing costumes. If you were in the Master’s program, you had to do a practicum and you could choose building the sets, working in the costume shop, or doing dramaturgy. The set guys were pretty nice but the boss, not so much. The costume shop was definitely the life of the party.
I loved my job. I was good at it too. I took it seriously, unlike most of the other work-study students, most of whom only lasted a semester, a year at most, and were flaky and just didn’t think they really had to do anything. Maybe because I had once harbored dreams of being the one on stage, I felt you had better make damn sure everything was ready before the show and the costumes were all set up back stage because how shitty would it be to come flying off the stage and have less than a minute to get changed and back out there without help or without everything set up just so. I would set up the dresses so all the actresses would have to do is run off, I’d unzip/snap/button the dress they had on, they’d step into the next outfit, lying open in a circle on the floor, then I’d pull it up around them and zip them into the new dress. New shoes at the ready, hat, gloves, accessories, 1, 2, 3. Boom. Back out there. During a show’s run, I could easily rack up 50 hours of work each week.
The costume shop was my turf. When I walked across campus it was a toss-up whether I’d be ignored or laughed at by the other students but in the costume shop, I ruled. I had the key. I’d get there and open up before anyone else, then the actors would come in and be thrilled to see me. We’d talk, tell stories, and laugh. There was music and people and we were young and alive. To have a place where I was accepted and respected, by people who were way cooler than the big-hair/mullet crowd, made those three years tolerable. There were perks too. I never paid for doing my own laundry once I started working there because I had access to our private machines in the basement of the theater building. I scored some signature pieces of clothing, and found out where to buy my beloved shoes. I learned how to alter clothes and how to make fake blood.
When I left campus 25 years ago, I was relieved to be done with that place and haven’t missed it once since then. But I still keep the costume shop close to my heart.
#WhereILivedWednesday is a meme started and hosted by Ann Imig of Ann’s Rants. Please check out her site for other stories.
Let’s stay in Manchester a while, shall we? A few weeks ago I listened to a tape from my senior year of college that was titled “Anguish, Fear, Lamenting.” That one was a thinly veiled account of my frustrations with my lack of progress with a certain guy. Long time readers might have thought to themselves, wow, no Smiths on that tape? That’s a surprise.
Well, that’s because only a month earlier I had made the tape I listened to today. The title should tell you all you need to know. “Does the Body Rule the Mind or Does the Mind Rule the Body, I Dunno!” Subtitled “Morrissey’s Most Moaning Melodies.” I didn’t need any Smiths songs on that other tape because this one had 90 minutes worth, all trying to answer that question.
Body Rules the Mind (Side A)
This Charming Man
Handsome Devil
Hand in Glove
Ask
The Boy With the Thorn in His Side
Stretch Out and Wait
There Is a Light That Never Goes Out
Reel Around the Fountain
Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want
Oscillate Wildly
Well I Wonder
Half a Person
Suedehead
Mind Rules the Body (Side B)
I Want the One I Can’t Have
Girl Afraid
These Things Take Time
You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby
Miserable Lie
Still Ill
Back to the Old House
Accept Yourself
Unloveable
How Soon Is Now?
I Know It’s Over
What Difference Does It Make?
I contemplated writing this entire post just stringing together lyrics from these songs to tell the story but I don’t have that kind of time and the songs tell it all themselves anyway. So I made a YouTube playlist this time since these songs are all readily available, unlike some of the other old tapes.
Tomorrow should be #WhereILivedWednesday so I’m borrowing another song from this tape to help out. Stay tuned!
I’m reading Peter Hook’s The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club and I’m up to 1993. In addition to recording how horribly mismanaged the club was, especially financially, from its very inception, it’s full of tales of the Madchester scene.
The movie 24 Hour Party People covered some of this, and how much of that film or Hooky’s account of events can be really accurate is something he even acknowledges in the beginning of the book. With the kind of rampant drug use depicted in both and the intervening years blurring memories, I’m sure there are holes in some of these stories. Still, I believe it was a wild time and that crazy things were going on in Manchester back then.
For Tape Deck Tuesday I decided to pop in my Stone Roses Fools Gold cassingle. Do you remember the cassingle? It seems like such a joke of a format. This one was even some kind of maxi cassingle because it was the cassette version of a double A side. Both sides of the cassette were the same, the full version of Fools Gold, followed by What the World is Waiting For, then the short version of Fools Gold. Even though I bought the thing, this seemed stupid to me. So I pulled the old, piece of tape over the little hole on the top, move and recorded a bunch of other Stone Roses songs over the short Fools Gold and all of side B. Blasphemy? It’s a cassingle, how much worse can it get?
I used this tape for the first test of the tape deck, because cassingle.
Side A
Fools Gold
What the World is Waiting For
She Bangs the Drums
Side B
Elephant Stone
Waterfall
Shoot You Down
This Is The One
There’s the visual from Instagram for you.
I liked the Stone Roses and the Charlatans (UK) but I didn’t get into the whole scene. Maybe you needed to be on ecstasy to really appreciate them all but that wasn’t my thing. I rather liked being in control and I never really saw the appeal. I remember going to a Grateful Dead concert with a bunch of friends in high school and one guy in our group became truly green (I’d never seen a person actually turn green before) and passed out. These were some pretty hard partying kids but they were usually drinking beer and smoking pot and he had taken god only knows what. He was a big guy too, fell like a tree being chopped down. If he couldn’t handle that, little old me, who didn’t even smoke cigarettes, had better not take any risks. I wasn’t a total goody-two-shoes but I didn’t see the need to lose myself either.
I used to think I would really have loved to have been able to go to the Haçienda. Now I know that I would have been happy to have been there during the early days when it was a split of dance nights and live bands, and I probably would only have gone on the band nights, but I’d leave the ecstasy-fueled raves to others. The music is enough of a high for me.
After months of deliberating, I got my haircut on Saturday morning. I delayed it for so long because I can’t find a hairdresser I like near either my home or office. The last two times I got it cut while visiting my mother, and the woman did a better job than the previous cuts I’d had, but I also didn’t really try to get the cut I want.
Which is what, you might ask. I have no clue how to describe what I want and I never find a picture that really matches the idea in my head. I think I used to have this haircut, pretty much, not exactly right, but closer than I’ve managed since, well this New Order song was new.
This time I had two pictures that were not alike at all, really, but both had elements of what I wanted. I explained that I did not want a standard short haircut. That I wanted to be able to flip my head over, use a hair dryer, scrunch it up so it would be wavy (which my hair will do now in the hot and humid summer weather), but that I can’t stand having hair on my neck. So, it’s a short haircut, very short on the nape of my neck but long enough elsewhere to curl up some.
She started cutting and was making the very bottom hair in the back way too long. I told her, really, make it much shorter back there, I don’t want it on my neck (which it would have been in a big way). Ok, she made it much shorter and continued on. It seemed to be going fine. It was only when she was nearly done that I thought, fuck, I’ve got the standard mom short haircut. How did this happen? It looked nothing like the pictures I’d brought along when she was done. There’s no difference between my head flipped over or standing up. There’s not enough length to curl anything. I can make it poofy but that’s it. Yeah, the back is short but even that is still not right.
Sigh. In high school my mother used to limit my sister and me to one conversation about hair a day. I’m sorry, it was the early 80s. Hair was a big topic (pun intended) even if we weren’t big-hair girls. I got a short haircut during my senior year of high school and went off to college with one of those asymmetrical short haircuts that stood out on my campus full of Jersey girls with perms and teased bangs that sat up four inches high. I grew out the uneven cut and discovered that if I went to the on campus barber and held most of my hair out of the way, I could get them to buzz cut about an inch of the part on the nape of my neck by telling them to make it like the top of a ROTCs head. I believe you would call this undercutting but I didn’t know that then.
It’s hard to describe to people how to cut something they can’t see. I have failed, yet again. Here I am with the good hair weather before me (warm and muggy is perfect) and yet my hair is now too short to take advantage of it. I should have gone down to Astor Place. I should have waited until I went back up to my mother’s. I couldn’t take the hairgrow I had any longer though and now I am really regretting it.
But, only one conversation about hair a day. Everyone at work has seen my cut and heard it wasn’t what I wanted, though they all said they liked it. If you saw me over the weekend you probably are thinking, what’s your problem? It looks perfectly normal. Which is my problem. It’s probably much more age appropriate, and it is a big improvement over my grown out cut from just a few days ago, but it’s very ordinary. It looks good, she did a nice job, it’s just… not right.
Yes, that’s Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band in the Astor Place video and no, I don’t want my hair cut like that either.
This morning got off to a rough start, chalk it up to having had Monday off I guess. Just enough time to get yourself a little bit out of the daily routine to leave us scrambling to get out the door. Consequently I forgot my breakfast, which I usually bring along in the car because I don’t have time to eat it before I leave.
I was annoyed with myself for not having my breakfast and looked through the seven or eight tapes I had in the car to choose one for Tape Deck Tuesday. Which is how I came to decide that today was the day for ON THE FRINGE OF THE FRINGE (Assorted new music) Vol. 1.
This tape was given to me by a guy named Fred who was a graduate student when I was an undergrad in college. I can’t remember what year it was but probably 1986-87. My on-campus job in the costume shop at the theater meant that I got to know just about everyone at the school who didn’t fit the dominant big hair/mullet, sorority/fraternity paradigm, simply because that was the only welcoming spot. Fred wasn’t one of the regulars but he was around often enough at one point to have heard the music I was playing when I was the one working in the shop. He suggested I might be interested in some harder stuff and he’d bring me some tapes.
I assumed he’d bring in some of his tapes for me to listen to during whatever show was being performed, or he’d let me borrow some for the length of the run. Instead he gave me two tapes, ON THE FRINGE OF THE FRINGE (Assorted new music) Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. He may have had these mixes at home already or he may have made them just for me, I wasn’t really sure. He was very nonchalant about it so I took them to be tapes he really didn’t need cluttering up his car anymore. The insert was typed, on a typewriter, which is an impressive level of detail, or an admission of horrible handwriting, either one. I’m typing it up the same way it appears on the tape for authenticity.
I’m sure I dutifully listened to these two tapes a handful of times so I could feel like I could talk about them if Fred came around and not sound stupid but my overall feeling was, if this is the fringe of fringe, I’m pretty sure the actual fringe is not my cup of tea. I had heard of some of the bands and maybe one or two songs were something I’d heard on one of the other college radio stations’ hardcore shows but mostly this was unfamiliar territory.
Side A
FLIPPER
Sacrifice
The Light, the Sound…
The Old Woman…
Sex Bomb
HALF JAPANESE
Mt. King/Louie Louie
Thing With a Hook
8-EYED SPY
Diddy Wah Diddy
Love Split With Blood
Lightning’s Girl
Lazy in Love
EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN
Seele Brennt
Sehnsucht
Halber Mensch
Side B
WILMA
Life Without Adjec.
Georgie Girl
BUTTHOLE SURFERS
Concubine
Eye of the Chicken
Creep in the Cellar
American Woman
TEENAGE JESUS
Red Alert/Orphans
The Closet
Burning Rubber
Crown of Thorns
Red Alert
NO TREND
Teen Love
Your Love
Karma Nights
Ironically, the box is checked off for noise reduction. I’ve kept these tapes all these years mostly because I never get rid of music and I’ll admit that back in the day, I liked having something like this as part of my collection. I didn’t have Volume 2 in the car with me today but I think that’s the one with Hüsker Dü and Sonic Youth, among others, so I probably listened to that one more often. As for Volume 1, this No Trend song brought instant recognition when I heard it as I pulled into the parking lot at work. Timeless, really.
One drawback to my new-old car is the lack of a decent antenna. I’ve decided that must be the reason why I don’t get as many radio stations as I used to and I lose the ones I do get a lot sooner on my drive than I used to.
It hardly seems worth it to buy an antenna but I kind of miss being able to check out something I may not already know. I did have on my local college station the other day and Shazamed a song I liked since I felt sure I’d lose the signal before the dj told me the song. Only now did I get around to looking up the song and the band. This isn’t the same song I heard but it is the band, the Sam Roberts Band from Montreal, I think.
I love that I can find out a song by tapping on an app, then find it online, check out more songs by that band, look up some background about them, all on my phone. The speed and ease of music discovery is fantastic. I do really miss the depth of the old ways though. Even for bands I already know a lot about, I want the liner notes and the album art. I went to a record store in a nearby town yesterday that had lots of new releases on vinyl. My local record store doesn’t get in a lot of new releases and I had a bit of sticker shock looking at some of the album prices. $25-30 for a new record, just a normal length single LP, is not in my budget. I picked up an $8 CD of Superchunk’s Majesty Shredding instead. Of course I don’t have a CD player in the car so I’ll need to rip it to iTunes and transfer it to my iPod which I can use with the cassette adapter I bought. Yeah, I see how just streaming music is easier but I still want to read the booklet and buying an album, even at only $8, is going to mean more money going to the band.
As for Sam Roberts, I’ll do some more listening but so far I like the songs I’ve heard from this album.
Another unmarked tape. This time it was in a soft plastic case with a small picture of Ralph Fiennes from the movie Strange Days taped onto the cover. I thought at first that it must have been a tape with the Strange Days soundtrack on one side but no. Chances are there’s another tape floating around with that on it and I just mixed up the boxes. After all, it hardly matters when there’s nothing written on the box.
I am pretty sure this tape comes from summer 1996 since a bunch of the songs were on albums released that year but it doesn’t have any songs from the Luscious Jackson release later that year so it only makes sense that I made this compilation before that came out.
1996 would put it at a time when I was living up in Maine, trying to save up money for my next move (which wound up being graduate school in Wales a year later). I worked at an insurance company, very boring work, and I didn’t have a lot in common with most of my co-workers. I had bought my first car to get back and forth to the job. It was the most bare bones model they had. It didn’t come with a stereo, not even an antenna, just holes for where the equipment could go if you paid for the upgrade. I figured a car company stereo was probably pretty shitty anyway and I would just go to a local car stereo store and set myself up.
Well, I dropped a huge chunk of change on the stereo at the local place. I got a six-CD changer installed in the trunk, which was controlled by the unit in the car that had a tape deck as well, and a detachable faceplate. This was the height of sophistication in car stereos at the time. I really liked the detachable faceplate feature because I tried to go down to New York, Philadelphia, and DC as often as possible to visit friends and go to shows. So popping off the faceplate made my otherwise very basic car look like it had already been stripped down and not worth breaking into. At least that’s what I told myself and, whether the lack of a noticeable stereo had anything to do with it or not, my car was left alone.
The drive from where I lived in Maine to New York is at least six hours, more if you stop along the way or hit traffic. Usually I would load up the disc changer with six discs that would help kill all that time. However, once you get right down into the heavy traffic area, you can’t be fiddling with the stereo and I would have already burned through all six discs on the way down. I needed a tape that was fast paced to match that last stretch of the drive. I’ve found that the key to driving in cities is to drive as the locals do. This means it’s usually a lot faster and more aggressive than you might otherwise be comfortable doing. Add in unfamiliar territory, frequent lane switches, pothole-ridden pavement, construction detours, and that’s just on the BQE. I made this tape for just those kind of drives.
Side A
Wrong – Everything But the Girl
Shu Zulu Za – Poi Dog Pondering
City Song – Luscious Jackson
Spark Plug – Stereolab
The Noise of Carpet – Stereolab
Stutter – Elastica
Surprise – Luscious Jackson
Waking Up – Elastica
Diamonds and Buttermilk (Matt Warren remix) – Poi Dog Pondering
Big Deal – Everything But the Girl
Flipside – Everything But the Girl
The Chain – Poi Dog Pondering
Side B
Carnival – The Cardigans
Here – Luscious Jackson
Hard Sometimes (M-Theory remix) – Poi Dog Pondering
Before Today – Everything But the Girl
Percolator – Stereolab
Cybele’s Reverie – Stereolab
Wrong (Todd Terry remix edit) – Everything But the Girl
God’s Gallipoli (Arqueen remix) – Poi Dog Pondering
Platetectonic – Poi Dog Pondering
Complicated (Berlin remix) – Poi Dog Pondering
Rise and Shine – The Cardigans
Zap Disco (House-O-Magic mix) – Poi Dog Pondering
I’m fighting off a cold so for this installment of Tape Deck Tuesday, I wanted something that would not tempt me to sing along. I picked up Urgh! A Music War, which I’m pretty sure was taped through some elaborate VCR to cassette arrangement by my best friend, back in the analog days.
She had a friend from high school who had a cousin (if I’m remembering this right) who was into cool music and he dressed really funky and was really good looking with curly hair that flopped in his eyes. He was the one who had maybe taped it off of tv or something, and she had borrowed it during the summer and taped it for me. It wouldn’t all fit on one 90 minute tape so she left off bands we already knew enough about, like the Go-Go’s and Joan Jett, in favor of the more obscure ones like Klaus Nomi and Invisible Sex. Accompanying the tape was a long letter with her impressions of the visuals that I would have to wait to see until a future date.
I know I did eventually see the movie because I remember seeing those performances by Klaus Nomi and Invisible Sex and thinking, what is going on here? Very unlike any concert experience I had had up to that point. Likewise Skafish doing “Sign of the Cross” and Pere Ubu. And the Cramps. I knew the Cramps because my older brother was a big fan but I’d only seen the album covers and I just remember watching the video and wondering how Lux Interior managed to keep his pants from coming completely off. Many of the clips are on YouTube now but not all of them. I really wanted to see “Sign of the Cross” again but no luck.
Here’s the track listing for the tape I have (the actual movie listing is here):
Side A
Wall of Voodoo – “Back in Flesh”
Toyah Willcox – “Dance”
John Cooper Clarke – “Health Fanatic”
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – “Enola Gay”
Chelsea – “I’m on Fire”
Oingo Boingo – “Ain’t This the Life”
Echo & the Bunnymen – “The Puppet”
XTC – “Respectable Street”
Klaus Nomi – “Total Eclipse”
Athletico Spizz 80 – “Clocks are Big; Machines are Heavy/Where’s Captain Kirk?”
Dead Kennedys – “Bleed for Me”
Steel Pulse – “Ku Klux Klan”
Magazine – “Model Worker”
Surf Punks – “My Beach”
The Members – “Offshore Banking Business”
Side B
Au Pairs – “Come Again”
The Cramps – “Tear It Up”
Invisible Sex – “Valium”
Pere Ubu – “Birdies”
Devo – “Uncontrollable Urge”
The Alley Cats – “Nothing Means Nothing Anymore”
John Otway – “Cheryl’s Going Home”
Gang of Four – “He’d Send in the Army”
999 – “Homicide”
The Fleshtones – “Shadowline”
X – “Beyond and Back”
Skafish – “Sign of the Cross”
UB40 – “Madame Medusa”
The Police – “Roxanne”
I’ve mentioned before how just being able to see a small sampling of what the music scene was like outside of the mainstream (in those couple of years before I was old enough to take part it in it myself), felt like putting the puzzle pieces together. I don’t think I listened to this tape all that often but I liked knowing what the bands both sounded and looked like. It definitely played a part in my overall music education and if you get a chance to see it, you should do it.
Noisy Cats 