The Moon (from "The Moon" 7" and the "Song Islands" CD)
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The Moon, to me, is a pretty unique mix in the scheme of them and I’m not sure why. Possibly it is because it has the most tracks of any of the first wave mixes. By this time I had a definite format and scaffold for the mixes. Themes were very well underway. I chose The Moon as the subject of mix four I think because, it was then, and still is, pretty much my all-time favorite Phil track. I don’t think I’m alone in that club. Lanterns and Antlers set up the idea and Universe was a, then very newly released, favorite, which is why it took me until mix four to get to my favorite song, I guess.
After having such a hit, on Universe, with “Fred Jones” leading off it just seemed a natural choice to start this one of with “Cigarette”, another Ben Folds heartbreaker. This song, unwittingly, set the thematic tone for the first movement of this mix. That lilting piano, to me, was just immediately reminiscent of the soundtrack music to the film “Crumb” all about the life of cartoonist Robert Crumb. The soundtrack was all made up of old ragtime blues and jazz tracks from Robert’s personal collection of ancient 78’s, some original recordings, some rerecorded versions. This was on heavy rotation for a little while the last time I moved back to Atlanta, way back in 1997 A.D. I was working at a little second-hand shop for a short time before I got the job at Wax-n-Facts Records and I would play this on the little boombox behind the counter and tap my foot on the wooden floor and lean back in my chair and watch the night sky get dark blue and then black outside of the windows and sometimes I would pace back and forth or look blankly at a TV playing Martin reruns with the sound turned down. Anyway, very killer. Both the soundtrack and the movie are worth your time.
This, of course, all called to mind that little sample which provides the backbone of “Disseminated” by Soul Coughing. Perfect. He even talks about a “moon” in the lyrics. As well as a “Chocadile” Brilliant.
For some reason this segues into “Something Big” a Burt Bacharch cover by Jim O’rourke. Not sure why. I’m thinking it was maybe just the breezy feeling of it reminded me of the breezy feeling of “Disseminated”. Jim has always been a favorite of mine and with an insanely large and diverse discography (this guy seriously sets the standard for those of out here trying to chronicle an artist and his works… http://tisue.net/orourke/). He doesn’t make many appearances on the mixes, making this early encounter all the more odd or appropriate, depending on how you look at it.
There is nothing that logically flows into “The Moon” here, acoustic guitar maybe. It’s always the catch-22 about this song. It’s a big favorite and well loved but really, really quite sad. Kinda really brings a room down and sends people into an extremely introspective place, as it ought to. Which makes its placement in this chain of songs all the more odd. Yet, somehow, it works. On this particular mix I guess it serves as, sort of, almost the sole holdover of the “slow opening”s we usually see on mixes. This one really speaks for itself. It is seriously PIANO TITANIC.
I remember, years ago, right around the time that “The Glow Pt.2” and “Song Islands” came out and the world was sort of finally catching on to how incredible Phil is, I was hanging out with a group of trouble-makers (that actually really fucked up my life in a lot of ways) and everyone was pretty obsessed with those records and one night being at this one kids house and him sitting on a bed with a guitar trying over and over again to get the riff to this down. Haltingly attempting and attempting it.
Later, when I finally started solidifying my tattoo ideas (coming soon! for real this time), my original dream was to get all of the lyrics to this on my forearm, which seemed unrealistic. I was later informed that it would require probably my entire back to fit them all. Sigh. I settled for the lyrics to “I Have Seen Tomorrow” (which I was, also recently, informed would not all fit on my forearm and will have to be painstakingly edited down). I have a vague memory of most of that series of events taking place in the Castle either just before or during a KINGS game. I recall sitting on the green or the orange chair and the three of us, Coree and Zoe and me, exchanging our Phil related tattoo dreams.
A final note, after I moved back here and we had all developed a supernatural relationship with THE PILL at Great Scott I recall it becoming a refrain for me and Z and C “the pill, the pill, the blue light of the pill…”
So, then we have “Sweet Adeline”, our old friend ES returns with the lead-off track from his major label break-out “XO”, which, I may have mentioned, I’ve always felt was a bit flawed and spotty (I mean come on, “Amity”? to this day, having used so, so many ES tracks and scoured live and rare recordings for hot inclusions, I still refuse to use that fucking song.) But, all that aside, this track completely kills. It kind of really perfectly bridges one from the old world of ES to the new. That signature feeling of acoustic strumming and picking and whispery singing, aside from the clearer production, could easily have been on Either/Or. Then, suddenly at about the 1:33 mark we launch into what would become a hallmark of new school ES, huge flourishes, layered voices, beautiful piano counterpoint, big sound.
Not totally sure why “Tired of Sex” was my choice for second-ever Weezer song on a mix. I’m thinking that I’ve always really had a moment with that part here, at about 2:17, the sort of really 80’s rock breakdown where he’s all “tonight, I’m down on my knees, tonight, I’m beggin’ you please”. Man, anything that evokes that 80’s rock nighttime feeling gets me every time. I remember when Pinkerton came out, way back in cold, cold New Hampshire (around the same time as Pavement “Crooked Rain” too I think. That was a huge moment for me in my life. Eh, too much to elaborate on here. Suffice to say there were lots of hot, hot summer nights in Nashua, NH listening to the walkman, out on my skateboard, sitting and sweating it out on city benches next to empty streets, pining for something far away and impossible. It was a dreamy time for me) and, at first blush, I thought it was kind of cool how it sounded more collaborative, like the keyboards, to me, seemed like Matt Sharp’s Rentals project was really creeping into the Weezer structure. I marveled at how, at that time, it seemed like they were just intentionally sabotaging their own songs. Just heading into a hook and then totally throwing it into reverse and backing out of it. I guess, in retrospect, the album isn’t really like that. But only with the advantage of hindsight. Trust me, listening to Pinkerton on a white label promo CD, the week before it came out, on headphones in NH, it was seriously a wholly different animal than it is today, parsed out to the millions and millions a million times over and lifted to the level of legend and myth. Once upon a time that record was still unheard, unproved and really a very odd and brave and personal excursion.
I will demure to earlier stories about Brendan Benson and this album (See the Antlers post). I think right about here, with the Weezer track esp. I was attempting to launch into the “big pop songs” up portion of the mix. Hence one of Brendan’s finest moments included here. A little throwback to Antlers and all of its never-ending pop gymnastics.
Which, of course, brings us to “Tracy” by Creeper Lagoon. CL, as I may have discussed, has always, and still to this day, for some reason, been a fascinating situation to me. I first heard them on a Shrimper Cassette of all things, again, back in NH when I was obsessed with the Shrimper label and was foolishly trying to (as we all know I am prone to do) collect all of their output. Shrimper was my Phil Elverum at that time. (Before Shrimper it was Kill Rock Stars, before that it was Drag City, give me something cool in a series or serialized fashion and I will pour my heart into it every time.) (This is a pretty serious attempt someone made to make a very nice discography page for them if anyone cares, http://www.underwaternow.com/ihearstrangemusic/shrimper.htm) Back then it just seemed like one guy making very, very lo-fi recordings using rudimentary loops of recognizable indie rock and unrecognizable other sources. There was a strange little 7” and that was kind of it for awhile. Years later a promo of this album “I Become Small and Go” made its way into my hands and it was much, much more fleshed out and refined. You could still catch the old tape loop elements to it here and there but now it was rounded out with legitimate pop songs and dirges. It kind of made sense. It was also confounding. Flash forward a few more years. I’ve lost track of them again and suddenly they reappear, all over the place and sound, pretty much, just like Third Eye Blind. Completely bizarre. Can this be the same project I first heard so many years ago? Really, in the scheme of things, their story is a cliché. Single 4-track enthusiast has a little project, it not too elegant. He meets some other dudes and they sort of make the project into an actual band. One of these new guys also starts sharing vocals and becomes the lead vocalist. They make a more band-oriented album that bridges the gap and hints at more. All this takes place during the major-label indie rock cannibalization golden-age of the late 90’s and so they get signed and make some big, well-produced stuff that gets minor radio and media attention. They tour, do radio spots, have videos. The bubble bursts, they get dropped back into limbo and obscurity. Put out a couple little Eps that sort of come down a bit from the major pop rush of the major label stuff. Members leave to get real jobs. Band fades into obscurity. Some years later they reappear with the original guy fronting and some new folks (including a girl!) and make a very different almost My Bloody Valentine-y album. Seem poised to be a real working band again, then nothing, again. (this is pretty decent and outdated little info piece http://www.inmusicwetrust.com/articles/57h01.html) (The Wikipedia page is pretty not-great but it has a few more inklings of info. Once upon a time there was a really comprehensive discography page that has since disappeared. Sigh.) So anyway, the last time we saw CL they were leading us on a tour of what Coree and I came to call “The Wraith” (which just so happens to be the namesake genesis of my sister page). It is some weird ass sample of God knows what which I think had its first appearance/creation on the Dinosaur Jr, track “Poledo” from the “You’re Living All Over Me” LP. That song was really more of a Lou Barlow solo experiment that somehow ended up on the album. It’s completely killer and scary and boasts the first known appearance of this sound, “The Wraith”. This was one of the things that legitimized CL and made them strange to me. They actually sampled that sample and used it as the wallpaper for the song “Sylvia” which was the last time we saw them on the mixes. That was the CL I knew. Weird, atmospheric, a quasi hip-hop beat, vocals that sounded like they were slowed down, but weren’t (incidentally, that same template, to me, still sounds killer and is the basis for several of my own early attempts at home recording and song writing [see “It Is Your Skin That I Wear” over on the POLTERGEIST Soundcloud page]). Here we have them popping up for a second time, this time in their new, shiny, pop band guise. When I first listened to “I Become Small and Go” this song always jumped out at me as a huge hit-that-never-was. I did my best to make it so. And I think, at least to us, I succeeded.
Next up, again, a nod to Antlers, out old friends the Apples. This one comes from their absolute high-point as a band “Tone Soul Evolution”. This album is almost flawless and would be milked mercilessly for mixes. That sunny Beach Boys/Beatles thing they do so well is always instantly gratifying. This was the kind of thing that I put on the mixes because I had a strong feeling it would be an easy sell to my friends. And I think it kinda was. This one features one of my favorite Apples lines, the opening bit about “when I called last night I wasn’t high, no I had not been drinking”. So appropriate and yet, so completely untrue.
As a side note, I cannot now recall why I was so into pushing Elephant 6 bands on the mixes and the kids but refused to put in Neutral Milk Hotel, the most well-loved and well-known of the bunch (it is worth noting that NMH would not make any presence in the mixes until mix 32 and even then it was just The Mountain Goats covering “Two-headed Boy”, NMH themselves didn’t make an actual appearance until mix 97. I don’t remember why. It was most likely due to the, at the time, very over-played-ness of the two major NMH releases. Everyone was on his dick at that point and it felt play-out and tired to me I guess. And so we see all his friends in the collective and even covers long before Mr. Jeff Mangum makes his grand entrance. Even now it’s hard for me to mix those songs. So good, but really so, so ingrained)
From here we dive back into some serious mix landmark territory. The Decemberists return from their victory lap on Universe with “The Apology Song” here chosen because it was an early favorite of mine. I’m pretty sure Fred had a strong connection with this song. One of the things I most associate it with is when, for a brief and tortured period, Fred became a bike messenger in Boston and was pretty much wasting away and dying. He and Luke became ingratiated with the Boston bike-dude culture and all that it entailed (Fred had also just, just started drinking, might I add, God bless him, I was not that far off the wagon myself…). I remember him describing some, typical apparently, arduous and vomit-inducing bike messenger race/event that he was taking place in that involved some sort of seriously long loop around the city (which was referred to as a “Madeline”) done again and again, possibly interspersed with beer chugging, which continued until someone started puking and that was how the winner was determined. Fred if you’re out there please post something and clarify these details for me/us.
This was, in fact, the first Atom song I ever heard. I think I recounted the story of that in the Universe post. I guess it seemed like a good top choice for an Atom song. It’s always a nice feeling to have a source of pop affluence that you are trying to convince your friends about with a ton of great instances of brilliance. Just being able to cherry-pick one of many really lovely tracks. Case in point… As before, still reminds me seriously of living on Boulevard Drive, working at Felini’s and Wax’n Facts, the emo summer of 1997, house shows, patch-punk and so on. I guess that’s why bridging into the first Promise Ring appearance makes sense here.
This song was one of the bonuses on the CD reissue of the first bunch of out-of-print 7” and compilation tracks “The Horse Latitudes”. I remember buying that CD and a navy blue shirt at a show at The Middle East, down. The PR and their ilk always seemed very off-limits to me as a mixer. They seemed either too raw or way too loaded with social stigma for my co-workers to accept. This one is dropped in here I think in deference to that just because it is so unlike all of the rest of the stuff that they had done up to that point.
And then we have Mr. Simon Joyner making his second appearance. This time with something much closer to his usual output, long, chorusless, shambling. The idea of “you gotta aim high if you wanna bring down Goliath” is one that had been very near to my heart for years prior. I think I had actually written this on a little scrap of paper and taped it to out kitchen wall soon after we moved in. As true today as it was when it was written.
In fact, this might eve have its genesis in Seattle. That scrap of paper may have traveled all the way from Seattle to Boston, to the KINGS. That SJ 2 CD affair is still a high point for me with him.
And then, interestingly enough, we have a real moment: the first appearance of Ryan Adams in our hallowed halls. The first of many, many, many. I mean, did any of us know how important RA was going to be to us when we first dipped out toe in? I was late to the game. “Gold” came out and was getting played a lot a Newbury by the powers that be. Robbie summed it up perfectly, “dress like a punk and play country” I guess there it is, or was. From there I back-tracked to this album. “Heartbreaker”, like much of RA’s output has always been a little frustrating. You get this killer lead-off track and then 40 minutes of ballads, admittedly killer ballads, yes, but, man, you just want more of the raucous. Gold served as a larger version of this. One whole album of all that raucousness followed by a lot of very all-over-the-place-ness. Gold was sort of RA’s “Purple Rain”, proof positive, in an insanely prolific artist’s output, that he can produce perfect pop/radio/listener ready music that resounds with energy and emotion that we can all key into, but consistently refuses to make. And here we have the masthead of it. This song is pretty much everyone’s “moment” with RA I think. And rightfully so.
One of the greatest moments in the history of this song for me was sitting in Fred and Jamie’s kitchen in new year’s eve, uh, ‘07? (help me out Fred) drinking heavily, hanging out with you guys and various others (Andrew, Morgan) and Luke sitting on the floor with the guitar playing this and me and him singing it. That was a serious night, interspersed with me yelling “WE’RE GONNA LIVE FOREVER!!!!” and later a serious dance party in Andrew’s room to The Rapture. There are pics from this event and I have some, courtesy of Fred, when he was here for the wedding, which I will try to incorporate. This night was also the night that the Mount Eerie “Live in Copenhagen” triple LP became deified in my mind after seeing its huge presence on Andrew’s record shelf.
The we dive back into some serious historical shit. I’m guessing, in my head, coming off of the the “Going to Georgia” moment on Universe that I wanted to hit up the other early important MG “Georgia” moment. I learned about this song at an actual MG show when he played it and it made such an indelible impression on me that I then had to search the records and find it. This song, while obviously amazing, additionally illustrates, for me, an important aspect of life. The idea that there is this very, very heavy and serious event happening in your life. Something devastating, life-halting, that you somehow deal with and process by breaking it down to the most mechanical and simple details of life. The absolute rudiments. The part where you are so destroyed and shocked that all you can do is notice the very simple specifics of things: the air was humid, the sky was grey, I had boiled peanuts for breakfast from Cairo, GA, the pink flowers along the western window made me feel better, I turned the air conditioner on. I am often moved in these ways in my life. The need to focus on the most tiny and creature details of the immediate surroundings of life to cope with the huge and insane out-of-control aspects of the same.
I cannot imagine the circumstance under which I was listening to this in the presence of my stepfather, Scott, but it happened at some point because I distinctly recall him telling me that it was pronounced kay-ro, not kigh-ro. Please refer here to the “listen” function here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo,_Georgia
Somewhere down the line Guided By Voices became one of those bands that I was unsure of but everyone got very into and I was really pumped (the pivotal point for GBV, in particular, was the day I went to look at Coree’s Myspace page and noticed her “who I’d like to meet” had been changed to a long chain of GBV song title charracters) and thus started looking back over mixes and inserting songs here and there (as I was prone to do, once upon a time when there was a “finite” number of mixes and thus a limited amount of space to get everything in. Other members of this category include Destroyer, Morrissey and Mates of State, Frank Black [another one that was defined by a trip to Corees Myspace. This one on a time when I went to visit and noticed that she had changed her “Quote” to a line from the FB song “Ten Percenter”.) This is definitely an instance of that. A little, no commitment needed insert to test the waters.
Condor Ave. I’m sure was just me putting in some Elliott Smith that I was really fond of. Part of me thinks it was more significant but I can’t think of a reason why. This song would come to mean a lot to me much later, just before I moved away from Boston, but that is really another story entirely.
Again I cannot recall what led me to put this Mike Doughty song on here. It is worth noting, as we will see in a moment when I cover the differences between the final mixes and the original drafts of them, that this suite of songs was added all together, as a set, filling in to the gap I opened up.
This song is obviously making allusion to Kermit playing “Rainbow Connection” in The Muppet Movie and he certainly nails the feeling from that. (I remember, on the way to SC, trying to impart this whole story to Jenn, and failing, as we were listening to Sunglassez, telling her that, yes, that was indeed Kermit singing on that song and that, ironically, it was not the first appearance of Kermit on the mixes…). This is one of those very strange and singular moments in mix history because they are strange and singular in the artist’s history. I am fairly certain this is the only recording or performance of this song by MD ever. (“he is trying to make a point here…”) or (“let us contemplate the sadness of the banjo-playing frog…”) and so on. This is a very singular and defining moment in the LA-feeling part of the mixes for me.
The it is clearly time to try to pull up out of all that melancholy. Atom to the rescue with a song that even features my name in it (drink one). I remember, around here, in the hard core, hardcore scene at the time (ie late, late 90’s) that there was a lot of feeling that Atom had kind of lost it and sold out in-between the first and second albums. But we could all, at least, come together on this song. (“Maybe we can get Assuck to play the senior prom” is a sentiment we can all get behind.)
Then we bridge into the remnants of a killer run I had put together on the first version of this mix. In the original it started with “Blinded by the Lights” by The Streets and then went into this, “Scatterbrain” by Radiohead, and culminated in “Lazy Bones” by Soul Coughing. I can’t recall why “Blinded” got ditched, maybe it had too much “START” in it or something. Or maybe I was concerned about being able to pair it up with those lost tracks from the Blood Brothers “Crimes” sessions. But ditched it was.
Regardless “Scatterbrain” into “Lazy Bones” is still perfect. I’ll let it speak for itself.
I guess from there I was so deep in I needed to dig out, back up to normal mix-ness. The piano worked well to bridge to this, a good double-whammy. A much beloved artists covering a much beloved artist. Ben Folds doing The Beatles? Ship it.
Which bleeds perfectly into the piano and drum duo with the ex-Elliott Smith compatriot singing. Quasi has a lot of material out there and yet, they live in that weird place in band-world where a group puts out tons of records but, for some reason, to you (me) they only seem to hit all the chords perfectly one time, one album. For me, with Quasi, this is the album. It came to be a big part of my life while living in Seattle.
“A Living Will” is actually a moment of mix vigilance faltering for me. It’s a cover and I don’t have much knowledge of the original. Bad work, kid. This was placed here in the mix, originally as a balance to what immediately preceded it in the original version of this mix, which we will get to in a moment. It was meant to be a quick recovery from some things that I felt would be unpopular.
In that light, this cover follows suit. I mean, hey, its Ben Folds doing A massive Cure hit. Who’s not gonna love it as an outro? The fact that is the second Ben Folds cover of a very well-known song in just four songs seems to have escaped me at the time but did not escape Jenn when we listened to this mix recently (pre “Mix Listened To Log” era).
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ALT VERSIONS
--004a/b/c
OK
now
in the original version of this mix (--004a) “Sweet Adeline” bled into “Parasites” by Ugly Cassanova for some reason. No idea. I guess that record was still pretty new then. And this song always stood out to me as being such a weird silly-sounding march.
In that version “Tired of Sex”, instead of leading the battle charge, came after “You’re Quiet”, after “The Apology Song”, after “Seems So” and “Tracy”, and led into the Atom song. Going in it works as a segue, going out it does not.
On that early version I remember, distinctively, going back and inserting that weird little suite of songs (GBV, Condor Ave, Frog and Banjo etc). The way it originally went was “Alpha Omega” into The Streets, which really doesn’t work. However The Streets into Scatterbrain and Lazy Bones is still, in my head, perfect.
In the original version “The Poisoned Well” went into a Bushwick Bill track “Phantom’s Theme” which is a ridiculous intro to his album “Phantom of the Rapra” that has to be heard to be believed. I mean, really, it’s short but still hard to get through, clearly included to continue the ridiculous thread of Bushwick that goes back to the first mix. That, naturally led into, coming on the heels of “Trapped in the Closet”, the latest R Kelly hit “Sex in the Kitchen” (Remix) which, besides its overlong spoken intro, is pretty solid. It was coming off of those two tracks, and most likely Coree ditching outside to smoke that “A Living Will” and “In Between Days” were originally sequenced to pull it all back in.
This mix went through three versions before arriving at the final mix. And, to be fair, I could make an argument that that the third and fourth (final) mix are disputable. The only difference being the omission of the Bushwick track on the final version. Thus, bringing this mix in, actually, about a minute and a half short of max mix length.
And so, yeah. That is “The Moon”. It’s a nice ride.
it is 5:17
this is the seance
xo
