Mixtape Monday: O

She's back!  
In spite of a brief illness (a major sinus infection that initially sent her to the dentist because the pain was in her teeth!), a well-deserved and hard-earned promotion at work that required her to finally remove the band aid from the video camera on her work laptop and planning an Easter feast/Birthday dinner for her eighty year old mother, MRS. HERC somehow found the time to label tape "O" for us, the next in the series we left off with a few months back because I discovered she hadn't ever gotten around to labelling them when I gave them to her 30 years ago. 

That's "O" as in odd, cause this is one curiously strange tracklisting: popular songs from the Seventies and Eighties including one each by John Lennon and his first born son, Julian, alongside a rather tame Eighties comedy routine by Eddie Murphy, silly songs by Murphy and Julie Brown; three novelty raps next to two Shel Silverstein poetry readings, two extended dance remixes and a song from one of my favorite musicals.  Twenty-two tracks in all that have no reason to be together.  I'm not proud of this one but I'll own it.  I did it for love.  MRS. HERC's exact words after finishing her private listening session were "What were you thinking?"

Shel Silverstein came into my life when I was in sixth grade and a teacher gave me the book Where The Sidewalk Ends for winning some contest.  Maybe most books read that year?  Much like I did with the works of Dr. Seuss before him, I fell in love with the drawings and wordplay found on each page of Silverstein's book.  In junior high, I discovered Shel had written two of my favorite songs: "A Boy Named Sue" and "Cover Of 'Rolling Stone'" (though later I discovered this was the original version) and then in high school I found out he had been contributing to Playboy for years and had more than half a dozen solo albums to his credit even while continuing to compose whimsical, childlike poems.  His second book A Light In The Attic was another gift though I was in high school by the time of its publication.  His readings of the two books of poems were released in 1984 and 1985 respectively and remain on the Vinyl Shelf to this day.  I also bought them when they were later released on compact disc.  The brief poems were perfect for filling up those brief end of side silences on mixtapes.  And as demonstrated here on mixtape "O" can also be used to begin a side.

Comedienne Julie Brown began getting airplay on the Dr. Demento Show with her song "I Like 'Em Big And Stupid" in 1983.  But it wasn't until one night when her ringer song "Will I Make It Through The Eighties?" closed out a Friday night radio mix show in 1984 that I heard of her.  By that time, she was getting video airplay on MTV as well for her song "Homecoming Queen's Got A Gun".  I picked up her five song EP on Rhino Records the first time I saw it sitting in the racks almost exactly thirty years ago today even though it came out a year earlier.  Her bouncy, spot on accurate "'Cause I'm A Blond" bothered the blonds I knew in much the same way that Randy Newman's "Short People" bothered all the short people I knew when it came out.  Of course when it came out in 1977, I and all of my eleven year old, pre-pubescent friends were kind of short so we sang it as "Old People".  Another song on her EP was made into a feature length film Earth Girls Are Easy.  The video below is from that film.

			SIDE A		45:40
	1982		Change	John Waite	03:15
	1983		Ice Cream Man / Shoe Throwin' Mothers	Eddie Murphy	05:52
	1985	*	Radioactive [Special Mix]	The Firm	05:49
	1980		Don't Let Him Go	REO Speedwagon	03:47
	1985		White Lies	Jason & the Scorchers	03:23
	1973		Knockin' On Heaven's Door	Bob Dylan	02:32
	1985		Don't Come Around Here No More	Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers	05:07
	1983		Human Touch	Rick Springfield	05:07
	1974		Whatever Gets You Thru The Night	John Lennon with Elton John	03:27
	1984		Will I Make It Through The Eighties?	Julie Brown	02:20
	1981		Ai No Corrida [single edit]	Quincy Jones	04:18
	1984		Invitation	Shel Silverstein	00:43
			SIDE B		46:15
	1984		Sick	Shel Silverstein	01:23
	1983		She's A Beauty	The Tubes	03:55
	1982		Boogie In Your Butt	Eddie Murphy	04:11
	1984		Santa's Rap	The Treacherous Three	06:10
	1984		Wappin' (Bubblehead)	Phony Four MC's	06:11
	1985		Rappin' Duke	Rappin' Duke	06:09
	1961		America	cast of West Side Story	04:59
	1984		Say You're Wrong	Julian Lennon	03:25
	1984		Cause I'm A Blond	Julie Brown	02:14
	1984	*	All She Wants To Do Is Dance	Don Henley	07:38
			[Extended Dance Remix]

Cross referencing the songs on this tape with the albums I acquired in 1985, I can say with a fair degree of certainty that this tape was probably in all likelihood dubbed one night in the third or fourth week of April 1985.  Maybe.