Mixtape Monday: EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! [2016] - UPDATED April 26, 2016

So it's opening week for Major League Baseball here in the USA. The only "baseball" I ever played was wiffleball under the lone parking lot light after closing at my first job. Sometimes we didn't have a regulation wiffleball and we'd use a taped up wad of aluminum foil, which would destroy the slim yellow bat after just a few hits. First team to hit it in the street won because it was 1) hard to hit the ball all the way into the street as we were playing a few hundred yards away and 2) no one wanted to fetch the ball once it was hit that far.

I did collect Topps Baseball cards from 1972 when I got my first cards (including Hank Aaron, pictured below) out of a vending machine until 1981 when Fleer and Donruss broke the long held Topps monopoly and all my money was being spent on music anyway. For me, the attraction was the colorful design on the front of the card as well as the numbers, the stats on the back of the cards. I've always been a numbers man - even when I was a boy. To further illustrate my lack of baseball knowledge, Dave Kingman has always been my favorite player solely because of his insanely high number of home runs (442, currently ranked 40th all-time) and strikeouts (1816, currently ranked 15th all-time) back when I was paying attention; he was a true all or nothing man. That's his 1972 rookie card below but I didn't start liking him until 1978 or 1979 when a kid at school asked me who my favorite baseball player was one day and Dave Kingman was the first and only name that came to mind because I had heard his name on the radio the previous day because he had a three homer game as a Chicago Cub against the Dodgers and their coach's remarks were bleeped out cause he was cussing Kingman out so much.

I have been fortunate to attend only two Major League Baseball games in my first 50 years here on God's Green Earth, including a 1976 1978 Houston Astros game at the Astrodome when it was FREE Batting Helmet Night and another game, a Spring training game when the Cleveland Indians played the Chicago Cubs in 1983 or 1984. One last thing, I managed to collect a complete set of MLB Sundae helmets from Dairy Queen in 1977 or 1978. Having a Dairy Queen with walking distance - just four blocks - from my Texas Grandma's house certainly helped in that endeavor as did my grandparents insatiable appetite for hot fudge sundaes. So yeah, I'm not really a baseball fan so please ostracize me accordingly. But I am a fan of (most) Richard Linklater films and I look forward to seeing Everybody Wants Some!! if and when it plays within 80 kilometers of The Hideaway. I say that only because Dazed & Confused never played here until after its initial theater run. Instead, I saw it in an empty second-run theater nearly two months after it had opened. But Linklater has made some great flicks since then so I remain confident though Fandango has no listings for it yet.

When I saw the first trailer for Everybody Wants Some!!, I was underwhelmed. I believe my exact thoughts were "Not a baseball movie!" or something along those lines. Pretty positive I also expressed curiosity about the film's soundtrack. The poster below piqued that curiosity.

The music was from 1979-1980 based on cassettes pictured though there were a couple of things that stood out for me:

• the Queen tape is different from any one I've ever seen;
• the Pink Floyd tape is much older (1971?) than the rest of the tapes and 
• is that Foreigner 4? - it didn't come out until 1981

Then the official soundtrack was announced in March with a couple of surprises. In addition to compact disc, the soundtrack is going to be released on cassette(!) and as a double disc vinyl album with tracks that aren't on the cassette and CD. It even looks like they have aged and worn the cover art. In interviews, Linklater has said he pulled out "hundreds of songs" from 1979-1980 while writing the script and that they informed the story. Here's a longer quote from the press release which I've read on more than a dozen websites already:

The Everybody Wants Some!! soundtrack tries to capture the amazing diversity of what was on the table musically at that time. So many artists were at the top of their game, and it seemed like a lot of popular genres were viable. Metal and R&B were as big as ever, disco was still hanging in there (although it would be ‘dead' within a year or so), and, thanks to the movie Urban Cowboy, country was suddenly cool in places it hadn't been before. Even more exciting was the immediacy of punk and new wave, and the first examples of this thing you'd eventually know as hip-hop. Over the years some of this has been parodied and made to look ridiculous, but this movie is asking you to experience it as if for the first time - from those opening drum beats of "My Sharona" to the utter newness of "Rapper's Delight."

After the poster pictured above, looking at the soundtrack playlist and reading the quote above, there are still some questions:

• Why are there no country songs on the soundtrack? He specifically mentioned the genre as well as Urban Cowboy and Everybody Wants Some!! is set in Texas in 1980, the year of Urban Cowboy.
• Would the soundtrack feature single edits or longer album versions, especially for R&B, disco and rap songs?
• Why are there no songs included from four of the tapes so prominently pictured on the poster? Is it licensing issues? Are those songs gonna be heard in the film?

All questions regarding the film's soundtrack aside, I am now looking forward to Everybody Wants Some!! whose early working title was That's What I'm Talking About, one of Slater's lines from Dazed & Confused. I'll be watching that film a time or two before taking in "the spiritual sequel", a new term that opens up a whole new sub-genre for the motion picture industry, much like prequels.

By the time I opened up Spotify to make a playlist for Everybody Wants Some!! with visions of a stop-motion hamburger wailing on a guitar in my mind, I found that Jordan Raup had beaten me to the punch. I wasn't satisfied with his vision (he titled it official soundtrack when he inclusion of a sound-alike recording of M's "Pop Muzik" was but one offense) so I made my own and after listening to it over the past couple of days, I think you might like it. Or you may feel how a commenter felt on one of those other sites that published the soundtrack's playlist. He said something along the lines of "Oh, great! Another collection of songs no one ever need hear again."

The first 23 tracks in the playlist below are in same order as the vinyl release of the soundtrack though I used longer versions of songs if available. I also included that M song from Local Files which means you can do the same cause you probably have the song on your hard drive anyway. The second 23 tracks in the playlist kick off with songs from the four tapes - Pink Floyd, Queen, Kool & the Gang and Foreigner - that didn't make the official soundtrack album and then I added 19 more songs from the era, following the odd "no country" directive that had been established unless you count the inclusion of "The Devil Went Down To Georgia" as a country song cause I sure as heck don't. Listen to the playlist and shoot me your suggestions via email or comments. Play ball!

UPDATE 4/10/16

So it's been a week and though Everybody Wants Some!! has opened elsewhere and a few Hideaway viewers have kindly written to let me know a few things about the soundtrack, the film is still nowhere to be seen in my neck of the woods though mysteriously a surprise showing of Dazed & Confused is booked for a 2PM screening on three local first-run screens on April 17th according to Fandango.

According to my sources, over 40 songs are heard in Everybody Wants Some!! including the 23 songs from the double disc vinyl version of the soundtrack album. Below is a playlist featuring nothing but songs heard in the film including a couple of tracks heard on the Urban Cowboy soundtrack. Randall Poster gets the music supervisor credit for the film's soundtrack.

UPDATE 4/26/16

Everybody Wants Some!! finally came to my little neck of the desert (metropolitan population of 980,263) but forces beyond my control have thus far kept me from going to see it, which concerns me becuase it is only playing on just one of the nearly 100 screens in said metro area. Just discovered the OFFICIAL Spotify playlist below yesterday; apparently it was posted on April 8, 2016, the day of the film's opening. Sixty-three "Hits that inspired the film" makes for over four and half hours of tunes.