Hello and welcome to another Mixtape Monday. (It is Monday, right? Feels like a Monday.) Today's tape is YY, the 51st in The Somewhat Alphabetical Mixtape Series. The tape is another example of a circa 1984 TDK SA90 bought in bulk from Price Club.
Special shout-out to our newly refurbished Sony TC-WE805S for playing back today's tape without issue. While this wasn't the deck the tape was originally created on, it handled the playback of YY very well. While the tape is labeled with Dolby C encoding, we preferred to listen without the Dolby C noise reduction activated.
We have a scan of the J-card near the end of this post, and it only lists the artists again. However, there aren't enough artists listed, leading us to believe that this tape may contain twelve-inch single versions. I bought quite a few of them in the mid-eighties so that could be the case as I had done it before.
Beginning with Led Zeppelin's fourth album when it was first offered in a Columbia House catalog, I had been buying compact discs since the summer of '86 but had no way of playing them. (Had picked up the Springsteen live box the day it was released either right before or right after I made this tape.) I think experts call that putting the cart before the horse but my good friend Stephen had a Sansui CD player so he let me come over with my tape deck, hook it up, and record the discs onto tape to listen to in the Bug. Experts call that doing it wrong. My friends would later surprise the ever-loving crap out of me with my first CD player, a JVC XL-V200, for Christmas 1986. Haven't had the player since the early Nineties but I just recycled the manual this past December as my downsizing project finally moves into my papers and personal files.
The tape begins with the unmistakable sounds of "Shout" by Tear For Fears from the album Songs From The Big Chair. I had picked up the album back in March and remember being initially nonplussed by the previously released singles, only wanting to buy the album after hearing "Everybody Wants To Rule The World". She liked "Shout" so that is probably why it shows up here on YY. She even bought me the twelve-inch single of "Shout" in July 1985. The album version of "Shout" runs six-and-a-half minutes and makes for a pretty good starter song but I'm a little relieved when it ends. Then the beautiful cascading intro comes on and I'm very excited to hear "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" as the second track on the tape. I'm also curious if there's gonna be a third Tears For Fears song coming up when the song ends too soon after four minutes. The amount of artists listed on the J-card makes more sense to me.
The tempo moves up as "Church Of The Poison Mind" begins as the third track of today's featured tape. I'm enjoying the song like I always do but also wondering if there is gonna be another song from the album. One of my favorite aspects of Colour By Numbers is the powerful vocal performances by Helen Terry in counterpoint to Boy George's honeyed tenor.
Speaking of George's soulful voice, he intros the next song over a smooth backing chorus. "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me" was the first Culture Club I song I heard and ignited a fandom for George's voice that lasted through Culture Club's first two albums (Kissing and Colour), a handful of b-sides, and two soundtrack appearances (Electric Dreams and The Crying Game). So we've got a two-fer thing going on...
Julian Lennon burned bright for more than a few months in 1985 and into 1986 after the release of his first album Valotte in late 1984. The jaunty "Too Late For Goodbyes" is the fifth track on YY with its reggae rhythm and harmonica solo from legendary Toots Thielemans. As the game is afoot, I can't help wondering if there were any other singles besides the title track spun off from Valotte while I'm enjoying the song. After "Too Late For Goodbyes" ends, I have my answer when the decidedly more rocking "Stick Around" begins. The song was the first single off the Valotte follow-up album, The Secret Value of Daydreaming in 1986. Guitarist Justin Clayton uses a talkbox to produce harmonica-like sounds during a solo. Been more than a minute since I've heard this song and I make a note to listen to the whole album SOON.
"The Reflex" comes fading in and I'm thankful it's Nile Rodgers's Dance Mix of the song and not the original album version from Seven and the Ragged Tiger. To be clear, it's the single edit of The Dance Mix and upon its release, it was something of a revelation and soon replaced the album version on my personal mixtape of the album. That tape's A-side was the group's Rio album with the Carnival remix version of "Hold Back The Rain" substituted in for the album version while the B-side of the tape held a Frankensteined version of the Seven and the Ragged Tiger album with remixes of "The Reflex", "Union Of The Snake" and "New Moon On Monday" replacing their album-length counterparts. Which Duran Duran song was I going to use to follow up "The Reflex", a song she loves. Racking my brain to think of what other double Duran songs she enjoys and about six cue up in my head.
The distinctive percussive intro of "Union Of The Snake" soon solves that mystery as we're eight songs into YY and if my calculations are correct, there's gonna be about ten minutes left on the A-side of the tape after this song. Including a few twelve-inch mixes would have been a good idea. Or maybe I added another Duran Duran track like "New Moon On Monday" to make it a three-fer. Or maybe the next two songs are from an artist I failed to write on the J-card. Maybe I circled back and included songs from artists already listed. As much as my mind is racing here and there, I really have been enjoying the song selection and remember her singing or humming along with these tracks.
There is a longer silence after "Union Of The Snake" than between any of the tape's previous tracks before the Chuck Berry-style riff of "Fun, Fun, Fun", one of her all-time favorite songs, comes on. The Beach Boys are her favorite band so it makes sense I'd include them in a tape series called Greatest Hits. The second song is "I Get Around" and I have almost no time to contemplate what could possibly come next before "Help Me, Rhonda" begins playing. I'm looking at the digital real-time counter on the tape deck and I calculate that there is room for one more three-minute song right about the time "Don't Worry Baby" starts to play. The tape ends wonderfully with a four-fer. I realize that all four songs had to be dubbed off of Endless Summer, one of three Beach Boys albums I had back in 1986. The other two albums were 15 Big Ones and Best Of The Beach Boys, both of which were RCA Music Service pressings. My copy of Endless Summer was a Bookman's pickup and it was in excellent condition, maybe very good plus with just a little shelf wear on the bottom of the jacket. The poster was still inside and didn't look like it had ever been unfolded.
The playback head spins around so we're in auto-reverse mode and on the B-side of tape YY. The sound collage that marks the beginning of Power Station's cover of T. Rex's "Bang A Gong (Get It On)" plays. Re-titled "Get It On (Bang A Gong)" as it was originally written and recorded by T. Rex before a skittish American label executive had changed it to avoid confusion with Chase's "Get It On" out at the same time in 1971. The song rocks and for the first time since the tape began, I know exactly which song will be next. I think. Sure enough, Tony Thompson's thundering drums introduce "Some Like It Hot" and the edgy rock continues. We were gonna go see The Power Station live but my girl got sick the day of the show so, at her urging, I went with someone else. The concert was a huge disappointment as Robert Palmer, unbeknownst to us, was not touring with the band. Rock veteran Michael Des Barres, who looked like a lead singer did not sound remotely like Palmer was handling vocal duties and we left after they played "Some Like It Hot" about four or five songs into their set.
The high-intensity beats continue as Phil Collins comes in with his heavily rhythmic "Don't Lose My Number" from 1985's No Jacket Required. By this time, I'm no longer wasting brain power trying to guess what songs are next. Instead, I'm living in the moment and letting each track wash over me as I sit in my comfy chair, in the stereo sweet spot. I also believe I have edged to volume up on each of the last three songs. After "Don't Lose My Number" fades out, the hard-hitting drums of "Sussudio" come on and yes, the song does sound a lot like Prince's "1999" but I just don't care. We saw Collins live on the No Jacket Required World Tour passing by my own father and his friend at the gate as they had decided to carry a cooler from the parking lot into the show and when they were denied entry, they just sat down there at the gate and enjoyed the show.
The fifth song on the tape is Foreigner's "Juke Box Hero" and it is definitely more of my greatest hit than hers. It's kind of every guy's greatest hit about living the dream of becoming a rock star. The band's album 4 still holds up almost 45 years later thanks to great songs, fantastic Mutt Lange production, and contributions from Motown legend Junior Walker and soon-to-be new wave icon, Thomas Dolby. I quietly make a wish that "Urgent" is the next song while rocking out to "Juke Box Hero" as I edge up the volume once more.
"I Want To Know What Love Is" is not the song I had wished for but it was not a disappointment either. We have shared memories of good times with this song as the soundtrack so I'm confident the song is a greatest hit for both of us. We saw the group on Halloween 1985 and local church choirs gathered on stage to perform "I Want To Know What Love Is" and it was magnificent. While Thompson Twin Tom Bailey played synth on this track sometimes I wonder what it would sound like had original producer Trevor Horn stuck around to produce the album, taking the band in a more electronic direction.
The slow jams continue with track 7, Simply Red's "Holding Back The Years". It's a great-sounding song but it took me a long while to like it while she was the one who went out and picked up the album almost immediately after she heard "Holding Back The Years" on the radio. I thought it would be cool to hear "Money$ Too Tight (To Mention)" after this song and it turns out this time I was right as that song follows. I am concerned that there is no other artist written on the tape's J-card and the tape counter says only about 37 minutes have passed on the tape's B-side. What did I do?
Again, there is a slightly longer silence between the previous song and "(Theme from) The Monkees" so I'm wondering if The Monkees are going to be to the tape's B-side what The Beach Boys were to the A-side. As soon as the brief song ends – it's the show's actual less-than-a-minute-long theme and not the 2:20 single version – another TV show theme begins. This time it's "The Brady Bunch Theme" followed in quick succession by the themes of The Partridge Family ("C'mon Get Happy"), The Three Stooges ("Three Blind Mice"), and Looney Tunes. All of these TV show themes come from 1986's Television's Greatest Hits Volume II. I glance at the counter as it rolls past the 42-minute mark.
A grizzled, funny-sounding voice comes on, declaring "I will not play at tug o' war..." and I recognize it as Shel Silverstein reading a poem from Where The Sidewalk Ends, his 1974 collection of poems and drawings. It is immediately followed by another favorite "Smart". So the tape ends on a silly note. Ten years after the book was published, Silverstein recited, sang, and shouted his poems for the audio edition of Where The Sidewalk Ends which I came across one day in the store because it was misfiled in the twelve-inch single section for some reason. Looks like I bought the CD version in 1992.
Based on the songs found on YY and the release dates of the albums they were taken from, our best guess is that the tape was recorded in late October or early November 1986.
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Are you still there? Here's an alternate tracklist that lives up to my original thought when I saw the shortlist of artists listed on the J-card for tape YY. There were three songs on the tape that I had no extended or remix version of but I fudged one of them and included a 2012 "Extended Reconstruction" from Blank & Jones, curators of the so8os compilation discs. I also included a different vintage song from Foreigner that had an extended version. Looked up each song's peak on the Dance Club chart as well. Turned out pretty well, right?
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