Here is the track list for 26 Reformations of a Middle Class American Heart, Vol. 4: Livin’ Right Is Easy, which I completed at my parents’ house in Alaska during a visit in July 2022.
Side A:
Toad the Wet Sprocket, All I Want (3:18)
Gin Blossoms, Hey Jealousy (3:56)
Sponge, Molly (3:36)
Goodness, Superwise (4:04)
Mudhoney, Generation Spokesmodel (2:33)
Monster Magnet, Negasonic Teenage Warhead (4:28)
Supersuckers, Born With a Tail (3:15)
Everclear, Santa Monica (3:11)
Chris Isaak, Go Walking Down There (2:50)
Cracker, Low (4:36)
Weezer, Say It Ain’t So (4:19)
Son Volt, Drown (3:20)
The Lemonheads, Into Your Arms (2:45)
Side B:
NOFX, Linoleum (2:10)
Bad Religion, Stranger Than Fiction (2:21)
Rancid, Ruby Soho (2:38)
Catherine Wheel, Judy Staring At the Sun (3:57)
Elastica, Car Song (2:24)
Face to Face, Disconnected (3:28)
Super Deluxe, She Came On (3:11)
Green Day, Christie Road (3:33)
The Dambuilders, Teenage Loser Anthem (3:16)
Social Distortion, Ball and Chain (5:44)
Sonic Youth, Superstar (4:08)
Kristin Hersh, Your Ghost (3:16)
Radiohead, Fake Plastic Trees (4:51)
Here I am, on the road again in the summertime. It seems like every other summer I’ve got a strong urge to spend all my time driving on highways and scenic roads, camping in tents beside rivers or caves or mountains or dinosaur bones, eating cold food in campgrounds, strumming my guitar, listening to my kids, even now that they’re teenagers, play imaginative games and talk about music. And while I drive, I listen to music I’ve never heard before and I wonder what will stick with me once I’m done driving.
I know how I got this way, though. The origin story is simple: I grew up traveling the Alaska Highway, Interstate 90, the Pacific Coast Highway, and hundreds of other highways and roads just about every other summer with my Mom and my three younger siblings — sometimes with my Dad (who was otherwise working for Icicle Fisheries in Alaska) and always in a van of one kind or another. First a purple Nissan, later a big red EuroVan. So as I travel the National Parks with my own four children in my own van, I can always remind myself that all I’m doing is being my mother. And if you knew my mother you’d know that’s doing pretty well by everyone involved.
The music also came from those summers in a van. It started with this music specifically. By the time my family was getting ready to leave on our summer trip for 1995, I was about to start high school and knew that I didn’t want to spend the summer listening to We Sing Silly Songs or spend all my time talking and playing games with my siblings. I had recently discovered 107.7 The End, the alternative rock music station in Seattle that, I’ve learned in the time since, did a pretty good job of keeping at least some of its shows clear of corporate airplay control and offered a variety of music that may have centered on grunge and post-grunge and resembled MTV rotations at some times of day, but also extended out into some of the fringes of alternative and indie rock at other times of day. I had a walkman and a pair of cheap headphones. I bought a package of ten Maxell 120-minute cassettes, turned on my boombox, and taped twenty hours of radio to get me through the summer.
Needless to say, nearly thirty years later I no longer have those cassettes — they were too valuable as tape-over sources for later listening projects — and nor do I remember most of what was on them. But I do remember some things: the materials of this tape, as well as another 30-40 songs that sank in well to my conscious and subconscious minds over the course of that summer while I wondered, approaching each known extended family address stop, whether I’d get a letter from my girlfriend or not. Sometimes I did, but I think I remember the songs better that express absence and regret.
This mix begins the trilogy within the 26 Reformations of a Middle Class American Heart series that deals with my personal history of indie music — my entryways into the music that I would live my life by for most of my age 18-28 years. This tape deals more with alternative music than indie music, because it is dependent on materials drawn from radio, and radio stations were playing alternative music in the summer of 1995. But many of these bands offered avenues out of alternative music and into indie music, and over time I made my way down those avenues. Metaphorically speaking, this is where I got off the commuter bus and started to look around.
Just for the record, my true enduring favorite from that summer is the song by The Dambuilders. I never heard it, or anything else by The Dambuilders either, on radio again, so I must’ve gotten lucky when my tape player was rolling in mid-July.
Sunday Mixtape #13: Livin' Right Is Easy