1 Aeroplane - Red Hot Chili Peppers
2 My Own Worst Enemy - Lit
3 Chemicals Between Us - Bush
4 What's My Age Again - Blink182
5 Intergalactic - Beastie Boys
6 Kryptonite - Three Doors Down
7 Sour Girl - Stone Temple Pilots
8 Satellite - Dave Matthews Band
9 Boyz in the Hood - Dynamite Hack
10 Little Things- Good Charlotte
11 Foxy Lady - Jimi Hendrix
12 All Along the Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix
13 Over My Head - Fenix Tx
14 Sex and Candy - Marcy Playground
15 Polly - Nirvana
16 Keep Em Separated - The Offspring
17 Better Man - Pearl Jam
18 Last Resort - Papa Roach
19 Killing in the Name - Rage Against the Machine
20 Cirlces - Soul Coughing
This was the age of Napster. Pre-college napster. High school napster where only the cool kids knew what was up. At the same time I was being spoonfed slightly above average modern rock dribble, dished studiously, reliably, and repeatedly from Philly's Y-100. I was 17 and I didn't have a license.
It was my senior year and I had just been exposed to music. My CD rack was lonely, want of companions. I remember sitting around listening to Y-100 (45 miles outside of Philly, deep in the boonies) on my sister's hand-me-down cassette player, antenna pointed justly, waiting for "Inside Out" by Eve 6 or "Jumper" by Third Eye Blind to come on the radio. Maybe an occasional Live, Weezer, Eagle Eye Cherry, or Pearl Jam song. That's all I knew. But my fingers, hovering over that red record button, was always anticipating what the DJ was going to play next just so I could record it on cassette and listen to it over and over and over.
So it came as a surprise when Andrew Ross
offered to make me a CD while eating pancakes at 3 am in smokey Jenny's Diner. I had heard of this ability to pick and choose individual songs and record (record!) them onto a CD but it literally seemed too good to be true. I could listen to any song I wanted whenever I wanted as many times as I wanted? I jumped on the opportunity and we scribed a few selections on the white diner napkin.
There was another time when my friend--following a two-week camping trip where all we did was talk about the food we would eat and the movies we would watch upon return--promised to tape Christmas Vacation and The Goonies onto VHS. I spent the two-day trip from remote Ontario to Pennsylvania thinking about how when I got home I was going to spend the rest of the summer sitting in the cool dark of my grandparent's living room watching Clark W. Griswold and Chunk on repeat, maybe pausing for a swim in the pool and corn on the cob. Life looked perpetually easy until I had to start buying notebooks, pencils, and new shoes for the start of the school year.
That VHS never arrived. I knew it was too good to be true; to watch exactly what I wanted when I wanted.
Even though we wrote down some song ideas, I was sure that the lateness or the smoke or my general pessimism would again forbid this entertainment.
The next week my hopes were high but faded as we again met for bowling and late-night pancakes without a mention of the mix. So it was a surprise when a group of high-school guys made a purposeful trip to Andrew's house to watch a red-pleathered Britney Spears debut her newest video, "Oops!...I did it again," (raging testosterone is shameless) that he presented Recluse Ninjas, my first mix.
It had many the songs I asked for (Good Charlotte, Papa Roach, Lit, Dynamite Hack) and many I did not (Three Doors Down, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Hendrix, Rage).
As I didn't have a car I would often bring my collection of CDs into my friend Ian's car wherever we went. How quaint. I also remember, two years later, schlepping my now 120+ CD collection across the country on a family trip in the southwest. Such is the desire to play DJ. That fall, Ian and I worked at the Urban Outfitters distribution center. We are out a lot. Went on random drives. Went fishing. Recluse Ninjas was constantly in his CD player egging us on to sing those songs. On break from all the lifers at Urban Outfitters, we went to his car, ate Tastykakes, drank Turkey Hill Iced Tea, doors open and sang:
"Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me. Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me. FUCK YOU, I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME."
"Woke up quick at about noon just thought I had to be in Compton soon. Gotta get drunk before my day beings and my mother starts bitchin about my friends. About to go and damn near went blind you n***** on the block come up blindside, I went in the house to get my clip with my mac 10 on the side of my hip....then i let the alpine play, i was pumpin new shit by nwa. it was gangsta gansta at the top of the list..."
"...little things, little things, they try to break me down, the little things, the little things just won't go away.."
We criss-crossed Lancaster County, dipped into Delaware, and searched for nothing in particular while driving around singing crappy punk-pop, white-boy covers of NWA, political rage metal. Windows down, seats reclined.
Though the CD is scratched, the musicians dead, bloated, or faded into obscurity, the music and the order of the songs still resonates with me. It isn't the best music. Some I'm embarrassed to have liked (and some other friends made sure I was aware of this). It even encouraged checking out a few shows. But for the time it was my music. No one else had that combination of songs that played next to one another. STP into DMB into Dynamite Hack into Good Charlotte into Hendrix? I don't think so. But I did and it was all I wanted at the time. It was ALL I wanted. And it was all for me to share with my friends.
