My First Mix CD - Nothing But Good Things #1

Mix CDs are a category of lists unto themselves.  One might reasonably quibble that they have little in common with the other lists here, but I included them as a blog-worthy category in my preamble, and regular readers may have noticed I like to refer back to that preamble.  Here are my original liner notes from Feb 22, 1998 on the CD I made called Nothing But Good Things #1.

After years of treating my college DJ withdrawal symptoms by making mix tapes, I took a look at the 50+ I've made so far, and came to four conclusions.  1) In my zeal to fill 90 minutes I ocassionally throw in a song or two that just aren't any good.  2) Cassette tapes aren't going to be around a whole lot longer.  I don't know if it will be mini-disc or DVD or something else that replaces them, but those easily crinkled rolls of tape just aren't the wave of the future.  3) For all the mix tapes I've made for myself there sure are a lot of people I've been meaning to make a tape for and never have.  4) If random-play existed for cassettes it would be like having an exciting new mix tape every time I played it.
This is the first in what will hopefully be a series.  I like all these songs a lot.  They aren't my 13 favorite songs of all time - I want this to be a series after all - but I feel like they all hang together reasonably well as a baker's dozen.  If the CD makes you happy, send me a note or give me a call or write me an email and say "more, more, make more" and maybe I will.

And here's the track list:

1. Slapp Happy - Everybody's Slimmin
2. Kip Hanrahan - Shadow Song (Mario's In)
3. Lesley Riddle - I'm Working on a Builing
4. Linda Smith - An Ideal View of an Ideal City
5. Sun Ra - We Travel the Spaceways
6. The Gories - Nitroglycerine
7. Vehicle Flips - Diplomacy, Home, and Abroad
8. Colorblind James Experience - Quite a Guy
9. ATS - Blanche
10. Austin Lounge Lizards - Brain Damage
11. David Thomas - Planet of Fools
12. 5ive Style - Once Around the Park
13. Spot 1019 - Nothing But Good Things

Now, 13 years later, it's entertaining to see the ways in which my liner notes are dated.  To make the original mix CD, I had coped WAV files onto my computer.  The CD only had 13 songs largely because that was the amount of space I had availble on my hard drive for WAV files in 1998.  Can you imagine only being able to fit 13 songs on your computer?  The mini-disc never took off, so it's a good thing I never bought that mini-disc player I'd been coveting at the time.  I did play this CD and many others I made on random play, but iPod shuffle mode made random play on individual CDs downright quaint.
Over time, the idea of playing the individual CDs on random play became less important to me, and I began taking the order more seriously and paying more attention to the segues, as I did when I was a DJ.  There are some segues here that make OK musical or thematic sense, but there are others that don't.  That's still true of CDs I make today, but I try harder.

Eventually, I'd like to figure out how to post streaming audio for these old CDs, but I'm taking this blog thing one step at a time.  The tech-savvy among you should feel free to offer advice about how one would do that.