Mixology: Jason Voorhees Sings Motown

Mixology is a recurring feature in which I take a look at one of the many mix tapes I made over the years. Some are better than others, but all of them are fun to revisit.

Jason Voorhees Sings Motown (10/29/88)

My senior year at UNH was a lot of fun. I had just completed a summer internship at the Peabody Times that confirmed my desire to become a newspaper reporter. It also gave me a semester's worth of credits that left me with only three required courses to take to graduate.

Of course, I had no desire to leave school early, so I spaced them out over the full year and took some other stuff just for the fun of it, like Writing Poetry (with future Pulitzer winner Charles Simic). The previous year, I was the news editor at The New Hampshire, spending 30 hours a week at the paper. I decided to step back from that role into a reporting position, writing a regular column and helping create Laphos, a humor supplement. But mostly, I just partied a lot and enjoyed the last vestiges of a responsibility-free life.

My roommates and I were in our second year in our off-campus apartment and things were good. There were four of us crammed into a two-bedroom flat, but it still beat living in the dorms. As with some of my previous mixes, I made this tape in anticipation of a party we had.

I don't remember the party, but the mix is full of the mostly mainstream music we were listening to and watching on MTV. U2 was HUGE and Rattle and Hum, the movie was about to come out; my roommate Rob had already picked up the album. Coming after the magnificence of The Joshua Tree, anything was bound to be a disappointment and Rattle and Hum was, although to be fair, it wasn't meant to be a proper studio album. It was a collection of studio and live tracks designed to go with the documentary, which was originally envisioned as an arthouse pic to play a small run. But the movie went over budget and the band's success turned into it into something bigger, but it stiffed at the box office. Still, there are some good songs on the album and "When Love Comes to Town" with BB King is a great track.

The mix is a pretty fair representation of what we were listening to at the time. Yeah, Sting, Clapton, Hornsby, Mellencamp. It is what it is. But you can see the evolution into alt-rock as I worked the Cure, REM, and Midnight Oil in there. The Van Hagar track is probably the only song of theirs that I can stomach these days and the DLR song came from his second, less good solo album. And you've gotta love a party mix that ends with a Midnight Oil song about Australian aboriginal rights. If that doesn't say party, what does?

The side names come from the infamous McDLT sandwich that McDonald's was hawking at the time. If you were a sentient being at the time, you remember it:




Side A: Hot Side Hot
When Love Comes to Town - U2
Be Still My Beating Heart - Sting
In Today's Room - Squeeze
Early in the Morning - Robert Palmer
Mystify - INXS
Miss You - Eric Clapton
Tunnel of Love - Bruce Springsteen
Cherry Bomb - John Mellencamp
The Valley Road - Bruce Hornsby
Brothers in Arms - Dire Straits

Side B: Cool Side Cool
The Boy in the Bubble - Paul Simon
Dance Little Sister - Terence Trent D'Arby
Blind - Talking Heads
Hot Hot Hot!!! - The Cure
It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) - R.E.M.
Sweet Fire of Love - Robbie Robertson (with U2)
Finish What Ya Started - Van Halen
Damn Good - David Lee Roth
Pour Some Sugar on Me - Def Leppard
Beds are Burning - Midnight Oil



The late great RP:


Hot x 3: