My driving disc.
I go to Vandergrift, Pennsylvania twice a year to see eight vintage horror movies at a drive-in. I go to Chicago once a year for B Fest, a 24-hour-long bad movie marathon held the last weekend of January. It's about a five and a half hour drive to get to either destination (barring shitty weather, horrible traffic or MapQuest directions that add an hour to your trip--all of which I have encountered at one point or another). Sean Frost, my friend and constant co-attendee for these things, would burn a couple of CDs worth of music for each trip; I'd burn a couple of CDs as well. It was a way to fill up time on the road, share music with a friend, and kill time. Three 77-minute discs more or less took one leg of the trip to get through after I picked up Sean partway to Illinois.
So this disc is the distillation of what I like to listen to when I'm driving--"My Guru", for example, is a track I could drive forever to if it was on loop. Same with "South Side", or "Phantom Bride" or "Government Center" or anything else on the disc. Driving takes time, so there aren't that many superfast tracks on this one. It's more about getting into that Zen driving trance and moving along than zipping down the highway at 90 miles an hour.
"Glad All Over" is on this disc because I used to thumb-bonk the steering wheel with my hands in the properly mandated ten-and-two position for the two drum hits before the band sings "glad all over", and this drove my younger brother out of his fucking mind for some reason. Maybe he just hated the song. But I have memories of when I had a drivers' license and he didn't, this song coming up on the radio or in the tape deck, and the thumb hits on the steering wheel irritating him as much as anything possibly could. Since I'm not ferrying him around any more, the song's on the disc and he never has to hear it again because he's never wanted a Timothology.
Timothology: Strange Aeons Disc 06 / 48
Theme: Tim's personal road trip / driving disc
Label phrase: "I once saw a forklift get picked up by another forklift."
01) Piltdown Rides Again / The Piltdown Men
02) Glad All Over / The Dave Clark Five
03) Working on the Highway / Bruce Springsteen
04) South Side / Moby featuring Gwen Stefani
05) Macho Man (12" version) / The Village People
06) Ring of Fire / Johnny Cash
07) You Sexy Thing / Hot Chocolate
08) Phantom Bride / Erasure
09) One Dumb Thing / Devo
10) Nervous Breakdown / Eddie Cochran
11) Shoehorn with Teeth / They Might Be Giants
12) My Guru / Anandji V. Shah, Kalyanji V. Shah & Dan the Automator
13) Hurdy Gurdy Man / Donovan
14) Hold On! I'm A Comin' / Sam and Dave
15) Authority Song / John Mellencamp
16) Telstar / Alien Cowboys
17) Punk Rock Girl / The Dead Milkmen
18) (I'm Stuck in a Pagoda With) Tritia Toyota / The Dickies
19) Okey Dokey / The Incredible Bongo Band
20) Temptation Baby / Gene Vincent
21) X Offender / Blondie
22) Run Runaway / Slade
23) Do You Wanna Dance? / The Ramones
24) Mr. Moto / The Challengers
25) Government Center / The Modern Lovers
26) Wild, Wild West / The Escape Club
Here's a bit of my thought process about this disc, which you exactly confirmed...
ReplyDelete"Hrm, I thought this was the driving one. Why isn't it making me want to drive faster? That's how these things work. Maybe I misread it? No, I'm sure it said driving..... Maybe it means driving like people do. You know, driving a place at a reasonable speed. Driving in general. Like a highway, and you're not in a hurry. Like for a vacation. Yeah! That makes sense! ALL this makes sense. It's a driving CD for people who drive much different than I do.
Anyway, me being glad to have my suspicions confirmed isn't really the point. Really liked this disc, more once I actually understood it. It even kinda made me try to drive more casually, and it works great for that. I liked pretty much everything on it bar a track or two--my long-standing opposition to cleverness can sometimes get in the way.
Anyway, today when IU got in the car, I started at track 12 and 12-17 was a perfect drive sequence. Fun, poppy, familiar. Really enjoyed that you put in that homage to the 1993 song from disc 2. And there's just nothing like singing along to Punk Rock Girl. Wild Wild West was a hugely pleasant surprise--it was familiar at first but took a bit for me to really remember the song, which I don't think I've heard in a large number of years.
Most importantly, though, we gotta take our equipment, do rock and roll. The secretaries won't be able to sit.
I got stuck in construction traffic in Gary, Indiana on a Chicago trip a few years back while this disc was playing. I turned off the A/C, rolled the windows down and sang along at the top of my lungs and irritated the hell out of other drivers for a while, which made the whole experience worthwhile (viewing this memory through the magic of self-delusion, I had other people join in the choruses of "Macho Man" or something).
ReplyDelete"One Dumb Thing" was off the soundtrack to a driving combat game called INTERSTATE '82 or something like that. Devo are awesome.
I don't know if I'll ever be able to adequately repay you for introducing me to Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers.