Slightly Stoopid, "2am"

Sometimes you just want to set aside all the madness of the world and talk about music with your friends. That’s what Bob, Carla, Mark, and I are doing with The Mixtape Diaries (Apple Podcasts, Spotify). We’re three years and 33 episodes into the project, our download rate is stuck fast at a negligible 94 listeners per episode, and we couldn’t be happier with how things are going.

I started podcasting during the pandemic, when my friend Mike suggested a joint venture called Bang a Gong. The notion was we’d each go off and mine our COVID doldrums for anything new and interesting we could reach from lockdown. Then we would report back in the next recording session and riff about it. Show and tell, essentially. Bang a Gong subjects included:

• Brad reads an entire issue of The Economist, cover to cover.

• Mike digs into Norwegian television serials.

• Brad finds an online treasure trove of VHS-recorded early 1980s MTV.

• Mike plugs into Rolling Stone’s 100 Maverick Movies list, and we start watching them.

If you ask Mike and me to go into separate rooms and list our Top Three Reasons for Doing This, I’d expect we would have the same answers: namely, in that moment we wanted both (1) to create some supporting infrastructure to keep our worlds from shrinking and (2) to have regular substantive conversations together, ideally about something other than death rates and elections; and (3) based on our past history getting wound up in bars on subjects of little consequence, we actually thought our banter might amuse other people.

(Bang a Gong is, alas, on indefinite hiatus and no longer available through the podcast outlets. Shame on you if you let this cultural moment pass you by.)

Toward the end of 2020 I opened discussions with two other friends, Bob and Mark, about a second podcast. This one would be about music. By January we had settled on a very simple idea—and one that to this day I’m convinced is perfectly suited to podcasting and could grab and hold the attention of millions if first, we could get together and record with greater regularity and second, which seems more important, anybody knew or cared who the hell we are.

The simple, perfect idea is this: we use the podcast to build a Playlist. First we select a theme for the next episode. Could be cover songs (Apple Podcasts, Spotify), Canadian artists (Apple Podcasts, Spotify), songs sung in foreign languages (Apple Podcasts, Spotify)—anything. Once the theme is settled, we each pick three songs that fit the theme. Then we listen to each others’ chosen songs, engage in some preliminary gushing and kvetching about them on our text thread, all the while conducting the fraught and protracted process of finding a mutually agreeable time to record. Once we lay down the recording and the episode goes live, we add the songs we covered to our ever-growing playlists on Apple Music and Spotify.

And just like that—ping!—we are the tastemakers of the early 21st century. The horizons of dozens (dozens!) of regular listeners are expanded, shifted, and reclaimed based on our recommendations. But taking over the world isn’t even the best part. The best part is the four of us (two years ago Carla joined us, too) have been friends forever, and The Mixtape Diaries gives us reason to get into semi-regular video chats and talk, argue, and laugh with each other about rock ‘n’ roll. We’re strewn all over the country now, in SoCal, the ’burbs of Cleveland, Nashville, and New England. But we all grew up together back in Warren, and we were especially close in those seminal teenage years when we were first discovering ourselves through music—sharpening our tastes, reaching as far as we could with our lawn-mowing money to grab hold of new bands, new records to share with our friends and allies.¹

In those days, music was so central to our lives and identities that two teens’ shared enthusiasm for a record could cement a lifelong friendship. This was at that age and stage of development when your rat bastard brain is telling you 24-7 that you’re alien and strange. Meanwhile, everyone else in your peer group is wearing a false front signaling that, by contrast, they’re perfectly well-adjusted and confident. As a result, you’re left grasping for anything you might hold in common with literally anyone. So we forged important group bonds over, among other things, our opinions and preferences about rock music. And having locked arms together to cordon off that safe space, we each went about the further business of establishing our distinct identities within it—by obsessing over one favored artist more than others did (see “I Know It’s Over”), nominating new records for the others to ratify, and so on.

That second process, of differentiation, was every bit as important as the first. The ego can’t survive without carving out some private territory for itself. In this respect, the teenage friend group of the late ’80s/ early ’90s Midwest wasn’t unlike a gated community. Within this subdivision, fenced and sectioned off from the larger world, each of us had the right to design and build his own house—but subject to complaints from the neighbors, if our landscaping didn’t conform to code.

Accordingly, disagreement with a friend about a band could deliver a real shock to the system. For example, it was an outright betrayal for me to be digging on the Stone Roses in 1990. My closest friend Brad communicated as much to me one day in the Howland High cafeteria, when he strode up to my table with a folded-over copy of Spin Magazine² and pointed to words on a page associating the Roses with the year 1967 and “flower-power’s Day-Glo euphoria.” Under existing law, this was enough evidence to secure a slam-dunk conviction. There was nothing else I could do but flat cop to the charges: Yeah. Flower-power. And I still think they’re great.

I understand that restorative justice programs are a useful means for working through issues like these, but back then we didn’t have recourse to them. So instead Brad and I just glared at each other for a minute—one of us wondering if he even knew who the other one was anymore, while the other worked through mixed-up feelings of shame and indignation. Then we separated and dug back into our pizza turnovers. Not many months later Brad had the Charlatans’ first record on CD (see footnote 2), and ten years later he was the best man in my wedding. All’s well that ends well.

What’s been really fun—if at times challenging—about The Mixtape Diaries is that the stakes may be just as high for us thirty years down the line. After high school graduation, we all left town. For a while we continued to see each other quite a bit, during college break weeks and the summer months. But as time wore on, we increasingly went our separate ways: we grew and changed, expanded our comfort zones, ran free from our old gang’s taste-policing and maybe even tossed our own badges in a junk drawer.

For sure, we’ve continued to be in each others’ lives, and music has always been an essential part of that. For years a handful of us were in the habit of posting record recs or reminiscences to one another on Facebook; now we do it by text. In the early 2000s we started a CD of the Month Club, where we each took turns burning playlists to blank CD-Rs and sending to them out to the group by mail. Carla’s July 2003 entry was the stuff of legend and a big reason why we recruited her to join us on The Mixtape Diaries.

(We had a Yahoo! group for the CD of the Month Club, and there came a point where I, as administrator, started getting emails from all over the world asking to join and offering pictures. It took me a minute to figure out what was happening. Turns out that in certain circles CD is more readily interpreted to mean not “compact disc” but “cross dresser,” and these writers were looking to join what they thought was a monthly competition. We set the listserv to private after that.)

But for all these efforts to keep connected, all of us were—still are—off on our own in the day-to-day. Making new friends, sorting out our careers, falling in love, starting families, etc., and largely out of earshot of the group. Hand-in-hand with all this, we’ve been charting our own paths forward on cultural matters, too. So when we do report back in—whether by text, on a weekend visit to Columbus for an OSU game, or in a podcasting session—we find people who matter a great deal to us who are somehow the same as we remember them and also shockingly different. And we have to figure out what to do with that.

For the four of us on The Mixtape Diaries, a lot of this figuring out happens in real time behind the microphones. Certain of us might have seen their way around to admiring jazz and R&B music. Others spent years in the wilderness cutting swathes back through punk rock into the jungles of psychedelia and early metal. Still others rode the alt-rock wave forward into the 2000s, 2010s, and now the 2020s. All of these options are on the table for inclusion and discussion. The Playlist is a jointly-administered museum of our lives as music lovers. We bring to it souvenirs from our winding, circuitous journeys of decades away from, and now back to, each other. I can struggle with this sometimes, when the choices reveal to me just how long and how far my oldest friends have traveled without me.

To be sure, many of the songs in our Playlist are mementos, treasured by all, of times we spent together. Often as not, though, at least one of us shows up with a song and is met with confusion, derision—maybe even concern:

Brad, REALLY? Sly & the Family Stone?!?

With the wisdom of middle age, we of course recognize the importance of taking these jarring moments in stride. In that mode, whatever I might have written beforehand on the text-thread, I did work hard—almost past endurance—to maintain a tone of strained politeness on the mic after Mark dealt us Ani DiFranco’s “Little Plastic Castle” (Apple Music, Spotify) two years ago. The thing is, when you’re hanging with friends from your teenage years, there’s a dormant dickish part of you that reactivates, and you become your 17-year-old self again, for at least a couple hours online.

It’s in that delicious teenager-redux recording space where the four of break into factions, take sides, form and dissolve alliances of convenience. It’s like High Fidelity meets Mean Girls. In the thick of it, I will turn sharply on Carla over her execrable Glass Animals selection (links withheld on principle), and she’ll (indefensibly) counter with a show of disdain for Jesus Christ Superstar. Then in the next moment she and I are joined together again, carrying the flag for Krautrock and for the ’70s more generally, in the face of reactionary Gen X complaints from Mark and Bob’s crabbed intolerance for songs more than six minutes long. Then Mark and I might rise together in defense of Muse or in opposition to Chaka Khan or Jamiroquai.

For his part, Bob generally assumes the role of peacekeeper, but even he gets to the point where he blurts out, without warning or apology:

I can’t stand that Cocteau Twins song (Apple Music, Spotify).

My song this week is “2am” (Apple Music, Spotify) by Slightly Stoopid. This was one of Mark’s picks for our “Stand in the Place Where You Live” episode (Apple Podcasts, Spotify), which happens to be—for reasons that escape us—our most popular episode by far. This one predated Carla’s arrival, and in it Bob, Mark, and I picked songs by artists local to where we’re living today. Slightly Stoopid was Mark’s choice, and on first hearing it I was annoyed. *Slightly?*, I asked myself. Oof. What is Mark thinking with this? I looked up the date of release. Well, of course: if you extrapolate the worst rock excesses of the 1990s all the way through to 2007, this is one of a handful of places you would end up.

Then I played it a second time. Then a third and a fourth and a fifth. And now I get it. Not only do I get it, but I hear the Clash’s “Revolution Rock” (Apple Music, Spotify) bubbling up in this song, and it warms my heart. And isn’t this exactly what we’re after with this podcast: that the four of us can drop pins and tell each other not just where we used to be but where we are now, in the hope that some of the time—maybe not always—the others can meet us there? And when our oldest friends pull up on that street corner and high-five us over Slightly Stoopid, Bully, early Eurythmics, or the Joy Formidable, isn’t that one of the best feelings there is?

Let’s be clear: music is not on its own a basis for friendships. But it absolutely does supply both a mode for conducting and a medium for celebrating them. I’m lucky to get to do just that with my Mixtape Diaries gang—swapping songs, texting takes, talking trash, and from time to time coming together over the proposition that The Song in Front of Us is a goddam frickin’ masterpiece.

Now if we could just get on a regular schedule already …

1. For more about how we scrounged and scoured the landscape for tracks and traces of anything good, see “Lazarus.”

2. The article was in fact a Simon Reynolds write-up about the Charlatans UK, which I found a minute ago in the Rock’s Back Pages online archive. Before he turns specifically to the Charlatans, Reynolds sets the scene by distinguishing the bad-trip psychedelia of Loop and Spacemen 3 from the more euphoric—maybe ecstatic is the better word—Madchester scene in which the Roses and Charlatans were embroiled.