Spring, 1991. I’m living with D in a basement apartment in Ithaca, New York. She’s in her senior year at Cornell and is about to graduate cum laude in history. I’ve blown my chances at finishing college and am unemployed, majoring in drinking. I’ve got very little money to spend on CDs, or anything else, so I’m getting my music the old-fashioned way; I’m stealing it.
Well, it’s not quite as dire as that. The cut-out bins and loss-leader compilations still yield their treasures, as do the record collections of relatives and friends. But there is one incident...
We are invited to a New Year’s Eve party at a condo shared by then-future World’s Best Brother-In-Law Jeff. One of his housemates has a dad who works in the music industry, and has a crate of freebie promotional cassettes in his room. If I remember correctly, he and Jeff aren’t getting along at the time. Now, I wouldn’t say that Jeff encouraged me to pilfer from this pile of tapes, but neither did he do anything to stop me; hence the Tin Machine, the Bruce Cockburn, the Renegade Soundwave, the Lloyd Cole, and (I think) the Pete Townshend.
The Joe Satriani was my brother’s. My old friend the Magazine Man sent me a tape of the Outback. Frankie and Wang Chung were both borrowed from a housemate—and in the case of the Frankie track, I did a pretty drastic in-tape edit to chop about three minutes out of “Pleasuredome” (it’s present in its entirety here). And there were a handful of covers from Elektra’s 40th anniversary compilation Rubáiyat, with which I was much taken at the time. Yes, that’s the set that unleashed the Gipsy Kings version of “Hotel California” on an unsuspecting world; like I said, I was drinking a lot at the time.
Download Side One (51:34, 47.2 meg file: YouSendIt link good until 5 February), and feel guilty by association.
[ MP3 expired - so sorry ]
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