This’n dates back to 1994. In recent years I’ve become a fiend for themed mixes, but back in the day my remit rarely went beyond a catchy title. For this tape, however, I set myself one ground rule: I would include only songs I had heard on the radio in the last six months.
I can still remember where I was when I first heard most of these songs on the radio—which in most cases was the first time I heard them, period. A good whack of Side One, for instance, I heard on the road, on a desolate stretch of I-90 through western New York, while I was driving from Boston to Toledo for the Magazine Man’s wedding—one eye on the road, scrawling names and titles on a napkin as the DJ back-announced them. One quick note to be fair; it wasn’t this version of “Easy There, Steady Now” that I heard on the radio; what I heard was a live version, on NPR’s Fresh Air (I wish I could find you the episode, but the online archives only go back to 1996, alas). It was just Richard and one acoustic guitar, and I swear to God it sounded like there were three guys playing. Anyway: If this tracklisting doesn’t conjure up a lot of household names (and does conjure up visions of signs reading Terre Haute Holiday Inn Lounge Welcomes Possum Dixon), maybe that’s why the radio these days is such a drag; it just couldn’t sustain itself. But, y’know, in the words of another Richard Thompson song (and everything reminds me of a Richard Thompson song), “There’s beauty in what’s brief; there’s beauty in what’s small.”
Download Side One (45:29, 41.6 meg file: YouSendIt link good until 19 February), and tune in.
[ MP3 expired - so sorry ]
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