OCD Playlist of the Week

Ever since I owned my very first Casio (or some such) stereo with a double tape deck (GOD how I miss those analog honies), I have been obsessing over what the oldsters call "mix tapes" and what the youngsters call "playlists." I love making them, but even more importantly: I love the PURPOSE behind one. You need a halfway decent reason to do pretty much anything, and sinking my teeth into a PURPOSEFUL list of songs is a very worthy activity. I am more than willing to dedicate significant time and effort into the mix--in fact, I insist on the process being more long term than most others would be comfortable with.

In my younger days I made mix tapes for boys that I liked (but, being totally chicken shit, I never actually gave one away to any of them). I made them for my friends and people I wanted to impress, but I reserved special mix tape-making zeal for the annual "Cincinnati Tape," a mix tape especially for summer road trips from my home in Louisville up to Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. Once my older brother was driving age and had access to a car, he and I would make the hour and 20 minute drive to go sit in the nosebleeds and watch the Reds get their butts kicked around the National League (except in '94 when, shockingly, they won the Central Division pennant). We would do this between 6 and 12 times a summer, as ticket prices for a Reds game were as bargain basement as you could get in those days (thank you, Marge Schott), as cheap as a ticket to Louisville's AAA minor league team games, in fact. The music on these tapes was not generally good (although I was really into it at the time), and many of those songs that inevitably made the rotation are acutely embarrassing for me to admit now (although I will still stand by some of them).

My brother and I had rather strange taste in most things growing up: movies, T.V. shows, general aesthetics, and, especially, music. Our favorite genre was what I would now classify as "wussy 1970's easy listening." One of our most prized CDs, a virtual goldmine for our various mixed tapes, was a compilation that we found in the music store bargain bin titled, [grimace], "Baby Boomer Classics." Yeesh. I'm talking about The Doobie Brothers, America, Peter Frampton, and Al Stewert (and those are the less embarrassing ones).

All of this is on my mind this week because my new Playlist Purpose is to recreate our old (and by now, long lost) Cincinnati Tape, as closely as I can. We never really had one definitive master copy, we made a new tape every year (sometimes more than one a year), mixing in a few different songs here and there, fiddling with the order, but we generally used the same stable of songs. My Purpose with this playlist is to capture, as closely as I can, the SPIRIT of the old Cincinnati Tape; I want to get the order just right, with a nice progression and transition as close to the way I would've done it 17 years ago. So this, my friends, is my challenge to myself--truly a project that will be worthy of my mix tape/playlist pedigree and talent. I hope to have it finished by the end of the summer, maybe for a drive up to Cincinnati before the end of the season...