Oregon Emporium (Dayton 1998 Mix)

I still have (not counting Boat Chips) ten or eleven cassettes. Most of these, sadly, are Nitpickers Guide to Star Trek: TNG audiocassettes. One is the Fletch soundtrack; another is the License to Kill soundtrack. A couple of others. And then there’s this one.

I moved to Dayton to study film at Wright State. My buddy AJ (RIP, seven years ago today) was already there, so I moved into his place on E. 5th St, the Oregon District. Got a job in the district at the coffee shop at the end of the street (which also sold fancy beers and pastries and eventually sandwiches) for rent and spending money. Eventually I stopped going to school altogether and just worked full time at the Emporium, officially "the Oregon Emporium," aka the coffee shop. 

E. 5th St. was full of bars and restaurants with lofts and apartments above most of them. We were the only coffee shop, though, so I soon got to know everyone on the block and their routines. It was a great place to live and work, early twenties, and I'm happy to have preserved some of it in musical amber with this mix tape. Anyone who listens to the same ten or eleven CDs over a thousand shifts knows how they can expand to explain or imbue every corner of your life whether you want them to or not.

I wrote a little bit about leaving Dayton the second time (1999) at the end of my DS9 post. This was the mix I made when I left the first time, mid-summer 1998. This was just before the iPhone / Instagram era, and I don't have as many pictures from Dayton and my time there as I wish I did. 

I'll link to things individually, but here's a mix of the whole thing, in order, if you prefer it that way. Without further ado, here's at least one of the soundtracks for twenty-one months of my early twenties.

SIDE ONE

1.  You and I – David Byrne

"You and I - may kill ourselves

You and I - go straight to hell

Where they have barbeque and beer

Better than they do up here

And you know all the words to the songs

Yeah - we smoke cigarettes

We dance with the dead

They're soft to the touch

We drink way too much

And darling, I think you'll like it here."

2. What’s the Use in Getting Sober – Joe Jackson

I've been fortunate to have had some good bosses over the years. One of them was Joe Miller, at the Emporium. He paid more attention to real-life stuff in my life than I did. I mean I was mostly focused on beer and my long distance girlfriend and hanging out with my friends. You know how it goes. You've seen these movies. Anyway, this was one of his CDs. I used to needle him by referring to "Got the Time" as either "that Anthrax song" or "isn't this just 'Walk Like an Egyptian' by the Bangles?"

Despite such things - and an erratic work ethic - I think Joe liked me. Before he employed me he made me read a book on the history of coffee, which I always thought was cool. I'd love to thank him for the thousand kindessness shown to me 1997-1999. You try tracking down someone named Joe Miller sometime, even in our exciting modern age. 

3. Rudies Don’t Care – Hepcat
4. No Worries - Hepcat

Here's a CD I only ever saw at the coffee shop. Some googling tells me Hepcat never really broke the big time. There was a lot of this sort of thing in the air at the time, at least in Dayton in 1997 and 1998: zydeco, swing band stuff. 

We've gotten used to the internet collecting things from all walks of life - and of lives before we were born - hell, that's what this post is, even. The past has an immediacy/ portability that it didn't used to have. I bring this up here because the "Underneath the Mango Tree" part of "Rudies Don't Care" was a throwback to my VHS childhood watching Dr. No over and over, and in 1997-1998, I loved that little connection.

Now it seems like, hey, what's the big deal? There was more segregation between past and present experiences back then. This is a bigger topic, perhaps, than how it relates to these specific remarks, but ah, the velocity of time. 

5. Mean Eyed Cat – Johnny Cash

Another of Joe's CDs. I found it so fascinating that guys my age (Joe was six or seven years older but still) were listening to Elvis and Johnny Cash. I was green enough to assume this was something unique to Dayton/ Ohio, thinking hey, they didn't do this back in Rhode Island. But they did do this back in Rhode Island, it just took me moving to Ohio to realize it.

I remember these liner notes pretty well. The coffee shop was sometimes very, very dead and I think I read the liner notes to everything, as well as the ingredients to everything in every cupboard. Anyway this was a song Johnny wrote in the 60s but never finished, so he added the last stanza for the Unchained CD. "She bought a ticket with her tips, and now we're curled up on the sofa / me and her and that mean-eyed cat."

And speaking of country:

6.  Private Conversation – Lyle Lovett. 

7. I Can’t Love You Any More - Lyle Lovett

I made many attempts with other Lyle Lovett based only on my love of these two songs, but nothing ever clicked the same way. 

Years later, my wife (back when we were just long distance love banditos) and I were driving back from New Hampshire and this tape was in the deck and she remarked on how sweet the lyrics were. (Was there more? See title.) I had literally just been thinking that the sweetness of the lyrics was not something everyone appreciates when she said that. We got married a few years later; I won't lie - those two or three seconds in the car after she said that and realizing hey, she gets it - probably had a lot to do with it. 

So hey, thanks, Lyle.  

8.  Buck Naked - David Byrne

9.  Angels –  David Byrne

“I am just an advertisement /
for a version of myself” 

Not much to say here. Two great tunes. "I'm ready now / but where are you?"

10.  Make a Change - Buckwheat Zydeco

More zydeco. The summer of 1997 in the District was big with this kind of stuff, like I said up there. It's in the background of all my memories, just as DS9 was the spring and summer after. A weird match but such things happen, in life, mix tapes, and up there in the scrambled McBrains. 

11.  Tommy's Song - Hepcat

12.  Country Boy – Johnny Cash. 

Listening to this again reminded me of something I'd almost forgotten: this CD eventually got taken out of rotation because someone in the District complained about the "Jesus, Jesus" refrain of one of the songs.

My country appreciation more or less stopped with Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, and Elvis, not counting some other stuff my friend Mike had back in the day. I later worked at a bar that had a lot of country in the jukebox - new country, old country, classic country, alt-country, you name it. Heard most of the big ones and more than a few of the older ones. More power to them all, but most of it's just not for me. 

Hip hop and country, pretty much: two genres that never hooked me then or now outside of a few outliers. Who knows what the future holds?

SIDE TWO

1.  Love Is Strange – Everything But the Girl 

I don't remember much about this one except it probably made me miss my girlfriend or something ridiculous. This is that part of the movie, I guess. (The hero descends to the underworld...) 

2.  Gimme Me Some Truth – Sam Philips 

Here's an album and artist I unfairly forget about in between spins of this mix tape. (I think I've rectified this, though, by discovering several subsequent albums on Amazon Music, the kind I already have, so I bookmarked a few. Looking forward to it.)

T Bone Burnett, her ex, produced this one. He and Butch Vig and a few others really authored the 90s sound for me in my head. I keep forgetting I have Stephen King's and John Mellencamp's Ghost Brothers of Darkland County waiting to be listened to, and that's produced by T Bone Burnett. I need to better organize my queues. That's, ironically, in the queue - better time management - for the post-blog life. 

3.  Sad Song  – David Byrne 
4.  Rowboat – Johnny Cash
5.  Sea of Heartbreak - Johnny Cash
6.  Rusty Cage - Johnny Cash

These lyrics are so funny, but it cracks me up how every song is about being sad. I have these routines I do with my wife, now, about songs from the 80s or 90s, and one of them is just how Chris Cornell was always talking about hanging himself. This was, you know, before. Ouch. Retired that one from "the set." 

When I hear these songs now I a) love them b) think of how my life in most of the nineties was defined by dehydration, overtiredness, and various things I don't feel like mentioning to the court. Most of my opinions, feelings, and moods I see through a lava lamp of such. I wonder how the 90s would have I seemed had I ate oatmeal and drank enough water every day? 

"Sea of Heartbreak" is so great. That's Tom Petty on there - I mentioned the liner notes. At one time I had all these guest parts memorized. He and Johnny Cash were both alive back then, too, with good albums and big hits still to come. Cornell, Cash, and Tom Petty - looking at the future from the past from beyond the grave. 

"The lights in the harbor / don't shine for me..."

7.  So Long Baby Goodbye– the Blasters

Joe had a bunch of CDs there that I'd describe as dorm room music from the mid-80s. I don't know if this fits that bill, or if my memory is even accurate, but I can picture this one playing over a crane shot of a mid-80s campus party, for sure. 

This and the Blasters' "Dark Night" were in a few things. Two great tunes for sure. 

8.   Baby I Can’t Please You – Sam Philips. 

9.   Black Sky - Sam Phillips

10.   Wheel of the Broken Voice - Sam Phillips 

I never saw this video at the time. The only over-the-air TV I watched at that time was Sunday nights for the line-up. ("The Simpons" through "The X-Files" with the middle spot being whatever Fox was hawking). The rest was all laser disc, or VHS. 

At the tail end of my time in Dayton we were getting really crappy TV reception in one room in one of those furniture-TVs AJ inherited from when his Dad moved to San Francisco. We watched some 90210 over that, and I definitely (memorably) watched He Touched Me on that thing, as it put the bow on my going to Dayton to become an Elvis fan. There's a tie-in with the name homonym of the artist, here - I digress. There’s no Elvis on this mix and there probably should be. Luscious Jackson, too, and plenty more. 

“Wheel of the Broken Voice” – those lyrics, oh the 90s-ness! But in the best way. Not a Rusted Root way. Both could be used to the same effect in Dawson’s Creek, though, and few would know the difference. Don’t shoot the messenger. Incidentally, Sam Phillips went on to be the soundtrack of quite a few Gilmore Girls episodes. 

11.  Throwing Stones - Bob Weir

This (the linked-to) is not the same version on my tape. It doesn't sound all that different, except Wasserman is turned up in the mix on that version and not on mine. This was from a CD bootleg of some kind, back when such things weren't exactly uncommon but not something I can look up. Or, I could, if I had more info to track it down, but all I have is "that solo version of "Throwing Stones" on that one bootleg, recorded sometime between 1987 and 1998.

It's pretty great, though. 

12. I’ve Been Everywhere – Johnny Cash. 

The tape ends with this one, which became a commercial and lost a bit of its luster as a result, but for a few years there it was cool insider baseball. I mean, in my circles. Not for cosmopolitan fancy folks, or country folks. 

Oh for when such things mattered even while pretending they didn’t.

But this mix extends a bit beyond the tape, to a long shot of me closing up the shop across the street, finishing up, with a couple of ghosts, living and dead, smiling back at me, to “Last Dance.” Call it a special feature or a post-credits sequence. 

Fini

~

"I'm the ice cubes in your glass
A busted Cadillac
A garden of delight
A joker in your deck

Well it ain't in what I feel
No, it ain't in what I say
In the pleasure of a kiss
It never fades away."

- David Byrne