Oh yeah, I was assuming erin didn't need a copy of her own mix....

I never got erin's mix.

yeah LJ, I think the group with erin's mix is a few spots back of you. It was moving around the holidays if I remember correctly. Shouldn't be too far away.

I'm assuming that in order to speed things up, an extra copy of erin's mix took a shortcut to near the end of the list?

yeah. I sent the stuff that I had directly to Sue thus creating a very small circle for about 5 of the disks.

msbelle sent me a bunch of CD's that would have jumped the queue a bit, and Erin's was one of them. However, I don't know how much queue jumping happened.

Just so everyone has an idea of where we are. There are 21 people in the exchange.

Jeff Mangum donated a beautifully decorated acoustic guitar to an AIDS care organization and they're auctioning it off on eBay: [link]

I remember that there were 4 discs, but the handwriting on two of them was very, very similar. Also, I think I lost the liner notes to one of those two - at least, I couldn't find any when I went to ship them off. And, no, I don't remember whose.

Thanks for the link, Ginger. I couldn't figure out how to finesse that.

Here's the review itself for the click-averse.

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Times of London

January 28, 2005

For the ones that got away - Bob Stanley

IMAGINE the scene: a rock magazine is compiling the World’s Greatest Punk Records to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Slaughter and the Dogs’ first gig. The editor looks through his well-thumbed list — Anarchy in the UK? Check. Clash? White Riot will do. Somebody suggests Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited has a bit of a punky attitude.

The editor looks fidgety, beads of sweat appear on his brow. “And the Beatles?” he asks. “How are we going to fit them in?” This is not how pop writing was meant to be. What we deserve is the grand tradition of informed enthusiasm and unwarranted bile which stretches from Nik Cohn and Lester Bangs, through punk sage Jon Savage and sly brainbox Simon Reynolds. What we get is a cover-stars-by-rote version of pop history —people who rate Nirvana as slackers with one good idea and a pretty face are royally bored by twice-yearly definitive histories.

A giddy new book called Lost in the Grooves, on the other hand, is exemplary pop writing. “It’s always a treat to find something new that really blows your mind. I think that’s what every music freak is looking for,” explains editrix Kim Cooper. Lost in the Grooves is a collection that has grown out of her and co-editor David Smay’s Scram magazine, dedicated to digging deeper than the familiar Elvis/Beatles/Pistols/Nirvana saga. At the same time, the editors are no obscurants, placing albums by Paul McCartney, Prince, Pentangle, Lou Reed, OMD, the Kinks, the Bee Gees and the Beach Boys alongside the Dream Lake Ukelele Band’s one shot at fame. They just don’t pick the albums you read about on every other list.

Paul McCartney’s 1980 album McCartney II, for instance, came after a foolish drugs bust in Japan that effectively meant the end of Wings. He discovered synths and went all DIY and electronic. The juddering insanity of Temporary Secretary made it a hot Hoxton item 20 years on, Summer’s Day Song is warm honey, while Darkroom imagines Cabaret Voltaire re-jigged by Jonathan King. As for the bubbling Tomorrow’s World-ish instrumental Front Parlour, I’m proud to say I once played it at an electronica night and three people asked what it was.

Nobody has time to listen to everything, and this is where Lost in the Grooves becomes invaluable as a trigger. I’ve pored over the works of the Bee Gees and Beach Boys to the detriment of my soul and my social life but had still never heard either Mr Natural (the one before Jive Talking) or LA Light Album (the one with Lady Lynda), both LITG inclusions: they were officially uncool and I’d been conned. Now I’ve heard them both and I’d say the former’s Throw a Penny is a match for How Deep is Your Love, a natural-born guilty pleasure. Lost in the Grooves is written with such zip, enthusiasm and love of music that you can’t help but get sucked in.

For Cooper “it’s all about lauding the brilliant underdog and discovering unfamiliar glories. Part of the reason I love John Cale’s Paris 1919 so much is that I can still listen to it with fresh ears, where I overplayed my Velvet Underground albums to saturation point.”

Cooper and Smay first came to prominence with the groundbreaking book Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth four years ago. It revived the spirit and endless inquisitiveness of late Sixties/early Seventies fanzines such as Teenage Wasteland Gazette and the late Greg Shaw’s Who Put the Bomp with contributions from the originals (Shaw, cartoonist Peter Bagge) and the latterday pop-culture mavens.

The book was greeted with relief — essays penned with a mixture of gravitas and glee normally reserved for undiscovered Springsteen outtakes were on subjects such as the Monkees, the Sweet and the Archies. Roots and authenticity, touchstones of the musically bankrupt, counted for nought. Cooper describes the Archies as “masters at evoking (continued...)