A few days ago, my husband completed his Van Halen vinyl collection with the arrival of For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, a Sammy Hagar fronted 1991 album. Rounding out the collection was no easy feat since during the later Van Halen years, CDs were the rage, and vinyl albums weren’t being pressed. Walking to work, we reminisced about when the album came out, where we were in our lives (college), and I mentioned that I thought I had that album on, gasp, cassette tape.
I had an extensive cassette tape collection. I would stay up late at night, with the lights out so my parents didn’t know, and I would record Rock Over London off the radio. WMMR, our local radio station, would play album sides, and I would record them. I had a whole slew of punk bands that I had copied from my friends, not because I actually liked them, but because it sounded cool to have the Butt Hole Surfers or the Dead Kennedys in my collection. My friends and I exchanged tapes, copied tapes, but strangely, I don’t ever remember making a mixtape, but I must have. I must have sat down and carefully curated songs for my friends, because I remember stuffing tapes in my bookbag, and sharing them. And then I started thinking, did anyone make me a mixtape? I know I never received a mixtape from a cute boy, like in the movies, who wanted to express how he felt through special songs – I ran with the nerdy crowd, no boyfriends, just homework parties, very exciting stuff. When we were dating, my husband burned CD’s for me, but they were full albums, not “mixtapes.”
So, if I were to make a mixtape today, for myself, what would it be? What would the title of my mixtape be? Let’s throw some cards,
Of course, right away, I wanted to know what that Knight was looking, where is he taking that cup? So I pulled another card:
Ah, he’s going back to the well! And as soon as the word “well” popped into my head, so did Bruce Springsteen’s song, Glory Days.
Think I’m going down to the well tonight
And I’m going to drink ’til I get my fill
And I hope when I get old I don’t sit around thinking about it
But I probably will
Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture
A little of the glory of, well time slips away
And leaves you with nothing mister but
Boring stories of
Glory days yeah they’ll pass you by
Glory days in the wink of a young girl’s eye
Glory days, glory days
Glory Days, Bruce Springsteen
Photo: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Wells Fargo Center, 3/16/23
I’ve loved Bruce since I was 14 years old and I figured out my name was in the song Born to Run (which I had on cassette tape). Over the span of 30+ years, I’ve seen Bruce over 20 times, I lost count. We just saw 2 weeks ago. Made sense! I’m a sentimental Knight, going back to the well. My Mixtape would be called Glory Days!
Not so fast! There’s Justice staring us in the face, with a symmetrical, harmonious flourishing set of coins in between. Justice says, get with the program, as the Judge often says to my clients who are failing on probation, or to a lawyer who doesn’t want to follow the new ways of doing things. We are here, in the now, no going back to the well, my sentimental fool. To grow, you have to see what’s right, for right now. If you call your mixtape Glory Days, and that’s what you play ever morning, those coins will not be yours. You will be stuck with boring stories.
So, then I started thinking about U2, and their new album, Songs of Surrender, which came in the mail yesterday. In Songs of Surrender, U2 revisits its catalogue of hits, strips them down, and reimagines them. The Edge had this to say about the project, “[it] started as an experiment” but quickly became an “obsession as so many early U2 songs yielded to a new interpretation. . . Intimacy replaced post-punk urgency. New keys, new chords, new tempos and new lyrics arrived… Once we surrendered our reverence for the original version, each song started to open up to a new anthemic voice of this time, of the people we are now, and particularly the singer that Bono has become.”
Surrender the reverence for the old, and what is old, is not new again, but something completely different. Full of possibilities.
Justice always applies precedent, but precedent to what stares her in the face.
I think U2 made my mixtape!
What’s your 2023 mixtape? Throw some cards, leave a reply in the comments, or tag me on Instagram – @oliveslingscards.
2 Comments
Will
U2 is definitely not my thing, but you sucked me in with the Wizard of Oz reference and the idea of revisiting your greatest hits to remake them. Read the the whole blog so far — good luck on it in the days ahead.
Wendy
Thanks so much Will for stopping by! U2 hasn’t always been my thing either, but I really like these stripped down, acoustic versions of the old songs. And, I love that they featured Glen Hansard in the documentary about the making of the album. Once is one of my favorite little films.