Side A
Artist	Song
Black Sabbath	Back Street Kids (1976)
Coverdale/Page	Shake My Tree (1993)
Porno For Pyros (w / Perry Farrell)	Meija (1993)
King Crimson	Heartbeat (1982)
The Moody Blues	It's Up To You (1970)
Corrosion Of Conformity	Who's Got The Fire (2000)
Bob Dylan	The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964)
Mott The Hoople	Backsliding Fearlessly (1970)
Ted Nugent	Weeken-d Warriors (1978)
Pearl Jam	Glorified G (1993)
X	What's Wrong With Me... (1985)
Mudhoney	A Thousand Forms Of Mind (1998)
Queensryche	Real World (from Last Action Hero) (1993)
The Police	Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic (1981)
Queen	All Dead, All Dead (1977)
MC5	Gotta Keep Movin' (1971)
Anthrax (w / Angelo Badalamenti)	Black Lodge (1993)
Nirvana	In Bloom (1991)
U2	Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kil-l Me (from Batman Forever) (1995)
Yes	Almost Like Love (1987)
Side B
Artist	Song	Buy
Pink Floyd	Take It Back (1994)
Chris Cornell	Moonchild (1999)
Evanescence	Going Under (2003)
The Ramones	Strength To En-dure (1992)
Ian Hunter	Morons (1999)
Accept	What Else (1994)
The Sex Pistols	Belsen Was A Gas (live version) (from The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle) (1978)
Manic Street Preachers	The Intense Humming Of Evil (1994)
Emerson, Lake & Palmer	Toccata (an adaptation of Alberto Ginastera's Piano Concerto No. 1, 4th Movement) (instrumental) (1973)
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band	Veteran's Day Poppy (1970)
Tool	Intension (2006)
Van Der Graaf Generator	A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers: Eyewitness / Pictures / Lighthouse / S.H.M. / Presence Of The Night / Kosmos Tours / (Custard's) Last Stand / The Clot Thickens / Land's En-d (Sineline) / We Go Now (1971)

Comment:

Well, to pull a reversal on Christopher Penn's famous line from Reservoir Dogs, "Last thing's f-/-ing first!":

When I started out with this one, I was kind of making it up as I went along, and I thought it was starting to turn out really cool. But then, yesterday morning, I brainstormed myself into a truly dark alley and came up with the final five-song cycle for Disc #2 - a truly warped, dark and twisted mindfunk of heavy experimental/alt/prog rock thunder (Manics, ELP, Beefheart, Tool and Van Der Graaf)! I mean, we're talking about a guided tour down the corridors of the Overlook Hotel, or perhaps the ill-fated starship Event Horizon, with the ghosts of 20th-century man's sin lurking behind every door and worming their way into our brains!

At the same time, I also had it in mind to use the Sex Pistols Satellite on a mix at some point in time. But then it occurred to me that I could put Belsen Was A Gas (from their final show at Winterland in San Francisco in '78) just before the be-ginning of Disc #2's final five!

To be perfectly, brutally honest, Belsen Was A Gas is one of the Pistols' most brutal, hard-hitting rockers (although not quite up there with the best of Never Mind The Bollocks), and Johnny Rotten (Lydon) delivers the lyrics with the appropriate level of revulsion and disgust, but overall it's a song that's a triumph of shock value over taste. Honestly, the only way I'd ever really use that song in one of my mixes would be if it was paired up with the Manic Street Preachers' The Intense Humming Of Evil, that band's brooding meditation on the Holocaust from their '94 The Holy Bible. Because the latter song has a strange way of absorbing and justifying the excess of the former. (Intense Humming also o-pens with an exten-ded sample of the narration from a film about the Nuremberg trials, heard over a clanking percussion sample.)

After Intense Humming, I decided to put ELP's discordant and helter-skelter classical adaptation Toccata, from '73's Brain Salad Surgery, because in a strange way I thought it sustained the menacing mood of the Manics' song. (Come to think of it, it also serves to help the listener prepare for the stormy seas of the Van Der Graaf finale to come!) And then comes Captain Beefheart's Veteran's Day Poppy, from Trout Mask Replica. (For a crazed split-second, I entertained the notion of substituting Veteran's Day Poppy with Dachau Blues, for the sake of thematic unity with the Pistols' and Manics' songs, but then I thought to myself, "Uh-uh, not a chance. That's just waaaaayy too freaking morbid!")

Just for a joke, I thought it would be kind of funny to put Ted Nugent's Weeken-d Warriors back to back with Pearl Jam's Glorified G ("Glorified version of a pellet gun"!), and it turned out to actually work rather well. (And if you think about it, the X number which follows sort of provides an extension, thematically and subtextually!)

You may remember that on my MIX #50, I put Bob Dylan's Masters Of War back to back with John Lennon's Working Class Hero, which I thought would be rather effective since the two songs were stylistically similar and would thus make rather good companions. Well, on this mix I put Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin' back to back with the early Mott The Hoople song Backsliding Fearlessly, which if anything works even better than the earlier example. (And if you've heard Backsliding Fearlessly, you'll perfectly understand why!)

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