Artist	Song
Frente!	Ordinary Angels
The Sundays	Joy
Pale Saints	Half-Life, Remembered
Saint Etienne	Nothing Can Stop Us
The Darkside	Waiting for the Angels
The Field Mice	If You Need Someone
The Jesus & Mary Chain	Girlfrie nd
Verve	Slide Away
The Dylans	Lemon Afternoon
The Boo Radleys	Lazarus
Spiritualized	Run
Ch@rlatans UK	Indian Rope
The Stone Roses	Made Of Stone
Pixies	Monkey Gone to Heaven
Blur	Chemical World
Veruca Salt	Seether
Dinosaur, Jr.	Blah
The Smashing Pumpkins	Siva
Moose	Jack
Teenage Fanclub	Everything Flows
Sugar	Tilted

Comment:

It was a cold March evening in Columbia, 1993. Steve and I were making our normal rounds up and down 9th street, from quarter beers at 9th street deli to burgers at Booche's and finally down at Shakespeare's Pizza, looking for a vagabond guitarist to accompany our crooning. At a certain point in our evenings and at a certain state of mind, Steve would get the urge for us to duet on his favorite American Country & Western Songs, you know, tunes like Dead Flowers, Runaway Eyes, Sweet Virginia, etc.

Well, we didn't find the guitarist, but we started off with some hackneyed version of Sympathy for the Devil, which was country enough for us at the time. The "kids" (2 years younger than me at the time) on the sidewalk looked at us as if we had just gotten off our spaceship. For me, the look they gave us was a sign that my time in Columbia and the States was coming to a close. But Steve summed it up perfectly back up in his apartment, as I pulled his muffler off from around his neck, "Those God-Damn PIZZA hippies!"

And thus was born a new catch phrase, to describe the Lollapaloser generation, of which we were more than glad to be "above" with our Billie Holiday, Stooges, Burning Spear and Mose Allison, among others. It seemed that most of those "kids" thought that Pearl Jam had invented rock n' roll and had no grasp of their roots. And of course, in Kaufmannesque fashion, the funniest joke is only understood by one person (or in this case three people).
Steve and I soon graduated, I moved to Mexico, got married and settled down in Guadalajara all in the same summer. I got a job teaching high school English and my teenage students and I connected on a certain number of artists, but still mainly the Seattle scene and others. As a Neil Young freak, it was easy to latch on to J. Mascis.
However, it was my wife's cousin Gabriel, in about 1995, who was a year or two older than me, who finally turned a switch on to me with a mix tape containing many of these artists. Still tied up with the old fart influence of The Wad, I mockingly titled his mix "Pizza Hippie Sampler". But then I really started listening to it and realized how great that music could be. The one that really turned me on was the Jesus & Mary Chain track here, then Pixies, and then Spiritualized, and then the Stone Roses. Soon, I borrowed several of his CDs to make my own samplers of my favorites. I held on to those cassettes in the intervening 13 years and handed them off to my buddy Strange Loop earlier this year to rip to MP3s. This mix collects my favorites of the favorites. The sound quality of all of them may not be the sharpest, but they did travel 3000 km in a hot moving van 8 years ago.

I have used a few of these tunes here and there on alt-djs, etc., but this particular mix idea has been simmering in the back of my head since I digitized those cassettes. And I have explored the Pizza Hippie concept before as well. Now this week, between her country and gutbucket mixes, e.buster has inspired me to work outside my comfort zone. As they say at Shakespeare's, "It's the pizza, stupid. And maybe the beer. Everything else can go fly."
See my blog for the complete story...

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