Breakaway Mix

The Pace of Everything

Where All the Veins Meet

A gold-dust summer afternoon in northern New Mexico. The sky's clotted with sun, cicadas all abuzz. It's a hundred in the shade and there ain't no shade.

But we're all inside the dark and AC'd chapter house which doubles on Saturdays as a roller rink. It's circa 1981 so there are rainbow leg warmers and Jordache jeans and the teenagers have hair feathered like the Brothers Gibb. Kids cling to each other, carom off the walls, lean way forward for shin-busting landings at the benches. 

There's also a mirror ball and pulsing disco lights and the DJ got hold of some choice 12"ers. A little Olivia Newton-John, a little Queen, and suddenly all the wobble leaves your legs and you are jubilant in speed, cruising like a Pontiac Firebird down the long side and daring that crouched lean with the extended right to make the turn. Your skates eat spinning cheerios of light and you are intergalactic, a bolt of synthesized sound bound for the 11th dimension. Right after a stop at Concessions for Reese's cups and a 50 cent Coke. You have to believe we are magic.

High Desert Roller Disco

Much of what I remember from childhood is rendered in the aspect ratio of an Oldsmobile's windshield and soundtracked by the scanning AM dial. Whole days crossing landscapes of umber, ocher, sage. Wincing against the glare of a cloudless cornflower sky. Hog reports and local news and talk radio before talk radio went batshit. Distance signs reading Socorro 125 miles, Roswell 249 miles, Las Cruces In Your Next Life. Pine log telephone poles precariously atilt. A spiral of vultures, a whorl of sand rising from the earth like a genie. The rare thrill of passing through a tumbleweed stampede. And then sometimes music, music broadcast from the far side of the moon and received through dashboard holes barely bigger than a rotary phone's, songs blurring as often as not into static or some other distant station's drifting signal. You will know, on a drive from Cline's Corners to Carlsbad, the kind of tedium that tends toward the transcendental.

Time Keeps On Slipping

Handsome Devil - A Halloween Jam

But That Was Just A Dream

One for the Road

It was New Year's Eve and he was in the elevator, headed down, but then the music began to play.

Freedom Mix

The heist. The caper, the final score. That One Last Job. If some character states "Impossible, it can't be done. But if it COULD...," you have this family's complete attention. 

Maybe it's because we like ensemble casts. The groovy repartee. The thrill of the double-reverse-reveal. 

But really I think it's because we like to feel like we're pulling a fast one on The System. Sometimes we need to feel like this, even if all we're really doing is tooling around town in a twelve-year-old Honda. Feel like the ragtag crew cracking wise while outsmarting that smug wealthy villain who holds all the cards, for once beating the odds that is the darkness of the world (the house always wins, always) with one-liners and a flip of the bird. To get gone before they even knew you were there.

The Biggest Ella Fitzgerald Ever

Disco's Revenge

I remember saying something like, "I feel a bit lightheaded."

Somewhere Around Barstow

For the Light Which is Reflected

So I'm busting out a dusty stack of 90-minute Memorex cassettes. Vintage Gen X high school pop, this. Straight off Albuquerque's Q102, circa 1984-1990. I used to buy those tapes by the gross. My in-home studio then = a Panasonic RX-C39L stereo boombox with 3-band EQ. Me with a trigger finger response time measured in milliseconds. You had to be fast: the promo teaser'd roll right into that one Smiths song and you couldn't lose that crucial shoegaze lead-in.

There'll never be better mixtapes than those we made back then. No curated mix compares with the random bouillabaisse concocted from chance and timing. The clipped ads for Miller's Outpost or Godfather's Pizza adding savor. Eight seconds of mid-song static for complexity. The zest of the song that got chopped off three-quarters in because you risked Side 1 having room for just one more.

And who could forget, once the tape was complete, the poignancy of pressing Record when you intended Play, obliterating forever some portion of that peculiar stew?

Q102 - Thoreau 1979 - 1991 Mixtape

Former DJ now mixing for the fun of it. Profile photo courtesy of Stacey Conant. Header illustration by Dan Namingha.

Josh Wilkinson

Pinned to spotlight

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