An Old Mix-Tape Obsession... (reposted from last.fm)

I lived in a house south-east of the University of Washington during the 1994-95 school year, in a punk rock house that we affectionately called The Goat House, with eleven roommates spread throughout the three floors of the house. The house was a crumbling fixer...some of us were UW students. Most of us were just friends, living on our own in Seattle for the first time. We were doing things you might expect: starting bands, booking shows in our basement/practice space, throwing loud parties in the living room, etc. Murder City Devils, Modest Mouse and Red Stars Theory, among others, came out of this place. The house had been a band house before us...I remember hearing rumors that an old Seattle punk band, The Scalywags, had lived there before us. A couple members of The Walkabouts lived next door, and were quite patient with all of our noise...

Anyway, I was a junior Creative Writing major at this point, and the Goat House was the first place I'd lived outside of a UW dorm or my parents' house. I was a habitual mix-tape maker, and I was obsessed with buying vinyl at Fallout Records, about a mile & a half south-west on Capitol Hill. I picked up a 12" copy of the Smitten Love Song Compilation there, maybe during the first month it was released. The lifelikeweeds track "The House Is Between The Porch And The Barbeque On Mouth Speed" became a huge obsession for me, probably for much of the rest of that year. I recorded it off the turntable on to some crappy cassette that we'd stolen out of the dumpster of some Muzak-like corporation on Capitol Hill (I can't recall their name now)...I had an alarm clock radio that had a cassette deck wired to the alarm. I made my roommates (one of whom was literally living in my closet at the time) sick to death of this tune, ha ha...

I like the images that the title suggests, of a small town or the "bad side" of a suburb, maybe some remote part of Anchorage, AK (my hometown until age 15). I have often wondered exactly what "mouth speed" is. The volume of the song's lyrics are low in the mix, and are mostly incomphrehensible. The drumming and guitar playing throughout feels lazy, stoned, but not altogether "depressed," to me. This is one of those songs that I'll hear in my head walking down the street, even if it has been years since I last spun up a disc or tape that it's on. I suppose someone might call it "soundtracky," and I suppose that soundtrack-like music is what I tend to dig. I was reading Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son a lot that school year...I still haven't gotten around to seeing the movie adaptation. I have often imagined this song in the soundtrack of the Jesus' Son adaptation in my head.