1983: A Mixtape by DJ sneJ

This is a continuation of the shameless personal exercise in nostalgia I began in my "80–82" compilation. "1983" picks up where that one left off: September 1982, when I arrived at college. It covers only one year, up until September 1983, because there was so much great music we listened to, that it became clear that each year would need its own CD.

These are the songs that had the greatest impact on me at the time, not necessarily the ones that I consider the "best" or "most significant". They are arranged in, roughly, the order in which I first heard them, not the order they were released.

The Tracks

King Crimson: "Elephant Talk" Begin at the beginning: After arriving in a strange town (Pasadena), the question: "Where's the best record store?" The answer was (and is) "Poo-Bah". New best-friend Diana drove me and new best-friend Matt there, and I emerged with King Crimson's "Discipline". I already had "Beat", and this one was even better.

The Beat: "Jeanette" And what did Matt buy? The brand new 7" by his favorite group, the Beat (known as the English Beat to us heathens), to add to his complete collection. (The B-side was a cool instrumental, which would show up with vocals added as "Rotating Head" on the Beat's next album.)

XTC: "Ball and Chain" I don't remember what Diana bought, but she already had the trump card, one of the key albums, in her car cassette player: XTC's "English Settlement". That fall and winter I went on to accumulate all of XTC's recorded output I could lay my hands on.

Killer Pussy: "Teenage Enema Nurses In Bondage" Pasadena was out of reach of genuine college radio stations like KXLU, but it had KROQ, the "Roq Of The 80s!", which was close enough most of the time. They'd hit on a commercial nü-wave formula that made them a huge success and spread to hundreds of "Modern Rock" stations across the country. A big part of that formula was lots of bouncy songs with naughty lyrics, and it gave this band from Phoenix their 15 minutes of fame. It may be a total B-52s rip-off, but it's irresistible.

The Stray Cats: "Stray Cat Strut" A mainstay of every campus dance, frosh year. The B-52s' "Rock Lobster" always brought down the house, but "Stray Cat Strut" was the best for dancing to with Diana and feeling those sparks fly. "I got cat class and I got cat style..."

Peter Gabriel: "The Rhythm of the Heat" Peter Gabriel's new album "Security" was his best yet, even if the record company made him put a title on it (how bourgeois!) It sounded like nothing else, thanks to his creative use of the cutting-edge and extremely expensive Fairlight CMI, one of the first samplers. And even though other artists later turned common samples like Orch.5 into '80s clichés (I blame you, Trevor Horn), this album still hasn't aged a bit. (I saw Peter Gabriel twice on his tour promoting this album; two of the best shows I've ever been to.)

Icehouse: "Icehouse" Upstairs friend Peter was a big fan of Icehouse, and although I've always had trouble with that overly affected faux-Brian Ferry voice (it was going around, too many bands had it) this song made up for it with shiny Gary Numan keyboards and an enigmatic story.

Kraftwerk: "Trans Europe Express" (single) Matt brought "Computer World" with him to Tech, but then availed himself of the immense vaults of Poo-Bah's used record collection to pick up their entire catalog — yes, all the way back to the first pre-Autobahn albums that no one listens to anymore. He even [re]discovered Neu! a good eight years before anyone else.

Andy Summers and Robert Fripp: "I Advance Masked" Since I was still a huge fan of both King Crimson and the Police (this was before "Synchronicity"), I ran to buy this record the day it came out. I played it so much that the songs became attached in my mind to bad things that happened this year, and it was a while before I could bring myself to listen to it again. ...Now fast-forward to 2007, and the album's out of print and I had to record it to disk off of the original vinyl, crackles and all.

U2: "New Year's Day" This isn't the first song that has its video inextricably tied to it in my mind (that honor probably goes to "Rio"), but it's the first one I really like.

Sex Pistols: "Holidays in the Sun" This song is dedicated to Matt's obnoxious older brother Greg, who showed up for a visit from Michigan, went into our room while we were in class, put on Matt's copy of "Never Mind The Bollocks", and started playing it at top volume. We showed up during "Sub-Mission", which he then tried to convince us was the best song on the album. Sorry, Greg.

Psychedelic Furs: "Pretty In Pink" This is the Furs at the top of their second album, before they shed half their members and all their noise and re-recorded a much inferior version of this song for John Hughes to use as the theme of one of his Molly Ringwald teen angst epics (which, OK, I kind of enjoyed.) This is not a Molly Ringwald kind of song at all, it's about a gang-bang: "The one who insists he was first in the line / Is the last to remember her name / She's gone but the joke's the same: / Pretty in pink / Isn't she / Pretty in pink?"

Talking Heads: "New Feeling" Oh, it is so hard to choose just one Talking Heads song here. In many ways they were the quintessential band of that year. We would greatly endear ourselves to the Dead-head upperclassmen by sticking our stereo speakers in the windows and blasting "Remain In Light" into the courtyard while we played trayball (the indigenous house sport, like racquetball with cafeteria trays). But I felt I'd already acknowledged that album on the previous mixtape. If "Remain In Light" was the ultimate headphone album to lose yourself in overdubs, there were still a surprising number of intricacies to untangle in their earlier songs, particularly this one, even if you could never quite remember all those revelations the morning after.

Thomas Dolby: "Flying North" Ah, synthpop. It was fun for a while, but lost its allure once everyone and his mousse-haired sister started doing it. I can't listen to most of that stuff anymore, but Thomas Dolby just nailed it: he had some brilliant sounds, and added sincerity and wistfulness.

Kate Bush: "All The Love" Remember I was going all ga-ga over Peter Gabriel's use of sound? I didn't know about her at the time, but this Kate Bush also had one of them Fairlights and did pretty impressive stuff with it. Was it Peter who discovered this album? Her voice mesmerized me, like Liz Fraser's to come. This is another album where it's hard to choose a single song; this one haunts me to this day. "We needed you / to love us too / We wait for your love..."

Joy Division: "Twenty Four Hours" Some of us didn't make it: too young, too far from home, uncertain of life's goals. Not going to class or doing homework, instead staying in bed listening to Joy Division. "Just for one moment, thought I'd found my way / Destiny unfolded, I watched it slip away." And the chorus of Kate Bush's goodbyes are for you too.

R.E.M.: "Catapult" I did make it through the year, and came back home to a summer job, and to KFJC again. Who were playing this album of jangly guitars and indecipherable words.

Violent Femmes: "Blister In The Sun" Also a big song that summer at KFJC (where "heavy rotation" meant you might hear it once a day; what a blessed relief compared to KROQ.)

The Buzzcocks: "What Do I Get?" A chance purchase of "A Different Kind Of Tension" and "Singles Going Steady" at a used record store, and two weeks later I'm sending postcards to all my friends, bearing the cryptic message "The Buzzcocks are great!!"

The Cure: "The Upstairs Room" They were this obscure band Matt had one or two albums of, and I remembered just the name; but the stereo at Tower Records was playing this new EP called "The Walk", and I liked it enough to pick it up on a whim. Good whim.

The Music

DJ sneJ: "1983"

Click the cassette and I'll dub a copy for your iBoomBox.
It's recorded in Dolby C on a TDK SA-80.

Appendices