Rob : The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don't wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules. Anyway... I've started to make a tape... in my head... for Laura. Full of stuff she likes. Full of stuff that makes her happy. For the first time I can sort of see how that is done.

High Fidelity, 2000

Once I had a friend named Daryl Brown. We hung out together through a couple terms of Ralph Salisbury's short story writing workshops.

A few years ago, Daryl Brown sent me a compilation cd. It was the first one I ever had. It had cover art, liner notes and a label.

It also had some brand new (for me) tunes, some by artists I'd never heard of. It was a perfect mix, and I played it almost nightly for a year. It came at a time when I was desperate for both inspiration and solace and it brought both. Originally I had tried to solicit some creative writing out of Mr. Brown, which he was not, at that time, able to contribute, but I discovered a different kind of storytelling through his mix and I decided I'd try it myself.

Since then, I've made dozens of compilation cds. As with any artistic endeavor, some rocked and some sucked! (For awhile I was hooked on including a TV track or two and that got old really fast). I haven't yet achieved the perfection of Daryl Brown's mix, but I've gotten sorta close, and my favorite so far is "longing & bliss." (The fact that my mix includes 3 tracks from Daryl Brown's mix only proves how far I have yet to go.)

Then along came Baby J and for his Davis family debut at The Edgefield, I put together a nine cd set called "The Essential Baby J." The father of Baby J asked if I would get together the music from when he was growing up. Well, that was quite a task and I barely made a dent. The result: nearly 200 tunes in three categories; radio, dna and jazz.

And boundaries have been blurred here, as several friends have pointed out, protesting, for example, my inclusion of Frank Sinatra in the "jazz" category. Another protest came from my use of the word "smooth" to describe a radio station's genre of jazz when I, apparently, should have used "cool." Yet another error was found in the dna "hot" mix; the liner notes claim the songs are alphabetical by artist when they're not. There are, also, several typos. Another (good) suggestion was that I should have included Portland's own KVAN in the radio set and I had considered doing so. But I wasn't able to recall enough of the songs Bob Anchetta was playing back then on the right end of the a.m. dial, to make it different enough from the "F.M." mix I already had. But it would have been fun to include a track of the rosary at the end.