Friendly Exhortations: Long Way, "We Got a Long Way to Go…"

Long Way, We Got a Long Way to Go… demo cassette (self-released, 1999)

This is a seven-song demo tape from a Rio de Janeiro, Brazil-based pop punk band called Long Way. Recorded March 24 and 26, 1999, the songs were performed by a four piece made up of Vinicius (guitar and vocals), Marcos (drums), Edson (guitar), and Claudio (bass and vocals)—and written collectively.

Sung in English, the music is high-energy pop punk that reminds me of melodic Dischord-style hardcore—the vocals occasionally bring Minor Threat or Seven Seconds to mind—and California pop punk, with simple, single-note guitar solos along the lines of Screeching Weasel. 

The handwritten insert offers lyrics in English and Portuguese, as well as several friendly exhortations such as “Read zines”—calling out the Brazilian zines Enizzine and No Fun Zine—“Go to shows,” “No violence at shows! Pogo happily to the sound of the Long Way,” and  “Any form of prejudice, whether racial, social, sexual, to different people—all prejudice—is shit.” Liner note marginalia also says, “Lyrics and vocals by their respective authors,” “Society often tries to reduce us to a simple number: a CPF, a grade at school, a paycheck, a statistic. Value yourself; don't lose sensitivity. Be human and be happy!” and “Booklet by Vinicius Mitchell, Rio de Janeiro, 1999.” Almost 25 years after this demo came out, I reached out to a Brazilian illustrator and comics artist named Vinicius Mitchell to see if they’re the same person. We shall see!

Long Way offers an energetic, friendly approach to pop punk, with tuneful songs, solid choruses—particularly on “Don’t Judge Me” and “Hopeless”—and largely positive lyrics. I can only imagine the local scene in Rio de Janeiro at the time; Long Way would have fit easily onto the bill for many shows I’ve gone to over the years in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, New York City, and now Los Angeles. I would have loved to see them live. Additional bands (Freakanoise, Dirty Shoes, YAWL, New Born Generation, Speak Clear, PPZ, and Surface—assuming they’re all bands) and zines (Trapilho, PV, and AFL) are listed in the thank you section.

Song lyrics address topics including living life to the fullest; individualism; making choices; the 1970s Mexican situation comedy El Chavo del Ocho, which was dubbed in Brazilian Portuguese in the 1980s; hopelessness; conformity; and challenging relationships. Despite some sense of concern or complaint in some of the songs, the tenor overall is one of hope and optimism. By finding our own way in life and developing a strong sense of self, we can overcome day-to-day challenges and problems.

The seven songs are recorded on one side of a tape. When the songs end, there’s little one can do but rewind and listen to them again. Seven solid songs! I wonder whether the band recorded anything else—and what’s happened to everyone since this demo was released. I hope they’re all doing well. I’ve enjoyed revisiting this demo.

Experiencing Joy: Joseph Spence, "The Complete Folkways Recordings 1958"

Joseph Spence, The Complete Folkways Recordings 1958 cassette (Smithsonian Folkways, 1992)

Sometimes I think about what it must have been like—what it must have felt like—to have been the first human being to approach Niagara Falls. As you approached through the trees or grassland, whatever foliage was there before much later residents established a built environment, the first thing you’d experience would be the sound of the falls: 5.9 million cubic feet of water every minute. 

Imagine the initially muffled, then ever-growing roar as you approached—before you even saw what was making the sound. That must have been strange, curious, perhaps terrifying—and once you reached a point from which you could see the falls—wonderful. Imagine, though, how it would have felt to wonder what was making that sound, the sound of Niagara Falls, as you approached. What could it possibly be? What wonder or horror lay ahead?

Listening to this 1992 cassette of the 1959 and then 1964 release of the music included on Joseph Spence’s The Complete Folkways Recordings 1958, I also think about how Samuel Charters must have felt as he walked through the Fresh Creek Settlement on Andros, there to collect traditional Bahaman folk music.

“Some men were working on the foundation of a new house, and as we came close to them we could hear guitar music. It was some of the most exuberant, spontaneous, and uninhibited guitar playing we had ever heard, but all we could see was a man in a faded shirt and rumpled khaki trousers sitting on a pile of bricks,” Charters wrote in the liner notes to this tape. “He had a large acoustic guitar in his lap. I was so sure two guitarists were playing that I went along the path to look on the other side of the wall to see where the other musician was sitting. We had just met Joseph Spence.”

All hyperbolic comparison aside, both Niagara Falls and Joseph Spence, who died in 1984, are forces of nature. If you’ve never listened to Spence, you owe yourself the meeting of his music. Similar to how Charters described Spence’s playing, I’ve never heard music so enjoyed by the performer, much less his audience. 

Spence must have been experiencing joy—or close to it—while playing for the visitors and their tape recorder. You can hear it in his energetic improvised lines diverging from the melodies of the mostly traditional songs. (Beetlejuice viewers will get a kick out of his rough-hewn take on “Jump in the Line.”) You can hear it in Spence’s persistent foot tapping, his periodic growls and sotto voce singing, and his occasional laughter as he surprises and delights even himself—or responds to those listening. This is among the most human music I’ve ever heard. It’s also among the most happy.

In a delightful bit of serendipity, these songs were recorded on July 23, 1958. I listened to the tape for the first time in a long time on that date—just yesterday, more than 60 years after it was recorded, to the day. Listening on a portable cassette player with headphones on the couch of my living room, I was right there and then, too, on the porch of Charters’s little rented house as Spence played for the visiting strangers. I can't wait to return.

The Most Important Songs: Various Artists, "Bluedot Records" mix tape

Various Artists, Bluedot Records mix tape (Johann Zweifel, 1992)

Some time in the early 1990s, my friend Johann made me a mix tape. Given that the resulting cassette includes releases put out in 1992, he might have given it to me during that summer three decades ago, when I was home from college interning at a local newspaper in southern Wisconsin—and hanging out again with my Janesville friends. It’s an excellent example of the kinds of mix tapes made by my friend Johann, as well as people involved in the tape trading network of the time, rather than a pure mix tape, per se. Tape traders’ mix tapes didn’t just compile songs of interest, they exchanged entire releases, as well.

Johann’s tape was recorded on a 90-minute Scotch XS II High Bias tape that had apparently been used at least once before. Despite the incomplete information about the contents on the insert Johann included—apparently made from a paper bag—the playlist is as follows, below. Most of the songs are included on this streaming playlist. It’s a good representation of the kind of music Johann enjoyed and listened to: a mix of local and national, mainstream and independent.

Side A

Alligator Gun, 3-Song EP (self-released, 1991)—not available on Spotify

• Scope This

• Fetish No. 5

• Theory of Independent Feet

Samiam, Don’t Break Me 10” (New Red Archives, 1992)

• Don’t Break Me

• You Looking at Me

• Sky Flying By

• Home Sweet Home

• Home Boy

Primus, Miscellaneous Debris EP (Interscope, 1992)

• Intruder

• Making Plans for Nigel

• Sinister Exaggerator

• Tippi Toes

• Have a Cigar

Side B

Screeching Weasel, Pervo-Devo 7” (Shred of Dignity, 1992)—included with the last issue of Teen Punks in Heat

• She's Giving Me the Creeps (this sequence indicates the B side was taped first; “I Wanna Be a Homosexual” is the A side)

• I Fall to Pieces—not available on Spotify

• I Wanna Be a Homosexual (the A side, don’t forget)

Nine Inch Nails

• Wish (from Broken EP, 1992)

• Last (from Broken EP, 1992)

• Gave Up (from Broken EP, 1992)

• Get Down, Make Love (from Sin single, 1990)

Adolescents (from Brats in Battalions, 1987)

• Welcome to Reality (partial, copied over by the preceding songs)

• Marching with the Reich

• I Got a Right

• She Wolf

Pitchfork, Saturn Outhouse EP (Nemesis, 1989)

• Thin Ice

• Goat

• Sinking

Having grown up in southern Wisconsin, I wish I’d paid more attention to Alligator Gun. I remember Johann talking about them often, but I tended to be more Madison- than Milwaukee-focused, in part because it was slightly closer and easier to get to. I have no idea why I didn’t take Alligator Gun more seriously as a teenager; the songs on this three-song tape are good! I can only imagine how much fun they’d have been live. Scott Schoenbeck went on to play with Dashboard Confessional.

I was also never really into Bay Area band Samiam, even though singer Jason Beebout had previously been in Isocracy—and Sergie Loobkoff had played with Sweet Baby and Soup. As a graphic designer, Loobkoff also designed a ton of record album covers. For the most part, I think I didn’t listen to them much because they went mersh, and at the time, that was important to me. But when this 10-inch came out, the band hadn’t yet moved to a major label. Listening to this 10-inch now, I should clearly listen to more Samiam. I should have listened to more even then based on their lineage alone.

The Primus songs at the end of Side A come from their covers EP, Miscellaneous Debris. The mix tape includes it in its entirety, featuring Primus’ take on songs by Peter Gabriel, XTC, the Residents, the Meters, and Pink Floyd. Johann, Noah, and I listened to a lot (a lot) of Primus the previous summer—Sailing the Seas of Cheese—working at a Scout camp together. When this EP came out, I think I was excited about the XTC cover. Now the whole thing is worth listening to, and hearing Primus perform the music of the Residents is particularly exciting—especially with the band currently touring covering Rush records. (Unfortunately, I missed their southern California dates.)

At the end of Side A, the Screeching Weasel 7-inch begins—but gets cut off. That’s not uncommon when making mix tapes: You record until you fill the side, and if it gets cut off, maybe it makes it onto the other side. On Side B, then, we get the full Screeching Weasel 7-inch, Pervo-Devo, which was included with the final issue of Ben Weasel’s zine Teen Punks in Heat. On the mix, the songs are taped out of order, with the B side preceding the A side. These songs were reportedly recorded during the sessions that resulted in My Brain Hurts, which was my introduction to the band. Johann, Noah, and I were all major Screeching Weasel fans, and I remember going to at least one Weasel show with the two of them. These songs were later collected on 1995’s collection Kill the Musicians, as well as as a two-song reissue 7-inch in 2021 (minus the Patsy Cline cover).

The Nine Inch Nails songs on Side B are labeled “bootleg” on the insert. I don’t know if they’re different versions than those included on the Broken EP and Sin single, but after a few listenings this week, I don’t think that they’re live or particularly unique otherwise. Perhaps their demos. At the time, I might have had Broken but not the Sin single, which included three versions of the song “Sin” and a cover of Queen’s “Get Down, Make Love.” Covering Queen wouldn’t have struck me as important or interesting three decades ago, but Trent Reznor’s music is wonderful and I would have listened to it just like any other NIN music.

At the end of the NIN tracks, the tape drops the listener back into previously recorded music from an earlier iteration of the tape, near the end of the Adolescents’ album Brats in Battalions. This is the part of the tape that Johann didn’t record for me. Three of the final four Adolescents songs are included completely, with the tape dropping back into “Welcome to Reality” partway. Johann didn’t mention the Adolescents on the insert, and I’m pretty sure that the tape he made to share with me went up through the NIN songs; what remained was left over from a previous tape or tape exchange. The Adolescents are a wonderful southern California band—one we were aware of but that wasn’t particularly important to us in southern Wisconsin at the time—but listening now, “I Got a Right” and “She Wolf” are especially worth returning to. The folks in Night Birds might even be particular fans of “She Wolf.” It’s their kind of song.

That leaves the last three songs on the mix tape. Pay attention to these. They, oddly, are the most important songs on the tape. I don’t remember them from previous listenings to the tape, but at this stage of my life, they stand out. When the songs first struck me upon first listening to this tape after three decades of inattention, it wasn’t because of the band name or the titles of the songs—it was just because of the sound. “What are these songs?” Included on the previous version of whatever was taped on this cassette, the songs didn’t even rate a mention on Johann’s insert. They could have gone unknown. They could have been forgotten. So I am thankful for the Internet, which let me search for song lyrics and identify the songs as Pitchfork’s first 7-inch, 1989’s Saturn Outhouse.

Pitchfork was a post-hardcore band active in San Diego from 1986-1990. They recorded this single 7-inch and a single album, Eucalyptus, documenting only 11 songs across the two releases, both on Nemesis Records. The three songs on the 7-inch are amazing. I would love this record even if the band had never done anything else of note, but check this out: John Reis went on to front Rocket from the Crypt, and he and Rick Froberg would also later form Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes. Pitchfork was the first serious band for the two and arguably set the stage for some of the best rock ‘n’ roll to come out of San Diego in the last few decades. It all started here, with these three, hidden, secret songs at the end of someone else’s tape—just waiting to be found.

Thanks for the mix tape, Johann. It was better—and listened to for longer—than either of us could have ever expected.

The Search for Home: Dan Israel, "Like the Country"

Dan Israel, Like the Country cassette (self-released, 1995)

I forget when and where I got this tape, but I’m pretty sure I met Israel, perhaps at Northwestern or through WNUR-FM after he’d moved from Chicago to Austin. (I’ve emailed him to see how he’s doing these days, and a friend reminded me that they were fraternity brothers at NU.) 

Originally from Minnesota, Israel joined his first band, the Big Madras, in 1986, performing with Dave Paul, who went on to join Guzzard, which recorded for Amphetamine Reptile Records. Israel began playing solo acoustic as a street musician in Boston, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco in the early 1990s. He eventually moved as a student to Chicago, where he co-founded One Town Horse with songwriter Brad Bouten. One Town Horse opened for musicians such as the Drovers and Rev. Horton Heat, and received airplay on WCBR-FM and WNUR-FM, where I volunteered as a DJ between 1991-1996.

By the time Israel self-released this solo acoustic tape, he’d moved to Austin, where he formed the Austin Chronicle-dubbed “ampheta-folk” band Potter's Field, releasing Esperanto and Live at the Outhouse, and going on tour in the Midwest. In 1995, the annual Austin Music Awards poll named Israel one of the top 15 songwriters in Austin—and Israel moved back to Minnesota, where he continued making music. The Chronicle reviewed the tape in September 1995.

I might very well have reviewed this previously in one of my zines from the 1990s, perhaps Karma Lapel or Fifth Man, but I recently pulled it out of a case of tapes to listen to it again with fresh ears. It’s an excellent cassette, and if Israel has indeed continued making music as his Web site suggests—updating his site until just before the pandemic—I look forward to hearing what he’s up to now. I can only imagine how much he’s grown as a songwriter. (Somewhat recent reviews from The Big Takeover and Goldmine suggest his most recent release, Social Media Anxiety Disorder, is worth a listen.)

The almost 30-year-old tape captures seven songs featuring Israel on vocals, acoustic guitar, and harmonica. While One Town Horse played such Chicago venues as Lounge Ax, Cabaret Metro, and the Cubby Bear, I can more easily imagine hearing these songs at somewhere like the Heartland Cafe, No Exit Cafe, or Uncommon Ground Coffeehouse. Even though the songs are slightly more oriented toward power pop than folk at times, the songs are perfect for a small, intimate, folk-oriented setting or open-mic night. And Israel is a singer-songwriter sure to hold your attention.

Sometimes stylistically reminding me of Bob Dylan, Graham Smith, and perhaps even Brett Rosenberg, the songs address topics such as holding someone back, remorse and regret, the search for home, self-discovery, and compromise. Songs might come and go from a musician’s repertoire over the years, but any of these songs would sound great live today. If you get a chance to see him play, request “When the Credits Rolled” for me.

Update: He has a Bandcamp!