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we talked between the rooms, until the moss had reached our lips, and covered up our names

For those not intimately familiar with every track used here, the line between the original artists' work and the DJ's additions is easy to discern. I added only spoken words from my Emily Dickinson and Malcolm Boyd albums, and the U 2 Can Yodel CD, as credited above. Also, my MIDI player provided the beeping and dinging sounds which appear here and there. My resources are very limited. Thus, for example, the "be your tree" intro to "Standing on the Verge of Getting It on" is entirely native to the original song.

For inspiration, I used Funkadelic's "Standing on the Verge of Getting It on" as sort of the totem concept for putting the Dickinson edits together. I wanted my mix about sex to have a very serious and dramatic underlying attitude about the business, and the way Dickinson's and Funkadelic's work reflect each other is meant to bring that to bear.


The Dickinson selections within the mix are as follows:

on "A Hymn No One Knows",
Letter to Otis P. Lord, 3 December 1882
on "Until the Moss Had Reached Our Lips",
a snippet, at the end, of I died for beauty, but was scarce
on "Hills, Sir!"
I cannot live with you
Letter to T.W. Higginson, 15 April 1862
Before I got my eye put out
To make a prarie it takes a clover and one bee
A narrow fellow in the grass
brief excerpts of A bird came down the walk


In selecting material for my mixes, I like to find works loosely from the same era, as I imagine it imparts a greater cohesion of spirit to the mix as a whole. This mix spans over a century, but bears strong chronological and personal links, I believe, especially considering, as I like to mention, that my resources are few. Here follows a chronological listing of this mix's older sources:

-Brahms, Piano Quartet no. 1, published in 1861. Performed 71 years later by Rubinstein, but who was ten at the time of the composer's death.
-Writings of Emily Dickinson, 1861-188x. Dickinson's and Brahms's careers overlap. She was two at the time of composer's birth. Harris's reading of her work was published by Caedmon records in 1960.
-"I Just Want to Make Love to You", appearing on the super-classic Etta James album At Last in 1960.
-"Perfect Freedom in Your Service, Lord" from Malcolm Boyd's Happening Prayers for Now, recorded in 1965. Columbia released two albums of Boyd's readings of prayers from his book Are You Running With Me, Jesus, mostly set to blues guitar playing by Charlie Byrd. The albums were produced by Teo Macero. It was a very popular right-wing youth revival answer to the same folk era that birthed Bob Dylan.
-"Romance in Durango" only appears here briefly, but is meant to be an essential part of the mix. Bob Dylan's Desire was released in 1974, the same year as Funkadelic's Standing on the Verge of Getting it On. Funkadelic's second most central member, after Mr. Clinton, was Bernie Worrell, a Julliard-educated pianist who manned the keyboards throughout the band's career and helped keep everything so high-brow. Miles Davis and his band (most notably the guitar-goddery of Pete Cosey) recorded Agharta in Japan in the first month of 1975. The recording was helmed by Davis' standing fusion-era producer, Teo Macero, late of happening prayers. Like Worrell, Macero attended Julliard.
-"Do It All Night" appeared on Dirty Mind, the seminal album of Prince's rock-altering sex-god persona, in 1980. Perhaps ushered off by this culminating moment of modern musical impropriety, Arthur Rubinstein passed away in 1982 (one hundred years and a month after Dickinson's mother). "Genius of Love" was recorded live by the Talking Heads (or, the Tom Tom Club, featuring David Byrne) in 1983, but the song was originally released (by the Tom Tom Club, i.e. the Talking Heads minus David Byrne) in 1981, and the bristling sexuality of the track almost certainly bears Prince's album as a creative touchstone. "Genius of Love" enjoyed extensive airplay, but Prince was still way too out there for FM radio in 1980/81. The Talking Heads performance is of course third of the trio of songs which forms the climatic emotive pinnacle of their legendary "Stop Making Sense" video-dance-concert. As he had been since 1981, Bernie Worrell, late of Funkadelic, joins the band on stage on keyboards.


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