ARCHIVAL RECORDING
Circa 1988.

Like pretty much every other kid with a dual-cassette recorder, I started making mix tapes in high school. Like pretty much every other music geek, I'm still making them, albeit mostly on CD these days. Like pretty much every other obsessive-compulsive music geek, I've been numbering and tracking them since the beginning. (I'm about to hit #400.) Though many of the early ones have been lost to the ages -- including 76 of the first 100 -- a few survive.

Sometime in 1988 I thought it would be fun to select a 90-minute tracklist completely at random. Armed with the notebook I'd been keeping listing my entire collection -- later a card catalog, now a database -- I rolled my trusty, well-worn D & D dice to select tracks at random. First I rolled for the page in the list that a track would come from, then for the album or single number, then for track number -- then from that random list I rolled again to sequence the resulting tape. Laugh it up, fuzzball, it actually turned out to be a pretty good mix, despite some really odd juxtapositions (mainly on side two).

EDITOR'S NOTE: If you counted only four 'GEEK FLAGS' in the above paragraphs, you missed a few.

Anyway, here's the complete tracklist from GC #40, 1988's A THROW OF THE DICE.

SIDE ONE
Monty Python - Executive Intro
The Who - I Can't Explain
Pink Floyd - The Fletcher Memorial Home
Foreigner - Dirty White Boy
Triumph - Magic Power
Marillion - Script for a Jester's Tear
Jimi Hendrix - Can You See Me
Loverboy - Friday Night
Asia - Heat of the Moment
The Canadian Brass - Boy Mozart
Led Zeppelin - Communication Breakdown
Paul Simon - That Was Your Mother
Stevie Nicks - Stop Draggin' My Heart Around


SIDE TWO
Stormtroopers of Death - Diamonds & Rust (Extended Version)
Don McLean - 'Til Tomorrow
Steve Taylor - I Blew Up the Clinic Real Good
Aerosmith - I'm Down
The Minutemen - Fascist
Petra - Thankful Heart
Peter Cetera - Glory of Love
Dead Kennedys - A Child and His Lawnmower
Tim Curry - I Will
Iron Maiden - The Duellists
Roger Waters - Home
The Doors - People Are Strange
The Crusaders - Keep That Same Old Feeling
Weird Al Yankovic - George of the Jungle