SIDE A: An appetite for destruction            SIDE B: But I scrape the plate

1. Girls Girls Girls: Jay-Z                                                                             1. Layla: Eric Clapton
2. Allison: Pixies                                                                                           2. Madeline: Yo La Tengo
3. Bonita Applebum: A: Tribe Called Quest                                            3. Ophelia: The Band
4. Christine: Siouxsie and the Banshees                                               4. Rhiannon: Fleetwood Mac
5. Daniella: Hurray for the Riff Raff                                                           5. Stephanie Says: Velvet Underground
6. Eloise: Des Ark                                                                                         6.Vanessa from Queens:Stephan Malkmus &the Jicks
7. Jezabel Lee: Midtown Dickens                                                              7. Girls: Beastie Boys

Last summer I worked for a nonprofit in the South Bronx and drove a bigwhite pick-up truck from community garden to community garden, pullingweeds and trimming hedges for eight hours each day. The drives betweengardens were long, hot and smoggy. The truck had no air conditioningand no CD player. Classic rock radio ruled my life.

I worked with some boys and they liked the radio, too. We talkedmostly about girls and music, as we all liked them both a lot. Itturned out that most classic rock musicians were also pretty stuck ongirls and they seemed to like naming their songs for them. We cycledthrough the ones we knew and played games naming them back and forth-- “Alison” by Elvis Costello, “Angie” by the Rolling Stones, “Cecilia” bySimon and Garfunkel, and so on until some unlucky kid was stumped.

That same summer I was single for the first time in awhile.Therefore, I found myself with a whole bunch of spare time and spentmost of it belly-down on my tile floor, lifting records on and off theturntable as a I alternately jammed the stop and record buttons down onmy receiver. Tapes. I made so many tapes.

Thus the original “Girls Girls Girls” mix was formed. While I wascompiling this cassette-bound epic, I was struck by the fact that inall my years of dating girls, I had never once slept with a titletrack. There were no Angies in my past, no Melissas, no Lolas. But aweek after I completed “Girls Girls Girls” I met a really cool girl andwe started dating. Alison and I have been together over a year now.

A good luck charm? Maybe. This is the abridged, less classic rock and more modern-indie version but it still rules. *mh