It's a 90s Show this week on Phoole and the Gang - specifically, it's a 1991 Show!

Phoole and the Gang Show 504 contains music I loved while residing at 504 College Avenue in DeKalb, Illinois in the year 1991, with a BONUS mini-mix of dance tunes DJ2R mixed for his radio show in that same year!
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As I dug through ten gigantic binders of CDs from the 1990s to make this show's playlist, I remarked to Tiffany that I sure had a lot of music in there from 1992 through the end of the decade, but not a lot from before 1992.
Tiffany reminded me that I didn't start working at Rose Records, a Chicagoland-area chain of record stores, until 1992. I started at the Rose Records location in Geneva, Illinois, which used to be on the corner of West State Street and South Bennett Street, just East of the Mill Race Inn on the East bank of the Fox River. When I returned to DeKalb, I worked at the Rose store there, which used to be in the Junction Shopping Center on Lincoln Highway, between the Junction Eating Place and Pizza Villa. The Geneva location looks empty and abandoned now; the DeKalb store's building appears to have been removed completely.
There was a time in my life before I owned even one CD, let alone thousands of CDs and cassettes!
Strange to imagine that now.
And there was a time in my life before the possibility of home CD ripping or burning existed.
I bathe in the nostalgia of being tethered to a thing called a "stereo system" with corded headphones, painstakingly recording albums onto reel-to-reel and cassette tapes, poring over album liner notes, normalizing mixtape gains so obsessively perfectly so that playback of each side would be at a uniform gain (I didn't even know about compression back then, or have any concept of hardware for managing compression), editing cassette mixtapes by popping out the cassette at the end of each tune and winding the tape back just a sixteenth of an inch, or a couple of millimetres/millimeters, so that the transition between songs would be the tightest it could be.
I used to draft the song lists in a notebook, calculating out the times of each tune, so that I could fit complete tunes on sides exactly, without running onto the leader, or without leaving too much blank tape at the end of a side.
I collected micro-songs, little goofy tunes and bits of random audio that could fill out the end of a side if I had tape to spare.
Overthinking! I have always done it. I probably always will. In this specific case, knowing isn't half the battle. Knowing is, perhaps, one-sixth or one-eighth of the battle, and the battle may not be winnable. I'm overthinking this paragraph about overthinking, right now.
I will have to do many more 90s shows to showcase the monstrous hoard of tunes I've been sitting on from that decade all these years.
Here is what I looked like in 1993! Dorkus, of the Mixcloud Manor massive, took this in the flat we shared on the second story of a building downtown in DeKalb, after we moved out of 504 College.

Back then, I shaved my head often, I played the Irish tin whistle obsessively and perpetually (apologies to everyone within at least a mile of me for those years - it's less of a musical instrument and more of a weapon, sonically-speaking), and I wore mis-matched plaid (tartan) clothing all the time. You can see the CD collection already burgeoning at this point in the photo above. I was minoring in Italian at the time, hence the Italian-language labels on things in the room. And look! A stereo system. I'm not certain, but the T-shirt I have on in this photo might be the one that Timothy Leary autographed for me, when Dorkus and I went to hear him speak on campus at NIU. I need to find and frame that shirt. It has art on it by Mike Gathman. THE GATHMAN! He was our next-door neighbor back then. MEMORIES.
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