For decades, newspaper companies managed to subvert child labor laws by inveigling young adolescents into hauling their very heavy product from door to door. Young nitwits bought the papers from the publisher then sold and delivered them to their neighbors at a markup. As such they could be said to be operating a “business,” not just slaving at the dying remnant of a nineteenth-century distribution model.

In 1986-87, at the age of 12, I was one of those nitwits, working for The Pittsburgh Press. My “business” came complete with a goonish supervisor who would regularly forget to drop off my papers — leaving me to fend off phone calls from angry geriatric shut-ins demanding their box scores — and occasionally try to extort extra cash from me by disputing my accounting practices.1 It also came with surprisingly backbreaking labor. Pittsburgh’s a hilly town, so my house was at the bottom of a steep incline that was in turn at the bottom of two steeper inclines. And because I was in the last house on the block, all my customers were above me. On Sundays my paper bag was so heavy that I had to run shuttle: carry a bagful of papers to the top of the first hill, drop it off, deliver papers to half of the next hill, get more papers from the bag, deliver papers to the other half, go home and get another bagful, repeat. It took hours.

More precisely, it took three hours. To make those three hours bearable, I bought a TDK 180-minute blank cassette and made myself a mix tape for my Walkdude.2 For some reason I was suddenly reminded of that tape yesterday, and I decided to try and recreate the playlist. I used Spotify to do it, so sign up for a free account and you can listen along and relive the memories I’ve repressed.

Building this list surprised me in a few ways, not the least of which was how hard it was to remember what was on the tape. It includes bands that I forgot I knew, and without Spotify’s Related Artists feature I doubt I would’ve recalled all the tracks. What I came up with is a rough approximation of the original, at best.

I was less surprised at how really and truly awful some of these songs are. This tape came at the peak of my Classic Hard Rock phase, which immediately preceded the Heavy Metal phase of my early teens (note the tape’s transitional Whitesnake song). As such we’ve got Styx and Triumph in all their glorious lousiness, April Wine fearlessly declaring that they “like to rock,” and for some fucking reason Aldo Nova.

I was more surprised to hear some of the other songs for the first time in years and realize that they hold up. Robin Trower’s “Day of the Eagle” frankly rocks, and Blue Cheer growls out fantastic garage psychedelia in “Summertime Blues.” I even hold more fondness for the two Deep Purple tracks than I ever would’ve expected, given my current feelings for the other bands whose logos I used to draw on my bookcovers.

Anyway, here’s the entire playlist with Spotify links and annotations for the especially interested. Three of the tracks aren’t available online, but I’m sure they’re ones you’ve heard before. I dare you to listen to the rest in one sitting.

Music to Deliver Papers By

1. “Rock & Roll” – Led Zeppelin 3
2. “More Than A Feeling” – Boston
3. “Hold Your Head Up” – Argent 4
4. “Burn” – Deep Purple 5
5. “Man On The Silver Mountain” – Rainbow 6
6. “Purple Haze” – The Jimi Hendrix Experience
7. “I Like To Rock” – April Wine 7
8. “Bang A Gong (Get It On)” – T. Rex
9. “Radar Love” – Golden Earring
10. “Burnin’ For You” – Blue Öyster Cult 8
11. “Ridin’ The Storm Out” (Live) – REO Speedwagon
12. “Wheel In The Sky” – Journey 9
13. “Hair Of The Dog” – Nazareth 10
14. “Wonderful Tonight” – Eric Clapton 11
15. “We’re An American Band” – Grand Funk Railroad
16. “Summertime Blues” – Blue Cheer 12
17. “Day Of The Eagle” – Robin Trower 13
18. “The Spirit Of Radio” – Rush 14
19. “Fight The Good Fight” – Triumph
20. “Foreplay/Long Time” – Boston 15
21. “Black Dog” – Led Zeppelin
22. “Fantasy” – Aldo Nova 16
23. “Aqualung” – Jethro Tull 17
24. “Ride My See-Saw” – The Moody Blues
25. “Shooting Star” – Bad Company 18
26. “Stealin’” – Uriah Heep 19
27. “Magic Carpet Ride” – Steppenwolf
28. “Ride A White Swan” (BBC Live) – T. Rex 20
29. “Blue Collar Man (Long Nights)” – Styx 21
30. “Still Of The Night” – Whitesnake 22
31. “Hush” – Deep Purple 23
32. “Carry On Wayward Son” – Kansas
33. “Wild World” – Cat Stevens 24
34. “Breakfast In America” – Supertramp 25
35. “Spirit In The Sky” – Norman Greenbaum 26
36. “Train Kept A – Rollin’” – The Yardbirds 27
37. “Helter Skelter” – The Beatles
38. “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” (Single Version) – Iron Butterfly 28

1. I was timid and hated doing weekly “collections,” so to pay my bill I relied on the check from one 174-year-old subscriber who always gave me a three-month advance payment (which seemed like perplexing financial decision for someone who should’ve been happy every time he made it through a Metro section alive). [↩]
2. Couldn’t afford a Walkman. [↩]
3. I’ll take the opportunity here at the top to say that my young musical tastes were molded almost entirely by Pittsburgh’s ridiculously popular classic rock station WDVE-FM, once the highest rated station in America in terms of market share, and still going strong. [↩]
4. Sad as it seems, this vastly mediocre song actually improved my life. I was a shy, picked-on kid who usually shuffled around staring at his feet. But then I started singing this song to myself, and I’d literally hold my head up. It didn’t really make me feel any better about myself, but if someone pushed me, I’d push back. (FYI, Rod Argent was a founding member/songwriter for seminal British Invasion band The Zombies.) [↩]
5. This song is so enjoyably stupid that now that I’ve been reminded of it I fear I’ll be listening to it regularly. [↩]
6. I could’ve sworn I also had Rainbow’s “Since You Been Gone” in this mix, but the overall duration says no. And by the way, I never realized until now what an ugly band Rainbow was. They looked like they should’ve been chasing after Swamp Thing:
   [↩]
7. I really related to this song, because of how I liked to rock. I remember also enjoying April Wine’s cover of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man.” [↩]
8. Another band that I think might have appeared more than once on this compilation. Man, I loved these losers. The first CD I ever bought was their apocalyptically terrible concept album Imaginos. It deserves to be forgotten for its ridiculously pretentious Lovecraftian liner notes alone. [↩]
9. Journey’s recent resurgence in popularity is utterly lost on me. I hate these guys. And yet at a party not long ago a guy told me that Journey’s now touring with a new lead singer, some dude from the Philippines that the band apparently discovered on YouTube and hired on the basis of his being a direct sound alike of Steve Perry. The partygoer described this to me as something good that I should consider myself lucky to be able to pay money to see. [↩]
10. In 1987 at age 12, hearing the phrase “son of a bitch” on the radio seemed strange and naughty. [↩]
11. This falls under the category of perfectly acceptable songs that I never need to hear again. [↩]
12. Great stuff. My dad’s a fan of Blue Cheer and introduced them to me years earlier by regularly playing one of their LPs. [↩]
13. I love the Hendrix-esque guitar work on this. Robin Trower was the guitarist for Procol Harum, another band I favored around this era. They didn’t make the cut for this tape, likely because their limey whining would’ve turned delivering papers on a Sunday in February into a waking night terror. [↩]
14. My enthusiasm for Rush quickly turned to derision. But in my late twenties I once turned on the radio in the middle of the guitar solo of Rush’s first hit, “Working Man.” Embarrassingly, I blasted it and thought, “Yeah! This is the best Black Sabbath song!” [↩]
15. Since this tape included at least two songs by Boston, I should say something about them, but what’s to say? I’m happy that they got their money’s worth out of that guitar-shaped spaceship. [↩]
16. According to the AllMusic, Aldo Nova was born in Montreal as Aldo Caporuscio. I enjoyed this not-good song largely because I misheard the first line of the chorus, “can’t you see,” as “cut to the streets,” which seemed very cinematic to me. [↩]
17. One autumn, the strange tastes of a certain WDVE DJ led to Jethro Tull’s obscure 1974 ballad “Skating Away (On the Thin Ice of a New Day)” becoming the most popular song in my high school. [↩]
18. I had a soft spot for songs about guys becoming rock stars, like this one and Foreigner’s “Juke Box Hero,” which I tricked myself into believing were inspirational. I should be paid reparations. [↩]
19. I don’t know why I opted for “Stealin’” over Uriah Heep’s other, much more preferable n-apostrophe song, “Easy Livin’” (which was used to great effect in the British sci-fi cop series Life on Mars.) [↩]
20. If nothing else, I can be proud of the fact that, as a 12-year-old in the late-80s American suburbs, I liked this song. My tape wouldn’t have included this BBC performance but instead the original studio version pulled off the hard-to-find T. Rex compilation T. Rextasy: The Best of T. Rex, 1970-1973. [↩]
21. Gag. [↩]
22. Later I would break the mold of metal fans by enjoying both hair metal, like Whitesnake and Def Leppard, and “real” metal like Metallica and Corrosion of Conformity. I attested to such in my letter to Metal Edge magazine. [↩]
23. I like this song and will fight someone to prove it. I suspect that this compilation also contained a third Deep Purple track, the awful late-period “Knocking On Your Back Door.” [↩]
24. I would never have admitted it, but this song encapsulated all my fears of becoming an adult, having to take care of myself, etc. Also in high school I discovered that liking it helped get you in good with college girls. [↩]
25. Supertramp doesn’t seem like a band I would’ve enjoyed, and a quick listen to the compilation I owned doesn’t offer any hints to what their appeal was to me. [↩]
26. Another one introduced to me by my father. Other songs my dad was particularly fond of at the time include The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” and “Fire” by Arthur Brown. [↩]
27. Another legitimately great song I’m proud of myself for liking. [↩]
28. The original mix tape unwisely ended with the entire 17-minute mess. I think I hoped to have delivered the last paper before it started. [↩]