Handmade Playlist of the Day: "Among The Missing"

Of the Greyed-Out

Head First¹ recently popped back onto the streaming services after a prolonged absence (at one time it was one of the few Badfinger albums available for streaming), and soon, for the first time ever, as I’ve mentioned previously, we’ll have Buckingham Nicks.

The unnerving ability of albums, or entire discographies, or just one necessary song—the Nerves’ “Hangin’ on the Telephone,” say—to vanish secretly from a streaming service, defacing your handmade playlists with sad greyed-out ghost-tracks; or else to abruptly manifest, without warning or explanation, enabling you to complete and share a playlist that has hung around, sometimes for years, lacking exactly the raggedy punch of Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation,” is one of the weird Fortean phenomena of late-stage paranormal capitalism.

When artists control licensing rights, and hold out for a more equitable deal, as in the case of Jett (I believe); or, as appeared to be the case with Bob Seger (three of whose long-missing tracks² left bitter, all but insurmountable gaps in a number of theoretical playlists of mine), because they just didn’t seem to think that streaming was all that big of a deal; or when, like God Speed You! Black Emperor last week, artists pull all of their music as a political statement, I get it. I hate to see a good playlist spoilt, but the music is theirs, and the streamers are (to use the technical term) evil fuckers, and so the absence of beloved and necessary music is something the playlist maker understands and must accept.

But what occult marketplace malediction lies on the Records, whose thrilling “Starry Eyes” (1978) has fallen in and out of availability so many times over the years? Surely the surviving Records—if any—aren’t holding out for a better deal, or making a political statement.³ At the moment it’s streamable again, randomly, as the tenth track on a quirky but amiable compilation of mysterious provenance called Power Pop Heroes.

Apple Music

And yet—while greyed-out de-licensed titles cling hollow and spectral to one’s Spotify and Apple Music playlists like the shed carapaces of a long-vanished summer’s cicadas—somehow YouTube skulks beneath the licensing wizard battles: hosting the legal and illegal alike, poorly organized, distractingly laid-out, annoying to search, prone to mislabeling, tracks weighted down in the Comments sections, as by cement shoes, with some of the most vapid music conversation the human race has ever conducted.

I’ve made playlists in YouTube, and have transferred some of my playlists into it from other services, but the audio quality of tracks there varies too much—and, over time, a YouTube playlist is also liable to lose tracks to license rot, content policing, or user absquatulation.

I’ve only ever created one proper mixtape in YouTube, one that I continue to maintain and update from time to time: Among the Missing; it is, naturally, a mix of all the songs that I most fervently wish were available on the other services:

Currently, and as has been the case for a long time now, Among the Missing kicks off with that heart-stopping piece of solo Buckingham fingerpicking from Buckingham Nicks, “Stephanie,” but of course that’s about to change. There are a couple of great—I might even say crucial—Badfinger covers, by the Loud Family and Aimee Mann, and some other key power pop tracks: one by Earth Quake, one by Candy and, above all—almost literally above all others—“Hanging on the Telephone” (1976): the original, written by the late Jack Lee (d. 2023), convincingly and famously covered by Blondie the following year. The Nerves version is edgier, more desperate, more nervous; I prefer it.

In the case of Syd Straw, Spock’s Beard, the Go-Betweens, and Tyrannosaurus (i.e., T-) Rex, the tracks are favorites from entire favorite albums that are not currently available.⁴

And then there are the tracks so deeply buried in layers of pop-cultural scurf and music-industry oblivion that they may never be excavated and made available: the wonderful “With Every Beat of My Heart” (co-written by Bobby Hart of Boyce & Hart, with a sweet, sultry lead vocal by Pussycat “Valerie,” in reality Patrice Holloway, herself a fine songwriter who co-wrote Blood Sweat & Tears “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy”); a memorable yet forgotten song by Sonny & Cher Show summer-replacements the Hudson Brothers; and the “hidden” track from Robert Altman’s Nashville, “Since You’ve Gone,” performed live in the film with radiance and charm by actress Cristina Raines (with Keith Carradine and Allan F. Nichols et al), and written by, of all people, Gary Busey. It’s the only song performed in the film that doesn’t appear on the film’s original soundtrack album because, no studio version was recorded.

You never know, though, with deep-dive collective-pop-unconscious tracks like those last few. For years, one of the highlights of Among the Missing was that peerless gem of cartoon-show psychedelic bubblegum pop, "I Enjoy Being a Boy,” by the Banana Splits, and that’s on all the streamers, now—though not, it must be said, in all its true, trippy, grainy, you’re-sitting-much-too-close-to-the-TV splendor. Not like this:

1. Simultaneously Badfinger’s sixth, and tenth, and final album, and the last to feature founding guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist Pete Ham, who committed suicide in 1975, shortly after the record was shelved by Warner Bros. It remained unreleased until 2000, by which time founding bassist/vocalist Tom Evans had long since killed himself, too. It’s a fascinating record, uneven in ways that directly and at times uncomfortably reflect the personal, artistic, and financial pain that this most cruelly blessed of bands was undergoing at the time, from Evans’ stinging yet feckless “Hey, Mr. Manager” and “Rock ’n' roll Contract,” to Ham’s bittersweet “Keep Believing,” with its uplifting melody and reassuring chorus wrapped around lyrics in which the singer seems to be reassuring himself that everyone—Ham left behind a wife and small child—will carry on all right without him.

2. “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,'“ “Beautiful Loser” and, of course, “Night Moves.”

3. I don’t know much about the Records’ history, but the lyrics of “Starry Eyes” itself appear to refer to band’s troubles with a tour manager.

4. I believe the absence from streamers of the entire early, Neal Morse-era Spock’s Beard is due to the wishes of founder Morse himself. I’m not sure what the deal is with the wondrously talented and sadly neglected Syd Straw, much of whose catalog is unavailable, but would speculate that somehow she is being screwed by some label or other. Some kind of label necromancy must be tying up the albums recorded by the Go-Betweens after they reformed in 2000 and before founder Grant McLennan’s death in 2006. As for the weird, sui generis, musically uneven but consistently delightful early records recorded under the name of Tyrannosaurus Rex by hippie bongoist Steve “Peregrine” Took and a fey, half-Jewish ex-Mod named Marc Bolan who was still learning how to play his guitar, represented on Among the Missing by “Debora” from My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair... But Now They're Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows and two favorites from A Beard of Stars—who knows? The state of the entire Bolan catalog on the streamers is a shonde.