Between the many in-depth profile pieces, the viral videos and his passionate, relentless promoting of live shows at venues like the Velvet Underground and Comfort Zone, there’s no forgetting that local promoter legend Dan Burke is, first and foremost, a music fan.
To further prove as much, Burke has contributed the latest digital mixtape for youlookdeath.ly, a website put on by the guys behind Unfamiliar Records and Hand Drawn Dracula.
Burke’s jam is volume 12 and other past curators include A Place To Bury Strangers, Fucked Up’s Mike Haliechuk and Toronto players Little Girls.
Through the kinds of bands he’s championed over the years, you could rightly infer Burke’s taste for 60s garage rock, psych and bottom-heavy blues rock.
This is much is represented with tracks from the Warlocks, Herman Brood, Babe Ruth – an obscure 70s English combo – and Soundtrack of Our Lives, a uniquely futuristic Swede rock outift who Burke’s promoted at live shows many times over.
But Burke shows his versatility with an A.R. Rahman tabla banger, a Sons and Fascination-era Simple Minds cut, and closes with a Wang Chung tune for their dark pop score for modern noir classic To Live And Die In L.A, among others.
Most enlightening and enjoyable for me was Quebec 60s crooner Michel Pagliaro, who I read Burke rave about extensively in relation to his youth in Montreal, but could never find his music.
Here’s a few words from DB himself on finding his mixtape’s vibe:
I just picked songs that turn me on, some of them which date back decades stuff that many younger people probably have never heard but might, to their surprise, like.
Band Of Gold, for instance, was the first song that ever moved me, when I was about 10-years-old, I guess.
All the songs I chose have place in my life, define and recall times and places and feelings — a bit of soundtrack of my own life, I guess, originating from transistor radios and jukeboxes in Montreal in the 1970s.
I’m not an audiophile or record-collector, just a normal guy, so…this is what I’ve heard that made a difference — love the castanets that segue from song 2 into 3!!!
Check out the mixtape here.
