Basket Case: Wacked

Basket Case
Wacked / The Problem
Timeframe: 1991

Tracks:

Side One (Wacked)

1 Hello Pain
2 WRENCH
3, 4 Eat This, FLUFFY MOUSIES
5, 6 Painful Spine, THAT WON'T BE ME
7 No After All
8 I'VE GOT MYSELF ON MY SIDE
9 Special Magic Secret Number 8
10 UNSIGHTLY
11 FEEDBACK SPIRAL

Side Two (The Problem)

12 In Trouble Now
13 COLOR ME SHAVED
14 Toda
15 EVERYBODY RIDES THE BUS
16, 17, 18 Thirty Something Chords, Power Ballad, GO TO SLEEP
19 Upstairs Music (Part I)
19 Upstairs Music (Part II)
20 FATHEAD
21 Upstairs Music (Part III)
21 Upstairs Music (Part IV)
22 I CAN'T STAND THE CONFUSION IN MY MIND
23 Still In Trouble Now
24 LATE MUSIC 4U

Basket Case was an electronic music group in the late 80's early 90's, from Madison, Wisconsin. I have two Basket Case cassettes in my possession. The first was given to me by Sunni Sailing, in High School. She was apparently friends with Aaron and Dave, the two main producers of Basket Case.

This first album is called "Sing Along With Basket Case". The cover art is a picture of guys in old low rider bicycles/motorcycles, colored over with crayons. The text on the cover/spine is in "ransom note" style, with random letters from magazines cut out to spell the words. This tape was produced in 1988. Inside, it actually has the phone numbers for Aaron, Heather, and Dave (Dave's is written by hand, in pen).

Some time later, I found a second Basket Case cassette, for sale in The Cat's Meow, a shop on State Street (Kind of a Hot Topic, before Hot Topic even existed). This cassette is called "Wacked". This album was produced in 1991, and contains the songs that are provided and linked here. Side 1 is Wacked. Side 2 is The Problem. The cover is an image of a housewife with some kind of back pain. Behind her is a blacksmith with a giant arm, his hammer poised near her rear end.

The inside credits include: "Basket Case is Aaron Harder and David Heagle." The track listing includes some tracks in ALL UPPERCASE. I have preserved the naming in the list above, in case there is any significant meaning to the spelling. In general, the uppercase tracks are more traditional 'real' songs, while the lowercase tracks are short motifs or just noise.

The original cassette features hand written silver paint-pen slogans underneath a printed label. On Side 1, it says "Burn, Wahlburg, Burn!". On Side 2, it says "Burn Wal-Mart (tm), Burn!"

The tracks here were digitized by playing the original cassette in a Technics RS-232 dual cassette deck, routed into a Denon CDR-620 CD recording deck. The audio CD track detection is not perfect, so some tracks are split (where they once had a single number on the cassette listing) or merged (where they once had two numbers on the cassette listing). The audio CD was then ripped with Sony (Sonic Foundry) Sound Forge 9, and finally convered into 192 kbps MP3 files.

The second album (Wacked) is considerably more well produced and polished than the first. Wacked was one of my favorite albums in High School. If anyone else out there has any more Basket Case music, or knows of what became of Aaron or Dave, please let me know!