AFTER almost two years in the making, the second volume of Stout City Rockers is finally done. But even now, producer Dave Miller (who has a day job at Metro) is still thinking about what's not on the record—or rather, who. "There's probably people that are mad at me because they didn't get in on it," says Miller, whose résumé of local bands includes, in reverse order, Talky Tina, Commercial Static, Odd Numbers, Saturday Saints, Not Hot and the New Mosquitos. Though he himself denies it, he became sort of an unofficial chairman of the South Bay rock scene when he put together the first Stout City Rockers compilation in 2007. It wasn't the first compilation he'd masterminded featuring local musicians, but it had the biggest impact. Rather than piling together songs by bands related by nothing but geography, Miller actually got them to play together, in various combinations, on songs he had written. Scene fixtures like the Shitkickers' Shawn Packer and the Forgotten's Gordy Carbone have returned for a second edition of SCR, along with newcomers like Smash Mouth's Greg Camp and somewhere around two dozen others. Working on one track a month for a year, with another year for mixing and fixing, Miller says he thinks this second time around is better overall, and he understands why so many local players sign on: "It's the camaraderie, contributing to the scene. A lot of these guys don't play a whole lot. You get these guys out of the house and up in the studio to create, they appreciate that." He took the time to run down the second volume of Stout City Rockers track by track; accompanied by my own italicized descriptions of the songs, here are his recipes for the perfect South Bay mix tape.

'What Do I Know?'

Post-Jam mod rocker uses chugging guitars and socially conscious sarcasm to insist that pleading ignorance isn't going to get it done.

"That was one of my favorites, and I definitely wanted to sing one of the ones I liked. I liked what it was saying, the message. I thought I could do it the best. Two of the musicians that play on that song, Greg Croak and Chris Smith, are in my band Talky Tina. Chris plays bass and Greg plays guitar. Randy played drums, Randy Burk from Stout Recording, who recorded the whole thing and owns the studio. 'Please wipe those flies from their face,' that was just seeing that commercial with the flies on the kids' faces and just wanting to 'change the channel, Jeopardy is on.' Wanting to keep that out of your sight. You know, 'Sign me up, so I can drink.' People don't want to see it."

'Gravity'

Jangly pop song with a great beat and a metaphysical angle about how walking is important because "gravity's stuck on you."

"I was pretty buzzed, I was walking over to Packer's house, and the song just came to me. I've only had three songs that just came to me, I usually have to sit down and really work on trying to write a song. I knew my wife wanted to sing it, and I couldn't blow her off. Bry [Caughey] had to come in and coach her, because she didn't want to listen to me. Couldn't do it. I'd be like, 'C'mon, we did this 30 times at the house! Get this!' I have no patience."

'Fire'

Sharp retro rock meets an almost hip-hop-style vocal.

"That was basically Commercial Static—Kyle [Donicci] on drum, Holly [Carthew] keyboards, the same two guys from the first songs on bass and guitar, and I play guitar. Sean Bjordahl from Curbside sings. He showed up to our practices and he knew the song, and he put his own little spin on it."

'Evil Love'

Poison love song chock-full of insectoid metaphors and the overall feeling that it doesn't matter whether or not you see the web being spun.

"Dover [from Saturday Saints] heard that song and was like. 'I want that song.' I wasn't even sure I wanted to put that one in. I consider that one of my better songs, and I kind of wanted it for myself. But he wanted to do it, so he got to do that one. I was just sitting in my room trying to write a song, and I had a bunch of spiders in my room, and I was like, 'You're just a bug, climbing up that wall, just to capture me, I'm an insect too, flying through that room, trying to avoid you.'"

'Mine'

Melancholy workaday song is what Husker Du might have sounded like if Bob Mould and Grant Hart could stand each other.

"That's Bryant [Caughey], who did the layout for the album. I went over to his house, and showed him a different song. I sang it, and he said, "That's cool." Then I said, 'OK, well, here's this one.' He's in 4banger, and I said, 'This one's kind of more 'Banger.' I didn't have any words to it, I just hummed the melody. And he's like, 'That's it, that's what I want.' We recorded the music on his GarageBand; he came back the next day and had the lyrics written for it. I think it's one of his best songs. It's just about his life, it captures his life perfectly. There's a different drummer on there, Dave Kashka from the Forgotten. I play acoustic. Mike Fox is on that, Greg Croak, Chris Smith on bass."

'Remedy'

Lead singer from The Forgotten applies his big punk brain to New Wave, then goes all Johnny Rotten on the last 10 seconds.

"That's Gordy. I had some cool music, and said, 'Hey, here's the melody.' He changed the melody a little bit, and wrote the lyrics for that one. Packer is on it. You try to mix it up, you have Packer, you have Mike Fox, all these great guitar players. Branch [Benson, from Shitkickers] plays bass."

'Runnin' Blind'

Feelin' fine or on the brink of perfect disaster? This walks the line as it winds towards harmonic convergence.

"That's Mike Belardes from the Kingpins, he plays sax in the Pimpsticks. He's been around forever, he was on Star Search and all this stuff. He's not a singer, he's a sax player, but I got him to sing. We wrote the lyrics together."

'With the Dregs'

Pure Britannia, or maybe Flying Nun–era New Zealand.

"Sometimes some of the guys would want to write their own lyrics; they'd change mine. I was fine with that. One that was pretty significant was 'With the Dregs,' with Big Brian [Dupras] singing. He kept one line of mine and changed all the rest of them. But he's kind of like that—he's kind of an egotistical guy. I don't care if you write that. I don't even remember what I wrote anymore. It's funny, I sing his words now."

'Howler Monkey'

How this didn't come out of L.A.'s hardcore years is beyond me. Could be an outtake from one of X's first couple of albums.

"That's about the first monkey in space. Me and Gary [Sunbury] wrote that together. It's also about hiding yourself away from the world. I think Dover had a hand in that one too, he came up with howler monkey. Packer plays on it with Mike Fox, you have a star-studded crew right there, two of the raddest guitarists around. Rybones, who was in Bodies in the Basement, plays bass. Randy on drums, with Gary singing."

'Infected'

Creepy, rootsier rock. The kind of subject matter Black Francis could sink his teeth into.

"Brian Campbell who sings in Shitkickers sings on that one. That one's about your basic meth guy who thinks everybody's after him. I played guitar on that one, with Greg, Chris and Randy."

'Jenocide'

However it's spelled, the word "genocide" has surely never been crooned so tenderly. Great fingerpicked outro.

"That one was written around the same time as 'What Do I Know.' Sometimes I write in pairs, they just come out like that. Packer plays guitar, and his ex-girlfriend Jen [from Suicidal Barfly] sings. Randy is playing drums, I play on it and Big Brian is playing bass. So it's a little different than Suicidal Barfly, more rockin.'"

'Common Boa'

Slower, weirder take on SCR rock.

"It's Randy and Mike Joseph, they were both in Small Time Napoleons. Really cool pop band, great band. Ray Yeh, who owns the Uptown in Oakland, plays the violin. We're all friends, but that's the only one I had nothing to do with."

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