When I got to the college radio station two decades ago, I walked through the door as a music neophyte. Or at least a good music neophyte. I’d love to say that I spent my high school years amassing gloomy, buzzy Jesus and Mary Chain records or the pile-driving genius of Husker Du’s SST offerings. Instead, the year the Replacements released Let it Be, I bought Chicago 17. Through the Columbia Record and Tape Club, no less.

The transition thankfully started during my senior year of high school when R.E.M. released Document, so I didn’t arrive at college completely unarmed. But I absolutely needed assistance to catch up, assistance that was forthcoming from my new cohorts, this wonderful band of musical Sherpas. This was still very much a time when everyone was anxious to get together and share their music, pulling vinyl discs out of sleeves and fitting them over spindles to share whatever discovery they’d made. “You’ve gotta hear this,” was the proud battle cry. That energy, I suspect, is still out there among music fans, but it’s funneled into the blogosphere. Back then, it had to happen in dusty college apartments and dorm rooms, the flimsy covers littering the floor as each song spurred inspiration for the next record to be slipped out of the collection. There was no time for returning things to their proper place. We were operating with immediacy.

In our radio station, that often translated to the request “Get me something cool from the C Stacks.” At the time I joined 90FM, the music library was divided up into A, B, and C Stacks, with the proximity to the beginning of the alphabet roughly corresponding to the artist’s fame outside of the rarefied tastes of college radio. U2 was in the A Stacks. XTC was in the B Stacks. E*I*E*I*O was in the C Stacks. When on the air, a shrewd DJ would try to break up any bit of predictability to their show (despite our best efforts, we all tended to return to favorites) by asking anyone else floating around the studio to grab something from the C Stacks that wouldn’t otherwise find its way onto the playlist. One day, I made that request to the Program Director at the time, and he handed me Curtains by The Balancing Act.

I’d played this record before. I’m sure of it. For one thing, the band’s promotional magnets–

–were ubiquitous at the station, producing the desired effect of having DJs otherwise unfamiliar with the group gravitate to their album. For another, it was on I.R.S. Records, the label so cool that its logo had to wear shades. I was never much of label groupie, but I.R.S. was the label that stamped out my beloved R.E.M. record so it felt like a safe friend. They rescued me from the dire sounds I was drowning in previously. Surely, they wouldn’t let me plunge into that sort of grim nonsense again.

The song the Program Director recommended was “She Doesn’t Work Here,” which couldn’t have been more perfect for the eighteen-year-old version of me, fully enamored with the nonthreatening perfection of unrequited romance. Like the Replacements’ “Skyway,” the song is a simply delivered story of futility pining after a lovely young woman, her distance heightened by the singer’s own personal reticence. The only way it could have suited me more is if it called me out by name.

As happened often, that simple request, “Get me something cool from the C Stacks,” gave me a song that earned a special place in my internalized music library, and can immediately make me feel like I’m back in that old studio, turning the monitor volume up and grinning wide.

The Balancing Act, “She Doesn’t Work Here”

(Disclaimer: This song is posted, in part, because it seems to be from a release that is out-of-print. As far as I can tell from a cursory search of the Interweb, it’s not available through any means that would involve the exchange of money and the eventual disbursement of that money to the band members. If anyone with reasonable authority to do so asks me to remove it, I will. Not the image of the magnet, though. That will remain forever!)