I’ve been involved with two different college radio stations, one as a student and the other as an advisor and General Manager. Both those experiences gave me tremendous exposure to the newest of new music, shaping my tastes and instilling in me a welcome aversion to complacency. Back in my student days, a friend of mine was on the air and took a call from a listener requesting a Grateful Dead song that was originally released at least two decades earlier. My friend hung up the phone and said “I hope I’m not sitting around twenty years from calling the college radio station to request the same old Bob Mould songs.” I felt the same way, and still think of that sentiment often. Even when I’m hearing songs of the newest Bob Mould record and thinking they’re pretty good.

In between my two stints in college radio, it was extremely difficult to find good new music. The local radio stations where I was living were largely stuck in corporate-defined ruts, and once valuable resources like MTV’s 120 Minutes were fading into insignificance. Online options were developing, but were haphazard in quality and dependability. Most problematically, the music magazines I’d once seen as Bibles issued on a biweekly or monthly basis had proven themselves to be woefully insufficient. Luckily, I found someone else who felt the same way on that last point.

Just when I needed it, Stephanie Zacharek wrote an article for the online magazine “Salon” entitled “I’m so bored with the USA.” The article’s subheader was simpler, more provocative and asked a question with a sentiment I shared: “Why do American music magazines have to suck?” The article was largely a celebration of two British music magazines: Q, which I’d heard of, and Mojo, which I hadn’t. I purchased a copy of Mojo as soon as I was able and found myself completely hooked. While it skewed towards older music, it wasn’t limited to the handful of ossified bands that routinely get held up for veneration in Rolling Stone. It was like a whole secret history of music, where Captain Beefheart and George Clinton and The Sonics were as vitally important as the Beatles and the Stones. One of the first issues I bought had a cover story on the Velvet Underground that was more detailed and impassioned than anything I’d ever read about any band in the stateside publications. Rolling Stone paid lip service to the Velvets and their significance. Mojo backed it up with their column inches. It was like switching from a United States map printed on a Denny’s placement to a meticulous AAA atlas: the road map to rock’n’roll now had so many more stops.

This gave the rest of Mojo‘s assessments and reviews that much more credibility. If they were willing to dig deeper into the music of twenty or thirty years prior, surely they must be paying closer attention to the great material on the fringe today. As much as I let their reviews page guide me to the best of the newer releases, I must admit it was the older music they covered that commanded me attention the most. When I started in college radio, I quickly tossed away any classic rock affiliations I still held, and now I was learning that looking backwards had some value. It was time to head out into the yard and retrieve the baby while letting the tepid bathwater of Eric Clapton and Doors records continue soaking into the grass.

Which brings us to Honey Cone. In their spectacular section of reissue reviews, Mojo covered the release of Soulful Sugar: The Complete Hot Wax Sessions on a U.K. label. What struck me most was the tidbit that Honey Cone had a number one hit in 1971 with the song “Want Ads.” I was just an infant when the song topped the charts, but I listened to pop radio throughout the seventies and this song was a complete mystery to me. Surely something that achieved number one status should be as familiar as the songs that preceded and followed it atop the Billboard chart. Impulsively, I bought the two-disc set and introduced myself to a world of seventies soul that had previously been obscured by radio’s reliance on the safest offerings from the most familiar names. Clearly, “new” could also mean “new to me.”

Honey Cone, “Are You Man Enough, Are You Strong Enough?”

(Disclaimer: As far as I can tell, all of Honey Cone’s releases are currently out of print, including the fantastic Castle Music reissue the lured me in initially. They do have some tracks available on iTunes, as well as the entirely of a “greatest hits” collection, so if you want to explore further, there is a mean to do so that, hopefully, routes money towards the performers and songwriters. The track posted here doesn’t seem to be among the songs available for purchase under any means, unless it’s hiding out on some comp somewhere. Of course, if anyone with due authority to do so asks me to remove the track from the Interweb, I will gladly comply.)