I think most students who gravitate to their college radio station do so because, first and foremost, they love music. Taking their first crack at the real world, or a simulacrum of such, they’re finally able to assert that inner part that connects to certain guitar chords or electronic beats or tangles of angular lyrics. Often it’s music that their high school compatriots didn’t get, dismissing it as weird as they pondered whether to vote for Bryan Adams’ “Heaven” or REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” for the prom theme. If commercial radio bothered to play it at all, it was usually late at night, or relegated to some specialty show shoved into a pocket of the low-listenership weekend, the DJ presenting the songs with a tone that bordered on embarrassment. I mean, they’re called Jesus and Mary Chain, they must be freaks, right? College is time to hit the reset button, seek out those who actually understand and sympathize when you’re rambling on about the genius of Document (even if they’ll insist in response that Murmur is better), and, if you’re lucky enough to have access to a powerful transmitter, tell the whole world about it.

Or am I just typing about me?

I suspect that’s even more the case now than it was then. When I landed at the college radio station over two decades ago, broadcasting was still a field you could reasonably aspire to be a part of. Now, it increasingly threatens to become the equivalent of studying typewriter repair. Somebody out there may need your services, but god knows who. Back then, the population of station staffers was still heavy with music freaks, but we also had a sizable contingent of individuals who were there because they were interested in radio itself. They didn’t view our music with disdain or confusions, but nor did they register the levels of excitement that swept over the rest of us when the span on a few weeks brought great new albums by The Replacements, XTC, Elvis Costello, Lou Reed and Robyn Hitchcock (Queen Elvis is out of print?! I think I now know what’s going to be featured on “One for Friday” next week).

This divide didn’t cause any sort of rift. If anything, the music fans among the staff were overjoyed when one of our less well-versed cohorts connected with a band. In fact, those associations often stuck and stuck hard, as we’d convince ourselves that the affection they felt for an artist they played with a little more regularity must equate to the same sort of passion we felt for our favorites.

One of my fellow executive staff members fell into this category. I’ll not share his real name, but you can choose from any one of the nicknames we saddled him with: Diamond Dave, Buzz, Bill, Boobs, Wally, Lethal. He was on the air doing a fill-in shift one of the very first times I went into the station to DJ. This was not, to say the least, his forte at the station, and when he rushed out to go to class, leaving the board to me, the booth looked like a tornado had struck a record store. Vinyl albums were propped up everywhere, their sleeves in the same neighborhood but not especially nearby. Simply matching these things up to put them away was like completing a puzzle in the Hipster Book of Fun and Games. This was my first impression of him. I liked him a lot.

At some point, we added the album Fun by the band Uncle Green to the rotation. In one of his rare turns on a music show, Lethal played them and liked them, probably offering no stronger testimony than “They’re pretty good.” That was enough. In the minds of some of us, they were his band. We didn’t know much about the group, but we knew that Lethal liked them. At the end of the year, when the album had earned enough airplay to rank on the inaugural Top 90 of the year countdown, the only thing we could think to say about the band was the preference our News Director had for them.

So invariably when I hear this band, I think of him. Over twenty years later, and, to me, they’re still his band.

Uncle Green, “Pass It By”

(Disclaimer: Uncle Green’s You appears to be out of print, probably with only the slightest of chances of being revived at some point. You can see that the Amazon page even has one of those smaller, somewhat poorly shot images of the cover, as if they’re visually conceding that they don’t even quite know what this product is. This track is presented here under that understanding, that American dollars cannot be exchanged for this release is such a way that a portion of that’s currency’s value will eventually make it into the bank accounts of the band members. If anyone with due authority to do so asks me to remove this file from the Interweb, I will gladly and promptly comply.)