When I started this weekly feature, I decided I was going to only post songs that were entirely out of print. Eventually Tim Quirk of Too Much Joy convinced me that music’s digital availability didn’t mean a thing when it came to artist compensation, so I shift a bit to focus on songs that were physically out of print. I’ve stumbled on that front a few times, largely because my hunting to determine availability is admittedly flawed, but that’s the guiding principle. Given that, I tend to default to music that was released some twenty years ago, when I was but an impressionable young man bedazzled by the ever-growing library in the college radio station I called home for several years. That’s the practical reason, but naturally there’s a swell of nostalgia that sends me casting back to my old favorites from the deep archives of the 90FM “C Stacks.” The same feeling sent me trolling in one of the corners of the Web that serves as a wondrous guide to the finest music of that era. I spent some time on The 120 Minutes Archive playlists page.

For the sadly uninitiated, 120 Minutes was a program aired on MTV on Sunday nights, filled with the music videos that were held back from regular rotation because they were sure to scare the more impressionable kiddies who wanted nothing more daring that the latest Def Leppard tainted candy. It was the music that otherwise had its most valued place on the left end of the radio dial, where college students dwelled and commercials were verboten. My Sunday nights freshman year always finished with myself and a few of my more enlightened dormmates sitting in front of the chained-down TV in the Thomas Hall basement watching the latest video offerings from the likes of R.E.M., They Might Be Giants and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Since my weekly shift at the radio station was the following night, the show also provided a hint or two about some of the more obscure artists worth seeking out. Often, sticking around for “the second sixty” of 120 Minutes meant discovering the best songs (or at least the chosen singles) from the bands that weren’t automatically recognizable when their new albums arrived at the station.

I was looking through these old television playlists because I was curious about those songs I may have forgotten about, those songs that were briefly on-air staples but have long since faded from memory. Sure enough, in between New Order’s “Round and Round” and Thelonious Monster’s “So What If I Did,” there was listed a song from a band called The Sidewinders called “Witchdoctor.” I probably hadn’t heard that song in at least fifteen years, maybe more. It’s been about that long since I’d even thought about it. And yet as soon as I saw the title, I could hear it again, I could see the album cover, I could practically feel what it was like to walk over to it’s spot in the stacks and slide it free to give it a quick traipse across the airwaves. Happily, we live in an age in which memories don’t have to suffice, and a few artful keystrokes later I had a copy of the song in my iTunes. My old 90FM playlists go on forever.

By the way, that old adage about not judging a book by its cover, which can easily be extended to albums, was clearly coined by an artist with terrible taste in covers. Sometimes you can judge an album by its cover.

The album is exactly as cool as that cover promises.

Sidewinders, “Witchdoctor”

(Disclaimer: The album that holds this song is seemingly out of print, although Amazon has it available digitally for those who want to dig a little deeper. I invoke The Quirk Rule alluded to above to post it here, but if anyone with due authority to request its removal contacts me and makes such a request, I will gladly and promptly comply.)