I can’t say with any amount of certainty whether or not the same rule applies now, but in my distant day as a student in college radio a band could sell an awful lot of records by coming up with earnestly penned and crisply sung songs about being a sad little boy in love. When I started in student-run broadcasting in the late nineteen-eighties, it was very much the province of males, who were naturally accustomed to adhering to the norms of their gender, established from approximately the moment the very first electric guitar chord was struck, that entailed nursing whatever romantic wounds they sustained (and this was largely a perpetual affliction, largely self-generated by masculine stupidity, during the commonplace collegiate span of eighteen to twenty-two) by retreating to the comfort and solace of records. The chief difference, of course, is that this sometimes took place across federal licensed airwaves, meaning the wallowing in sorrow was shared with anyone with the capability of operating a radio and a curiosity about what kinds of stations were way over on that left side of the dial.

Occasionally, I’ll listen to some track or album from that timeframe, a record that has largely slipped into obscurity but still has a home in the unwieldy music library on my laptop, and I’ll wonder just how it captured our attention in the first place. That’s not to suggest that the music in question is bad, but that I can’t quite figure out how it stuck out from the vast tapestry of material that was being targeted at college radio. The Northern Pikes sounds like plenty of other bands that were recording at around the same time–Fire Town, their fellow Canadians the Tragically Hip–offering a plainspoken, homespun brand of rock ‘n’ roll, carrying little hints of traditional folk and country, but far too slicked up to sound like appropriate fare for late night campfire circles. What made a few of my cohorts cross over from finding the music interesting enough to play every once in a while to something they needed to seek out (hardly an easy task back then) and add to their personal collections? I suspect it was the fact that they had songs like “Just Another Guy.”

“I know it’s hard sometimes/ I know it hurts sometimes/ No one said this would be easy/ And it ain’t easy,” may not ring with profundity, but I can say with mildly ashamed certainty that these are the sort of lines that sound like the secret of the universe sitting alone in a messy apartment at around 3:00 a.m. with too many empty Point Special cans on the salvaged coffee table. Now they sort of make me chuckle, but back then I would have probably nodded sympathetically and maybe even momentarily raised my fist in solidarity. It sort of depends on how many of those drained Blue Bullets were there in front of me.

The Northern Pikes, “Just Another Guy”

(Disclaimer: There are a few releases from the Northern Pikes that are still in print, including a surprisingly robust “best of” compilation. By all means, head to your preferred local, independently-owned record store and inquire about making a purchase. However, it sure looks to me like Big Blue Sky, the album that is home to “Just Another Guy,” is fully out of print, even for digital purchase. I also don’t think this track shows up anywhere else. What I’m trying to say is this: I don’t believe there’s a way to acquire this song that provides due compensation to the people who deserve to get paid for it, and the song is shared here under that belief. It’s a rationalization, sure, but it’s mine and I’ve used it effectively for almost a couple hundred songs now. If someone who is the boss of this song wants it taken down, all they need to do is tell me, and that’s exactly what I’ll do. There’s an email address in the “The History That Brought Us Here…” section. Just click up top and go from there.)