This series of posts covers my long, beloved history interacting with the medium of radio, including the music that flowed through the airwaves.

When a group of us college radio kids participate in the beater car caravan from our modest Midwestern college burg to the big city of Milwaukee, it was the closest many of us would come to a religious pilgrimage. The ultimate destination was a small club on the eastern edge of the urban landscape. We were going to see Too Much Joy.

The quartet that hailed from Scarsdale, New York were so dominant on the charts of WWSP-90FM, the student-run radio station at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, that they were basically our semi-official house band. Their 1989 sophomore album, Son of Sam I Am, was popular with our on-air staffers. Its 1991 follow-up and the band’s major label debut, Cereal Killers, was a downright blockbuster for us. Released at the same time as R.E.M.’s Out of Time, a huge hit on the college charts, the Too Much Joy album essentially kept pace with — and occasionally surpassed — the latest from the standard banners of the the left of the dial on our weekly airplay tallies. Noisy and tuneful at the same time, they played songs that were relentlessly catchy and infused with classic punk spirit. They sang about drinking beer and crushes that spin your head around and finding freedom and purpose. As far as we were concerned, they sang about us, in all our scuffling, twenty-something, middle-class disaffectedness.

We probably had a few free tickets to the show from the record label, but I doubt were the beneficiaries of enough comps to accommodate everyone who trekked downstate for it in our crew. Befitting our heroes, I’d like to think, we were raucous and cunning in the venue all night long. A few of us snuck backstage before the show for our own impromptu meet and greet with the band, and we tested the bartenders’ instinctual limits of how much beer we should be served. (In Wisconsin, those limits are ludicrously high.) Practically every song Too Much Joy played promoted us to career around the dance floor like turbo-charged bumper cars, only resting during the new songs. When one of the band members expressed disappointment that we didn’t like the new material as much, we protested that we needed to rest sometime. It really was a small club, and we were right on top of the stage. That sort of back and forth could happen.

When Too Much Joy left the stage after their encore, we 90FMers refused to let the night end. We clapped, cheered, and screamed for more. We thumped our fists on the stage and stomped our feet on the floor, chanting “Too! Much! Joy!,” quickly added a proud “Fucking!” between the last two words in their band name. Roadies were on the stage packing up gear and coiling cables. “Give it up,” one of them wearily snapped at us. “They’re not coming back.”

But they did come back. Across all the concerts I’ve attended, I’ve been witness to only two genuine encores, the artist returning to the stage because of overwhelming crowd enthusiasm rather than the pre-planned empty showmanship abetted by the house lights staying dimmed. One of those two encores was that night with Too Much Joy. They came retook the stage and started setting back up. When we urged them to start playing again, one of them responded sensibly they couldn’t perform a song until their instruments were plugged back in. We knew better, though. We called out for “The Otter Song,” an a cappella song that appeared on the Too Much Joy’s debut album, Green Eggs and Crack, and that was so popular at our radio station that we had to briefly prohibit the DJs from playing it. In my memory, the band’s lead singer, Tim Quirk, grinned broadly at the suggestion and launched into the song. I and my college radio cohorts sang along at top volume.

The night went on from there, but I think I’ll leave those portions of the story untyped. The only thing I’ll add is that our program director, who was truthfully the biggest Too Much Joy fan of us all, was gifted a cymbal that the band’s drummer, Tommy Vinton, broke during the set. Our transferred energy helped drive the powerful percussionist to tear through the alloy instrument that was theoretically one of the most durable tools on the stage. Each of the band members — Vinton, Quirk, guitarist Jay Blumenfield, and bassist Sandy Smallens — autographed the cymbal. For the remainder of the program director’s tenure at the station, it hung in his office like a certificate of unmatched achievement.

Previous entries in this series can be found by clicking on the “Radio Days” tag.