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

Thirty-five years ago, in the summer of 1989, the B-52’s released the album Cosmic Thing. The arrival of the fifth full-length from the Athens, Georgia band wasn’t exactly a surprise, but there were definitely suspicions that they wouldn’t continue following the death of guitarist Ricky Wilson, in 1985. Wilson, a casualty of the AIDS epidemic, died around the time the B-52’s finished the album Bouncing of the Satellites. Grief-stricken, the surviving band members, including Ricky Wilson’s sister Cindy Wilson, opted not to tour in support of the album and engaging in only the most minimal promotional efforts. The B-52’s went on hiatus, entirely uncertain about how to continue on. Like a lot of people experiencing terrible loss, they eventually decided the best recourse was to go back to work.

Made under mournful circumstances, Cosmic Thing is packed with jubilant, joyful music. That was no surprise coming from a band that was like a party with instruments, and yet something about the album’s magic caused it to connect with the masses like nothing else they ever made. Cosmic Thing is the sole B-52’s album to crack the Top 10 of the Billboard album chart, and three of its singles made the Top 40, two of them each peaking at the lofty height of #3. That took some time, though. “Love Shack,” the track that was the commercial breakthrough, was actually the album’s third single. It didn’t reach its chart peak until November and didn’t make its first appearance on the Hot 100 until September. Before that, Cosmic Thing belonged to college radio.

Cosmic Thing was released during my first summer as a college radio kid, a time I’ve been thinking about a lot of late, in part because I’m about to return to those old, well-stomped grounds to participate in the annual 90FM Reunion Weekend. I consider myself lucky that I had a such a perfect summer album moving through new music rotation during the summer. Drop the needle just about anywhere on that record and the set absolutely lit up for a few minutes. Even the slower songs, such as the magnificent “The Deadbeat Club,” spoke to a different side of those warmest of months, when romantic, hazy aimlessness set in: “Let’s go crash that party down/ In Normaltown tonight/ Then we’ll go skinny-dippin’/ In the moonlight.” The cut “Dry Country” is even more directly about those feelings: “And you roll out of bed in the morning/ Just sit on the porch and swing/ Sit on the porch and swing/ The heat of the day’s got me in a haze/ Those lazy days of summer are here.”

There were albums I likely listened to more that summer, but none yank me back to those days more forcefully and fully than Cosmic Thing. Let’s queue up “Channel Z” and go back in time.

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