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 Call released the album Let the Day Begin. The California band fronted by Michael Been plied their trade with the some arena-friendly, anthemic rock music that had recently made U2 arguably the biggest band in the world. The Call presumably were well-positioned to borrow a little light from the wide aura of success that surrounded U2, but it never really came to pass. After the Call’s album Into the Woods, released the same year as U2’s The Joshua Tree, essentially stiffed, the band’s label, Elektra Records, soured on them almost entirely. When the Call turned in their next album, Let the Day Begin, Elektra rejected it and cut them loose. MCA Records picked the album up and gave it enough of a push to make it the Call’s best performer since their 1983 LP, Modern Romans.

The Call definitely had a sound that was right in the pocket for most of the DJs at WWSP-90FM, the college radio station where I hung my headphones as an undergraduate student. We gave plenty of airplay to Let the Day Begin, but I’d say the vast majority of the album’s spins sent the title track out over the airwaves. It would be nice to report that I was more adventurous in my song selections than my cohorts, especially because, as the program director that summer, I was on the air an awful lot. I had a specific experience that forces me to concede I was probably as repetitive as anyone. I was staffing one of many shifts when the request line rang.

“Can you play something from the new Call record?” the voice on the other end of the line said. “But don’t play the same song you always play.”

“Wait a minute,” I retorted, my teenage umbrage reaching a steady simmer. “By ‘you,’ are you referring to me or to the station as a whole?”

“Well, you’re on there all the time, so I guess I mean both,” he answered.

The listener won that little debate. I played a different song. And from then on in, every time I pulled Let the Day Begin off the shelf, I thought of that phone call as I stared down at the playlist wanting ever so much to play the hit. When I’m on the air for this year’s 90FM Reunion Weekend, I just might grab that record again. If I do, I’ll probably go through the same internal battle, a telephone exchange that happened more than three decades ago giving my programmer’s conscience a shake. Then I’ll queue up “Let the Day Begin” anyway. It’s been a while since I played it last.

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