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 fall of 1991, Nirvana released the album Nevermind. It’s usually the height of hyperbole to say that a single record changed everything, but a statement of that enormity is apt sometimes. Nevermind changed everything in college radio.

At the time, it felt like Nevermind came out of nowhere. That impression wasn’t quite right. Nirvana’s debut album, Bleach, did well on the college charts, peaking at #22 on CMJ, the trade publication that served us scruffy kids toiling down in the noncommercial portion of the FM band. That same peak was reached by Beasties Boys’ Paul’s Boutique and Shelleyan Orphan’s Century Flower at around the same time. Even so, the Seattle-based band was obscure enough that CMJ misspelled the name of Nirvana’s frontman in their rave review of Nevermind: “More hump-rock than punk rock, Nirvana is gunning to take over the world, with Kurt Kobain the consummate dropout savant, using a still-palatable sense of the unwashed underground as additional sources of juice and friction.”

I haven’t verified, but I’m willing to wager that was the last time CMJ — or maybe anyone — got Kurt Cobain’s name wrong. To be fair, the icon-in-waiting was officially billed as “Kurdt Kobain” on Bleach. Oh well, whatever.

One week after it was reviewed in CMJ, Nevermind debuted at #2 on the publication’s album chart and its lead single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” debuted at the pinnacle of the Top Cuts chart. Nevermind inevitably made the only upward movement available to it the following the week, and the album remained atop the chart and generally dominant on college radio for months. The album’s rising tides rose the seaworthy vessels of other acts that bore an aural resemblance — and, ideally, a geographical kinship — to Nirvana. Soundgarden and Pearl Jam fortuitously had albums on radio stations’ new releases shelf at the same time, and there’s little doubt those releases overperformed by catching some light off of Nevermind‘s aura.

Perhaps more significantly, Nevermind was such a sensation that the broader music industry bent in Nirvana’s direction. Label A&R reps knocked each other over to sign any band that was noisy and tuneful at the same time, and commercial alternative radio stations sprung up all the place. The big tent of alternative rock shrunk a bit after that. Within a couple years, most labels gave the heartiest pushes to bands such as Bush, Silverchair, and the Offspring with music so thick and loud that it made it a challenge for other acts to break through. I think it’s telling that the two artists who had multiweek runs atop the CMJ album chart before Nirvana — Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians and Siouxsie and the Banshees —struggled to get the attention of alternative rock radio programmers with their next full-lengths.

I was right in the middle of my five-year tenure as a DJ and student leader at WWSP-90FM, the college radio station at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, so I should theoretically be able to relay what it was like to be in the midst of this sonic revolution. Weirdly, though, our station didn’t connect with Nevermind. Like, at all. In those first five weeks that the album had a stranglehold on the CMJ charts, Nevermind appeared on our weekly Top 30 chart only twice, once at #8 and once at #13. Only one album was consistently in our Top 5 during that span: Queer by Thompson Twins. I recollect Nevermind having a softer impact with us than our fellow college radio stations coast to coast, but I’m as perplexed as anyone that the album was that uninteresting to our DJs and, presumably, our listenership since we were getting and honoring a lot of requests in those days. Evidently, Central Wisconsin wasn’t feeling all that stupid or contagious in late 1991.

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