Author: Dan Seeger

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College Countdown: The Gavin Report Top 20 Alternative Chart, October 1992, An Introduction

Dan Seeger

I’m going to concede up front that this chart is presented as something as a place-holder. I have a much more significant countdown all cued up on one of the theoretical turntables, but I need a touch more time to get ready for it. Looking for something to carry this feature through to roughly the end of the calendar year, I landed on a chart from the fall of 1992. This isn’t purely random. For reasons not entirely unrelated to the next chart we’ll use, I was thinking a lot about my last year as a student in college radio. … Continue reading College Countdown: The Gavin Report Top 20 Alternative Chart, October 1992, An Introduction

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From the Archive: Hocus Pocus

Dan Seeger

This is another one of the record reviews I wrote for the short-lived but dandy Central Florida publication The Independent Journal. Enon was a band I hadn’t heard of — to my recollection, anyway — before becoming the General Manager and Staff Advisor for the campus radio station at Rollins College, but they were a favorite of some key staff members. The students even got the band to come into the station and play a live, on-air set. I carried around a CD copy of that performance for ages. It was my actual favorite Enon album. I’m selecting this for … Continue reading From the Archive: Hocus Pocus

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One for Friday: John Lydon interviewed by WPRK

Dan Seeger

So I’m going to do something a little different today. Usually I reserve this Friday feature to share an MP3 from some bygone record that I treasured in my college radio days, with the occasionally foray into music that was released after I got my paper and I was free. But the college radio experience was about more than the actual records to me. It was also about making connections with the performers that I enjoyed so much. While I didn’t have the opportunity to do it all that often, I retain a tremendous affection for those instances when I … Continue reading One for Friday: John Lydon interviewed by WPRK

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “It Should Have Been Me”

Dan Seeger

These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. Amazingly, Gladys Knight and the Pips never had a chart-topping single for Motown Records. As towering as the act was, the closest they came was with their version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” which was passed around to all of the label’s stars, including Smokey Robinson. Of course, it was Marvin Gaye who owned that particular number. His take was recorded … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “It Should Have Been Me”

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Seven

Dan Seeger

#7 — The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940) I stand by my longtime belief that John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is the tome most deserving of the well-worn honorific The Great American Novel. The appeal of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the default choice, is completely understandable given the way it weighs the toxicity of craving upper mobility along with the hollowness of wealth itself, but I find the gut-punch grimness of Steinbeck’s story to hold greater, more resonant truths. Gatsby has added layers, which tickles the inner intellect of literature aesthetes. The Grapes of Wrath gets … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Seven

Books, Comics5 Comments

My Writers: John Byrne

Dan Seeger

When it came to my comic book reading, I was always fiercely devoted. Completist tendencies are embedded deeply within me, which I directly attribute to my time perusing the unkempt racks of comics at the local supermarket or convenience stores, desperate to make sure I got every last issue of my favorite titles, handily numbered to help me track the the effectiveness of my efforts. While I was still comfortable in my tender youth when I started reading superhero comics — barely able to claim an age in the double-digits — I soon realized that being committed to certain series and … Continue reading My Writers: John Byrne

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Great Moments in Literature

Dan Seeger

“My favorite bit of Outside is the window. It’s different every time. A bird goes right by zoom, I don’t know what it was. The shadows are all long again now, mine waves right across our room on green wall. I watch God’s face falling slow slow, even orangier and the clouds are all colors, then after there’s streaks and dark coming up so bit-at-a-time I don’t see it till it’s done.” –Emma Donoghue, Room, 2010 “THE ROARING SILENT SCREAM OF INTERSTELLAR SPACE RUSHES THROUGH THE SENSES OF THESE ONCE-MEN…SENSES ROOTED FIRMLY TO THE EARTH. THE GLOW OF A LIFETIME … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature

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College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 1

Dan Seeger

1. Marques Bovre and the Evil Twins, Flyover Land Though I wasn’t at the station at the time, I can provide all sorts of reasons as to why Flyover Land predictably landed at the top spot of 90FM’s year-end chart. The simplest explanation involves the radio station’s biggest event of the year. A weekend-long affair modestly billed as The World’s Largest Trivia Contact takes place every April. Throughout much of the nineteen-nineties the weekend prior was marked by a couple of “Kickoff” programs: a midnight movie and a concert. In 1995, the movie was an indie crowdpleaser that likely challenges the sensibilities … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 1

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From the Archive: Run

Dan Seeger

One of the main reasons I could never take the concept of Patrick Dempsey as “McDreamy” seriously is that I remember all too well when he was a young actor in terrible movies, many of which oddly featured him seducing older women. I don’t remember a bit of Run, beyond lumping it into the big, vague category of Indistinct Junk We Used To Need To See In Order To Fill Out A Weekly Radio Show. Here’s yet another in the brief procession of reviews that needed to employ the nonsense word “thrill-omedy.” I notice I did a terrible job keeping my … Continue reading From the Archive: Run

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One for Friday: The Plugz, “Achin”

Dan Seeger

Sometimes I have no recollection of how a track came into my digital possession. Much as I appreciate the wide open bounty of the interweb, especially when it comes to those old and new acts that I surely would have never discovered without it, I sometimes miss the bygone ability to always identify the rough moment of discovery, to conjure up the origin story of each personally held piece of music, as it were. The vastness of what I can access now is better. But I can still be a little wistful about portions of the experience that are chipped … Continue reading One for Friday: The Plugz, “Achin”