Marti Jones was one half of what passed for a power couple in the land of college rock, circa 1988. Jones was part of the band Color Me Gone in the mid-nineteen-eighties. They released a bit of music on A&M Records. It didn’t take, but the label clearly liked Jones, signing her to a solo contract that led to the release of the LP Unsophisticated Time, in 1985. The man behind the boards for that record was Don Dixon, then a hot, up-and-coming producer thanks to his efforts, with Mitch Easter, on the first two R.E.M. albums. He wasn’t making … Continue reading One for Friday: Marti Jones, “You Can’t Take Love for Granted”

I was recently remind of one of the great pleasures of my bygone days: sitting around with friends and listening to records. When I showed up at the campus radio station way back in the late nineteen-eighties, CDs were fast emerging as the preferred format, in part because of cleaner sound quality but also because the execs in the music business figured out that could sell them at a far greater profit than records, perpetrating yet fleecing of their devoted consumers that stands as the defining quality of the industry as a whole. For most of staffing the radio station at the time, … Continue reading One for Friday: Rainy Day, “Sloop John B”