I worked in commercial radio for about two-and-a-half years. In that span, I had to play a lot of music I didn’t like. And I mean a lot. This was in the mid-nineteen-nineties, after Nirvana hit it big and Pearl jam hit it bigger, leading labels to clamor for any band that played thudding hard rock, especially if it sounded a little like it was being fed through damaged amps. The glut of “new rock alternative” stations that sprung upon around this time, including the one I worked at, played these bands like dutiful soldiers, even though many of them … Continue reading One for Friday: Hole, “Gold Dust Woman”

This weekly feature is usually devoted to a song that I swooned over during, as I put it, “my college radio days,” by which I mean the span of time when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and spending most of my time at 90FM, that institution’s student-run station. There is, however, a whole second life I had in college radio, working as the advisor and General Manager for WPRK-FM at Rollins College in central Florida. In additional to all the other opportunities and benefits this job shift brought, it gave me a chance to … Continue reading One for Friday: Firewater, “Psychopharmacology”