22. The Church, “Under the Milky Way” When Waddy Wachtel and Greg Ladanyi were brought onboard to produce the Church’s fifth album, Starfish, they sought to shift the Australian band away from the soothing, swirling psychedelia that was their defining … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 22 – 20
I turn now, as I do on occasion, to the stockpile of songs I once gratefully downloaded from a blog called Little Hits. The page is long-gone, lost to the misty whims of digital media. But at the time I … Continue reading One for Friday: The Scruffs, “She Say Yea”
25. Soft Cell, “Tainted Love” According to David Ball, the synthesizer player in the duo Soft Cell, he was familiar with song “Tainted Love” from its venerated place in the Northern Soul club scene in U.K. in the nineteen-seventies. Originally … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 25 – 23
The Screaming Blue Messiahs were a blast. More specifically, just about any track from either of their first two full-lengths — both of which sat snugly in the music stacks when I arrived at my college radio station in the late-nineteen-eighties — was a blast of bristling rock ‘n’ roll energy in the midst of a playlist. I don’t think anyone at our station would have held up the band as some pinnacle artist, transforming the landscape of college rock music nor issuing records that we knew — just knew — would be enduring classics. They weren’t R.E.M. or the … Continue reading One for Friday: The Screaming Blue Messiahs, “I Can Speak American”
28. Big Country, “In a Big Country” When trying to introduce a band to an international audience, there are worse strategies that releasing an anthemic single that has the group’s name right there in the title. “In a Big Country” wasn’t the first single from the Scottish band Big Country, but it was the first to get them significant attention in the U.S. (Its predecessor, “Fields of Fire (400 Miles),” was a Top 10 hit in the U.K., a level “In a Big Country” didn’t reach.) Officially considered the third single from the band’s 1983 debut album, The Crossing, the … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 28 – 26
Any travel is full of the unexpected, I suppose. It comes with traversing unfamiliar terrain. But my recent jaunt to the Pacific Northwest brought an especially jarring moment, although certainly not an unpleasant one. While walking past one of the many makeshift kiosks wallpapers with club fliers, a familiar band name jumped out at me. It wasn’t some flannel-clad band of scruffy misfits I associated with my college radio years — that certainly would have been understandable given I was in the geographic corner of the nation that came to dominate left of the dial playlists when I was helping … Continue reading One for Friday: The Woggles, “Get Tough”
31. Adam and the Ants, “Antmusic” “We name our music ‘antmusic’ to prevent classification and bracketing from other people,” Adam Ant told Tom Snyder when he appeared on Tomorrow to promote the 1980 album Kings of the Wild Frontier. “I don’t think that’s pretentious considering it’s taken four years to get the sound.” Besides the stretch of time identified by the singer, Adam and the Ants had gone through quite an ordeal on the way from their first to their second album, including the collapse of the band itself. Following a first flush of minor success — and some pigeonholing … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 31 – 29
It was one of those Replacements shows. Towards the end of the band’s tour in support of the album Pleased to Meet Me, the Minneapolis quartet was booked into the Pine Street Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Regional heroes the Young Fresh Fellows opened the show. Surely, it was a hot ticket, or at least a warm one, just a little uncomfortable to the touch. By this point in time — 1987, to be precise — the Replacements had plenty of people lining up to declare them the best rock band in the U.S. They also had a deserved reputation of … Continue reading One for Friday: The Replacements, “Portland”
Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too. I can’t claim that I stuck through Portlandia through it’s entire run — including the pending final season — but I have tremendous affection for the comedy series co-stewarded by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein. Although I didn’t have intimate knowledge of the scruffy metropolitan area it satirized when the program launched, I recognized a generational identity within the comedy. My swath of the … Continue reading Laughing Matters: Portlandia, “The Dream of the Nineties”
Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too. It’s not accurate to call the nineteen-seventies the heyday of comedy records, not when the prior decade saw the smash-hit album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, elevating a guy who’d recently been a Chicago advertising drone to both Best New Artist and Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards. That doesn’t even get into the likes of Vaughn Meader and Allan Sherman tying … Continue reading Laughing Matters: George Carlin, Class Clown
Coffee for Two 