More so than other music fandoms, I believe, having a heavy emotional investment in the college rock of the nineteen-eighties puts a person in a specialized, deeply insular club. At a time when there was a dearth of material that spoke to our instincts for countering the culture, and that material was exceedingly hard to come by, slipping the right record over the turntable spindle was a way to confirm that we weren’t alone. Someone else felt this way, someone else saw the world in similar shades of gloom. All of the above goes double for fans of the Replacements. … Continue reading One for Friday: The Cigarettes, “Paul Westerberg”

I can’t begin to explain how strange it was. While I’m loathe to admit it (and usually build in a slew of distancing qualifiers whenever I acknowledge what’s about to follow), I largely grew up in a small Wisconsin town called Stoughton. Technically a distant suburb of Madison, the state capital, the town had a decidedly rural feel to it, thanks to the buffer of tobacco farms and other agricultural homesteads around the modest municipal center. The comparably erudite opportunities of Madison were thirty minutes and a whole world away. Culture dribbled into my town slowly and unwillingly. Certainly anything … Continue reading One for Friday: Robyn Hitchcock, “The Only Living Boy in New York”

Realistically, it was all about R.E.M. I arrived at the college radio station in the fall of 1988, one year after the little ol’ band from Athens, Georgia released Document, the album that can be fairly termed their breakthrough into broader commercial success. Even before that, though, the were in complete command of the college charts. The dominance was so complete that any artists even mildly associated with R.E.M. got a boost. By the time I arrived, that absolutely extended to any band on the same label that launched R.E.M., the mighty I.R.S. Records. It’s not unusual for college radio … Continue reading One for Friday: Caterwaul, “The Sheep’s a Wolf”

I’ve tapped out plenty of words about the glory of having ready access to an array of new music in my college radio days, an advantage of the gig that has been somewhat blunted by the clicking immediacy of the internet that has emerged in the years since. But the wild west of the worldwide web lacks the intensely personal recommendations that I found in those poster-adorned hallways of my past. The algorithms will keep improving, but I doubt they’ll ever truly catch up to a pal with different music tastes who alights on just the right track to share … Continue reading One for Friday: Mose Allison, “What’s Your Movie”