3. Foo Fighters, Foo Fighters At the time, it seemed highly improbable that Foo Fighters was the thumping drumbeat announcement of one of the more enduring rock bands to emerge in the nineteen-nineties. In the aftermath of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 3
I’m still unpacking from a move that added a lot of miles to my odometer, so I’m going to once again pilfer a review from my former online home for our weekly look backwards. When this review was first posted, … Continue reading From the Archive: Shine a Light
When I got to my college radio station, in the late nineteen-eighties, I was anxious to start discovering artists who were entirely new to me. But I also appreciated the safety of those artists I’d heard repeated on the radio over and over again, even if it was with only one or two songs. Even more than that, I was somewhat proud that college radio could serve as a safe landing space for gifted performers who’d taken a spin with commercial success but were ultimately deemed too iconoclastic to become recurring residents on those parts of the dials. It matched … Continue reading One for Friday: Todd Rundgren, “The Want of a Nail”
4. Radiohead, The Bends In 1995, Radiohead wasn’t yet Radiohead. Yes, it was absolutely comprised of the exact same five members who persist in the lineup to this day, and any cursory listen to their earliest albums indicates that they were already engaged in some of the same sonic explorations that would define them in years to come, although it was definitely in a nascent version. That noted, the band wasn’t yet burdened by the stultifying reputation for modern pop distilled down to high art that began a couple years later, with 1997’s excellent OK Computer, and proceeded with a … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 4
A little more than eight years ago, I began working at a unique little college nestled in the Swannanoa Valley in Western North Carolina. Surrounded by mountains, equipped with a full working farm, and populated by students who came to the place knowing full well that their education was going to necessarily include fifteen hours each week devoted to keeping the operations of the college going, in every facet from office work to heavy-duty landscaping to cleaning floors and toilets. I’d come from an institution of higher learning with a fair number of enrollees who were just checking boxes in … Continue reading One for Friday: Dan Rousseau, “Good Morning Swannanoa”
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. Beverly Bremers began her music career early, appearing on television programs and recording her first singles when still a teenager. She experience only the mildest success until she found herself in the middle of a sensation, joining the cast of Hair during its original Broadway run. That led to other stage work, including a featured role in the Tony-nominated musical The Me Nobody … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “We’re Free”
5. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Brainbloodvolume As happens from time to time in this crazy endeavor of mine, I find myself downright startled by the high placement of an album on the chart being scaled through. The U.K. band Ned’s Atomic Dustbin had a couple of enormous hits on 90Fm during my time there. The band released their debut album, God Fodder, in 1991, and the singles “Kill Your Television” and “Grey Cell Green” were as constant of a presence on our Central Wisconsin airwaves as station policy would allow. Their follow-up, Are You Normal?, also did well, though I don’t recall … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 5
When I was a teenager, just starting to hone my musical taste into something respectable, I wanted to believe in a local music scene. As I read through my biweekly subscription copies of Rolling Stone with the sort of intense scrutiny others save for the Bible, I became enamored with any write-up about a town that was exploding with an influx of great new bands that were garnering national attention. The mixture of civic pride and being ahead of the curve was potently appealing to me for reasons I still can’t quite identify. Of course, I couldn’t truly take advantage … Continue reading One for Friday: Fire Town, “Turn To Me”
6. Juliana Hatfield, Only Everything I don’t think I was the only person at 90FM who actively cultivated celebrity crushes. At the risk of stating the obvious, boys are sorta gross when it comes to that, categorizing those to whom they’re attracted as objects of various degrees of desire in an effort to make sense of, well, mostly their own loneliness. Among my brethren, at least there was a little different set of criteria that guided our fetishizing appraisal of the singers and musicians that captured a shard or two of our desperate, addled hearts. For those of us who favored women, … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 6
This review came from my days submitted big gaggles of words to the Central Florida alternative weekly The Independent Journal, a publication willed into being by one of the most creative, ambitious people I know. As you can clearly surmise, I was still smarting from the pronounced disappointment of the Liz Phair album I’d written about a week or two earlier. Hey, not every record has to change the world. There are hearts and minds for the winning by just locking onto an enjoyable sound and sticking to it. Enter Dressy Bessy. On their third album, Tammy Eaton leads the band … Continue reading From the Archive: Dressy Bessy
Coffee for Two 