Animal Necessity, the third album by the Rochester, New York band Jet Black Berries, is one of those releases I sought for ages. Even once the internet dramatically shifted the availability of obscure music, it was devilishly hard to come by. I wanted to hear it again because this was one of those touchstone LPs from my first semester at the college radio station, way back in the fall of 1988. As I remember it, the album sat in rotation amidst, only mildly loved by the general station populace. For whatever reason, it spoke to me more, and I returned to … Continue reading One for Friday: Jet Black Berries, “Charles Darwin’s Dream”

Sometimes I marvel at all the different ways my college radio station introduced me to new music. There are the obvious ones, of course: combing through the walls of records, chatting with fellow deejays about their more obscure favorites, just plainly listening to station as much as I could. There was another method that I’m confident is fairly prevalent at college radio station to this day. I learned about music from the posters on the wall. Our station was flooded with promotional materials from the various labels and distribution agencies and just about anything that could get tacked up on … Continue reading One for Friday: Ranking Roger, “So Excited”

By the summer of 1998, the song “Torn” was practically unavoidable. I used to join a friend on an annual summertime jaunt intended to hit as many Major League ballparks as we could over a long weekend. While we always made sure the vehicle was stocked with plenty of mix tapes (competitively so), part of the ritual was scanning through local radio, including carefully cataloging which songs we heard the most. On that trip, “Torn” was the clear winner (though, to be fair, we likely zipped right past “The Boy is Mine,” which topped the Billboard charts for essentially the … Continue reading One for Friday: Ednaswap, “Torn”

I’m fairly certain I found my way to Sam Phillips through Rolling Stone magazine. As I’ve noted before, I was a devoted disciple on the magazine through my high school years, doing the best I could to glean from it what I needed to know about the vast land of rock ‘n’ roll that my local radio stations weren’t providing. That got me trapped in the magazine’s wearying predilections (Neil Young is an important artist, but not every damn album in a masterpiece), but I occasionally had just enough of an instinct to remember the albums that were offered effusive if … Continue reading One for Friday: Sam Phillips, “Tripping Over Gravity”