Plans for writing tonight were decisively dashed, though for good reason. Thanks to Lloyd Cole and Peter Mulvey for a fine evening. Always nice to discover a new gem during a live show. Regularly scheduled programming returns tomorrow. Continue reading And it was fine while it lasted
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. Get ready for some sugary, blipping R&B as only the early-nineteen-eighties could provide. Stephanie Mills first made her name in 1975, when she played Dorothy in the original Broadway production of The Wiz. She was only seventeen years old when the production opened. It got her a Drama Desk nomination, a signature song, and a recording career, although the latter was only fitfully … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Two Hearts”
64. Catherine Wheel, Happy Days Happy Days is the third album by the U.K. band Catherine Wheel and by most measures their most success effort. Riding the surge of interest in any alternative band that built some buzz into their sound, Catherine Wheel broke onto the Billboard albums chart for the first time (though its peak of #163 hardly reaches sensation status) and had a couple modest modern rock radio hits. One of those tracks, “Judy Staring at the Sun,” featured guest vocals from Tanya Donelly during the very thin sliver of time when the Belly frontwoman had enough prominence to nab … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 64 and 63
Anton Fier was a weirdly mythic figure to me when I was in college, plying my trade at the student-run radio station. He existed within the nation of independent music that was beyond my personal level of coolness, like distant figures on the vista. He was a founding member of the Feelies, a band I loved immediately, but he left after the band’s acclaimed, obscure debut, Crazy Rhythms, an album I’d never heard because its status as a low press run, long out of print artifact of greatness put it well out of reach. He was a member of John Lurie’s Lounge … Continue reading One for Friday: Golden Palominos, “Omaha”
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. By my count, Eddy Arnold has fifteen Top 40 singles, include several that were officially charting B-sides. That’s on the pop charts. It’s a very different number when consulting a different section of Billboard. Arnold landed 147 different singles on the country charts, spanning from “Each Minute Seems a Million Years,” released in 1945, to 2008’s “To Life.” Only George Jones could claim more. Happily, … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “The Last Word in Lonesome is Me”
66. Alice in Chains, Alice in Chains In the early to middle part of the nineteen-nineties, a band was almost guaranteed some national attention as long as they were from Seattle and knew how to turn their amps up. Alice in Chains officially formed in 1987, when roommates Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell joined one another’s new bands. The funk band Staley drew Cantrell into fading quickly, leaving the other group, defined by hard rock leanings, as the going concern. For the band’s name, they opted for a modified version of the group Staley was in previously, a glam metal … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 66 and 65
I plied my college radio, at least initially, in the Upper Midwest, spinning records at a happy output smack dab in the middle of Wisconsin. Existing in the midst of that frozen landscape stirs a certain kinship with those musical artists toiling at roughly the same latitude. There were simply some bands that sounded right, like they were coming at the world from a vantage point that was recognizably a product of frosty nights and taverns with interiors cloaked in wood panelling. They were of a world we knew. It’s not only the existence of a song all about aspirational … Continue reading One for Friday: Gear Daddies, “Color of Her Eyes”
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. In the late nineteen-sixties, a high school student named Vincent Damon Furnier, a recent transplant from Detroit to Phoenix, started a band with a few friends. They called themselves the Spiders, a name they eventually jettisoned in favor of Nazz. That was problematic because there was already a group calling themselves Nazz, with a talented guy named Todd Rundgren in the lineup. By … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Clones (We’re All)”
69. The Caulfields, Whirligig Much as I’ve groused about the bland uniformity of alternative rock radio circa 1995, dominated as it was by pallid echoes of the Seattle sound that crashed playlists a couple years earlier, largely thanks to Nirvana and Pearl Jam, there were a couple other dismal genre subsets that had secure footholds on the airwaves. The Caulfields nearly represent one of those. Hailing from Newark, the band was part of the long death rattle of A&M Records, the once prestigious imprint of Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss that had a self-destructive proclivity through the late-eighties and early-nineties … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 69 – 67
I’ve featured the Darling Buds in this space once before, writing about the way my affection for the band was compounded by their recording life cycle synching up exactly with my tenure as an undergraduate student who basically set up camp in the college radio station. At that time, I included a track from the band’s swan song. Today, it’s time to consider their debut. I don’t recall with certainty when I first encountered Pop Said… but online sources suggest it was released very early in 1989. That would certainly help explain why it locked in so solidly with me. … Continue reading One for Friday: The Darling Buds, “Burst”
Coffee for Two 