I knew practically nothing about the Swimming Pool Q’s back when I used to play them on 90FM, but I know a few more things now. The group formed in Atlanta in the late nineteen-seventies, in part thanks to connections made through Glenn Phillips, cult hero singer-songwriter and former member of the Hampton Grease Band. They released their first album in 1981, followed by a pair of releases on A&M Records, recently pulled together in a deluxe reissue using funds from a successful Kickstarter campaign. By the time I found my way to them, they’d parted ways with the label … Continue reading One for Friday: The Swimming Pool Q’s, “More Often Than Never”

Every band deserves one perfect song, a pop gem so glistening and lovable that all other transgressions against creative good taste can be forever forgiven. Flesh for Lulu had exactly that with “Postcards from Paradise,” a single off of their 1987 album, Long Live the New Flesh. The song is so good that any greatest hits album that includes that track and a random assemblage of eleven other of the band’s efforts is guaranteed to be a pretty damn good record. Of course, there’s a downside to that, too. Every other song, almost without exception, is going to sound fairly … Continue reading One for Friday: Flesh for Lulu, “Time and Space”

I’ve long been under the impression that I’m not supposed to like The Sound of Music, the last album credited to the dB’s during their original run. (Reunions happen.) In the canon of cool, the first dB’s album justly holds an honored place with every subsequent effort a dissipating echo. Certainly declaring allegiance to one of the albums recorded after band co-founder and stellar pop songwriter Chris Stamey is highly suspect. And yet the record that has the strongest nostalgic pull for me is not the masterful Stands for Decibels. It is indeed that final album. It is The Sound … Continue reading One for Friday: The dB’s, “Working for Somebody Else”

It’s now been twenty-five years since my first summer at the college radio station. That whole first year had a major impact on me, but there was something different–something deeply transformational–about the first summer. For one thing, I was now on the people in charge. I’d been on the executive staff the spring before, though in a fairly low-level position. Now I was the Program Director, effectively second-in-command on the staff, carrying responsibilities that encompassed everything that crossed the airwaves. For another thing, we were able to devote ourselves fully and completely to the operations of the radio station, without … Continue reading One for Friday: Concrete Blonde, “Little Conversations”