20. Various Artists, Supercop soundtrack Yeah, I don’t really get this one. While I’ve acknowledged that well-built compilations hold a special sway over college radio deejays who may be otherwise confronted with the dauntingly unfamiliar across the new music rotation … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 20 and 19
Now that it is completely, definitively, decisively established that the surest route to mainstream chart success these days is repetitive, dance-tinged songs about feeling empowered while dancing all night long in the club, I can’t help but wonder if there are any tracks on those slicked-up albums that take a look at the melancholy downside. It’s not that I think there’s some responsibility of pop culture to provide that balance. Instead, I’m just struck by the way that the college radio playlists of my younger days often seemed to have songs that portrayed drinking cultures in all their permutations, from … Continue reading One for Friday: Mark Eitzel, “Some Bartenders Have the Gift of a Pardon”
22. Soundgarden, Down on the Upside By 1996, it was already a decisive time for the various acts that surged to popularity on the grunge wave started by Nirvana and swelled to terrifying size by Pearl Jam. The commercial alternative … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 22 and 21
I had a nicely balanced week at Spectrum Culture: one film review, one album review. First I reviewed the new album from Minor Alps, a duo comprised of Juliana Hatfield and Matthew Caws, the latter best known as the leader of Nada Surf. His involvement piqued my interest, though, because of his preceding tenure with the Cost of Living. And thus my quest to cite obscure bands from my college radio days in Spectrum reviews marks another tally. On the film side, I wrote about a new documentary tracing the genesis, production and influence of George A. Romero’s The Night … Continue reading Spectrum Check
The announcement this week that the few remaining Blockbuster video stores would be closing inspired a lot of surprisingly wistful reminiscences for the chain with the garish blue and yellow color scheme that was once best known (and reviled in all the right corners) for a selective prudishness that deemed Henry & June unacceptable but Playboy exercise videos a-okay. (To be fair, I’m in absolutely no hurry to sit through the former again, so they may have had a point purely on aesthetic merits in my example.) Of course, this didn’t truly reflect a swelling of nostalgia for one particular … Continue reading One for Friday: Darren Hanlon, “Video Store”
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. Eddie Floyd started at Stax Records as a songwriter. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, Floyd partnered with guitarist Steve Cropper to write something for Otis Redding, emerging with the song “Knock on Wood.” After hearing it Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records (then deeply connected to Stax) was convinced that Floyd didn’t need to loan the song out. He had a hit on his own if … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “I’ve Never Found a Girl”
24. Victor, Victor As I noted somewhere around the lower seventies, there was at least one Rush super-fan on the 90FM Director Staff in the first half of 1996, meaning he probably had a little bit of sway and influence … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 24 and 23
We have an uncarved pumpkin on our front porch. Initially, there was a little regret about that in our household. However, a different sentiment quickly overtook it, defined by a simple, direct statement: every day is Halloween. There’s not exactly an abundance of holiday cheer in our residence, most of the special days of the calendar coming and going with, at most, cheerfully unorthodox commemorations. There is one that is held more dear than the others, and that’s Halloween. That reverence for October 31st means I’ve long gone out of my way to make sure I have a small surplus … Continue reading One for Friday: The Postmarks, “Every Day is Halloween”
I have a special fondness for the music that flooded college radio in the first six months or so of 1989. That’s partially a byproduct of my position at the station at the time, still fresh in my overall tenure and gifted with an atypically early ascension to the director staff level, specifically with responsibilities that related to reviewing new music. (Lorne Michaels has mused that everyone’s favorite Saturday Night Live cast is whichever one was in place when they were in high school. Surely, there’s a corresponding truth to college radio: everyone thinks the music scene was peaking the … Continue reading Lou Reed, 1942-2013
I first left Florida–meaning left with a car full of belongings and no real expectation of returning–over six years ago. At the time, there was something even more significant than changing the state in the union that I called home: I was fairly certain I was leaving radio behind for good. It had been a major part of my identity since I started college myself, even in the interim years when I couldn’t by any stretched interpretation of the word call myself a broadcaster. And it was was certainly central to a professional reinvention that began in the middle of … Continue reading One for Friday: The Heathens, “Stickin Around”
Coffee for Two 