Back at the college radio station, I was always appreciative when I found out the official derivation of a band’s name. This was in part because it was handy information to have when introducing or backselling a band’s songs on the air, providing something interesting to help fill up the time. It was also fairly difficult background to come by for a lot of the artists we played. Even at that late date, there was no shortage of articles tracing how the Rolling Stones selected their moniker, but it was a lot harder to find out where the hell the … Continue reading One for Friday: The Woodentops, “They Can Say What They Want”

Inadvertently, this is the second time in the last three weeks that I’m featuring a band that Atlantic Records simply didn’t know how to handle. Map of the World was a band from Ann Arbor, Michigan, signed by the major label in the late nineteen-eighties, a time when A&R men roamed college towns with fevered urgency, so sure that the next R.E.M. was lurking out there somewhere. The group–headed up by the sibling team of Khalid and Sophia Hanifim–had exactly one release for the label, a 1989 EP entitled An Inch Equals a Thousand Miles. When it wasn’t embraced automatically … Continue reading One for Friday: Map of the World, “I Fight for My Life”

For brief stretch of time, my adult beverage of choice was a velvet crush. I didn’t pick up on this from friends or family or even some intrepid bartender who could somehow spot that I’d be a sucker for the combination of sugary, “fruit”-flavored water and hard liquor, but because Soul Coughing sang about it in a song. The opening lyrics to the song “Mr. Bitterness” place the setting as a bar called The Bitter Seed and describes a woman who we will come to know as alluring and aloof. She drinks a velvet crush. Lead singer M. Doughty helpfully … Continue reading One for Friday: Soul Coughing, “Mr. Bitterness”

Eleventh Dream Day is the band that taught me about the fiscal realities of being a top college radio act. The Chicago group had a surprise hit on the CMJ charts with their second full-length and major label debut, Beet, in 1989. As it recall, it came out of nowhere, and wound up making it all the way to #2 on the CMJ album charts. To us, it seemed like a big deal. This was obviously a huge new band, rubbing shoulders with the iconic likes of the Cure, the B-52’s and Public Image Ltd. Surely they were now huge, … Continue reading One for Friday: Eleventh Dream Day, “Makin’ Like a Rug”