Though I sought out the college radio and the music it was dispensing because I longed for material that was edgier, bracingly different, wholly challenging, I’ll admit that I had an enduring weakness for the bands that surely belonged there but plied their trade with more of a reliance on dependable forms. It was the fall of 1988 when I arrived and there were plenty of artists that were leaning on the tried-and-true in their songwriting and playing, probably of a few key predecessors that had cracked the marketplace with some yearning Americana. Placed against the cheap, slick hair metal … Continue reading One for Friday: Hothouse Flowers, “Feet on the Ground”

There were a lot of Dream bands in the nineteen-eighties. By that, I don’t mean dream pop, although I suppose that’s true too. I’m referring to bands that actually used the word in their names. Perusing the D section of the music library of any respectable college radio station would turn up the Dream Syndicate and Dream Academy (and by the early nineties, the Dream Warriors). A little more concerted digging yielded Eleventh Dream Day. The really well-stocked stations might have even had a record or two from the Revolving Paint Dream. With all this, it’s no wonder there was … Continue reading One for Friday: Dreams So Real, “Rough Night in Jericho”

Back when I was playing their debut album off of the new releases shelf, I wonder if I knew that the band the Ocean Blue was from Hershey, Pennsylvania. As I’ve mentioned before in my best aggrieved tone of walked-to-school-in-three-feet-of-snow-uphill-both-ways of self-satisfied lamentation, we didn’t have ready access to Wikipedia pages and other online resources for the bands we played. There were all sorts of routes we did have for accumulating information, from magazine articles to the finer print of an album’s liner notes, but enough of the bands we played were obscure enough that missing (or not taking notice … Continue reading One for Friday: The Ocean Blue, “Between Something and Nothing”