At 90FM, certain songs were marked with a little red dot. There were other colored dots used to designate songs that had grown especially popular, either on commercial radio or our own airwaves, but the red dots were the important ones. They signaled to the DJ that there was some word in the song’s lyrics that the average listener or, more importantly, the FCC might find objectionable if we played it. There was all sorts of content that might get a song flagged that way, although, realistically, the red dot usually meant little more than the presence of the word … Continue reading One for Friday: They Eat Their Own, “Like a Drug”

I’ve haven’t meticulously combed through all the One for Friday entries meticulously to verify this assertion, but I believe today’s song represents the first time I’m featuring a track from someone who utilized his skills as a drug counselor to help out Drew Pinsky on Celebrity Rehab. Apparently, Bob Forrest, the chief songwriter and frontman for the band Thelonious Monster, went on to a career in drug counseling, even as he occasionally kept his various musical outfits going enough to put out the occasional album and play one-off gigs. Not only is that totally unexpected, I never even would have … Continue reading One for Friday: Thelonious Monster, “Lena Horne Sings Stormy Weather”

Much as I loved being on the radio back in college, I usually loved it just a little less in December. While 90FM certainly wasn’t one of those radio stations that completely ceded the playlist to yuletide cheer, somewhere around this time of year a modest stack of records (and, somewhat later in my tenure, CDs) were retrieved from their hidden corner of the music library and shoved in right by the new music in the main studio. In some respects, this was useful, given that there were practically no new releases after the late fall crush of horrid new … Continue reading One for Friday: They Might Be Giants, “Santa’s Beard”