I didn’t pay particularly close attention to the producer credit on albums when I was in college. Usually, the name in that part of the liner notes didn’t even register for me unless it was a person I recognized from their primary place in the music world. If Peter Buck from R.E.M. or Bob Mould was listed as a producer, I took notice. Otherwise, considering who was filling that vital personnel role was an afterthought. It was only well after deciding the work was great that I realized, for example, that Paul Fox produced several favorite records released during my … Continue reading One for Friday: Frazier Chorus, “Cloud 8”

One of the aspects of my personal era of college radio that I found interesting was the pronounced sense that the first wave of great left of the dial artists was coming to an end. By the time I landed there in the fall of 1988, it was already understood that Hüsker Dü and The Smiths were no more, for example. Several other bands that were mainstays of the college charts also seemed on the verge of calling it quits. In some ways, this made it feel like we’d just missed the Golden Age of our preferred music, but there … Continue reading One for Friday: Ian McCulloch, “Proud to Fall”

There were bands at our college radio station that everyone was practically mandated to know. I’m not referring to the titans of the college radio charts at the time–R.E.M., The Cure, The Replacements, bands like that–as much as those otherwise obscure acts that were represented on our station playlists like they were among the most vaunted figures in the college rock canon. Usually this developed because one person discovered a band and started pushing it on other DJs like the opportunity to charge for future necessary doses was a given. Often, it was an attitude that the band had that … Continue reading One for Friday: Couch Flambeau, “Models”