One of the little intellectual games that naturally came up around the college radio station involved speculating about other eras of music and what it would’ve been like to be taking our turn on the left end of the dial in those times. What must it have been like to be there in the late seventies, for example, when the burst of punk and new wave brought amazing albums from the likes of the Ramones, Blondie, and Elvis Costello into the rotation on a regular basis? Or to be Music Director when the package from I.R.S. Records arrived with Murmur, … Continue reading One for Friday: XTC, “My Bird Performs”

Including my years as an undergraduate student, I’ve moved to the rhythms of a traditional academic year most of my adult life. This means I get to recapture a little of that childhood feeling about summer, that it’s a break, or at least a change. Often my summers were actually busier when I was in school at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. It was a much smaller group of students who stuck around in the summer months, dedicated to keeping the college radio station going. During some stretches, it wasn’t uncommon for me to be on the air every day, … Continue reading One for Friday: The Trilobites, “I Can’t Wait For Summer to End”

When I started this weekly feature, I decided I was going to only post songs that were entirely out of print. Eventually Tim Quirk of Too Much Joy convinced me that music’s digital availability didn’t mean a thing when it came to artist compensation, so I shift a bit to focus on songs that were physically out of print. I’ve stumbled on that front a few times, largely because my hunting to determine availability is admittedly flawed, but that’s the guiding principle. Given that, I tend to default to music that was released some twenty years ago, when I was … Continue reading One for Friday: Sidewinders, “Witchdoctor”

Whenever I look back to the music exposure I had during my high school years, I’m generally dispensing laments about the inferior quality of the radio stations that could be pulled in by my humble antenna. I stand by those complaints–I think of of this time as the beginning of the end for strong, distinct, localized radio–but I should allow that there was an exception. WMAD broadcast at 92.1 on the FM dial. Their tower stood in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and the wattage was low enough that they barely covered the greater Madison area. It usually took some maneuvering, but … Continue reading One for Friday: Treat Her Right, “I Think She Likes Me”

There’s currently no shortage of ways to find out about new music, but it was a very different situation when I was a student programmer at the college radio station in the early nineties. We had ready access to most new music at the station (and least most new music that was likely to suit our collective taste), but the sheer quantity of it made it easy to miss good new stuff. So sometimes a little outside reading was beneficial. Much as I’ve decried Rolling Stone in various electronic spaces over the years, the deeper you dug into their reviews … Continue reading One for Friday: Apollo Smile, “Dune Buggy”