When I started at the college radio station, the 90FM music library was divided into three sections, each designated by one of the first three letters of the alphabet. The A Stacks were filled with the artists that were best-known to broader audiences. This was where U2 records resided, for example (and this was before the library was purged of its classic rock, so everyone from Aerosmith to ZZ Top helped fill out this area). The B Stacks was where the titans of college radio had their records filed, with the likes of Love and Rockets and The Replacements. Everything … Continue reading One for Friday: The Connells, “Fun & Games”

I never paid especially close attention to the producer credits on albums during my college radio days, but there were a few names that I definitely knew. One of those names was Mitch Easter. Easter has a certain venerated status in those circles because of his involvement with the earliest efforts by college radio standard bearers R.E.M. On the little labels that adorned the albums in our station, a wide array of Music Directors had often felt compelled to note Easter’s involvement with a record, and his own band was properly adored by those DJs in the know. There was … Continue reading One for Friday: The Hummingbirds, “Word Gets Around”

When I started working at the college radio station in my freshman year, the first regular shift I held was Monday night’s edition of “Soundstreams.” This was the all request program that 90FM aired (and still airs!) every weeknight from 10:00 p.m. until it was time to conclude our broadcast day at 2:00 a.m. While “all request” was a misnomer (as it is for just about any radio program that uses it, frankly), there were nights when the phone was especially active and huge chunks of my playlist were given over to listener suggestions. It made me dig into music … Continue reading Two for Friday: “Sex With You”

So I’ve been having some technical difficulties today, necessitating a little bit of a cheat for this week’s One for Friday. I’m working on something that will hopefully allow me to make up for it next week. The other day I realized that I have a remarkable number of different versions of Billy Bragg’s “A New England” on my iPod. Unfortunately, that epiphany was quickly followed by the sad realization that I don’t have this version of it. There may be no better way to ensure I have a touch of a crush on Kate Nash than for Billy Bragg … Continue reading One for Friday: Cheating Off of Someone Else’s Paper

At 90FM we used to have these stretches of programming that we called, admittedly without much ingenuity, Free Music Weeks. Making one of these happen started with us pulling something that was especially tricky for a little station like ours. We needed to convince a label to give us fifteen copies of a new release. That was our minimum for running a Free Music Week, the number of freebies we decided were needed to make it feel like the programming week was suitably inundated with one particular new album. Since our protocol at the time involved the DJ playing a … Continue reading One for Friday: Kingmaker, “Really Scrape the Sky”

I feel very fortunate to have landed in college radio just when I did, but I must admit that sometimes I wish I’d gotten there just a couple years earlier. There was a lot to get excited about during my tenure: the emergence of Sonic Youth as a left of the dial powerhouse, the flaring Madchester scene, the seismic impact of Nirvana, and I’ll always remember the spring of 1989 with great fondness as a time when there was an overwhelming avalanche of great records. Still, I never had the pleasure of seeing a brand new album by either Hüsker … Continue reading One for Friday: Chris Mars, “Popular Creeps”