I never felt cool enough to like The Mekons. By the late eighties, when I arrived at the college radio station, they already had a fairly daunting array of records on their discography, and there were very few people or publications capable of stepping up and helping to sort them out. In college radio at that time, it was practically a prerequisite to have a working understanding of the collective works of R.E.M., but a band like the Mekons was a murky mystery. They were great. I somehow knew they were great. Others confirmed their cool quotient, but no one … Continue reading One for Friday: The Mekons, “Memphis Egypt”

It was tough being a film critic in central Wisconsin. Humble Stevens Point may be a college town, but it’s also a community with a fairly small population and an availability of movie screens that’s commensurate with the number on the green highway sign on the way into town. This means that art house films and other offerings with a staggered release schedules took quite a while to get to one of our local theaters, if they arrived at all. This was frustrating throughout the year, but especially during Oscar season. Films that were playing only in major cities (to … Continue reading One for Friday: Boy George, “The Crying Game”

When I started with this One for Friday exercise just over a year ago, I decided that I was going to try to stick with songs that were out of print and, to the best of my determination, entirely unavailable for purchase. There have been some cheats and missteps regarding that principle over these many weeks, but for the most part I’ve stuck with it. As part of the process of determining what to feature next, I have a small mental list of albums that I check with some regularity thinking that they must have slipped from the lists of … Continue reading One for Friday: Richard Barone, “Something Happens”

I arrived at my college radio station, a fresh-faced and impressionable little fellow, in the fall of 1988. At the time, U2 followed up their smash The Joshua Tree with a ludicrous cash-in double album that was a companion piece to a major motion picture. The Dead Milkmen convinced their fans to bum rush the request lines at MTV, making their song “Punk Rock Girl” an unlikely cult hit. Siouxsie and the Banshees had arguably the biggest college radio hit of the fall with the plainly spectacular “Peek-A-Boo” (perhaps the erstwhile host of 90FM’s “College Countup” can confirm or refute … Continue reading One for Friday: R.E.M., “Time After Time, Etc. (live)”

I’ve long thought that opening act has to be about the worst gig possible. The audience isn’t there for that band, so they generally alternate between rudely ignoring the performance or, even worse, loudly announcing their impatience. Slogging through a set that’s met with nothing but indifference has to be incredibly disheartening, perhaps almost as disheartening as killing time on a music stage during a county fair. Which brings me to the best opening act set I ever saw: Blue Rodeo before an Edie Brickell and New Bohemians performance in Milwaukee, circa 1991. Brickell and the boys had recently put … Continue reading One for Friday: Blue Rodeo, “What Am I Doing Here?”

I’ve always been a sucker for pop references, at least pop references I was fluent in. Throughout college, I had a strong band of friends, many of whom regularly seasoned conversation with lines of movie dialogue or quoted song lyrics. We built metaphors around obscure television characters and routinely proclaimed one another “like school on a Saturday” in tribute to Fat Albert. Since this was my daily language, I was always very pleased when I would discover a kindred approach to such communication somewhere within the music I built into my playlists at 90FM, some band namechecking Alan Moore or … Continue reading One for Friday: Trotsky Icepick, “El Kabong”

For a while when I was in college, Smart Studios was famous. It wasn’t as well known as Abbey Road or Electric Lady, but I don’t recall the names of any other recording studios from the era of the late eighties and early nineties. It was the one-two punch of Nirvana’s Nevermind and Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish that did it. Both records were produced by Butch Vig and recorded, at least in part, at Smart Studios, and the seismic thump that both releases had on college radio caused it to seem like there was a little bit of magic existing inside … Continue reading One for Friday: Young Fresh Fellows, “Sitting on a Pitchfork”

In some respects, the most difficult time I had keeping up with and discovering new music correlated with my occupational era working in commercial radio. This wasn’t because I was working at some oldies station or some other crypt on the dial devoted solely to the music of the past. Quite the contrary, in fact. While I did my time with a couple different stations simultaneously, most of my hours were claimed by a “new rock alternative” station, ostensibly focused on the cutting edge of music. This was in the aftermath of the shock success of Nirvana, and their Seattle … Continue reading One for Friday: Tanya Donelly, “Mysteries of the Unexplained”

I like to say that it all started with a girl, but that’s not precisely accurate. Yes, there was a Robyn Hitchcock fan who won my susceptible little heart during my freshman year of college, and she professed her affection for the man in an open and charming fashion. She had first encountered him in Greece, where he played a show before a largely indifferent audience. She was enchanted by his socks. Robyn Hitchcock was one of those names that I knew before finding my way to the college radio station, one of those odd, enticing monikers that promised a … Continue reading One for Friday: Robyn Hitchcock ‘n’ the Egyptians, “Swirling”

I think most students who gravitate to their college radio station do so because, first and foremost, they love music. Taking their first crack at the real world, or a simulacrum of such, they’re finally able to assert that inner part that connects to certain guitar chords or electronic beats or tangles of angular lyrics. Often it’s music that their high school compatriots didn’t get, dismissing it as weird as they pondered whether to vote for Bryan Adams’ “Heaven” or REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” for the prom theme. If commercial radio bothered to play it at all, it … Continue reading One for Friday: Uncle Green, “Pass It By”