For quite some time, I operated under the theory that every college radio station had their one artist, the band or performer that the whole population of DJs tirelessly championed despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that no one else out there in the big, boundless musicverse understood the greatness contained within their records. I didn’t have a lot of empirical evidence to back this theory up. I’d peruse individual station charts in the back of CMJ and notice the occasional obscure outfit charting in the upper reaches of someone’s list, or have a label rep push some release … Continue reading One for Friday: Too Much Joy, “Hey Merlin”

I was always a little envious of the bands that Minnesota could claim as their own. At the college radio station, we always tried to take great pride in Wisconsin bands, figuring that supporting our home state was one of the moral obligations of celebrating the under-celebrated at the left end of the dial. Problem was, we didn’t have that many bands to get excited about. Sure, Milwaukee had someone as iconic as Violent Femmes, but their self-titled debut was six-years-old when I started college, ancient history to us then. Madison’s Fire Town released their sophomore album during my freshman … Continue reading One for Friday: Gear Daddies, “Dream Vacation”

I had something different in mind for this week’s “One for Friday,” but this song was lodged in my head this morning, begging to be shared. I’ve previously shared about the old 90FM C Stacks. There was always a keen sense of discovery that accompanied a venture into that area, combined with an even more alluring shared secret quality. These were, after all, the most obscure records in the station. Playing a song off of one of those–especially a really good song–was like giving radio listeners a audio glimpse inside the diary of modern music. Still, not everything housed on … Continue reading One for Friday: Hunters & Collectors, “Back on the Breadline”

During winter break after my first semester of college I asked the Program Director at the college radio station to tell me his pick for the best album of the year. He paused and thought about it, clearly not as trained as I was (by the nefarious influence of Rolling Stone) to always have a clear, decisive response at the ready whenever the opportunity arose to rank the offerings of pop culture. Eventually he answered “Soul Asylum’s Hang Time.” This caught me by surprise. I’d fiercely studied the handful of “best of” lists that were available during that era–what a … Continue reading One for Friday: Soul Asylum, “Heavy Rotation”

When I made it to the college radio station in the fall of 1988, I was focused on those performers who knew how to make their guitars do wonderfully noisy things. I came late to the stirring population of artists who populated the subgenre of “college rock” after flailing around all over the radio dial during my teenage years. When I arrived, I was especially susceptible to the guiding judgment of my peers, and when the less tolerant denizens of my high school (a phrase you may accurately read as “every other student in my graduating class”) deemed a band … Continue reading One for Friday: Alison Moyet, “And I Know”

Every April, Stevens Point is the location of the World’s Largest Trivia Contest. It originates and emanates from WWSP-90FM, the student-run radio station at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. 90FM is where I went to college. Well, okay, officially I went to college at UW-SP, but no matter how many classes I took or what the diploma says, I majored in college radio. I spent five years helping to run that contest and have been playing in it ever since. The team I’m on was in fact started by radio station alumni and probably about half of the forty people … Continue reading One for Friday: Dexy’s Midnight Runners, “Come On Eileen” (live)

I worked in commercial radio in the mid-nineties. I was employed by a mini-conglomerate in Madison, Wisconsin, so I wound up pitching in at a couple of different stations, but the bulk of my time was spent at a place that, just a couple of years earlier, I would have guessed would be a dream station. It was an alternative rock station, which eventually, tellingly started to tout itself as a “new rock alternative” station. When my cohorts and I were logging endless unpaid hours at the college radio station, commercial alternative stations were like distant beacons in the fog … Continue reading One for Friday: The Vents, “One Way Ticket”