When I started this companion feature to the other music related foolishness I indulge in to help close out the working week, I came up with a couple of guidelines. For one thing, I was only going to post material that was officially out of print, a guideline that’s already expanded to have some wiggle room. The other was that I’d stick exclusively with material that I owned, converting and uploading the audio for the express purpose of using it here. My iTunes library is filled with wonderful obscurities previously uploaded to different pockets on the Web by other souls … Continue reading One for Friday, The Cost of Living, “So Much Better”

One of the enduring pleasures of being a devoted fan of music is the hunt. Even in the long-tailed world of Amazon and the other well-stocked purveyors of recorded music out there in the wilds of the Web, there’s still a unique joy to be found in perusing a new record store, especially one with abundant used bins, discovering lost little gems or that album you’ve always wanted at a price that’s irresistible. The one and only time I was a patron of the Minnesota Monstrosity, I went in under the delusion that have more retail space would mean a … Continue reading One for Friday: Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, “Madonna of the Wasps”

Much as I might aspire to be a person of refined tastes, expounding on the art of cinema or submerging myself in some acclaimed literary wonder, I must also admit a taste for some less inspiring fare. This, sadly, is especially true of food. We are aspirational chefs in our household and strive to eat well. Given the opportunity, though, I would happily, greedily purchase and consume a whole sack full of thirty-nine cent hamburgers. Sometime during my first year of college, joyful drunkards of my acquaintance discovered this concrete bunker nestled within the strip of commercial eyesores on the … Continue reading One for Friday: Black Solid, “Hot N Now”

I had a Christmas tradition for a while. In the late nineties, I would call up my old college radio station and offer to take the first air shift on the morning of December 25th. As someone who served two years as the Program Director there, I knew how difficult it could be to wrangle up personnel during winter break, especially on the day that even the most devoted student volunteers were spending back home with the fam. This was after I won parole from my time served in commercial radio and before I found myself back in the strange … Continue reading One for Friday: Self, “Meg Ryan”

Remember that part in The Wrestler when Randy the Ram is discussing music and concludes that the “nineties sucked” because that Cobain kid had to come and ruin it all? He kind of had a point. Unlike the titular grappler, I wasn’t pining for lost hair metal anthems. Instead, I was disheartened with the way Nirvana’s astounding success suddenly, briefly turned “alternative rock” into a widespread radio format. The artists that made college radio so exciting through the eighties and into the early nineties were either in decline or had checked out altogether, making it all the easier from commercial … Continue reading One for Friday: Ed’s Redeeming Qualities, “I Will Wait”

Throwing yourself into college radio and the music that has its most welcoming home on the left end of the dial can make you feel as if you’re in an alternative musical universe. It’s not just that you wind up listening to completely different stuff that many of your contemporaries, often baffled over their inability to understand that listening to, to use an example from my era, a hearing a new Husker Du record is a far superior experience compared to listening to the same Led Zeppelin album side played for the thousandth time. It’s that the music you love … Continue reading One for Friday: Guadalcanal Diary, “Always Saturday”