2. 10,000 Maniacs, Blind Man’s Zoo Right from the top, there’s a unique detail regarding 90FM personnel that seems pertinent in considering the high placement, arguably unusually high placement, of the fourth full-length album from 10,000 Maniacs on the year-end … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 2
3. Violent Femmes, 3 While I’ll admit to loving that an album titled 3 landed in the third spot of the Top 90 chart, I swear that the tally wasn’t doctored to make that happen. Sure, I might find the temptation to finesse a ranking to accommodate such symmetry entirely irresistible at times, but accurate reporting prevailed in the matter of assembling this list. The scientific method employed in determining the Top 90 may have had some gaps in it, but I followed it assiduously. 3 is at #3 because #3 is where 3 belongs. 3 was the fourth album … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 3
4. Lou Reed, New York Lou Reed’s New York has the following instructive message amongst the liner notes: “This album was recorded and mixed at Media Sound, Studio B, N.Y.C., in essentially the order you have here. It’s meant to … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 4
5. XTC, Oranges & Lemons Perhaps befitting a band that had a colossally strong affection for the era of the Beatles built on densely layered psychedlia, XTC played their last tour date in the spring of 1982. While the Fab … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 5
6. The Replacements, Don’t Tell a Soul Earlier this week, in writing about the DC Comics relaunch that had an uncommonly prominent place in the ongoing mass media conversation, Tom Spurgeon noted, “no one does consumer entitlement like a comics … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 6
7. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mother’s Milk In case there is need for any additional evidence of my general inability to discern and predict which artists that ruled over college radio had the stuff to cross over to the mainstream, … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 7
8. Hoodoo Gurus, Magnum Cum Louder Hoodoo Gurus was one of my favorite band names to say on the air. It sounded silly and yet it didn’t. Those O sounds just begged to be elongated, the words stretching out and … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 8
9. The Weeds, Windchill I think it’s safe to say that, of all the bands on this countdown, the Weeds are the only ones who spent one night in 1989 playing a live show at The Encore in the University … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 9
10. The Pogues, Peace and Love There’s a picture of the Pogues on the back cover of the soundtrack to the 1987 Alex Cox movie Straight to Hell. In the photo, the members of the band are dressed in bandito garb and lead singer Shane MacGowan sits right in the middle, with a pistol pressed against his temple as if he’s about to pull the trigger and kill himself. My friend Colin, an aficionado of all things Pogue, once remarked that the picture would be far more accurate if MacGowan were holding a whiskey bottle to his skull, since that … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 10
11. Guadalcanal Diary, Flip Flop For a long while, it seemed like Guadalcanal Diary’s fourth and, as it turned out, final album, Flip Flop, wasn’t going to get played on 90FM at all. I doubt the station was especially high on any of the record label’s priority lists, given the fairly small city we broadcast from and the modest 3610 watts we pumped through our transmitter (when we expanded to 11,500 watts a couple of years later, the uptick in interest was noticeable). There were some small but significant labels that didn’t even bother sending us records and a couple … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 11
Coffee for Two 