2. Suzanne Vega, 99.9F° At the end of 1992, I engaged in a list-making activity that I don’t recall doing previously. I crafted my personal tally of the ten best albums of the year. I’m not sure of everything I had on there, but there is one certainty I hold: Suzanne Vega’s 99.9F° was my pick for the very top. I will admit — as I probably would have at the time — that a major criterion that inspired me to elevate Vega’s recording above all the others I’d heard that year was its distinct transformation from what the artist had released … Continue reading College Countdown: The Gavin Report Top 20 Alternative Chart, October 1992, 2 and 1

5. R.E.M., Automatic for the People Like a lot of music fans, I suppose, I have a little collection of regrets, mostly based around missed opportunities. There are artists that I arrived at later than I should have, and acts I wish I’d seen live where they were blazing up-and-comers rather that fairly established (I get a little dizzy when I think that Sleater-Kinney played with the White Stripes as an opening act at a dumpy little club in the college town where I resided in 2000). While I don’t have some official list that would allow me to double-check the … Continue reading College Countdown: The Gavin Report Top 20 Alternative Chart, October 1992, 5 – 3

9. Ramones, Mondo Bizarro Much as I find the long reach of alternative music of my generation remarkable (stuff I once played on the radio as brand new music, such as Nirvana, seems completely viable to current college kids in a way that doesn’t quiet match up with how my generation viewed material of a similarly aged vintage), we had our more old school bands that could still capture out attention and enthusiasm. Approaching twenty years past their stellar debut, no one was delusional enough to suggest the lather-clad compatriots who all adopted the last name Ramone were still making … Continue reading College Countdown: The Gavin Report Top 20 Alternative Chart, October 1992, 9 – 6

13. The House of Love, Babe Rainbow As I noted in the introduction (see below!), this chart comes from a point in time during which I was keenly attuned to the music moving through our college radio station, knowing full well that this would be my last dance with the wide-ranging genre I loved most deeply. Even though I liked the U.K. band the House of Love a great deal (they were responsible for a single that I’m tempted to claim is one of the ten best released during my tenure at the station), I have no recollection of the album Babe … Continue reading College Countdown: The Gavin Report Top 20 Alternative Chart, October 1992, 13 – 10

17. The Darling Buds, Erotica I don’t really remember if the Darling Buds ever had a college radio hit, the sort that commands such broad-based and intense affection from kids in broadcast booths coast to coast that it feels intrinsic to the era. They were one of the bands that defined my personal haul as a student deejay, thanks in part to the convenience of the calendar. Their debut release, the glistening Pop Said…, arrived when I was a freshman, and their final effort, Erotica, hit the Heavy Rotation shelf as I embarked on my last year in college, grumpily resigned … Continue reading College Countdown: The Gavin Report Top 20 Alternative Chart, October 1992, 17 – 14

20. Too Much Joy, Mutiny As I’ve noted before, Too Much Joy was our band. To the degree that every college radio station has a single artist that most clearly represents them — preferably an artist that is woefully underappreciated elsewhere, upping the sense of special discovery — the quartet out of Scarsdale, New York were the beer-loving, smart-alecky, boisterous, and endearingly cunning mascots of Stevens Point’s WWSP-FM. The bond began with their 1988 release, Son of Sam I Am, and was cemented one album later, with 1991’s Cereal Killers. By the time Mutiny landed in the mailroom, Too Much … Continue reading College Countdown: The Gavin Report Top 20 Alternative Chart, October 1992, 20 – 18

I’m going to concede up front that this chart is presented as something as a place-holder. I have a much more significant countdown all cued up on one of the theoretical turntables, but I need a touch more time to get ready for it. Looking for something to carry this feature through to roughly the end of the calendar year, I landed on a chart from the fall of 1992. This isn’t purely random. For reasons not entirely unrelated to the next chart we’ll use, I was thinking a lot about my last year as a student in college radio. … Continue reading College Countdown: The Gavin Report Top 20 Alternative Chart, October 1992, An Introduction