As I’ve shared previously, I first played music from the Balancing Act because of magnets. In conjunction with the L.A. band’s second and, as it happened, last LP, Curtains, I.R.S. Records inundated college radio with a huge batch of refrigerator magnets. Sporting the band’s odd little logo, the magnets were scattered across practically every metal surface in my happy broadcasting outpost in Central Wisconsin. That included all of the door jambs. I couldn’t cross from one end of the station’s offices to the other without being remind multiple times about the Balancing Act. Luckily, I wasn’t being coerced into playing … Continue reading One for Friday: The Balancing Act, “This Is Where It All Begins”

Ted Leo wrote “Loyal to My Sorrowful Country” in response to the first term of George W. Bush, another Republican president who took possession of the Oval Office despite receiving fewer votes than his opponent. Though “Now that Georgie’s reign’s begun” is right there in the lyrics, the track feels highly pertinent today. Though my name of bygone years In the land, in the land I’ll uproot it without tears And I’ll change it if I can And, no more shall I be loyal to my sorrowful country No more shall I be loyal to my sorrowful country Rousing, fierce, … Continue reading One for Friday: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, “Loyal to My Sorrowful Country”

There are plentiful reasons to long for the rock star life. For most, I suspect the main enticement are those that might show up in the most debauched sections of a memoir penned by one of the members of Kiss. I suppose there may have been a time when I would have eagerly agreed with that, but now that I’m older, I understand that hope is better directed at different glories. For example, if you have the ability and entitlement to demand anything, there are few better uses of that power than enlisting Mort Drucker to draw your album cover. … Continue reading One for Friday: The Bears, “Fear is Never Boring”

I’m hardly the first or most eloquent person to observe that 2016 has been one kick in the teeth after another. It’s as if the historic event of the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series for the first time in over a century used up every drop of good karma the year had amassed leaving existential carnage everywhere else. As we close the calendar on these dismal twelve months (and head into a 2017 that, let’s be real, will get worse before it gets better), I’m craving something charming and a little on the gentle side. Hiding in a bedroom … Continue reading One for Friday: Allo, Darlin’, “Will You Please Spend New Years with Me?”

Occasionally during my tenure at the college radio station, a song arrived that was so very, very, very, terribly British. Given that our station was largely populated by staff members who defaulted more to the angry blasts of Hüsker Dü than the artful, lolling heartache of the Smiths, a decidedly U.K. feel to a song was no guarantee of such on our charts. I was one of those who craves loud guitars more than intricate synths, but there were times when a song proved irresistible. “Hello,” the breakthrough 1990 single by the Beloved was one of those. Even if the … Continue reading One for Friday: The Beloved, “Hello”

More so than other music fandoms, I believe, having a heavy emotional investment in the college rock of the nineteen-eighties puts a person in a specialized, deeply insular club. At a time when there was a dearth of material that spoke to our instincts for countering the culture, and that material was exceedingly hard to come by, slipping the right record over the turntable spindle was a way to confirm that we weren’t alone. Someone else felt this way, someone else saw the world in similar shades of gloom. All of the above goes double for fans of the Replacements. … Continue reading One for Friday: The Cigarettes, “Paul Westerberg”

I can’t begin to explain how strange it was. While I’m loathe to admit it (and usually build in a slew of distancing qualifiers whenever I acknowledge what’s about to follow), I largely grew up in a small Wisconsin town called Stoughton. Technically a distant suburb of Madison, the state capital, the town had a decidedly rural feel to it, thanks to the buffer of tobacco farms and other agricultural homesteads around the modest municipal center. The comparably erudite opportunities of Madison were thirty minutes and a whole world away. Culture dribbled into my town slowly and unwillingly. Certainly anything … Continue reading One for Friday: Robyn Hitchcock, “The Only Living Boy in New York”

Realistically, it was all about R.E.M. I arrived at the college radio station in the fall of 1988, one year after the little ol’ band from Athens, Georgia released Document, the album that can be fairly termed their breakthrough into broader commercial success. Even before that, though, the were in complete command of the college charts. The dominance was so complete that any artists even mildly associated with R.E.M. got a boost. By the time I arrived, that absolutely extended to any band on the same label that launched R.E.M., the mighty I.R.S. Records. It’s not unusual for college radio … Continue reading One for Friday: Caterwaul, “The Sheep’s a Wolf”

I’ve tapped out plenty of words about the glory of having ready access to an array of new music in my college radio days, an advantage of the gig that has been somewhat blunted by the clicking immediacy of the internet that has emerged in the years since. But the wild west of the worldwide web lacks the intensely personal recommendations that I found in those poster-adorned hallways of my past. The algorithms will keep improving, but I doubt they’ll ever truly catch up to a pal with different music tastes who alights on just the right track to share … Continue reading One for Friday: Mose Allison, “What’s Your Movie”