So I’m going to do something a little different today. Usually I reserve this Friday feature to share an MP3 from some bygone record that I treasured in my college radio days, with the occasionally foray into music that was released after I got my paper and I was free. But the college radio experience was about more than the actual records to me. It was also about making connections with the performers that I enjoyed so much. While I didn’t have the opportunity to do it all that often, I retain a tremendous affection for those instances when I … Continue reading One for Friday: John Lydon interviewed by WPRK

Sometimes I have no recollection of how a track came into my digital possession. Much as I appreciate the wide open bounty of the interweb, especially when it comes to those old and new acts that I surely would have never discovered without it, I sometimes miss the bygone ability to always identify the rough moment of discovery, to conjure up the origin story of each personally held piece of music, as it were. The vastness of what I can access now is better. But I can still be a little wistful about portions of the experience that are chipped … Continue reading One for Friday: The Plugz, “Achin”

Back when I was a bratty twentysomething going to scruffy concerts in Madison, Wisconsin, I would occasionally look around and my fellow attendees and wonder about the older folks who were amongst the crowd, holding their own plastic cup beers and bobbing their heads along to the beat. I was so certain that spending nights in ramshackle rock clubs was a young person’s game that these folks with graying temples and developing crow’s feet seemed out of place to me. I didn’t begrudge them their place on the floor, but that place on the trajectory of a life was distant … Continue reading One for Friday: The Mekons, “Only Darkness Has the Power”

When I got to my college radio station, in the late nineteen-eighties, I was anxious to start discovering artists who were entirely new to me. But I also appreciated the safety of those artists I’d heard repeated on the radio over and over again, even if it was with only one or two songs. Even more than that, I was somewhat proud that college radio could serve as a safe landing space for gifted performers who’d taken a spin with commercial success but were ultimately deemed too iconoclastic to become recurring residents on those parts of the dials. It matched … Continue reading One for Friday: Todd Rundgren, “The Want of a Nail”

A little more than eight years ago, I began working at a unique little college nestled in the Swannanoa Valley in Western North Carolina. Surrounded by mountains, equipped with a full working farm, and populated by students who came to the place knowing full well that their education was going to necessarily include fifteen hours each week devoted to keeping the operations of the college going, in every facet from office work to heavy-duty landscaping to cleaning floors and toilets. I’d come from an institution of higher learning with a fair number of enrollees who were just checking boxes in … Continue reading One for Friday: Dan Rousseau, “Good Morning Swannanoa”

When I was a teenager, just starting to hone my musical taste into something respectable, I wanted to believe in a local music scene. As I read through my biweekly subscription copies of Rolling Stone with the sort of intense scrutiny others save for the Bible, I became enamored with any write-up about a town that was exploding with an influx of great new bands that were garnering national attention. The mixture of civic pride and being ahead of the curve was potently appealing to me for reasons I still can’t quite identify. Of course, I couldn’t truly take advantage … Continue reading One for Friday: Fire Town, “Turn To Me”

Today is apparently College Radio Day. I could write at near-endless length about my time as a student broadcaster and still note properly convey exactly how much I got out of it. I value everything about my collegiate experience, but the college radio station was special, in practically every way. It was a sanctuary, an enlivening mental obstacle course, a place of spiritual renewal. It was a place of constant discovery, for music obviously, but for so many other things, especially the reserves of belief, insight, and capability I had within myself that I’m convinced never would have been tapped … Continue reading One for Friday: The Feelies, “Away”

It sure seems like the most appropriate follow-up to last week’s One for Friday involves a song from Mr. Marti Jones. Most of the Girls Like to Dance But Only Some of the Boys Like To, Don Dixon’s solo debut, was first released in the United States in late 1986, only after it had proven successful as an import in Europe, where it had received distribution the year before. Making the journey seem even more arduous, most of the material on the album was first peddled to labels well before. As Dixon acknowledged at the time, practically every song on … Continue reading One for Friday: Don Dixon, “Girls L.T.D.”

By 1988, Angst was a band with a honorable history. Formed in San Francisco, in 1980, Angst put out multiple albums on seminal punk label SST Records, including a couple that were produced by the label’s co-owner, Joe Carducci, making it reasonable to consider the group one of the signature acts of the pile-driving music house. When I got to my college radio station, I didn’t know any of that. All I knew is there was an album called Cry For Happy in rotation that had a striking drawing of roses on the front cover. I’m pretty sure I even pronounced … Continue reading One for Friday: Angst, “I Could Never Change Your Mind”

Marti Jones was one half of what passed for a power couple in the land of college rock, circa 1988. Jones was part of the band Color Me Gone in the mid-nineteen-eighties. They released a bit of music on A&M Records. It didn’t take, but the label clearly liked Jones, signing her to a solo contract that led to the release of the LP Unsophisticated Time, in 1985. The man behind the boards for that record was Don Dixon, then a hot, up-and-coming producer thanks to his efforts, with Mitch Easter, on the first two R.E.M. albums. He wasn’t making … Continue reading One for Friday: Marti Jones, “You Can’t Take Love for Granted”