I was recently remind of one of the great pleasures of my bygone days: sitting around with friends and listening to records. When I showed up at the campus radio station way back in the late nineteen-eighties, CDs were fast emerging as the preferred format, in part because of cleaner sound quality but also because the execs in the music business figured out that could sell them at a far greater profit than records, perpetrating yet fleecing of their devoted consumers that stands as the defining quality of the industry as a whole. For most of staffing the radio station at the time, … Continue reading One for Friday: Rainy Day, “Sloop John B”

I believe it is inevitable. Anyone who is a deeply devoted fan of pop music and all its many offshoots is likely to find themselves identifying with the stories embedded within the lyrics. That’s certainly been the case for me. Especially in my college years, when I was intently defining and then redefining myself, I clung to the heady truths etched into vinyl grooves. In short order, I knew which songs bolstered my happiness and which spoke for my sadness. My heartbreak was melodic, always. The soundtrack to my life has a tracklist that stretches into infinity. As much music … Continue reading One for Friday: Bongos, Bass & Bob, “Cain’t Grow a Beard”

I’ll admit to feeling fairly discombobulated today. While this is hardly the place to get into details, it’s been a strange day. Thus, I’m going to refrain from expounding at verbose length on today’s musical offering. Let’s just say I felt especially compelled to revisit this Atlanta band, previously featured in this space just about a year ago. It’s good stuff, friends. Listen or download –> The Swimming Pool Q’s, “Laredo Radio” (Disclaimer: This song originally appears on Blue Tomorrow, the 1986 album by the Swimming Pool Q’s. That’s out of print. It was also included on a Kickstarter-funded reissue/compilation a couple … Continue reading One for Friday: The Swimming Pool Q’s, “Laredo Radio”

Animal Necessity, the third album by the Rochester, New York band Jet Black Berries, is one of those releases I sought for ages. Even once the internet dramatically shifted the availability of obscure music, it was devilishly hard to come by. I wanted to hear it again because this was one of those touchstone LPs from my first semester at the college radio station, way back in the fall of 1988. As I remember it, the album sat in rotation amidst, only mildly loved by the general station populace. For whatever reason, it spoke to me more, and I returned to … Continue reading One for Friday: Jet Black Berries, “Charles Darwin’s Dream”

Sometimes I marvel at all the different ways my college radio station introduced me to new music. There are the obvious ones, of course: combing through the walls of records, chatting with fellow deejays about their more obscure favorites, just plainly listening to station as much as I could. There was another method that I’m confident is fairly prevalent at college radio station to this day. I learned about music from the posters on the wall. Our station was flooded with promotional materials from the various labels and distribution agencies and just about anything that could get tacked up on … Continue reading One for Friday: Ranking Roger, “So Excited”

By the summer of 1998, the song “Torn” was practically unavoidable. I used to join a friend on an annual summertime jaunt intended to hit as many Major League ballparks as we could over a long weekend. While we always made sure the vehicle was stocked with plenty of mix tapes (competitively so), part of the ritual was scanning through local radio, including carefully cataloging which songs we heard the most. On that trip, “Torn” was the clear winner (though, to be fair, we likely zipped right past “The Boy is Mine,” which topped the Billboard charts for essentially the … Continue reading One for Friday: Ednaswap, “Torn”

I’m fairly certain I found my way to Sam Phillips through Rolling Stone magazine. As I’ve noted before, I was a devoted disciple on the magazine through my high school years, doing the best I could to glean from it what I needed to know about the vast land of rock ‘n’ roll that my local radio stations weren’t providing. That got me trapped in the magazine’s wearying predilections (Neil Young is an important artist, but not every damn album in a masterpiece), but I occasionally had just enough of an instinct to remember the albums that were offered effusive if … Continue reading One for Friday: Sam Phillips, “Tripping Over Gravity”

As happens periodically in this weekly space, I’m drawing the song to share from the bevy of splendid musical wonders I plucked from an old blog called Little Hits. As with other material parked on the World Wide Web, all of the writing on the blog remains, though it’s approaching ten years since it’s been updated. All the song links seem to be defunct, so consider this entry another modest attempt at preserving some of the extraordinary music shared on the blog that first inspired me to dig into my own collection to help fill Fridays. (With rare exceptions, I don’t … Continue reading One for Friday: Daryl and the Chaperones, “My Baby’s a Spy”

There were all sorts of reasons for me to play songs off of Oomalooma, the debut album from Eugenius, when it arrived at my college radio station, in 1992. First and foremost, there was the presence of Eugene Kelly as the band’s chief creative force. Kelly was one of the key members of the band the Vaselines, a group Kurt Cobain, recently installed as the voice of my generation, couldn’t stop talking about. Eugenius could also claim personnel, at one point or another, from buzzy bands like Teenage Fanclub and BMX Bandits. Then there was the helpful hook of the … Continue reading One for Friday: Eugenius, “Flame On”