Though I sought out the college radio and the music it was dispensing because I longed for material that was edgier, bracingly different, wholly challenging, I’ll admit that I had an enduring weakness for the bands that surely belonged there but plied their trade with more of a reliance on dependable forms. It was the fall of 1988 when I arrived and there were plenty of artists that were leaning on the tried-and-true in their songwriting and playing, probably of a few key predecessors that had cracked the marketplace with some yearning Americana. Placed against the cheap, slick hair metal … Continue reading One for Friday: Hothouse Flowers, “Feet on the Ground”

There were a lot of Dream bands in the nineteen-eighties. By that, I don’t mean dream pop, although I suppose that’s true too. I’m referring to bands that actually used the word in their names. Perusing the D section of the music library of any respectable college radio station would turn up the Dream Syndicate and Dream Academy (and by the early nineties, the Dream Warriors). A little more concerted digging yielded Eleventh Dream Day. The really well-stocked stations might have even had a record or two from the Revolving Paint Dream. With all this, it’s no wonder there was … Continue reading One for Friday: Dreams So Real, “Rough Night in Jericho”

Back when I was playing their debut album off of the new releases shelf, I wonder if I knew that the band the Ocean Blue was from Hershey, Pennsylvania. As I’ve mentioned before in my best aggrieved tone of walked-to-school-in-three-feet-of-snow-uphill-both-ways of self-satisfied lamentation, we didn’t have ready access to Wikipedia pages and other online resources for the bands we played. There were all sorts of routes we did have for accumulating information, from magazine articles to the finer print of an album’s liner notes, but enough of the bands we played were obscure enough that missing (or not taking notice … Continue reading One for Friday: The Ocean Blue, “Between Something and Nothing”

College rock in the nineteen-eighties was full of bands that provided a sonic echo of the jangly R.E.M. sound and the nineties was dominated by groups emulating the sludgy assault that was forged by Mudhoney, perfected by Nirvana and turned into a slicked up commodity by Pearl Jam. Those styles were so dominant that it’s easy to forget that there were other bands that were inspiring adherents, including a few fairly unlikely ones. Legend has it that a tour through the Midwest undertaken by the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the mid-eighties is what led to the formation of the … Continue reading One for Friday: Royal Crescent Mob, “5 More Minutes”

I wish I could claim to be one of those kids who was wisely immersing myself in the jagged, angsty splendor of the likes of Joy Division and Jesus and Mary Chain. I wasn’t, though. Most of my record collection was taken up by the same touchstones of regrettable pop conformity that were on a lot of teenage bedroom shelves in the mid-eighties, or so the sales figures and MTV airplay assured me. These records were so resoundingly mediocre that I can’t even impose a retroactive, post-ironic coolness on them. I had the capacity for a more sophisticated musical palette, … Continue reading One for Friday: Stealin’ Horses, “Turnaround”

If my rough tally is correct, this is the 150th installment of the One for Friday feature in this space, including the spectacular “Week of Fridays” event in the spring. The name of this weekly exercise in music sharing doesn’t necessarily make all that much sense now. It was a riff on the Friday distraction I used to deploy over on my LiveJournal site. “Five for Friday” made a little more sense, what with that alliterative ring to it. I’d come up with some fairly broad prompt for a music-based list, pop up the five best examples that sprung to … Continue reading One for Friday: Iam Siam, “Talk to Me (Can You Hear Me Now)”

At 90FM, certain songs were marked with a little red dot. There were other colored dots used to designate songs that had grown especially popular, either on commercial radio or our own airwaves, but the red dots were the important ones. They signaled to the DJ that there was some word in the song’s lyrics that the average listener or, more importantly, the FCC might find objectionable if we played it. There was all sorts of content that might get a song flagged that way, although, realistically, the red dot usually meant little more than the presence of the word … Continue reading One for Friday: They Eat Their Own, “Like a Drug”

I’ve haven’t meticulously combed through all the One for Friday entries meticulously to verify this assertion, but I believe today’s song represents the first time I’m featuring a track from someone who utilized his skills as a drug counselor to help out Drew Pinsky on Celebrity Rehab. Apparently, Bob Forrest, the chief songwriter and frontman for the band Thelonious Monster, went on to a career in drug counseling, even as he occasionally kept his various musical outfits going enough to put out the occasional album and play one-off gigs. Not only is that totally unexpected, I never even would have … Continue reading One for Friday: Thelonious Monster, “Lena Horne Sings Stormy Weather”

Much as I loved being on the radio back in college, I usually loved it just a little less in December. While 90FM certainly wasn’t one of those radio stations that completely ceded the playlist to yuletide cheer, somewhere around this time of year a modest stack of records (and, somewhat later in my tenure, CDs) were retrieved from their hidden corner of the music library and shoved in right by the new music in the main studio. In some respects, this was useful, given that there were practically no new releases after the late fall crush of horrid new … Continue reading One for Friday: They Might Be Giants, “Santa’s Beard”