I know where I was and I know where Jackson Browne was on Independence Day in 1989. This was the first summer I spent as a dedicated employee of the college radio station in Stevens Point, filling airshifts on an almost daily basis. By the timeframe that covered the end of June and the beginning of July, my cohorts and I were starting to get a little anxious and needing some breaks from keeping our slice of the left end of the day operational. Luckily, that stretch of days corresponded nicely with Summerfest, the annual music, comedy and beer drinking … Continue reading One for Friday: Jackson Browne, “For America”

I worked in commercial radio for about two-and-a-half years. In that span, I had to play a lot of music I didn’t like. And I mean a lot. This was in the mid-nineteen-nineties, after Nirvana hit it big and Pearl jam hit it bigger, leading labels to clamor for any band that played thudding hard rock, especially if it sounded a little like it was being fed through damaged amps. The glut of “new rock alternative” stations that sprung upon around this time, including the one I worked at, played these bands like dutiful soldiers, even though many of them … Continue reading One for Friday: Hole, “Gold Dust Woman”

This weekly feature is usually devoted to a song that I swooned over during, as I put it, “my college radio days,” by which I mean the span of time when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and spending most of my time at 90FM, that institution’s student-run station. There is, however, a whole second life I had in college radio, working as the advisor and General Manager for WPRK-FM at Rollins College in central Florida. In additional to all the other opportunities and benefits this job shift brought, it gave me a chance to … Continue reading One for Friday: Firewater, “Psychopharmacology”

It seems like I’ve invoked Hüsker Dü and Bob Mould quite a bit in this space lately. This week’s One for Friday selection is a natural extension of that trend. As I’ve noted, Bob Mould loomed large during my college radio years. Hüsker Dü was one of the touchstone bands of the station, and Mould was an especially accomplished alumnus of the group. He was also fairly prolific at that time. His first solo album came out around two years after the last Hüsker outing and his sophomore effort was out by the following summer. If his debut release was … Continue reading One for Friday: Bob Mould, “The Last Night”

I didn’t pay particularly close attention to the producer credit on albums when I was in college. Usually, the name in that part of the liner notes didn’t even register for me unless it was a person I recognized from their primary place in the music world. If Peter Buck from R.E.M. or Bob Mould was listed as a producer, I took notice. Otherwise, considering who was filling that vital personnel role was an afterthought. It was only well after deciding the work was great that I realized, for example, that Paul Fox produced several favorite records released during my … Continue reading One for Friday: Frazier Chorus, “Cloud 8”

One of the aspects of my personal era of college radio that I found interesting was the pronounced sense that the first wave of great left of the dial artists was coming to an end. By the time I landed there in the fall of 1988, it was already understood that Hüsker Dü and The Smiths were no more, for example. Several other bands that were mainstays of the college charts also seemed on the verge of calling it quits. In some ways, this made it feel like we’d just missed the Golden Age of our preferred music, but there … Continue reading One for Friday: Ian McCulloch, “Proud to Fall”

There were bands at our college radio station that everyone was practically mandated to know. I’m not referring to the titans of the college radio charts at the time–R.E.M., The Cure, The Replacements, bands like that–as much as those otherwise obscure acts that were represented on our station playlists like they were among the most vaunted figures in the college rock canon. Usually this developed because one person discovered a band and started pushing it on other DJs like the opportunity to charge for future necessary doses was a given. Often, it was an attitude that the band had that … Continue reading One for Friday: Couch Flambeau, “Models”

My music collection, at least as represented digitally, covers a lot of sonic territory. Once I became a true and total convert to my iPod and its “Shuffle Songs” feature, I worked hard to make that little device into the radio station I always long for, the radio station that already existed to a large degree in my collegiate past. I adored the vastness and variety of our music library at the college radio station, which afforded the DJs the chance to theoretically tap into every conceivable genre and subgenre of music, especially if they were artful explorers of the … Continue reading One for Friday: Happy Hate Me Nots, “Things Wearing Thin”

I’d been away from radio for several years in the summer of 2001 when I finally found myself back in the midst of a faction of the broadcast spectrum that I hadn’t experienced in nearly a decade. I was part of radio, this time as an advisor rather than a student. Still, I was right there in the heart of the station, my original office located directly across from the main booth. After a lengthy stretch of having to engage in hefty outside scholarship to stay connected to the music that I most enjoyed, it was now all around me … Continue reading One for Friday: The Actual Tigers, “Standing By”