There was a lot that I didn’t know about music when I arrived at my college radio station. Without knowing that a microphone with a broadcast capabilities was my destination, I’d spend the prior year or two cramming. I subscribed to Rolling Stone (in part, because Paul Schaffer told me to), I listened to the one local radio station that treated the release of a new R.E.M. record as an event, I stayed up late on Sunday nights to watch MTV’s 120 Minutes. Without really knowing it, I was researching, trying to understand the secret life of music that scooted … Continue reading One for Friday: Scruffy the Cat, “My Baby She’s Alright”

Tonight at 6:00 p.m., the college radio station that I write about often in this space will commence the 41st staging of their annual trivia contest, a Mardi Gras of minutiae that has grown so monumental that it lays claim to being the “World’s Largest.” As cameras have capture, I’m a participant in this contest, playing on a team of some notoriety, a team that, unbelievably, has been playing in this contest for over twenty years. For me, as it is with many of the 11,000 or so who will come to Stevens Point to hang on every word uttered … Continue reading One for Friday: “Come On Eileen”

One of the trickier aspects of being a music fan is when the music you love gets appropriated by pieces of the pop culture that you, well, don’t have such strong positive feelings towards, let’s say. I remember being shocked and appalled when I first heard Material Issue’s “Everything” butchered by some nasty, yearning band called Stereo Fuse. And while I’ve long since given up on righteous indignation as a response to a band selling off their songs for use in slick commercials, there’s still a part of me that instinctively winces when a song I really admire is paired … Continue reading One for Friday: Dream Warriors, “My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style”

I was in Memphis when Alex Chilton died. Most of what I knew of Alex Chilton started with Paul Westerberg and the Replacements. Before Westerberg was called upon to eulogize Chilton, he testified about him in song, supposing interstellar lineage as the proper explanation for his unique brand of coolness. This song arrived one album after an ill-fated attempt to have Chilton produce the Replacements’ major label debut, giving Westerberg the opportunity–and, in the opinion of the music journalists who were paying attention to this underappreciated corner of the sonic landscape, the obligation–to speak at length about the thwarted opportunity … Continue reading One for Friday: Paul Westerberg, “Trumpet Clip”

I never felt cool enough to like The Mekons. By the late eighties, when I arrived at the college radio station, they already had a fairly daunting array of records on their discography, and there were very few people or publications capable of stepping up and helping to sort them out. In college radio at that time, it was practically a prerequisite to have a working understanding of the collective works of R.E.M., but a band like the Mekons was a murky mystery. They were great. I somehow knew they were great. Others confirmed their cool quotient, but no one … Continue reading One for Friday: The Mekons, “Memphis Egypt”

It was tough being a film critic in central Wisconsin. Humble Stevens Point may be a college town, but it’s also a community with a fairly small population and an availability of movie screens that’s commensurate with the number on the green highway sign on the way into town. This means that art house films and other offerings with a staggered release schedules took quite a while to get to one of our local theaters, if they arrived at all. This was frustrating throughout the year, but especially during Oscar season. Films that were playing only in major cities (to … Continue reading One for Friday: Boy George, “The Crying Game”

When I started with this One for Friday exercise just over a year ago, I decided that I was going to try to stick with songs that were out of print and, to the best of my determination, entirely unavailable for purchase. There have been some cheats and missteps regarding that principle over these many weeks, but for the most part I’ve stuck with it. As part of the process of determining what to feature next, I have a small mental list of albums that I check with some regularity thinking that they must have slipped from the lists of … Continue reading One for Friday: Richard Barone, “Something Happens”

I arrived at my college radio station, a fresh-faced and impressionable little fellow, in the fall of 1988. At the time, U2 followed up their smash The Joshua Tree with a ludicrous cash-in double album that was a companion piece to a major motion picture. The Dead Milkmen convinced their fans to bum rush the request lines at MTV, making their song “Punk Rock Girl” an unlikely cult hit. Siouxsie and the Banshees had arguably the biggest college radio hit of the fall with the plainly spectacular “Peek-A-Boo” (perhaps the erstwhile host of 90FM’s “College Countup” can confirm or refute … Continue reading One for Friday: R.E.M., “Time After Time, Etc. (live)”

I’ve long thought that opening act has to be about the worst gig possible. The audience isn’t there for that band, so they generally alternate between rudely ignoring the performance or, even worse, loudly announcing their impatience. Slogging through a set that’s met with nothing but indifference has to be incredibly disheartening, perhaps almost as disheartening as killing time on a music stage during a county fair. Which brings me to the best opening act set I ever saw: Blue Rodeo before an Edie Brickell and New Bohemians performance in Milwaukee, circa 1991. Brickell and the boys had recently put … Continue reading One for Friday: Blue Rodeo, “What Am I Doing Here?”