Every April, Stevens Point is the location of the World’s Largest Trivia Contest. It originates and emanates from WWSP-90FM, the student-run radio station at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. 90FM is where I went to college. Well, okay, officially I went to college at UW-SP, but no matter how many classes I took or what the diploma says, I majored in college radio. I spent five years helping to run that contest and have been playing in it ever since. The team I’m on was in fact started by radio station alumni and probably about half of the forty people … Continue reading One for Friday: Dexy’s Midnight Runners, “Come On Eileen” (live)

I worked in commercial radio in the mid-nineties. I was employed by a mini-conglomerate in Madison, Wisconsin, so I wound up pitching in at a couple of different stations, but the bulk of my time was spent at a place that, just a couple of years earlier, I would have guessed would be a dream station. It was an alternative rock station, which eventually, tellingly started to tout itself as a “new rock alternative” station. When my cohorts and I were logging endless unpaid hours at the college radio station, commercial alternative stations were like distant beacons in the fog … Continue reading One for Friday: The Vents, “One Way Ticket”

When I started this companion feature to the other music related foolishness I indulge in to help close out the working week, I came up with a couple of guidelines. For one thing, I was only going to post material that was officially out of print, a guideline that’s already expanded to have some wiggle room. The other was that I’d stick exclusively with material that I owned, converting and uploading the audio for the express purpose of using it here. My iTunes library is filled with wonderful obscurities previously uploaded to different pockets on the Web by other souls … Continue reading One for Friday, The Cost of Living, “So Much Better”

One of the enduring pleasures of being a devoted fan of music is the hunt. Even in the long-tailed world of Amazon and the other well-stocked purveyors of recorded music out there in the wilds of the Web, there’s still a unique joy to be found in perusing a new record store, especially one with abundant used bins, discovering lost little gems or that album you’ve always wanted at a price that’s irresistible. The one and only time I was a patron of the Minnesota Monstrosity, I went in under the delusion that have more retail space would mean a … Continue reading One for Friday: Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, “Madonna of the Wasps”

Much as I might aspire to be a person of refined tastes, expounding on the art of cinema or submerging myself in some acclaimed literary wonder, I must also admit a taste for some less inspiring fare. This, sadly, is especially true of food. We are aspirational chefs in our household and strive to eat well. Given the opportunity, though, I would happily, greedily purchase and consume a whole sack full of thirty-nine cent hamburgers. Sometime during my first year of college, joyful drunkards of my acquaintance discovered this concrete bunker nestled within the strip of commercial eyesores on the … Continue reading One for Friday: Black Solid, “Hot N Now”

I had a Christmas tradition for a while. In the late nineties, I would call up my old college radio station and offer to take the first air shift on the morning of December 25th. As someone who served two years as the Program Director there, I knew how difficult it could be to wrangle up personnel during winter break, especially on the day that even the most devoted student volunteers were spending back home with the fam. This was after I won parole from my time served in commercial radio and before I found myself back in the strange … Continue reading One for Friday: Self, “Meg Ryan”

Remember that part in The Wrestler when Randy the Ram is discussing music and concludes that the “nineties sucked” because that Cobain kid had to come and ruin it all? He kind of had a point. Unlike the titular grappler, I wasn’t pining for lost hair metal anthems. Instead, I was disheartened with the way Nirvana’s astounding success suddenly, briefly turned “alternative rock” into a widespread radio format. The artists that made college radio so exciting through the eighties and into the early nineties were either in decline or had checked out altogether, making it all the easier from commercial … Continue reading One for Friday: Ed’s Redeeming Qualities, “I Will Wait”

Throwing yourself into college radio and the music that has its most welcoming home on the left end of the dial can make you feel as if you’re in an alternative musical universe. It’s not just that you wind up listening to completely different stuff that many of your contemporaries, often baffled over their inability to understand that listening to, to use an example from my era, a hearing a new Husker Du record is a far superior experience compared to listening to the same Led Zeppelin album side played for the thousandth time. It’s that the music you love … Continue reading One for Friday: Guadalcanal Diary, “Always Saturday”

Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York was released on CD after Kurt Cobain’s death. I remember someone writing at the time that after the unexpected shotgun blast proved the extent of Cobain’s depression, every song now sounded like a suicide note. Around two years after Cobain ended it all, another musician from my college radio days killed himself. He was far less prominent–no cottage industry of mournful t-shirts sprung up around his loss–but to me he was even more important. Jim Ellison was the lead singer and chief songwriter for the band Material Issue. Their albums were like gifts from … Continue reading One For Friday: Material Issue, “Don’t You Think I Know”

Since I’ve committed to only posting out-of-print music for this humble weekly feature, there’s a very good chance that I’ll be continually hearkening back to my college radio days. I find it less likely that this will become an exercise in CMJ nostalgia, but that seems a surprisingly fertile area for me this week. The weekly trade journal used to be the sole source for reading about the music that was likely to cross our desks and turntables (and eventually CD players) at the radio station. There was no Pitchfork, there was no collection of ultra-hip blogs. All we had … Continue reading One for Friday: Harm Farm, “Daisy, I…”