Any travel is full of the unexpected, I suppose. It comes with traversing unfamiliar terrain. But my recent jaunt to the Pacific Northwest brought an especially jarring moment, although certainly not an unpleasant one. While walking past one of the many makeshift kiosks wallpapers with club fliers, a familiar band name jumped out at me. It wasn’t some flannel-clad band of scruffy misfits I associated with my college radio years — that certainly would have been understandable given I was in the geographic corner of the nation that came to dominate left of the dial playlists when I was helping … Continue reading One for Friday: The Woggles, “Get Tough”

It was one of those Replacements shows. Towards the end of the band’s tour in support of the album Pleased to Meet Me, the Minneapolis quartet was booked into the Pine Street Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Regional heroes the Young Fresh Fellows opened the show. Surely, it was a hot ticket, or at least a warm one, just a little uncomfortable to the touch. By this point in time — 1987, to be precise — the Replacements had plenty of people lining up to declare them the best rock band in the U.S. They also had a deserved reputation of … Continue reading One for Friday: The Replacements, “Portland”

After I graduated from college and was underway with the slow, sad process of detaching from the student-run radio station, I did the best I could to compensate for no daily exposure to the waterfall of new music that came through the doors. After initially insisting my break would be clean, I eventually signed up for a weekly on-air shift as a community volunteer, and I scoured music magazines with the intensity of a conspiracy theorist looking for the clue that would bring down the menacing shadow government. When I found a song that I believed had similar stuff to … Continue reading One for Friday: The Soup Dragons, “One Way Street”

Since returning to my cheesy homeland, I have been blessed with multiple opportunities to make up for my feeble work in supporting the live, local music scene during my more youthful years. I remain woefully under-schooled on the upstart musicians who toil in the clubs with energizing blast of sonic invention right now, but I’ve had the chance to see a bunch of acts — or at least their delightfully odd new offshoots — that I should have stood before twenty years (or more) ago, bobbing my head and holding a plastic cup of sloshing Point Special. My one-city, multi-act … Continue reading One for Friday: Spooner, “Burn It All Down”

Like a lot of my cohorts in college radio, I saw music as serious stuff. I adamantly clung to the notion that the songs we played on our end of the dial were revolutionary, transformative, and deeply important as compared to the frivolous nonsense all the other stations were playing. Even when one of our favored artists indulged in comparative silliness about, say, mass transit smooching, we knew deep down that it really represented a deep expression of existential agony. Bubble gum fun was for the helpless sheep, lulled into complacency by the repetitiveness of Top 40 radio and MTV. … Continue reading One for Friday: The Mr. T Experience, “So Long, Sucker”

In 1989, thunder came to my college radio station. It’s possible there was a copy of Soundgarden’s 1988 debut, Ultramega OK, floating around the station, but I don’t recall it. Given the sound, I suspect it went straight into the heavy metal stacks. But the band’s sophomore effort, Louder Than Love, arrived on a bed of raves from the college rock press. This wasn’t something to be relegated to a specialty show, we were assured. This thing needed to be heard. Before Nirvana’s Nevermind shoved a big, grungy pushpin into Seattle on the rock ‘n’ roll map, Soundgarden was representing … Continue reading One for Friday: Soundgarden, “Ugly Truth”

The discovery process with music never ends. That’s one of the truest joys of being a fan. Even a band that has been studied and loved can provide a surprise, and an album that was listened to and appreciated can suddenly suddenly pop with genius when heard again at the right time, in the right way, probably with the right set of emotions swirling around inside. Blue Rodeo was a favorite band during my college radio days. It started, gently, with the albums Diamond Mine and Casino that arrived within my first couple of years at the station, but truly … Continue reading One for Friday: Blue Rodeo, “5 Days in May”

I’ve written about the allure cover songs had — still have, maybe — for college radio programmers. Much as there’s a fierce instinct for the new, new, new, there’s a reason most commercial radio stations default to a mere handful of songs that cycle eternally. The familiar stirs a powerful craving. Discovery is great, but we all want to sing along. So as much as I’d like to champion one of the originals included on the Austin band Glass Eye’s Christine EP, which hit the student-run radio station during my first semester there, the reality is that I gravitated to … Continue reading One for Friday: Glass Eye, “Cecilia”

I’ve probably tapped out enough words about The World’s Largest Trivia ContestTM this week. In recent years, I’ve used this Friday feature to share a lovely cover of my team’s theme song that was recorded by my friend Mollie Donihe. I still strongly recommend that particular track. For today, though, I’m going to opt for a song that another friend of mine insists should have an official place somewhere on the official Trivia playlist. I absolutely agree. For three strange days I had no obligations My mind was a blur I did not know what to do As the saying goes … Continue reading One for Friday: School of Fish, “3 Strange Days”