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Wis Notes – Home Taping Is(n’t) Killing Music / Mix Tapes and Compilations

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When I started my research for the Walk in Silence project last year, I’d decided to write some personal notes and reflections on how college radio affected me in the late 80′s.  It was a brief overview of what I want to cover in this book that lasted for twenty-five installments, a sort of a detailed outline of memories, thoughts on influential (to me) bands and albums, friendships, and such.  I’ll be posting these sporadically on the site over the next few weeks or so.

 

HOME TAPING IS(N’T) KILLING MUSIC

My older sisters introduced me to taping songs off the radio at an early age, probably sometime in the early to late 70s.  My eldest sister would be heading off to college in a few years and was taping things via sitting the family tape recorder (A bulky and black heavy thing we used everywhere) placed in front of the radio speakers.  She also introduced me to the year end countdown on WAQY out of Springfield.  There were also the tapes of random things—family noises, neighborhood singalongs, partial songs, and other things, interspersed with actual songs off the radio or from our meager record collection.

My own tape collection of the home variety probably started around 1980 or 1981 with copies of albums from the library (Heart’s Greatest Hits/Live from 1980 was a big one), and took off about 1982.  I’d started with taping stuff off the then-new MTV, which progressed to taping off the radio.  By 1984, I was big on the taping—I was listening to WAAF out of Worcester at the time and getting a lot of hard rock on tape, in addition to the classic rock being played on WAQY.  At that point in time I started naming my audio tapes—pretty much all the titles were a song featured on it—and was probably inspired by the K-Tel albums that were still floating around at the time.

Unlike those early tapes that were a mishmash of noises and recordings in random order, these new ones were tapes of songs dubbed straight from the radio using either one of my sister’s tape/radios, or my own recently acquired tape/radio, filled with songs I was looking for, sitting at my desk doing my homework or drawing or writing.  Also by 1984, I finally got around to buying cassettes instead of albums.  I picked out a few albums here and there—and duly snagged my sister’s already worn copy of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA—and another format in my collection was born.

By 1986 my tape collection was slowly growing, probably a few dozen tapes from my joining RCA, as well as stuff bought at various record stores and flea markets.  A year later it grew exponentially, through more purchases, but also due to my new circle of friends’ penchant for dubbing each other’s collection.  Those ninety-minute tapes you could buy anywhere (or even better, the 100 and the 120 minute tapes!) were perfect for dubbing albums…the shorter albums fit neatly on one side, so you could mix and match or even get a good chunk of someone’s discography onto one tape.  Of course there were a few albums that would get cut off, or go onto the other side, but more often than not it fit perfectly.

By spring 1988, when Chris and his gang were about to head off to college, we traded album and song lists (I was one of the few who catalogued theirs early on) and made wish lists of albums we wanted to borrow.   It had nothing to do with wanting to get an album for nothing—that wasn’t even in our thoughts.  No, basically it was that we wanted a copy of the other person’s album to add to our collection, and once they left town, who knew when we’d have a chance to borrow it or hear it again?  Dubbing people’s collections became a spring semester thing after awhile…when I was a senior, I was dubbing albums from Kris and others…when I was in college I was copying my roommates’ and friends’ albums.

I remember Chris got the Smiths’ Strangeways, Here We Come album before I did and he made me a copy on a sixty-minute tate—one side on each side, leaving a good ten mintues or so of space—so I asked him to throw random other Smiths songs on there.  I think he dubbed a few tracks from their self-titled debut and a few from elsewhere (and I think the end of side two had a few tracks from the Violent Femmes’ self titled as well for filler).  Interesting mix, but it sated my hunger for new stuff until I finally bought my own copy.  That was the thing—it was never about stealing music, it was about getting a copy to listen to, just like getting it from the library, and buying it if we really liked it that much.

 

16-20 September 2010

 

******

 

MIX TAPES AND COMPILATIONS

Out of the furious album dubbing came the compilation making.  I never called them ‘mix tapes’ because I always equaled that phrase with something to be played at parties.  And unless it was a get-together with Chris and the gang, I never went to parties.  I just didn’t run with that crowd.

As mentioned previously, my proto-compilations of yore were radio tapes—random things taped off the stations I listened to back then.  Somewhere along the line there were also the random tapes of stuff I’d taken from the library.  At that time, I just never thought about making a real compilation.

The ones I did end up making grew out of the radio tapes I gave K-Tel-like names to—Can’t Stop Rockin’, Turn Up the Radio, Reaction to Action, titles of featured songs and whatnot.  And with the college radio tapes, I’d just named them College Radio I/II/etc.

The first real compilation with a theme, with all songs from my collection rather than the radio, came in the spring of 1988, with something called Stentorian Music.  By then I’d been coming up with nifty titles for my fledgling lo-fi band The Flying Bohemians, and I thought something hyperbolic and taken out of my sister’s thesaurus (stentorian = loud) would work.  This one then, had all songs worth cranking up—The Vapors’ “Turning Japanese”, Screaming Blue Messiahs’ “Wild Blue Yonder”, Adam Ant’s “Friend or Foe”, the Pretenders’ “Tattooed Love Boys”, etc.—fitting onto a sixty minute tape.

This was quickly followed in the next few days or so by a compilation of quiet songs to listen to at one in the morning (Cimmerian Candlelight, featuring The Cure’s “All Cats Are Grey”, Felt’s “Primitive Painters”, The Woodentops’ “Give It Time” and so on), and a third one featuring new wave, technopoppy stuff (Preternatural Synthetics, which understandably had Art of Noise, Information Society, Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, and Sigue Sigue Sputnik, to name a few bands).  Not the most brilliant or coordinated, or smoothly-flowing mix, but they were the first three featuring nearly all “college music”.

These first three were trial runs in a way, testing out compilations of different kinds.  I followed these up with a few more, including a few duds like an aborted Remix series (all extended remixes of songs), one called Under the Ivy (named after a Kate Bush song, and featuring all single b-sides).  The first great one was Listen In Silence, so named as it was a tape I’d most likely listen to late at night, or that the songs were from tapes I listenened to at that time of night.  Either way, the aim was to create a compilation of my favorite college radio songs of the time.  Listen was a mix of old and new, purchased and borrowed.  It featured a lot of my favorites of the time, such as The Church’s “Under the Milky Way”, Midnight Oil’s “Dead Heart”, Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun”, and so on.  Nearly all the tracks were songs I’d heard either on WAMH or on 120 Minutes.  A few odds and ends were tracks I found at my brief job at the local radio station [more on that later].

I got fully into the compilation making to the point that I even gave them a label name to “release” them under: Plazmattack.  [Long story short: Plazma was an odd nickname given to me as a kid, and I’d used that portmanteau in various silly things such as my writing and art.  Its logo was a rune-like ‘P’ in diamond.]  I even got creative enough to make some c-cards for the tapes, though I never made any art for them (that I left for the TFB releases).  I never wrote down the exact dates of the early ones, but I can still make a good approximation as to when they were made, because of what was on them and when they were most listened to.

The next title that stayed was the one that shares the title of this project, Walk In Silence.  It’s the first line to Joy Division’s “Atmosphere”, which became one of my favorite songs of 1988 as the next-to-last track on the cassette version of the band’s Substance retrospective.

That year culminated with a best-of-year compilation, harking back to the years I spent listening to end-of-year countdowns on the radio.  This wasn’t so much a countdown, though, as much as it was a best-of.  Opening with the wistful “Will Never Marry” by Morrissey (a b-side from his “Everyday Is Like Sunday” single), it featured all my favorite tracks from my favorite year in music.  Cocteau Twins, Wire, The Church, Peter Murphy, Information Society, Front 242, Jane’s Addiction, Morrissey, U2, Joy Division, and so on, and title taken from Wire’s “A Public Place” (the last track on that year’s A Bell Is a Cup Until It Is Struck), Does Truth Dance?  Does Truth Sing?  The Singles 1988.  It was the pinnacle of a really fun, cool year.

I went through phases with compilations over the years.  Some years I’d have over a dozen comps made, and some years there would only be four or five.  It really depended on what was going on at the time…this first wave of comps lasted until about 1990, when I stopped obsessing as much over music due to focusing on college work.  The next phase, 1991-1993, was pretty sparse, 1994 was almost nonexistent (except for the Two Thousand soundtrack/compilation for a story I was writing at the time).  In 1995 things changed a bit—these were comps made to mirror my desperation of the time.  Quite a few were made during my tenure at HMV Records, 1996-2000, as well as my Yankee Candle years (2000-2005) when I was making weekly trips to Newbury Comics in Amherst.  The compilations have kind of died down since then, especially now that my collection is completely digital, but I’ve thrown virtual collections together now and again.

20-21 September 2010, revised 7 November 2011

WiS Notes – Fuzzbox, Sputnik and The The: Night Flight

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When I started my research for the Walk in Silence project last year, I’d decided to write some personal notes and reflections on how college radio affected me in the late 80′s.  It was a brief overview of what I want to cover in this book that lasted for twenty-five installments, a sort of a detailed outline of memories, thoughts on influential (to me) bands and albums, friendships, and such.  I’ll be posting these sporadically on the site over the next few weeks or so.

 

FUZZBOX, SPUTNIK AND THE THE – NIGHT FLIGHT

Before there was 120 Minutes on MTV, there was Night Flight on USA Network.  NF was a four-hour block on weekends that played all kinds of weird things typically aimed at the arty or creative college kids.  They’d do a retrospective of a video director, or a themed show of music from Australia, or cult movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Fantastic Planet, or band overviews, or what have you.

In 1986, the show featured a mini-film based on The The’s then-new album, Infected, a collection of eight videos filmed around the world and sharing a theme of being caught in uncomfortable situations—the theme of the album.  I of course taped it, partly due to having seen the video for the title song on previous NF episodes.  Additionally I’d read a review of the album from a music magazine (the name of which still escapes me) and was intrigued.  I’m thinking I bought the tape at Strawberries in Leominster, but I could be wrong.

About the same time, the music magazine I read, Star Hits, had made a big thing out of this new band from England called Sigue Sigue Sputnik.  Their claim to fame was being signed to EMI for a Malcolm McLaren-worthy four million dollars, not to mention having a sound akin to incredibly cheesy techno and a fashion sense of frightwigs, punk and all things Bladerunner.  One of my pen pals at the time, a girl from the UK, put their single “21st Century Boy” on a compilation for me.  That did it—I was hooked.  If I wasn’t going to be the morbid and moody Cure fan all the time, Sputnik’s Dionysian anarchy was good enough for me.  Silly release!  Why not?

And lastly, there was the other fun punky band I latched onto via Night Flight and Star Hits, We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It!! (exclamation marks intended).  This tatty foursome were like British punk girls you didn’t so much want to go out with as you knew them as friends or at least crushes.  They didn’t have the best musical abilities, but damn it, they were too cute not to like!  And added to that, you realized their version of punk was what resonated with you most.  Not the angry stuff, not the political stuff, but this, the celebration of being yourself and having fun doing it, and to hell with everyone else!

These three albums made quite the difference to me in late 1986, because that was when I’d started to change my outlook on life.  I’d started drifting away from popular Top 40 music because it was boring me…I’d drifted away from trying to fit in with the popular crowd because that was a lesson in futility.  And yet I was drifting away from older friends, some I’d known since elementary school, because I’d stopped trying to fit in with them.  Some of these old friendships remained, but for the most part I started drifting.  I’ll be honest and say that part of it was class in nature—most of my these friends were from families that, while not exactly poor, didn’t exactly aim any higher than they were expected to.  These were the people that most likely weren’t going to go to college—basically graduate high school, get a job somewhere, and start a family before they hit twenty-five.  I don’t hold that against them in any way, and I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with that choice–it’s just that it wasn’t me. While I fit in for the most part with their group—more like they accepted me without question, unlike the more opinionated popular crowd—I realized I was different in that I wanted and needed to aim higher than that.  Part of me felt guilty of course, but part of me was relieved that I’d come to this realization.

These three albums were part of this realization, albums I’d listen to on my walkman late at night when everyone else was asleep.  It was my escape into another life I could prepare myself for—the rampant silliness and anarchy of Sputnik, the willful nonconformity of Fuzzbox, or the stark, no-holds-barred reality of The The.  There was an opening that made itself present to me, and all I needed to do was take it.

At the time, it was taken in baby steps, as I tended to be of the school of thinking before acting.  Sometimes too much so, but at least it was in the right direction.

In the writing field, my fiction made a turn for the strange, with the Infamous War Novel I’d been writing for the last year or so started taking on darker, weirder plot twists.  Newer stories such as the nightmarish Dream Weaver and the roman a clef Teenage Thunder (yes, I stole song titles for all my writing at the time) I wrote while at my job at the YMCA, cornering myself on the back steps and frantically scribbling away when I wasn’t poring over the latest music magazine.

Socially I started testing people out by throwing this music at them.  Some of them understood my excitement, having older siblings that listened to the stuff, but they themselves weren’t too excited.  “It’s okay, but who sings about a ‘piss-stinking shopping center’?” one of my friends said to me about The The’s “Heartland”.

It must have been late 1986 or early 1987 when I went for broke and wrote a record review of Flaunt It for the school newspaper.  My only motive for doing so was that I thought it was a hilarious and fun album and I thought others might want to know about it.  Sure, there was an element of showing off my newfound nonconformity, but readers could take what they wanted from it, if at all.  There may have been some pushback when I submitted it, though I don’t remember either way.  I’d been writing for the school paper in one way or another since junior high.  It was kind of expected, considering having a reporter father.

I must have been a few days after the publication when Jim B. walked up to me, asked if I was the one who wrote the review, and proceeded to thank me profusely for it.  Someone had reviewed an album that wasn’t Top 40 crap!  Even more so, someone reviewed something cool with the other nonconformist kids!

I was absolutely thrilled by the payoff.  Over the course of the next few days, a few others had run into me and thanked me for the review or thought it was cool.  One was Chris, one of the guys I’d met briefly in junior high but had lost touch with despite our getting along like gangbusters (and, as it turns out, being distantly related).  Through him and the others, I met a new circle of friends that, to my surprise, totally fit in with my new mindset.  The only problem was that they were all a year ahead of me.  I didn’t take that too hard at first, though…since freshman year I’d met, hung around or got in trouble with others a few years ahead of me.  I’d worry when the time came.

As the 86-87 school year wound down, I started hanging out with this group almost exclusively, going over each others’ houses to play games, watch movies, and of course talk about music.

Chris and I seemed to latch onto each other the most, mostly due to our mutual love for college radio and music in general.  In a way he was the cool older brother I didn’t have.  Every now and again we’d meet up, compare each other’s latest music purchases, and dub them if we could.  We were both part of the music club crowd, so we’d be really bad influences sometimes, ordering albums we didn’t have the money for.

This new group of friends I had ended up running into each other or hanging out over the course of the summer.  We’d go to movies, hang out at Hampshire Mall, and have all sorts of fun.  And for me this was important because these guys were the class geeks, the upper rank of students.  We didn’t always talk about mundane things—we had all sorts of intellectual conversations.  Even when I was lost and resigned myself to just listening, it was a change from the teen soap opera conversations I’d hear with others in my own class.

By late 1987, this was my new circle of friends, and ones I’d cherish for a long time.  I would probably need to thank those three bands—The The, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and Fuzzbox—for being a catalyst for getting us together.

 

13-16 September 2010

WiS Notes – Collecting

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When I started my research for the Walk in Silence project last year, I’d decided to write some personal notes and reflections on how college radio affected me in the late 80′s.  It was a brief overview of what I want to cover in this book that lasted for twenty-five installments, a sort of a detailed outline of memories, thoughts on influential (to me) bands and albums, friendships, and such.  I’ll be posting these sporadically on the site over the next few weeks or so.

 

COLLECTING

My parents were enablers.  Well, that, and I was insistent that they buy me such-and-such’s album.  Still, it wasn’t in a bad way that they enabled my music addition.  When we went shopping at the local mall, I’d gravitate to the music stores while my mom shopped for clothes and my dad spent his time in the bookstores.  They didn’t mind that I went alone, because they knew that’s where I’d be and where I’d stay until they came to get me.

My first collection, of course, was the Beatles.  After receiving the Blue Album (1967-1970) as a Christmas gift, I started my search for Beatles albums I needed to complete the discography.  They came from varied areas—Help! came from my uncle, Abbey Road and a few others from the local department stores, still others from tag sales, flea markets, and elsewhere.  The Beatles were the first band where I went out of my way to acquire a complete discography (including various bootlegs).  It wasn’t enough to get the US catalog that was available at the time…I had to find the rare b-sides like “The Inner Light” and “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)”…the ones that hadn’t been released elsewhere.

Once I started actively listening to music—sometime around 1981 or 1982—and more to the point, around the time I’d started taping stuff off the radio (1983-4 or so), that’s when I really started the collecting thing.

Part of it was due to acquiring various music reference books or taking them out of the library, and part of it was due to the info on new releases that radio deejays would give out.  Most of it was from the books, though.  And once I started listening to college radio, a lot of it came from a copy of the Trouser Press record guide form the local library (and then my own, once I found it at a book store).

Once I had all this info, I would wonder what those albums sounded like—not to mention what the covers looked like, since the stores in my town obviously never carried them.  That sort of sparked, or at least fed, the mystique of college radio as something nocturnal [more on that later].

About 1984 onwards, my dad would let me buy an album or a cassette or two while on our roadtrips.  Most of them were popular, easy-to-find titles like Purple Rain, Born in the USA and so on.  It wasn’t until 1986, after I started listening to college radio, that the collecting really kicked in.  One of the first acquisitions was the cassette version of The Cure’s Standing on a Beach—the one with the b-sides on it.  I figured that would be a good place to start. (Amusingly enough, when I heard “Let’s Go to Bed”, I immediately remembered that song from the early days of MTV.  Small world, and that wasn’t the last time that would happen.)  That soon led to other first acquisitions—The Smiths’ Hatful of Hollow (found at a record store in North Adams), Depeche Mode’s “Shake the Disease” single (found in a cutout bin at a K-Mart in Leominster!), and others.

Truthfully, I really had no real idea who to look for, since I was new to the genre.  I basically looked for who I recognized from Trouser Press (or was mentioned in Star Hits, the teen music magazine I read at the time), or who I heard on college radio or on Night Flight and later on 120 Minutes.  That would explain why I gravitated towards the more well-known of the bands—The Cure, Depeche Mode, and The Smiths.

Another way of collecting was via those record clubs one used to see advertised in TV Guide and in newspaper inserts.  I believe RCA was the first one I joined, sometime around early 1987.  By then I had a few part-time jobs—one had been at Victory Supermarket downtown, and later at the local YMCA.  What little funds I got from that job that didn’t go into a savings account went to my pocket.  That was my money for music magazines, candy, and the occasional cassette or LP, and also the money used so I could pay off the music club.  I bought a small number of albums and ordered things for my sisters as well.  One early purchase from them was World Party’s Private Revolution on cassette.  I believe I also snagged a few albums on vinyl that were on sale.

I quit RCA around late 1987 when my friend Chris tried to get extra albums by signing his friends (read: me and a few others) to join Columbia House.  I decided to join that one basically because it had a better selection—that is, RCA was more mainstream and CH was more adventurous in their selection.  I stayed with them  until college started, I believe, and finally quite for good sometime in 1991.

Back to stores—I spent most of my money at the mall stores, simply because they were more accessible.  The Strawberries at Searstown Mall in Leominster had a great selection (I’d buy many major-label titles there like Music for the Masses, Love Hysteria, Flaunt It (the vinyl version), and so on).  There were two at separate ends of the Hampshire Mall in Hadley—the one at the western end next to JC Penney (whose name I’ve forgotten) had a great selection.  I remember being pleasantly surprised (and the cashier indifferent) when I found Love Tractor’s This Ain’t No Outerspace Ship on cassette there, soon after I heard it on WMUA.

My foray into the independent stores came early, specifically when I started looking for Beatles bootlegs.  That’s Entertainment in Worcester was one such place my Dad took me in the early 80s.  That was a neat store, because it carried a lot of their hard-to-find solo albums, like the early pre-Plastic Ono Band discs that John Lennon did with Yoko.

I think it must have been soon after I started listening to college radio that my dad brought me to Al Bum’s—first to the one on in Worcester, then to the one in Amherst—and soon after that, to Main Street Records in Northampton.  Al Bum’s was a local mini-chain of new and used titles, and definitely catered to the college crowd.  And since we didn’t go to Worcester as much as we did the Pioneer Valley (mostly due to ease of driving there), so the one in Amherst became a hangout.  I found a few Beatles boots there, and later many alt.rock titles I’d been looking for.

By association, we also went to a storefront that was originally an outlet of a Noho store called Faces.  That store in particular carried the usual proto-Hot Topic clothes and accessories (I was into silly pins back then, as everyone was).  In the back, there was a small record store-within-a-store (sort of like the old fashioned Five and Dimes) called For the Record.

It was here that once I’d started buying more college rock titles, I’d find some great titles to add to my collection.  One was Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s Flaunt It which I’d heard about through Star Hits.  Another was The The’s Soul Mining, which I’d picked up after buying Infected elsewhere (possibly at a mall store).  Flaunt It would end up being one of my life-changing purchases (so to speak), as not only did the music excite me and inspire my rebellious streak, I’d meet a whole new group of friends after writing a review of it in the school paper [more on that later as well].

Once I started hanging with that group, it became a weekend thing to drive down to Amherst and/or Northampton to hang out.  These people were just shy of a year from graduating high school, so they of course gravitated to the Five College area (instead of roadtrips to, say, Keene or Leominster or Worcester).  The Valley’s ambience grabbed us and fit our mindsets perfectly.

We made Al Bum’s our second home, as well as Main Street Records.  Not to say that’s all we did, of course—we did go to the movies, eat out (the Panda East in Amherst was a favorite), and basically hung out, like any high school group.  Just that mine had a few core members who were as big on the music as I was, and we gravitated to the music stores most of the time.

Of course, the collecting wasn’t always about buying.  In our own way we were guilty of ‘Home Taping Is Killing Music’ by borrowing each others’ tapes and vinyl, and dubbing them onto cheaply bought blank tapes we’d buy at Radio Shack or the department store or wherever.  It almost became a ritual to let each other know who had what and borrow it throughout the course of the year.  For the most part we were good about it, borrowing on a Friday and getting it back to them on a Monday.  By the time my friends graduated high school, we were dubbing in earnest, trying to level off each others’ collections before everyone left in the fall.

At that point, in the late 80s, my penchant for collecting wasn’t as intense as it was later on…I was content to search for albums and not every single minutiae that got released.

 

August 31 – September 10, 2010

WiS Notes – College Radio

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When I started my research for the Walk in Silence project last year, I’d decided to write some personal notes and reflections on how college radio affected me in the late 80’s.  It was a brief overview of what I want to cover in this book that lasted for twenty-five installments, a sort of a detailed outline of memories, thoughts on influential (to me) bands and albums, friendships, and such.  I’ll be posting these sporadically on the site over the next few weeks or so.

COLLEGE RADIO

Back in the day, once I understood the schedules, I’d look forward to the kickoff of another season at the college radio station.  The first time I understood it, after that initial discovery, I looked forward to hearing WMUA—I picked it up again in the autumn of ’86, about the same time I’d actively started keeping an eye out for neat stuff on USA Network’s Night Flight to videotape.  This was soon after 120 Minutes started, something I wouldn’t habitually watch until about mid-’87.

But with college radio, when you first discover it in the spring you semester you don’t get much of it.  Still, it sowed the seed of teenage rebellion.

To me, looking back, college radio in the mid to late 80s was akin to progressive radio—in terms of “progressive” meaning its radio term of being album-track friendly rather than chart friendly.  A precursor to AOR, in a way.

Once the new school year started, college radio usually didn’t kick in until the end of September—a month’s worth of students settling in, the station manager setting up and running interviews, listening to auditions, and so on.  Back then, many of us listeners were twitchy, waiting for the first day of going live.  In a roundabout way this delay makes sense, in terms of what’s played.  Rock music sells quite well in the fourth quarter at record stores, so there’s a good chance that a new college radio season can mean a lot of good stuff coming out an being played straight out of the shrinkwrap.  At the same time, of course, alternative college radio prided itself on being vehemently anti­-commercial, so many music directors went out of their way to look for something that was great but not necessarily a big seller.  A double-edged sword, to say the least.

Still—there was always that exciting thrill of waiting for the station to come on the air.  Back in the pre-internet days, you actually had to wait for things, and that was part of the fun.  Like waiting on new releases, for instance…back then, you’d hear so-and-so was in the studio or coming out with a new album in the fall, and you never heard a peep of it until the promo copies went out to the stations.

This in its own way was a mental high for me as it was my own way of thinking “hey, someone else who’s in my mindset is coming soon!”  After losing my friends to college, this was a tie-in, a reminder .

That first time was interesting.  If I recall correctly, the CCE [Clarence Clemons Event–more on that later. –Ed.] took place in spring 1986.  My dates are wrong on some of my cassettes, as I know for a fact that the first “college radio tape” had to be autumn of 1986, and the second one soon after.  I’d originally thought the CCE might be autumn 1985, but that’s when the song came out.  Still—once I knew college radio existed, I knew enough to expect it when the school year started.  I’d be prepared with blank cassettes (or used tapes, recording over older stuff with the mindset that I was growing up and moving on to better things).  At first I had the older kitchen radio, then moved onto the “jonzbox” as well as one of my sister’s radios she wasn’t using.  At least two, if I’m not mistaken.

One radio—the jonzbox, a well-worn cassette/radio—was on my desk and tuned to various stations.  It had a six-foot extendable antenna that I bought at Radio Shack (and I think survived for many years until some idiot in college bent it).  The front plastic facing had a strip of paper taped under the dial, covering the AM  band numbers—come on, who listens to AM anymore?—marking the general settings of all the stations I listened to, or at least the ones that came in.

Again, my house was in a valley so not everything came in great.  Local stations came in clear and sometimes even bled over other stations—cheapo radios still do that.  The college stations I liked were tricky, because they were usually low-watt and therefore the local NPR station (WFCR out of Amherst) sometimes overpowered anything near it.  Added to the fact that my family owned a cheapo police scanner, which caused stations to drop out if the radio signals crossed (even worse if it was in scan mode—it would mute a song for a half-second at every pass).  Thus the mega-antenna.

The mindset I remember, like I mentioned above, was that of excitement that I was hearing this stuff again.  At that point, I’d grown out of trying to fit in, grown away from the circle of friends I’d had since childhood.  I did occasionally hang with my friend Kevin, especially my senior year (I’d known him since junior high), and also with Kris (I knew her since grade school—her dad was my fourth grade teacher as well), but most of the others I’d known for some time were floating into the background.

My junior year was the best since I got along famously with so many in the class ahead of me.  They had discovered college radio about the same time I had, so we had that in common for starters.  For all of us, I think we all had that idea that this was something that was a notch beyond the normal pop stuff.  It had substance, it was art, and it wasn’t disposable.  For us, that meant that the things we liked, the things we put our hearts and minds into meant something.  That was key for us, having grown up in a small town.  To put it more bluntly—we rose up above the yokels and the rednecks with our art, with our music, and our intellect.  Because really—if we didn’t have that in this town, what the hell else did we have to live for?

Personally, listening to college radio gave me the impetus to rise up against my own misgivings.  I’ll be honest—even though I may have “hated” the jocks and the popular cliques in high school, a lot of it was my own doing, and I believe that’s true for a lot of people my age that grew up in the 80s.  Life may have felt like a John Hughes movie, but in reality it wasn’t (the exception being The Breakfast Club, in my opinion still his best film)…those movies were caricatures.  My ire was fueled by my social status, and I  hated that I didn’t quite fit in.

Discovering college radio was like an eye opener, a veil finally pulled away to show that there’s a hell of a lot more to life out there than what we were temporarily binded to.  Becoming a part of its universe was like being accepted into that bigger world.

30-31 August 2010

Walk in Silence: References, Homework and Sounds

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[Note: This was posted on my LiveJournal blog a few days ago, but thought I’d share it here as well.]

 

 

First off, I have to share this absolutely brilliant quote about from Bob Mould in his autobiography, See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody, which talks about his tour with Husker Du in the early 80s, which I believe brilliantly captures what I’m aiming for in this book:

“We were quickly discovering that the East Coast had a unique mentality that might be summed up best in two words: college rock. A lot of it came down to the clustering of high-quality schools in the Northeast, particularly in the Boston area, where the tour took us next. There were many more college radio stations in the Northeast than in the Midwest, and they gave rise to the likes of the Bongos, Violent Femmes, and the dBs, bands who had a more accessible, more melodic sound than hardcore.”

Seriously, I need this as the preface quote.

The research for Walk in Silence continues apace, with much reading and note taking.  I probably should be doing some more pencil-marking in the books I’m reading, but I’m one of those book geeks who cringes at doing that.  (Which is funny, considering how my Dad’s been doing that for years with his own hometown history research.)  Still, I’m finding a lot of interesting information that I can play with, and I’ve ordered a few books from Amazon that should be coming my way soon that could help.

It’s kind of interesting, looking for the history of college radio.  Not college rock, per se–one just needs to look for biographies of the genres, bands and scenes, and there are many–but when it comes to college radio in particular, it’s kind of a desert when it comes to books, or even online resources for that matter.  There’s a few books out there on the technical and historical sides of college radio stations, and there’s a ridiculously huge number of band/scene biographies…and crazy as it sounds, I’d like to marry the two in this project.

Why, you might ask, would I want to do something like that?  Would anyone really care about why some backwater college played The Smiths instead of Kylie Minogue, or The Cure instead of Van Halen back then?  But that’s part of why I want to write it:  because if that backwater college hadn’t played the Smiths or the Cure, they may not have been as huge and influential here in the States.  Sure, some of this music filtered through in other ways–hardcore and punk pretty much survived on DIY and word of mouth–but a lot of these bands that I’m focusing on weren’t DIY punks from LA or DC or wherever.  I’m not focusing on the hardcore punk scene anyway–there’s quite a glut of those books out there already.  I’m focusing on British post-punk bands and local American bands that were rarely carried in chain stores because they weren’t fast, big sellers.  They were bands that caught the ears of the collegiate crowd in the early 80s and were played on their stations, and maybe by some fluke (or some brilliant producer or director) showed up on a tv or movie soundtrack.  In my opinion, it wasn’t so much the hardcore punk as it was this particular post-punk genre that became the basis of today’s indie rock, and I think that story needs to be told.  We’ve already celebrated “The Year Punk Broke” in 1991/92, but again–that’s just a subgenre of a much larger musical movement.  I’m not looking to tell the story of its grand entrance into the mainstream; I’m looking to tell of the story of how it eventually got there, something that’s very much glossed over.  My idea is to explain why this music came to be important in the mid-to-late 80s, show its origins, and how it eventually became the norm.