COLLEGE RADIO

In the literal sense.  The local college had (and probably still has, but I’m old and grumpy and set in my ways now, so I only listen to my Donny and Marie vinyl collection) a station when I was in high school with no set format whatsoever, which made it pretty entertaining.  They also had a pretty small transmitter so, even though I lived on top of a hill, I couldn’t always get the signal, and I was only 20 miles away.

Some of the deejays brought in their own instruments and made an unholy racket.  Others played pretentious avant garde shit.  Others thought they were funny and played c&w or Lawrence Welk-type music, or maybe they weren’t funny and actually enjoyed it.  That who stupid concept of liking things ironically was just becoming a thing, so a lot of real bad soft rock & pop 70s music was played on a regular basis.  A few of the people spinning records there were just as obsessive as me, though, and they were always looking for new stuff to share.  Most of them forgot to speak in between songs, unfortunately, so I had to call in a lot to see what the hell they were playing.

Some of the stuff I heard there for the first time:

- Mojo Nixon’s first few records
- “Boy on the Roof” by The Outnumbered (awesome song)
- “People Who Died” by Jim Carroll
- “Tainted Love” by Coil (oh yeah, that’s some creepy shit)
- “Let’s Go Back to Viet Nam” by The Forgotten Rebels
- “Otto” “Willpower” and “Within Your Reach” by the Replacements
- my beloved Felt
- “Take the Skinheads Bowling” by CVB
- “Slip it In” by Black Flag
- “Bitchin’ Camaro” by Dead Milkmen
- “Cheer” by Descendents
- some early Scruffy the Cat (not that they ever had a late period)
- “Public Image” by PiL
- Siouxsie, Wire, Yo La Tengo, Cramps, Cure, OMD

It was a few years after this heady heyday that I also heard Low for the first time on this station. 

And then I became a hermit and started wearing tin foil hats to keep all of that shit out of my brain.


The End.