Drunken Owls and Other Delights

As you may have noticed on my WordPress site, I haven't quite gotten around to posting the next Blogging the Beatles post, though I should hopefully get one up by next weekend. It just so happens that I finished up the major revision of A Division of Souls a bit earlier than expected, and all my creative time has been dedicated to getting the manuscript all nice and tidy for submission. Given that I've been working on this novel nigh on a decade (granted, there were a few years in there where I was working on something else and letting this one stew), I believe it's high time I get this one out and away, and I'd like to make sure I'm doing it right this time. So yeah...that novel takes precedence.

Still, I should have gone on that site and posted a "more posts coming soon" filler much sooner. Sorry about that.

On the plus side, I've been doing pretty good with making sure I find time for my other creative outlets. I've posted a couple of new poems over at the Dreamwidth site that are crossposting here (which btw, I don't think I've ever had someone *squee* at my poetry before, so thanks anagramofbrat!) and making sure I get at least something new done each day. It helps that I put my poetry notebook, my journal and my Wacom under my monitor shelf as a way to remind myself to pick them up now and again. Feels good to do that again.

In the meantime, I've been listening to a lot of college radio again. I know..."When are you not listening to that stuff?" Heh. Well, considering that a lot of my desk listening has been either the now-sadly-departed AOL Spinner or my mp3 collection (and occasionally Save Alternative or Radio BDC), I figured it was high time to start branching out again. This time out I've been listening to a lot of KSCU out of Santa Clara University, their playlist is definitely up my alley--lots of indie rock, indietronica, and alt-folk, with a smidge of electronica thrown in there. Just the right level of indie that's not too outsider (like KALX in Berkeley), or trying too hard to cover every single possible music genre (which is another post entirely). In a very eerie way, its playlist is quite similar to WAMH's playlist back in the day--a good mixture of sort-of-well-known alternative, local, and obscure. This is definitely a station for listening. That is, it feels like a station for people like me, who are listeners and not necessarily partiers or hipsters. Well--I could go on about this, but I'm thinking I may have another WiS post in my brain instead. Either way--great station to listen to, well worth checking out.


On that note...Monday beckons and I've got stuff to do these next few days, but hopefully I won't be as scarce as I have been. Hope everyone else has a spiffy week! :)

I was thinking of this track a few days ago, and it happened to pop up on VH1 Classic last weekend, so I thought it would go well here on the A to Z. This is a track I'd hear on WFNX in my early college days, knowing I'd heard it somewhere before but never remembering who it was, until I finally got around to downloading the album a few years back. I'm actually kind of surprised, given its catchy pop, that it didn't get airplay in the US when it came out in 1985.

Propaganda was a band under Trever Horn's ZZT label in the UK. But instead of being quirky and weird like labelmates Art of Noise, or flashy and over-the-top like Frankie Goes to Hollywood, they chose to go with a sleek, metropolitan sound, with a bit of Krautrock thrown in there for good measure. Their album A Secret Wish is considered a great piece of dancy synthpop that was unfortunately overshadowed (and delayed in release) by FGTH's ridiculously overblown Welcome to the Pleasuredome album. They had a few minor hits in the UK with the above track, as well as with "Dr. Mabuse" and "P:Machinery", released one further album (1234) in 1990), and pretty much dissolved. They've reunited here and there over the years, doing a few live shows and releasing a few compilations and reissues, but their discography is relatively small.


I think of radio shows whenever I hear this track. Aside from hearing it on WFNX (I believe it was one of Julie Kramer's favorites back in the day), I'd hear it now and again on WMDK in the afternoon, and I'd hear all kinds of stuff from the band on WAMH. During the 87-88 and 88-89 semesters they had an industrial show on Thursday nights. That's how I got to know all those bands like Ministry and Front 242, as well as the more leftfield EBM bands like A Split Second and Clock DVA. Propaganda fit somewhere in the middle there, based in electronic sound and quite danceable, but much less aggressive in their approach.

A lot of what I gravitated towards in those years between 1986-89 was from WAMH and WMDK, but there were definitely specific shows that grabbed my attention. I don't remember the deejay names on WMDK, but I know their morning show was quite excellent, as I would always listen to it while getting ready for school (I even remember it was the radio on my bureau that was tuned only to that station). In 1989 they would always play the Go-Betweens' "Streets of Your Town" every morning as a gentle wake-up tune.  They also had a great afternoon guy that loved to play Crowded House whenever he could.

But it was WAMH, especially my junior and senior years, that grabbed my attention the most. The one show in particular that made the biggest impression on me was Haphazard Radio, which I believe was on Thursday afternoons. I wish I could remember the student's name, but he was one of the best college deejays out there in my opinion. He had this low, laid back voice, a natural for the airwaves. He was knowledgeable and fascinated by the stuff he played, and gave out all kinds of trivia and news. His in-between banter wasn't childish or vapid (the bane of many a student deejay), but he wasn't above joking around if need be. He played everything out there, from the obscure local indie bands to the major-label alternative bands.  I picked up a lot of new bands from his show; I also stole the show's name when I had my own show on WECB at Emerson.

There was also the countdown show, The Potted Plant Countdown, which they played on Sunday nights for years--I think this current semester is the first time in ages where they don't have it scheduled. The name originated from one of their local sponsors, a plant nursery who would donate a small plant that would be given away at the end of the show (usually given away to some student who called in and answered a trivia question correctly or some such). If I missed any of the other shows that week for one reason or another, I'd be sure to catch the countdown on Sunday while doing my homework, so I'd be caught up with the latest alternative music.

There were other shows on WAMH, many of them having all sorts of silly or creative names (The Sewers of Rangoon and Hey Look At All Those Psychos! come to mind). Even these names were an inspiration for many of my later compilations...something different and deliberately uncommercial, maybe ultimately harmless and pointless, but sounded cool at the same time. For that brief time, I listened to as many shows as I could, made sure I was in my room and the radio was on when it started, a blank tape at the ready in case I needed to tape something. And it was the best time ever.

First off, I have to share this absolutely brilliant quote about from Bob Mould in his autobiography 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.

So! For your entertainment/perusal, here's a list of some of the books I've been using as reference so far, or at least have in my to-be-read pile:

Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991

Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor, Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day

Joshua Clover, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This To Sing About

Travis Elborough, The Vinyl Countdown: The Album from LP to iPod and Back Again

Josh Frank and Caryn Ganz, Fool the World: the oral history of a band called Pixies

John Harris, Britpop! Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock

Greg Kot, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music

CP Lee, Shake Rattle and Roll: Popular Music Making in Manchester, 1955-1995

Greil Marcus, Ranters & Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92

Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution (**currently reading)

Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

Brett Milano, The Sound of Our Town: a History of Boston Rock & Roll

Barry Miles, London Calling: A Countercultural History of London Since 1945

Bob Mould, See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody

Richard Neer, FM: the Rise and Fall of Rock Radio (**a big influence/inspiration for this project)

Michael Plumides Jr. and Virginia Saunders, Kill the Music: The chronicle of a college radio idealist's rock and roll rebellion in an era of intrusive morality and censorship

Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past

Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (**this one's a HUGE help, and highly suggested**)

Simon Reynolds, Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews

Samuel Sauls, The Culture of American College Radio

Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond

John Sellers, Perfect from Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life

Christopher Sterling and Michael Keith, Sounds of Change: A History of FM Broadcasting in America

Neil Taylor, Document and Eyewitness: An Intimate History of Rough Trade

Jesse Walker, Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America

I know there are a hell of a lot more books out there I could be referencing (and if you have any suggestions, by all means let me know by commenting here or emailing me (joncwriter at yahoo dot com)...if I'm gonna do my homework on this, I'm gonna do it right!


On the music side of things...

I've been acquiring a lot of mp3s of music from the 1983-1989 era, thanks to eMusic and elsewhere, just to refamiliarize myself with the sound. It's really interesting to hear this stuff within the context of its time. I'm doing this in a few ways--listening to other albums/songs that were released around the same date (thank you, MediaMonkey, for having an awesome tagging feature!), reading histories of what was going on at the time (thank you, Wikipedia time lines, for making it easier to reference!), and remembering what I was doing personally at the time (thank you, weird habit of dating my writing sessions!). I've gathered quite a few albums and tracks, but I know it's still far from complete.

Which of course, means that if you have any suggestions for bands/albums/sounds that I should know about, again--comment here or email me!

I'll most likely be posting more about this later this weekend, but thought I'd share what I've been working on so far. It's been a lot of fun researching this...I've never written a nonfiction book before, never had a reason to do so in the past, but for those who know me, this one's coming from the heart and it's been great so far.

[This is a sorta-crossposted shoutout I originally posted on Facebook. This is the longer LJ version that goes into further detail, which will also be x-posted to FB, so sorry to the FBers who are seeing this twice.]

I'm in the midst of research for a non-fic book called Walk In Silence about 80s college radio (rough timeline, 1982-1991...basically post-New Wave to pre-Grunge)--the genre/era that would become today's alt.rock that we all know and love. I posted notes and ideas about this project here awhile back, but the main objective here is that I wanted to write a non-fic book about the era of alternative rock that changed my life and became an obsession, and how it came about, and how it influenced others, and how it's changed over the years.

At this point I've got quite a few short snippets of memories and history on hand that I could build upon, but most of them are pretty much from my own point of view. What I'd like to do is get some other people's ideas, memories, and thoughts, and compare how this music genre affected others aside from myself. I would also like to get a decent grasp on the history of the genre as well as the mindset of the time. That will most likely be my heaviest bit of research to be done.

I want to avoid writing too much about the "scenes" (that is, place-specific music scenes like New York, Boston, Seattle, etc., as well as subgenre-specific, such as goth/hipster/indie/etc.)--there are quite a few books on them out there already. This is more along the lines of a Nick Hornby/Rob Sheffield/John Sellers type of book.

Would anyone be interested in being interviewed about it (their knowledge, love of it, memories of it, how it changed their lives, etc), or perhaps know of college radio djs of that era as well that could supply radio-centric history/info? If anything, I would be emailing you a short(-ish) questionnaire regarding on how you came upon this genre, favorite bands, fond memories of songs/albums/etc., things like that. I may follow up with other questions, but for now I'll keep the questions and things relatively short and easy.

If anyone's interested, or know of anyone who would be interested, please let me know by commenting here or dropping me an email at joncwriter (at) yahoo (dot) com.


Thanks!

(Why yes, I did just make an obscure Jesus Jones reference! Fitting, since music is pretty much still an addiction and an obsession for me... :p )

I'm starting this a little late for today, but I'm thinking this might be a fun thing to do in the background on the days I work from home. It will also keep me from being too distracted by other things when I should actually be working. ;)

What is this project, you ask? Another project, you say? Isn't he actually supposed to be doing some writing or something like that, when he's not actually working? *ahem* :p

Anyway, this project is something I've been wanting to do for years now, but never got around to it. What I've done is connect an old Walkman via a line-in to the back of my computer, and booted up the WavePad Sound Editor I have, so I can do a straight tape-to-PC mp3 of the radio tapes I made ages ago. A lot of these tapes are a good twenty-plus years old, and I figure getting them digitized before they disintegrate on me would probably be a good idea, especially since I really enjoyed listening to them back in the day (hell, a lot of them inspired me as well as my writing then and shaped who I am now).

I know this is an easy project for me to deal with because I don't actually need to listen to them while they're being recorded onto my hard drive. I did the same with the Flying Bohemian tapes a few years back (hell--I still need to do a bit of editing and mixing and post some songs! I completely forgot!!), and it they came out pretty decent for the most part.

Of course, listening to these tapes will most likely inspire me to write a RTS (or worse, extend on a Radio Radio chapter :p ), so you were warned ahead of time.