Drunken Owls and Other Delights

[Note: This year's A to Z Challenge will continue last year's theme of music, though this time I'll be expanding on it by tying it in with my ongoing Walk in Silence project as well. This means that I'll be posting various songs that tie in with 80s college radio as well as songs that have affected me personally in one way or another. Hope you enjoy!]



The Cure's "A Forest" was one of the songs played the night I discovered college radio in late April of 1986. I've already touched on that evening, so I'll expand a little further on what happened afterwards...

I was still looking for jazz down on the low end of the dial at that time, but after that night, if it came in, I'd look for that station (WMUA, UMass Amherst) and see what they played. Sometimes they played more stuff that sounded neat, other times they played stuff that I just couldn't get into, depending on who was deejaying that night. I also figured there would be a possibility that the station would go off the air come May, when school let out. Since it was so late in the semester, I figured I'd listen to it when I could, write down a few things they played, and go from there.

This is when I found a copy of Ira Robbins' Trouser Press Record Guide at my local library (they're still going strong online here if you're curious), which helped open me up to all sorts of other alternative bands. Since The Cure was a band I'd heard of before that night in April (I remembered seeing the video for "Let's Go to Bed" way back in the early days of MTV), I chose them as the first alternative band to follow. As it so happened, they were releasing a compilation that May (Standing on a Beach - the Singles), in which the cassette version contained a handful of rare b-sides, so I jumped on that album as soon as it was released. And thanks to the Trouser Press book, I knew which further Cure albums to look for. The next purchase I'd make would be the ...Happily Ever After cassette, which was their second and third albums (Seventeen Seconds which featured the full version of "A Forest", and Faith) packaged together for the US Market. It took me a few years, but by 1988 I had the Cure's entire US discography in one format or another.  The Cure would remain one of my favorite alternative bands for quite a number of years, mostly due to the dark moodiness of their early albums up to and including Disintegration.  The dark atmosphere inspired many of the weirder scenes in my early writing attempts, and also inspired quite a few of my lyrics and poems around that time as well.

Meanwhile on the radio front, a new rock format was rising. At the time it was called "progressive" or "new music", stations with a small but significant reach (and mostly in the low 90s FM band) that had chosen to forgo the pop music formats and be more creative and adventurous with their music. There were two in my area at that time: WMDK 92.1 out of Peterborough NH (later to be taken over by alt.rock radio pioneer WFNX in the early 90s), and WRSI 93.9 out of Northampton (which featured Rachel Maddow at the time). These were the only commercial stations that played the more commercial-friendly modern rock of the time.  While they would play some of the more well-known bands such as INXS, REM and Crowded House, they were also playing lesser-known bands like the Smiths, the Cure, and Depeche Mode. Well--at least they were lesser-known bands by backwoods New Englander standards, because most of those bands were the darlings of college radio in that neck of the woods.  They were perfect stations for music fans like me, who needed a change from the increasingly-bland pop and rock being played out there.

During the summer of 1986 I was still listening to popular rock stations, but by the time autumn came around, I was ready for a new semester of college radio.

Here's the last wave of great tracks from one of my favorite years in alt.rock. Enjoy!

( Yet more tasty music goodness lies within )

This obscure little number is found at the end of Side 1 of Was (Not Was)' 1983 album Born to Laugh at Tornadoes. I'd never heard of the song until I heard PJ Harvey's version from the 1997 Lounge-a-Palooza compilation, but it's one of my favorite covers. It's a damn spooky song and it makes sense that Was (Not Was) got the Velvet Fog himself, Mel Torme, to sing it, as it sounds like one of those mood pieces he and Sinatra did so well back in the day. I do like how PJ Harvey was able to keep the torch sound in her version and also give it a trip-hop spin a la Portishead.

What--you were expecting some other song? ;)



I will say this--the movie is pretty painful to watch, not so much for the acting but that the dialogue is pretty horrid, mainly due to too many rewrites. It's a film out of time--it's a pretty decent old school "let's put on a show in the barn" musical mashed up with a roller disco theme (it was also inspired by the 1947 Rita Hayworth movie Down to Earth).

On the plus side?

--Gene Kelly hoofing it.
--Electric Light Orchestra.
--The Tubes!
--Don Bluth cartoon sequence.
--I first learned about the nine muses of Greek mythology in this movie.
--I learned the name came from not Citizen Kane but a Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem.
--I learned about how album covers are made and how they can be reproduced for sales purposes.
--It's actually a pretty decent soundtrack.

I just remembered that I'd wanted to use this song for the letter T, so I'm adding it here. This is a 1993 acoustic version of the original 1974 single.

Sparks is one of those bands that you know about but you're not sure if you actually know anything by them. If anything, you may remember "Cool Places", a song from their 1983 album In Outer Space, which had Jane Wiedlin from the Go-Gos sharing vocals. Or lacking that, you might recognize the band as the two Mael brothers--the pretty-boy singer Russell and the weird-looking, pencil-mustachioed keyboardist Ron--and their quirky videos in the early days of MTV.

I never really paid too much attention to them until just recently when I saw the above video on YouTube. I was familiar with the song through the Siouxsie & the Banshees cover from 1987's Through the Looking Glass. After that I started downloading more of their earlier albums, and I'm glad to say I'm quite happy I did--they're extremely odd, but they're damn fine songwriters and a lot of fun to listen to.

(time to catch up on my meme here...)



A track from Sing-Sing's first album that came out in 2002. A project created by ex-Lush guitarist/lyricist Emma Anderson, it only lasted for just shy of ten years (disbanding in 2008) and released just two albums and a handful of singles. One of my favorite tracks of that summer, it featured on two of my compilations and was definitely on heavy rotation.

I've said this many times before...I loves me some Hooverphonic. Blue Wonder Power Milk is one of my go-to albums during writing sessions. "Renaissance Affair" wasn't a single, but it was used in a handful of commercials like the VW Vapor in 2006. This one came out while I was working at the HMV in Solomon Pond Mall, and you'd hear me playing this one in the back room constantly (along with Dishwalla's And You Think You Know What Life's About, which came out on the same day). There were a lot of good releases out in 1998, and that was also a good year for creativity for me. I was headlong into writing The Phoenix Effect at that time, and experiencing a resurgence in my poetry as well. I'd pretty much gotten past the frustration of the 1995-96 failures and setbacks and was aiming forward at this point. I was also taking quite a few roadtrips across the state, both to comic stores and to various Boston hangouts. It was a good year for me.

Most people know The Verve Pipe for their track "The Freshmen" and not much else, but their Villains album was in heavy rotation on my cd player in the spring of 1996 when it came out. I've always felt that the other three singles from the album--"Cup of Tea", "Photograph", and the title song--were much stronger tracks than the one that ended up being the major hit (a song I tend to call "one of those Dawson's Creek type of tracks" because it has that high school melodrama feel).

The spring of 1996 was a major shift for my life. I'd moved back home with my parents a few months previous in August of 1995 and trudged my way through the rest of that year by working at various places like the Leominster Sony Theater and then at WCAT. Around that time I also started hanging out with Kris, one of my friends from high school. She and I were in the same boat, stuck in a small town and feeling aimless, so we got each other through the doledrums by hanging out, going to shows and going on road trips. Our lives were so pathetic that on New Year's Eve of 1995 into 1996, we went to see Jumanji in the theater and hung out at a friend's house playing pool...and none of us noticed the clock passing midnight until at least a half hour later. We all decided right then that 1995 truly did suck ass on multiple levels, and promised ourselves that 1996 would be infinitely better.

Kris and I spent a good amount of time listening to this album and others (mostly Spacehog's Resident Alien, Ben Folds Five's self-titled debut, and Radiohead's The Bends) on our rides through New England. We took trips to Northampton and Amherst, up to Keene, and sometimes even out to Salem. Eventually she moved out of town and we lost touch for a number of years, but we both moved on and moved ahead. By the end of 1996 I'd been hired by HMV, owned my first car, and began writing The Phoenix Effect. It would be another eight years before I too moved out, but I was at least moving in the right direction.

This was an interesting time for alternative rock...it had finally broken through into the mainstream just a few years previous with grunge and so on, and now all the more radio-friendly alt-rock bands came out of the woodwork: Sophie B Hawkins, Sarah McLachlan, Third Eye Blind, and so on. These songs would show up on those 90s shows like Dawson's Creek and Felicity as mood music for a melodramatic scene, and they'd end up on the charts. "The Freshmen", a track that was actually much older than the album (it had showed up in a rougher form on a 1992 EP), got major airplay because of those shows.

I for one didn't really mind the selling-out of alternative rock, as there was quite a lot of it out there that still wasn't getting played on the radio. Other alt.rock fans out there hated it, of course, and considered that the genre had sold out. By the last 90s it had faded back into semi-obscurity to be overtaken by rap-metal, Girl Power, and boy bands, but it left its mark. You can still hear elements of alt.rock in the rock music of today.

Michael Penn's debut album March came out in the first week of September of 1989, just as I was heading off to college. I'd been looking forward to going to Emerson for most of that year. Part of it was because it was a Massachusetts school that focused on mass communications (at least much more so than some of the other colleges I'd been checking out. Part of it was that I wasn't just escaping the small town I'd grown up in...I was heading to The Big City. Mainly, it was for me to make my attempt at a writer, possibly a filmmaker, possibly a musician, in this place.

I won't say I failed miserably, nor will I say that I was a smashing success...but it was definitely a learning experience. There are still some events that took place back in 1989-1995 that I'm finally coming to terms with, or putting into perspective to learn from them, and that's twenty years ago. Most importantly, what I see now that I didn't see clearly then was that I'd avoided a hell of a lot back then. What if I'd stood up to my roommate that pissed me off so much? What if I'd broken it off with T instead of dragging it on for close to four years? What if I'd just said no instead of letting JA be such a bad influence on me? What if I'd stopped feeling so damn sorry for myself because I couldn't find friends like the ones I'd had my junior year in high school? What if I'd transferred to UMass Amherst instead if I felt so damn out of place?

What if I were Romeo in black jeans, indeed.

But that was then. I've gotten over all those what-ifs and moved on. I actually learned quite a bit in college, despite my less than stellar grades. I still can't speak a sentence of French without making a fool of myself, but I can pick up a lot of a conversation. I might not be a filmmaker, but I learned out to have an eye for visual cues and how to tell a story. I might not be a musician--at least not in the way I'd envisioned--but I was in two bands and have over a dozen tapes and at least 30 or so songs under my belt, and recording digitally is something I can do on my own at any time now.

It took me a long time to get over moving away from Boston in 1995. I was so damn angry, mainly at myself. For not doing the best I could. For being such a pushover. For being so easily influenced by things and people. I was pretty much starting over from scratch.

On the other hand, I faced my fears and failures directly. I would make visits to Boston on an almost monthly basis, right about the same time I was working at the bank and was about to start working at HMV. I'd stop by all my old haunts: the new and used record stores, the old dormitories, the apartments, the restaurants and parks. I'd get a little nostalgic, sure, but it was part of my healing process--that I could still face all my old haunts without feeling like an idiot that I was no longer living there. Especially when all the Emerson buildings I knew ended up being sold while the campus moved to the corner of Boylston and Tremont.

The last time I spent any significant time in the Boston area was with emmalyon when we stayed at a hotel near the Boston Garden in 2005. Things had definitely changed, even then, with a number of buildings gone or remodeled, stores closed, and so on. It's no longer the Boston I lived in, but that's a good thing. It's been long enough that it's like visiting a new area for me again. I'm seeing new things, remembering old things, and having a lot of fun doing it.

I'm very choosy when it comes to mashups...but CCC is by far my favorite of the mixers, because he's absolutely brilliant. His forte tends to be mashing up Beatles songs, and he does it REALLY well, such as the above, which is my favorite mix of his. The main music track is Ride's "Leave You All Behind", the vocals are the Beatles' "Anna (Go to Him)", and in the long coda of the song he even throws in the guitar solo to The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" and the Beatles' "Hey Bulldog".