It’s early fall of 1992, my junior year of high school, and I’m sitting in a movie theatre in a mall downtown (movie theatre! mall! downtown!) watching the opening credits of a movie roll when the music starts: three chords, loud but slow, then a chord up, louder and faster, and then the vocal, rough but boppy, infectious. Ah hah hah….
This, I think, this is my music.1 Of course I know this is my music being ripped off, my music selling out (in one of a slew of movies from that time at least in part about selling out), but I have to say, I still love the soundtrack to Singles. And at that moment, sitting in that movie theatre, I was listening to my music—the music that played on the radio in my car, in the boombox in my room, in my head as I walked through the halls of my high school. The radio I listened to then was KRUI, your sound alternative.
College radio was the soundtrack of my 1990s, my high school and college years. It wasn’t the weekend till the guys on Relapse spun “Bang the Drum All Day”2 on KRUI. They specialized in terrible '80s music from 3-5 pm on Friday afternoons—the sort of terrible '80s music people my age now all get up and dance to.3 I remember someone once called in with a request for “Burning Down the House.”
“So we’d play that,” said one of the hosts, “but it’s actually good music, and we don’t play good music on this show.”
The rest of the KRUI lineup was dedicated to good music, or what college students thought of as good music at the time (and there are no snobs quite like college radio DJ snobs). I listened to what they played. I listened hard, listened lying on my bed or on the floor, listened driving my car, listened on my Walkman on the bus. I have multiple tapes I recorded from the radio back then—all of Frank Black’s first post-Pixies album, some Primus release or other, and a block of Pixies songs I got by request because I called in to help the DJ’s younger brother with his physics homework. That show was all blocks—three or four or five songs in a row all from one band—and I got to request my favorite for, as the DJ said on air, “solving the physics problem.”
Here’s twelve minutes of The Pixies (and some banter) from KRUI in 1993, including thanks to yours truly. Here’s how I did my physics homework: sitting on my bedroom floor, listening to the radio. The sound quality is even worse than the levels on the radio show I eventually hosted, but that’s what you get with a tape played in a secondhand Walkman connected to an upcycled PC and using Audacity for the first time.
A few years later I went from consumer to producer, migrating from KRUI all the way to New York state and WVKR, 15,000 watts of tea and crumpets, as a tshirt from that time put it.4 Because I watched all the sellout movies of the ‘90s, I desperately wanted to be a DJ so that I too could instruct my classmates to eat their cereal with a fork and do their homework in the dark. I went to a big meeting for prospective DJs, where the intimidating general manager and even more intimidating music director talked about what we’d need to do to get a slot. This was alternative radio, although by 1994 “alternative” was a sellout term, so they probably didn’t say that. “So you can play Pavement,” they said, “but you can’t play ‘Cut Your Hair.’ Or maybe you can play ‘Cut Your Hair,’ but not, like, more than once a semester.” I wasn’t too worried about that—I wasn’t even sure I knew “Cut Your Hair,” though when I finally heard it I recognized the title line. Back then you couldn’t just look up any song you wanted. You had to wait around.
I put my demo together in Studio B. As with shows, you had to use a combination of songs from the playlist—a bin of CDs and 7”s chosen by the music director and the people who showed up for meetings and reviewed tracks—and songs of your own choice. I might still have a copy of that tape somewhere, but I’ve long since forgotten what was on it. A Pixies track, I’m sure. Memory has dredged up the Circle Jerks, but the internet tells me they didn’t have anything out that year. I was chosen as a substitue DJ my freshman year; sophomore year I got my own show—and I discovered that I liked the idea of playing music and talking to people much more than I liked the actuality of cuing up records (and for awhile the studio’s equipment was so busted that we had only two turntables to work with) and talking into the void.
The car I drive now when I need to drive a car is slowly disintegrating, as things do, and among the things that don’t work is the aux plugin. And how, I asked myself the other day, can one listen to music without one’s phone? Then I remembered the radio. I scanned through the stations. Around the middle of the dial the mainstream rock station from my high school years is now a “classic rock” station—meaning it plays exactly the same music now that it did then. Pearl Jam is now classic, along with the Rolling Stones. As you move up, you get country stations and then some pop. The lower end is packed with public radio—in some parts of town you can pick up four different public radio stations. Sometimes I listen to one of the music-oriented ones (it’s kind of The World Cafe most of the time), and it’s good, but it’s somehow too polished—the DJs are too smooth, the sets are too set. But nestled in there is KRUI, 89.7 FM. I landed there and listened. There was something clanging, and then a lo-fi number I immediately fell for—I looked it up as soon as I got home. These days you can look things up—you don’t have to call the station and hope someone answers.
In the days since I’ve listened some more. I’ve heard indie pop (“tra la la with pretty guitars,” according to the WVKR general manager), electronica (I confess I don’t linger on that), indie rock (“rah rah rah with angry guitars), and genres I can’t even identify. The other day I caught a show that was doing a history of guitars in rock music (I learned a lot, though I was tempted to call the host and say, “actually, Elvis did mostly covers, not just a lot”). They still play PSAs by the Ad Council—I heard one recently about drunk driving that was almost like the old days except for the conceit that you didn’t want to drive tipsy, get arrested, and have to have on your online dating profile that you lived at home (presumably due to the whole drunk driving charge situation?). But above all I’ve heard voices—voices that picked the music, this music, because it said something to them, because it didn’t sound like anything else out there, because it seemed like the right thing to play on a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon.
Awhile ago my acquaintance Kembrew McLeod released a playlist of 1980s college radio. Played on shuffle, it does feel almost like that, and I’ve spent quite a few hours with it. It’s good stuff (if you listened back then, I bet you’ll like it), but it’s not live radio. Nothing but live radio is live radio, and I will always love it best.
I come from the very tail end of GenX, which makes me inherently not cool. I’ve gotten over it. You probably can too. Or not. Whatever, nevermind. I wasn’t old enough or cool enough to see Nirvana when they played Gabe’s on the Bleach tour.
Not all that alternative, as it turns out, but I didn’t know that at the time.
Come on Eileen, I swear what I mean / At this moment, you mean everything to me. What, I wonder now, does Eileen mean at the other moments? But I’ll still dance to that song. For some definitions of dance.
Somewhere, perhaps, I still have the tshirt from the signal boost music festival held my freshman year, a relic I wish I still had. The Magnetic Fields played, or maybe they were supposed to and cancelled? In fact I had not heard of the Magnetic Fields in 1994, but I want to pretend I did. You know, so I can be cool.