The Radio.biz Music Blog – Entry #2
People talk a lot about something being “life-changing.” Often, it’s something that happens, giving them a different perspective on something. Very rarely does it actually change their life.
But music can change your life. And one band, in particular, did it for me.
I remember it like it was yesterday. My best friend Joe came over to my house, like he did a lot in high school. He lived out in the country, and I lived in the suburbs closer to town. On his way to my house, he sometimes stopped to look through the record bins at Gold Circle, a now-defunct discount department store, and the one near my house was across the highway from Kmart, another now-defunct discount department store. On this particular visit to one of the now-defunct department stores and his subsequent journey to my house, he had with him the album that would change my life most profoundly. You see, on this particular visit, he had Chronic Town, R.E.M.’s debut EP from 1982 with him. (Editor’s note: Joe remembers that it was R.E.M.’s Murmur album, their 1983 full-length record, but I remember that it was Chronic Town. Either way, it was R.E.M., and it changed my life.)
I can still remember placing the needle on the record and hearing the opening guitar chord of “Wolves, Lower.”
I would never be the same again.
I grew up on classic rock. The typical stuff that any kid growing up in a beige suburb of a small Midwestern city would listen to. Led Zeppelin. The Kinks. The Who. The Rolling Stones. And then The Cars, The Police. Other bands that started with The. And, oh yeah, The Beatles.
But all this music seemed like music from a prior generation. We didn’t really think in terms of generations back in the 70s and 80s. The term “Gen X” didn’t come around until the Canadian author Douglas Coupland used it in an article for Vancouver Magazine in 1987. And, I certainly didn’t think of myself as being in Gen X until much, much later.
But here I was in 1982 or 1983 listening to this band that called themselves R.E.M. and had this gargoyle on the cover of their record playing guitar as I’ve never heard before. Dave Davies didn’t play like that. Elliot Easton didn’t play like that. John and George didn’t play like that.
And what was this guy singing?
I listened closer to “Wolves, Lower.” The vocals started. “Suspicion yourself, suspicion yourself. Don’t get caught?” Is that what he was saying? “Here’s a house to put wolves at the door.” What did that mean? And why was the song called “Wolves, Lower?” Why wasn’t it “Lower Wolves?”
And I haven’t even mentioned what the rhythm section was doing with that great bass line and driving drums.
I wanted more.
Track 2 – Gardening At Night
Again, what was he singing about? How could you garden at night?
And that guitar. It’s so “jangly.” Is that a term yet? No, but soon this would be known as the “Jangle Pop” movement.
Joe and I played guitar. But up to this point, we were just trying to learn songs like Boston’s “More Than A Feeling.”
Maybe the most “alternative” song that I asked my guitar teacher, George, to teach me how to play up to that point was “One Thing Leads To Another” by The Fixx. Joe, by the way, kinda had a haircut like Cy Curnin, the lead singer of The Fixx, but that’s another story for another time.
But all of these songs and all of these bands that I’ve mentioned so far have one thing in common. They all got played on the radio stations that I could hear in my small Midwestern town in the 70s and 80s. I didn’t have a cool college station that I could tune into. I could pick up some stations out of Cleveland, but mostly that was stations like 100.7 WMMS, known affectionately as “The Buzzard.” And WMMS sure as hell wasn’t playing a band like R.E.M.
The first side, which is called “Chronic Town,” ends with “Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars).”
Again, what?
In this song, Michael actually sings “Chronic Town.” Is this the “title track?”
The second side, called “Poster Torn,” begins with the jangliest of jangle pop, a song called “1,000,000.”
Michael sings, “I could live a million years.”
And, the EP closes with the arpeggiating “Stumble.”
I think the thing that hit me the hardest after hearing this record was that it was unlike anything that I had ever heard on the radio. The radio stations that I listened to didn’t play anything like this. I think the most alternative stuff that I can remember hearing on the radio in my high school years was the band, The Call.
It would be years later before I would listen to, and be a part of, college radio and hear artists like R.E.M. After that, a whole new world would open up to me with bands like The Replacements, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Prefab Sprout, and Skinny Puppy.
What band or album changed your life?
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