[for the soundtrack to this post, you have two options:
1. If it’s before 11pm ET Sunday March 25th, then listen to the mp3 archive of Jon’s show, then jump ahead to the 3rd item in the playlist (the Sun2300.mp3 file), then fast forward 2m45s. Alternatively, download the last hour of the show via this and this direct link to the 30 minute mp3 chunks. That’s not the BoS album I’m writing about, since Jon played a later album, but it’s close enough.
2. Play these four videos from Youtube, but realize that until today I hadn’t seen those and I’m not really writing about the videos, I’m writing about a band and how they fit into my life years ago.
3. Go to this apparent BoS Myspace page and, after the page loads, click on the song titles in the player section in the upper right corner. Still not Love Agenda, but eh you get the gist of it. Ah, Web 2.0.]
Jon Kincaid’s Personality Crisis (also blog) is one of a handful of weekly WREK shows that I keep up with religiously. On the third Sunday of the month he closes the 2-hour show with an album in its entirety. Classic in Jon’s context means a seminal punk / no-wave / new-wave recording, typically from the 80s or maybe the late 70s. Past artists have included Green On Red, The Pretenders, Meat Puppets, etc.
So last Sunday he launches into the album (never preannounced, you just need to figure it out) and I immediately recognize the sound. That unmistakable roar of Fender guitars and sinewy bass lines. Band Of Susans!
It was a real shock to hear an old Band Of Susans record featured by Jon. I mean, I didn’t think that they were that important to rock music in general, although they certainly were important to me. Let’s fire up the old wayback machine, shall we?
I spent the last couple years of high school and the first year or so of college burning through the classic rock catalog. There’s all that data that any classic rock nerd is supposed to know, and I was just absorbing it all. Just the usual AOR crap, memorizing the output of Led Zep, AC/DC, The Police, Guns ‘N Roses, etc. and hearing all the stories (possibly apocryphal) about the rockstar antics of the aforementioned. Just nothing really interesting or threatening, but I think you do need to get through it to understand where the whole corporate radio machine stands so you can start to recognize what they’re leaving out (which is 99% of everything) and move on from there.
Don’t get me wrong, I still find myself entertained by a lot of that crap nowadays, but now it’s less of the aforementioned bands and more of T Rex, Blue Cheer, Cheap Trick, early Black Sabbath, etc.
So, anyway, by the 2nd year of college I’d bored of 96 Rock and moved on to dabbling in “college rock”. R.E.M., The Church, Concrete Blonde, Let’s Active, all fairly interesting to me at the time. So basically at this point I was plowing through the WRAS playlist, and that lasted about 6 months. I started to recognize that the WRAS DJs actually had less of a clue than me, and those little bonmots of info they had for each record (“the Sisters Of Mercy were formed by former members of the Mission”) were just being read off a little index card. Well, shit, I can do that, so in late 1988 I wandered into the studio of WREK and signed up for their little training. A few lazy months later, after some training sessions with Beth Stettler (who to my newly refined counterculture eyes was the cutest chick ever) I was suddenly on the air.
At WREK that means that you get to play pretty much whatever you want BUT you only get to select from the records that have been “programmed”, meaning preselected by some folks at WREK who have a musical clue. And right off the bat, my favorite band was Band Of Susans. To my male cockrock ears, those roaring guitars were just the most accessible. I made a cassette tape of that album, Love Agenda, put Steve Tibbets on the other side, and pretty much played that cassette over and over for about a year (the previous resident in the tape player probably having been my Rush tape, “Moving Pictures” or “Signals” or some such). You know how you’re so familiar with an album that you know what song’s next and start humming the opening notes in anticipation? Love Agenda was that album for me in 1989. From the ominous bass line in “Pursuit Of Happiness” that opens the album, to the chiming chords of “Tourniquet”, that album has some neural networks dedicated to it in my head somewhere.
I don’t really know much of their later albums, although the album that Jon played (“The Word And The Flesh”) sounded familiar enough to my ears. That’s the thing about working at WREK, or really any college radio station with a similar mission: you just find yourself suddenly confronted with this huge world of music that you didn’t know existed, and new music that is the greatest thing you’ve ever heard is quickly eclipsed by even more greatness.
Haven’t listened to them in many years, and I couldn’t find the cassette this week, so I must have thrown it out in a cleaning fit. Here’s to Poss and Stenger et al, I hope they’re doing well these days.