Time & Place
 

Introduction

As you can see, I've decided to start a new journal. I'm not abandoning my old one by any means. This one has a completely different focus so I plan on working on both at the same time. When I'm not in the mood to work on my countdown, I'll work on this. When I'm not in the mood to work on this, I'll work on my countdown.

The genesis of this journal was seeing Urban complain about the fact that most everyone uses their journal to write album reviews. Since I myself was one of the guilty parties, I started wondering what the hell I'd write about if I wasn't writing little reviews. After a lot of pondering, I decided to basically try and write an ongoing music column, but not just an open-ended music column, I wanted to write a column with a specific focus. The focus I've chosen, as you can see from the title, is music as it relates to time and place. Hopefully I can keep this going for a long time. I have a pretty long list of ideas and I've already started working on a few so the outlook seems good.

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Grandpa Liked to Party Too:
The Golden Age of Mento

Here's an interesting piece of information you may not be aware of: this winter marks the sixtieth anniversary of the first recording facilities in Jamaica. It's hard to imagine these days that there was a time when that island, which is now easily the largest per-capita music-producing nation on the planet, was exporting no music at all, but prior to the early fifties that's how it was. That studio, such as it was, was primitive to say the least. Constructed by Stanley Motta, a department store owner who came from a family of Sephardi Jews who had been in Jamaica since the Spanish occupation, the studio was a single tiny room in the back of a woodworking factory with some soundproofing boards on the ceiling and a single microphone. There was no overdubbing, everybody in the band had to cram into that little space and play live. There was no mixing of any kind either, just a volume knob on the cutting machine. The finished acetate lacquers were shipped off to London to be pressed to shellac 78rpm singles by Decca and then sent back to Jamaica to be sold at Mr. Motta's store.

Though MRS (Motta's Recording Studio) would close its doors after a mere six years, it can't be denied that it started something huge. From this humble starting point, the Jamaican music industry would slowly explode over the next few decades, and the style of music that it would start with was mento. It's, of course, not the first music to come from Jamaica. The island has a rich musical tradition going back centuries and consisting of everything from African-derived Anancy stories to choirs to jazz to children's ring tunes. But in the early twentieth century, a style of music began to evolve in rural areas which occupied a social niche similar to the one held by the blues in the United States. Rough edged and often bawdy, it was known to the locals as country music, but as it slowly metamorphosed and made its way into the cities it came to be known as mento. The instrumentation varied somewhat but often included the guitar, banjo, rhumba box (a sort of giant thumb piano), bamboo sax and hand drums. It was this music that Mr. Motta heard around him in Kingston and decided he wanted to capture.

The first ever recording at MRS was medley of mento songs performed by one Rupert Lyon, better known as Lord Fly. There was a lot of nobility in the world of mento at that time—Lord Flea, Lord Lebby, Lord Messam, Count Sticky, Count Lasher, the list goes on and on—and Mr. Motta recorded many of them. As the popularity of these 78s grew, MRS began to expand it's market by selling compilation albums. These records were labeled "Authentic Jamaican Calypsos" in an attempt cash in on the popularity of actual calypso music, a style from Trinidad with a much more pronounced latin influence than mento. Resulting genre name confusion notwithstanding, mento soon found an audience among foreigners, culminating in the release of Jamaican-American singer Harry Belafonte's inaccurately titled album Calypso, which is one of the best-selling albums of all time in the United States to this day. Business was booming. A major mento compilation was released in the UK on London Records. Several mento artists were signed to major American record labels such as Electra and Capitol, though always marketed as "calypso". Lord Flea even ended up in Hollywood, appearing in a couple of movies as well as on American TV.

In the end, like all styles, mento's popularity began to fade, largely due to the increasing profile of R&B in the late fifties, but it will forever be the music that gave birth to the Jamaican recording industry. Its reach can be felt in ska, rocksteady, reggae and beyond. And it's far from dead. Though its golden age is long past, it can still be heard in its home country, mostly in tourist areas and mostly in its tamer forms, but nevertheless it's there.

Now for your listening pleasure...

"Blu Lu Lup"—Lord Fly


"Naughty Little Flea"—Lord Flea


"Night Food"—Bedasse with Calypso Quintet
(this is a pretty funny little R-rated story if you pay close attention to the lyrics)

Heh. Try to contain yourselves, people.

Great post! I really like your other blog too, so I'm excited to see what you'll be putting in here. :)

An interesting glance at a style of music I've never really explored beyond a Harry Belafonte best of record. Thanks for the write-up :)

I really like that first track. This is a genre I know absolutely nothing about, but you can really tell how it could be a big influence on other genres just from the songs you posted. Also interesting to see how it was marketed sort of similar to Motown at the same time.

Thanks guys! I appreciate the positive feedback. :)

Earlier today I came across this little article that you might get a kick out of. There isn't really much to it, but I thought it was funny to learn that the song "Night Food" that I posted the video for above was denounced on the floor of parliament back in 1959 on "moral grounds".

Great stuff Jans! :D I did reviews for awhile and hated it. It felt like homework. Ever since then I decided to just keep it all as random as I felt like.

I'm digging this and looking forward to more. Curious now though, is there any connection between Jamaican Mento music and Cajun Zydeco? The instrumentation is a bit different but there are some stylistic and rhythmic similarities.

Thanks man! :)

I haven't specifically heard that but I wouldn't be surprised. Jamaica and Louisiana are places with major ports not all that far from each other. And Jamaican music was certainly influenced by other Louisiana exports such as jazz.

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Italian Noise Circa Now

Piedmont, as I've recently learned, is one of the twenty regions of Italy, far up in the northwestern reaches of the country, nestled in between France and Switzerland. The name comes from the medieval Latin a pedem montium, literally "at the foot of the mountains", and that's no joke—the Alps surround the region on three sides. Maybe it's the majestic landscape that inspires people in this area to create such goddamn phenomenal music.

Now, to be clear, I intend to write about amazing, unusual, current Italian music in general here, and there are some examples from outside of Piedmont. Genoan Godfleshy/prog hybrid band Vanessa Van Basten would be one of them. Aggro free jazz Jooklo Duo—who, according to every bit of information I've ever been able to dig up, are simply from "Italy"—might very well be another. I would have assumed initially that a discussion about the cutting-edge music of Italy would focus mostly on that nation's largest city, Rome, but interestingly that isn't quite the case. Not to say there isn't some great stuff coming out of Rome, because there most assuredly is. Take Zu for example. You've probably heard of them. Instrumental drums/sax/upright bass trio on Ipecac Records who play some kind of John Zorn infused post-punkish hardcore jazz metal. Simply put: they're great. I'm sure you knew that. But did you also know they have a more electronic four piece side project called Black Engine who are even better? I bet you didn't know that.

Let's talk about Luca T. Mai for a moment. Here is one busy ass musician. Not only is he the stunningly talented saxophone player in Zu, able to make his horn sound like a wall of guitar noise at will; not only does he also record as part of the aforementioned Black Engine; not only is he a talented jazz musician who plays in backing bands for a variety of artists; but he's even able to take time out of his hectic schedule to help string together my fragmented narrative by being the sax player for Piedmont-based oddball grindcore/powerviolence/jazz/experimental band Psychofagist, who also happen to be one of the greatest bands on earth at the moment. That's a fact.

So now we're back up in Piedmont. At the core of the region's generally noisy and off-kilter music scene there is a record label called Supernatural Cat, founded by the members of the astonishing drone/doom/pychedelic/space rock trio Ufomammut (check out my review of their album Idolum here) and Malleus, a visual artists' cooperative that involves some or all of the members of the aforementioned band (see artwork above). On this label are a small number of artists, all of whom are, at the very least, really, really good. At the top of the pile is, of course, Ufomammut and their consistently awesome (to use the word in its original sense) discography. Also worthy of special note is Morkobot, a bass/bass/drums instrumental trio that is heavy as hell, often groovy as hell, and frankly sounds like no one else I've ever heard in my life. And then there's the hardcore-with-a-slight-dash-of-electropop of Incoming Cerebral Overdrive, the weirdo minimalistic sludge of OvO, the one-off experimentalism of Farwest Zombee and the post-metal/hardcore of Lento—who are actually from Rome but they recorded a whole album with Ufomammut so we won't hold that against them.

The remainder of the Piedmont music scene outside of the Supernatural Cat roster is made up of a motley array of bands. Bachi da Pietra is one of the standouts. Featuring Bruno Dorella of OvO, this duo plays a style of subdued, David Lynchian minimalistic rock music that is nevertheless oddly doomy. And speaking of doom, let's not forget Dead Elephant, whose sprawling art doom compositions occupy a somewhat similar territory to Ufomammut. One other unusual Piedmond group out there who don't really fit in with the rest are Uochi Toki, a quirky hip hop act that could best be described as the Italian answer to Anticon.

So what's the story with Italy? It's a big country so makes sense that there would be at least some great music there, and of course it's no surprise to hear it coming from the nation's biggest city. But why does such a disproportionate amount come the far-flung and relatively sparsely populated Piedmont region? Maybe it really is a result of the grandeur of that alpine scenery. Maybe it's product of the region being the crossroads of multiple cultures. Or maybe it's just magic.

Yeah, that's it. It's definitely just magic.

:eek: I think I'm going to worship this journal...
Those were some amazing tracks. I'm definitely looking forward to what you'll write in here.

Thanks, and welcome to MB! :)

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Roller Skate 88

Nineteen eighty-eight was a big year for little eleven-year-old me: I had my first girlfriend, got my first kiss, grew out the mullet that would haunt my shoulders throughout junior high school, and I discovered my local college radio station. That last part, though, didn't occur until a little later on in the year, and when it did happen, my musical tastes were changed forever. Prior to that, what I listened to generally was a very mainstream amalgam of pop, rock, and pop rock from the seventies and eighties. Plus R.E.M. I guess they would have been my one little scrap of hipster cred at the time—had I known what "hipster cred" even was at that age.

Memories of the music I liked at this weird, transitional time of my life—when I was just starting to own my own tapes and records—are inextricably linked to my memories of this one particular roller skating rink that was a couple towns over from where I grew up. It all started at my friend's birthday party, which he had at this establishment, and which, if I remember correctly, was quite the little fifth grade throwdown—horrible rectangular pizza slices and all. I was having a nice time skating around, hanging out with my friends and whatnot, but my day got infinitely better when I ran into (figuratively, not literally) this really cute redheaded girl from my school. She was in sixth grade and thus a seemingly unattainable older woman to me, and of course she wasn't there for my friend's party, but nevertheless she seemed to want to talk to me and even wanted to—gasp—skate with me. Butterflies spawned exponentially in my stomach. Traitorous bastard that I was, I naturally drifted away from my friend's party and focused my attention completely on this girl who, for the sake of protecting the innocent, I'll call Lilly.

That one day was all it took, I asked her to "go out with me" and then we were an official junior high school item. From then on I went roller skating a hell of a lot. There were a handful of times we went over to each other's houses or went to the movies, but probably 90% of the time we were together it was at the roller skating rink. Her one contribution to my music taste was introducing me to Whitesnake—their track "Here I Go Again" was basically our song—but most of the music I loved at the time came directly from the extremely nerdy DJ that the roller rink employed. It was a mixed bag of pop flotsam that I probably would have hated if I were a little older, but at that undiscriminating age I loved it. The Dirty Dancing soundtrack was huge at the time so that always figures into my memories of those days, as does the sugar sweet pop squirted out by the likes of Tiffany and Belinda Carlisle and the mature-enough-to-be-slightly-over-my-head sex appeal of George Michael and Salt-n-Pepa. And, of course, we are talking about the late eighties here so I'd be remiss if I didn't mention some other other cock rockers like Def Leppard and Bon Jovi—I clearly remember the scream-along contests that the roller rink used to have for "Livin' on a Prayer". There was even one song that DJ played that I might possibly have actually liked even if I were older: "Pump Up the Volume" by M/A/R/R/S.

My first kiss was also at that roller rink, in a corner, on one of those carpet-covered benches that they have in those places, my friend Pat sitting right next to us. Maybe it's poetic memory but I swear that the song that was playing as we skated away after that kiss was "She's Like the Wind" by Patrick Swayze. It certainly felt that way. She was, indeed, like the wind through my tree. Whatever the fuck that means. My relationship with Lilly lasted for quite a few months, which is basically the equivalent of decades at that age, and when it ended, for reasons I no longer remember, that was pretty much the end of my visits to the roller skating rink. I soon discovered college radio, befriended kids who introduced me to thrash and death metal, and the next phase of my musical growth was well underway.

For your amusement, I present my top five roller skating tracks...

Fun read, Jans :) I've never seen a rollerskating rink in this country, but your story was relatable. My first serious relationship when I was 16 was with a girl at 18 who ran this cafè with two of her friends. This was possible here as the cafè building was an unused part of a communal building and after they'd asked, the office of culture in the town we lived in basically gave them the run of the place. They didn't even pay rent! That place became my second home for a good 4-5 years or so, much longer than your time in the skating rink, but there wasn't a massive amount of CDs in that place and so what we had, we played over and over. I don't much listen to that music today, but whenever I hear it, it's an instant reminder of my time in that cafè and, sometimes, that first romance.

Heh, that sounds really cool for them that they were about have a café like that. So what were some of the CDs you listened to there?

It's interesting that there aren't any roller rinks over there. It seems like the kind of thing that would be all over the place, but after a little Wikipedia research it sounds like they might be mostly an American thing. Apparently the inventor of the quad skate (the kind in the picture I posted) is actually from my home state. I had no idea!

It would be stuff like Best of Cat Stevens, Lisa Ekdahl's self-titled debut (swedish singer/songwriter), Eels' Daisies of the Galaxy or the music from Hair (the musical) which I have a difficult relationship with even today. I never thought it made for good cafè music!

There was also Beastie Boys (The Sounds of Science Anthology), The Cult, The Cure and various norwegian rock like Gartnerlosjen in the rotation, some of it played at high volume after closing hours when we were doing dishes and cleaning the place. :)

Stuff like Eels' Daisies of the Galaxy is basically music that I like, but it feels like I've heard it enough to last me a lifetime and I'm still tired of it!

One of my GF's favourite albums was Massive Attack's Mezzanine. We used to listen to it while .. you know. It was pretty sweet to have a GF at 18 as a 16 year old :)

Terrific read. Even though I was a 90s kid, this is very relatable for me. I don't know if it's still a popular thing to do nowadays (the roller rink I went to closed a while ago, anyways), but it's interesting that some things were still the same over a decade apart.

Any birthday party was always at a roller rink called Wheelies, and it was always a time where the boys and girls tried to push cooties aside and mingle a bit. Still awkward as hell though. :laughing:

This song will forever be ingrained in my brain in relation to Wheelies:



I swear it was the only song they played. I still love that song though.

Heh. Well you certainly had a way cooler soundtrack to your experience than I had for mine! It would have been pretty sweet to skate around to Massive Attack, though of course they hadn't even put out any albums yet in 1988.



I've always liked that song too, though I didn't realize it was popular enough to be played at roller skating rinks. Or maybe your rink was just a lot more hip mine was.

It's funny, I actually saw the Cardigans in concert when that song was new but I remember next to nothing about the show.

Really good read fella. I don't do skating but love the connection of music, growing up and nostalgia.

Besides this track is killer :) I had a massive crush on her. Still do really.

Holy crap dude, this was the soundtrack to my grade 6 train trip to Halifax that same year hahahaha

My neighbor also bought that Tiffany tape and I had to listen to that single while waiting for the school bus every morning until the end of June. Most of the other students also ended up buying fingerless biking gloves because in 12 year old 1988 brains it made a person look tough as hell.

Yeah, me too I think. :)

Haha, I used wear fingerless weightlifting gloves when I was that age. :laughing:

I know all of those tracks by heart, and yeah I used to hang out in roller skating rinks for kids' birthday parties and such at the same time that you did. Your post is almost too familiar for words.

Yeah, uh, late-80s Belinda was one of my first sexual experiences so to speak :love:

Uh, more a Suzi Quatro man myself (reveals age...) --- man she looked hot back then! Probably still does...
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Heh. I'm glad to hear someone can relate so much. :)

:laughing:

I think mine was probably Lisa Bonet, who had that amazing Rolling Stone spread in the very same year I was writing about.

I don't know her, and she doesn't look like she'd be into men, but Wikipedia tells me she was an influence on Tina Weymouth so she's a-okay in my book.

Oh wow! You don't know her? Now I feel OLD!
Suzi was the original rock chick, way before even the likes of Joan Jett or Lita Ford. The first famous female bass player ever, she fuelled many a young man's fantasy (including, of course, mine!) back in the 70s and 80s, and yes, she was married. Twice. To men. And has kids.

Here she is in action... how could you resist? ;)

Are you in the UK? From what I'm reading about her, it sounds like she was a lot bigger over there than here. So it may be more of a geography thing than an age thing.

Well, technically. Ireland actually. You could be right...

It's always weird how stuff like that happens. Sort of like the "big in Japan" phenomenon I guess.

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Nine Curzon Place: A Tragedy in Three Acts

Goin' down now

Don't ask me how far down

Don't ask a drowning man how far down

All I know's I'm goin' down.
—Harry Nilsson


Act I

The lights come up on Harry Nilsson, standing center stage with a suitcase in one hand. His newsboy cap is squashed down on his mess of blonde hair. His beard is scraggly and unkempt. His sensitive eyes shine with a mixture of good humor and immeasurable disquietude. The scene is a small London flat in the early nineteen seventies and the idiosyncratic American songwriter looks relieved to finally have a permanent place to sleep in this city. After crisscrossing the Atlantic one too many times, he finally decided to buy this flat, number twelve at nine Curzon Place, Mayfair. It's right in the heart of the city and essentially across the street from the Playboy Club, something which he is all too happy to point out to his friends.

Ringo Starr and his business partner Robin Cruikshank enter stage right. Their interior/furniture design company, ROR, has been hired by their friend Mr. Nilsson to decorate his new home. They take turns shaking his hand and then begin to dash about the place, quickly whipping it into shape with the hippest of seventies accoutrements.


Act II

A warm late July night in nineteen seventy-four. The flat a nine Curzon Place is filled with police, moving from room to room with jumbled purpose, like ants at a picnic. In the bedroom, a large shape lies under a white sheet on the bed. A ham sandwich sits on a plate on the nightstand.

The shape under the sheet is one Ellen Naomi Cohen, better known to the world as Mama Cass. Nilsson is back in L.A. for a bit and she had been staying in his flat while playing a number of solo shows on this side of the Atlantic. She had received standing ovations at her two Palladium appearances on recent nights and was thrilled by the prospect of her horizons broadening beyond the confines of her old band. She went to bed happy and filled with champaign and she never woke up.

Standing at the front of the stage, Dr. Anthony Greenburgh, the medical examiner, makes an unfortunate comment to the press about the ham sandwich, which fuels endless media speculation and decades of urban legend. The simple fact, though, is that Mama Cass didn't choke on the sandwich. She died of myocardial degeneration—basically her fluctuating weight had caused her heart to simply stop beating.

In L.A., projected in shadow on the curtain, Nilsson hangs his head.


Act III

A mild September morning in nineteen seventy-eight. The infamous wild man of The Who, Keith Moon, reclines in bed in the flat at nine Curzon Place. Once again, Nilsson is out of town and letting a friend stay at his home. Moon smokes cigarettes and watches the movie The Abominable Doctor Phibes, occasionally harassing his girlfriend, Annette Walter-Lax. When she objects to his demands for her to cook him steak and eggs, he yells, "If you don't like it, you can just fuck off!"

She storms out of the room, and perhaps in response, Moon downs thirty-two tablets of clomethiazole, a sedative he had been prescribed to alleviate his alcohol withdrawal symptoms. Unfortunately, six of this tablets are enough to be lethal and he soon loses consciousness. When Annette returns that afternoon, he is dead. The stage goes dark.

Spotlights now illuminate a sequence of brief scenes: Grief-stricken over the loss of his friend and disturbed by the seemingly cursed nature of that bedroom, Nilsson sells the flat to Pete Townsend. A series of residents come and go from the flat throughout the eighties as it grows more and more worn out looking. The nineties come and it sits vacant.

In L.A., projected in shadow on the curtain, Nilsson collapses to the floor and dies, both broke and broken.


--


Afterword

For anyone interested, I've posted three wonderful Nilsson tracks below, each one reflecting a different side to his often dark, yet oddly humorous and upbeat songwriting. All three tracks come from his penultimate release, Knnillssonn, which was the last album he put out while still the owner of the flat at nine Curzon Place. It's an absolutely brilliant attempt at a comeback album which, sadly, was completely eclipsed by the death of Elvis Presley shortly after it after it came out.

A true story, incidentally. Except the stage direction.

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San Jose, California:
Holy Mountain of Technology, Underdog of Art

San Jose, for those who don't know, lies about a 50 minute drive south of San Francisco and is the unofficial capital of Silicon Valley. With a population of almost a million it's actually quite a bit larger than it's famous neighbor to the north but you'd never know it to look at the place. Its downtown lies in the airport's flight path which means all the buildings have to be relatively low and it's the quintessential sprawling western American urban model—more like a gigantic suburb than a real city. It's also a very new city overall, partially because earthquakes keep knocking the old buildings down, but mostly because, before it was home to the likes of eBay, Adobe and Cisco, San Jose was largely farmland.

So why on earth would I choose to write about this place in terms of music? Well, I lived there for a while a few years ago and you know how, once you've owned a certain kind of car you can't help noticing that make and model every time you're near one? That's a little like my experience with music from San Jose. Before I lived there I couldn't name a single band from that city. Afterwards I kept noticing them. I make no claims about quality here, I'm just going to throw the names out there.

The bigger artists from the city are an odd hodgepodge of styles really. Smashmouth and Papa Roach are two of the more well-known examples—not exactly a strong selling point but something you might expect from a sprawling California quasi-suburban metropolis. On the other hand, weirdo experimentalists Xui Xui call the city home as well. Garage rockers The Count 5 were also from there and were the first band from San Jose to have a hit—with their song "Psychotic Reaction". The Doobie Brothers and Chocolate Watchband popped up not long after. Peanut Butter Wolf grew up there, and during my stint in old SJ I even had the pleasure of seeing him do a DJ set at a bar right across the street from my apartment. Mathcore goofballs Heavy Heavy Low Low hail from there as well, as do doom metal legends Sleep.

These last two bands I mentioned lead me to my personal experience with the San Jose music scene: loud music. As a person who spent considerable time perusing the "musicians" section of craigslist while I lived there, I can tell you there are a hell of a lot of metal bands there as well as a good amount of punk. This was further demonstrated to me both in hearing the other bands at the practice space I wound up at, as well as from the sounds emanating from the clubs downtown, such as Voodoo Lounge (now closed), Caravan Lounge and Blank Club. Caravan Lounge in particular was a wonderful, slightly seedy spot for local metal.

I assume it isn't the beautiful Mediterranean climate and sunny skies of San Jose that made people want to kick up such a ruckus. I assume it also isn't all the technology and wealth. Maybe it's those countless miles of suburbia that were so often traffic-clogged that you would frequently get to say, Guitar Center, only to have to wait for a parking space to free up in the lot. Or maybe, just maybe, it's a kind of second city primal scream. Maybe, like a couple other cities I've lived in, it was the bellow of the overlooked, a demand to be acknowledged. Maybe it was even a sort of first cry of a newborn, for a new city whose artistic zenith has yet to come.

Hey Janszoon, thx for the Mento stuff at the beginning... always glad to find some HAPPY music, you know, tunes you can play when having guests or to put on a sampler for someone you like :)

But the Vanessa van Basten stuff is impressive also. keep it on!

Thanks! And welcome to MB! :)

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Double Parking in the 90s

When I was in my early twenties I worked as medical supply delivery driver. I got the job through my roommate's previous roommate, and the interview, such as it was, consisted of one question: "Can you drive stick?" I could indeed so I was quickly brought in to drive for this struggling, dysfunctional family business. It was run by a manic, greasy-haired, middle-aged former nurse and her geriatric, deaf, cranky Chinese doctor husband who called everyone in their life, including me, an asshole. Also part of the equation was their mildly retarded son, who drove the van like a lunatic, broke everything he touched and fought constantly with his parents. On the bad days, I was out on deliveries with the son—or worse, stuck answering phones in the office with his two perpetually bickering parents—but on the good days I was out on deliveries by myself.

This was in 1997 and 1998, an odd, sort of forgotten era jammed in between the death of grunge and the rise of nu-metal. It was the time of electronica's brief moment in the sun, the last gasp of britpop and the short flash of swing revivalism. In many ways it was an interesting, underrated time period on the fringes of the dial, when music seemed to be cross-pollenating at a frantic rate in anticipation of the end of the millennium, and I was stuck behind the wheel of a car all day with little else to do but listen to the radio. My deliveries took me all over the place, from projects and group homes in forgotten parts of the city to high rises and blue-blooded neighborhoods where, in one case, I had a regular delivery of adult diapers for some brahmin's fucking dogs. In between, during long journeys and time-consuming traffic, it was radio time.

There were several good stations in Boston at that time, all but one of them belonging to colleges. WMBR, the MIT station, played pretty good punk and hardcore in the mornings on their Late Risers Club show. WHRB, from Harvard, played classical during the day (surprise, surprise) and electronica in the evenings. The only downside to these two was the fact that their signals were pretty weak so I could only pick them up in certain parts of the city. But Emerson College's station, WERS, had a surprisingly strong signal and easily the most varied programming I've ever heard on the radio—folk in the mornings, latin and world music during the day, children's music and a cappella music in the afternoons, hip hop and reggae in the evenings, jazz late at night, metal and electronica on the weekends. I listened to all of them quite a bit, but my go-to station was WFNX, a non-college station which was nevertheless one of the only independently owned and operated radio stations in the entire country at the time.

My recollections of certain songs that they played on that station at that time are all tied to these little driving vignettes, tiny memories that shuffle and fan out through my brain like a deck of playing cards in the hands of some Vegas croupier. Thrown face up on the felt of my mind I can examine them one by one. I can clearly recall, for example, listening to The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" in the early darkness of one December evening, lost on side streets in Brighton, struggling to spot addresses through the cold-fogged windows of the the car. Or winding my way down Enneking Parkway surrounded by the sunny, springtime greenery of Stony Brook Reservation while listening to the Foo Fighters' "Monkey Wrench". Or victorious expert-level parallel parking on the crowded streets of Allston to the tune of Everclear's "Everything to Everyone". Or rolling into the projects just off of Melnea Cass blasting the Chemical Brothers' "Block Rockin' Beats". Or battling traffic by the aquarium with the Squirrel Nut Zippers' "Suits Are Picking up the Bill" on the speakers. You get the picture.

Eventually, after one too many bounced paychecks and hysterical freak-outs from my boss, I quit and went on to get my first, and only, design internship at a tiny little studio on the opposite side of the city from the medical supply company. That was a calmer, more stable work environment of which I have fond memories, but still, to this day, I sometimes miss those days as a driver, meeting people from all walks of life, cruising through the city, listening to music. It was probably the last time in my life that I listened to the radio on a consistent basis. Sadly, WFNX was bought out this past summer and turned into some kind of Clear Channel "adult hits" bullshit station, but in my head, for as long as I live, there is always going to be a playlist of songs they once played, back when they were the soundtrack to breast pump, catheter, wheelchair and hospital bed deliveries in 1997 and 1998. Below is a little YouTube mix I've come up with that reflects just a bit of that mental playlist from that time. Hope you enjoy it.

I enjoyed reading your new journal which wasn't about album reviews. I've gathered from previous posts, that you've lived in quite a few different parts of the USA, so it's good to hear something about them.

BTW Suzi Quatro was popular in the UK in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was probably the most popular female rocker at the time, then she just seemed to disappear, before popping up on quiz shows and the like before totally disappearing.

I can relate to driving for a living, especially in and around the Boston area.
I used to drive for a courier company, based in Massachusetts, servicing the New England area. I spent 10 hours a day for 7 years, driving and listening to the radio while making pickups & deliveries as far north as Maine and as far south as New Jersey (mostly in and around Boston, though.)
I spent countless hours listening to the radio stations you mentioned.
I remember WFNX when it was WLYN in Lynn, before Stephen Mindich, owner of The Boston Phoenix, bought it.
And you can't talk about Boston radio without mentioning WZBC 90.3 in Newton (still going strong and my favorite of the bunch.)
North of Boston, WJUL 91.5 in Lowell (my choice when I was too far north to receive the Boston stations) another great station at the time and to this day.

It's been many years since I spent so much time behind the wheel, outdoors and free from an office building or plant/warehouse, earning a living in constant movement on the road.
This quote by you echoes my sentiments about that time...
"I sometimes miss those days as a driver, meeting people from all walks of life, cruising through the city, listening to music. It was probably the last time in my life that I listened to the radio on a consistent basis".
I couldn't have put it any better.

Thanks! I may do a couple more of entries at some point that relate to places I've lived as well.

Heh. It's nice to hear from someone who drove those same streets! :) Believe it or not, I'm not familiar with WZBC though. Not sure why since it sounds like something would have liked back then, maybe the signal wasn't as strong in a lot of the place I delivered in or something.

I didn't even know you had this journal.

You know what your problem is, you're just too damn prolific ;)