"How I long to see your face photographed in 15-second intervals..."

David Lowery has begun telling the stories behind the songs of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven on his new blog, 300 Songs.

Much like his lyrics, the blog is insightful, inspiring, cryptic and occasionally cantankerous. From the introductory post:

"Over the course of my career as a singer/songwriter/musician/producer I estimate i’ve written recorded and produced three hundreds plus songs. I often get asked questions about different songs. I sometimes enjoy answering them but most of the time i don’t do a very good job of answering. i’m really pretty anti-social. I can’t really help it. I think I was just born this way. So i came up with this idea to randomly select a hundred or so songs and write a few comments about each of the songs. like: with whom i recorded, what the song is about, Or simply something funny or interesting that happened in the session. Nothing too in depth. Sometimes i’ll also provide the lyrics and basic guitar chords for the fans who like that sort of thing."

"I've got the big beat, I hear the sound..."

Adding yet another to the blog roll - this one from an old friend who recently found himself jobless after WOXY.com went silent.

Check out Mike Taylor's Big Beat for a well written, informed and entertaining musical viewpoint.

"Went around all day with the moon sticking in my eye"

I've added Magic Alex DJs to my blogroll. Check it out!

"I may not offer anything but a few uneven rhymes..."

Even though I did not know him, I miss Joseph Marques a little bit more each day. Marques, the vocalist/lyricist for one of my favorite college-era bands, Winter Hours, died of an overdose seven years ago. Oftentimes compared to Jim Morrison due to his rich, velvety voice, Marques and his band never reached the acclaim of The Doors, but they certainly had the potential. Maybe if they'd come along just a little bit later, when record labels figured out that there was a market for "college rock," they would have reached the heights of peers REM and U2.

I recently learned that a Winter Hours tribute album had been quietly released two years ago, a labor of love put out on a small label to commemorate the band's 25th anniversary. I could not order it fast enough!

While there are some bright spots on the double length CD, what struck me most about the album was how insubstantial the songs sounded without Marques' trademark vocals. Each track made me want to submerge myself in the original again; to rinse away the shallow pretenders and ride once more in his ocean's storm.

Why has no one snapped up the rights to release the band's back catelogue? Does Link Records own the rights and some sort of acrimony keeps them from resurfacing? Have the masters gone walkabout? I don't have the answers - all I know is that it's a shame that this worthy cache of songs isn't readily available.

I'm one of the lucky ones - I own all their output on vinyl and an analog-to-digital mixing deck. I've spent countless hours transferring everything over to MP3 so that I can take Winter Hours with me where ever I go, yet I'd still snap up the music again if it was officially released.

We can only win.

"Things are never quite the way they seem..."

WOXY
Back to the Future Playlist
Saturday, 11 October, 2003

8 a.m.
Thompson Twins – “Lies”
The Go Betweens – “Karen”
The Connells – “Fun & Games”
Poi Dog Pondering – “Jackass Ginger”
Hot House Flowers – “Don’t Go”
Tom Robinson Band – “2-4-6-8 Motorway”
Happy Mondays – “Kinky Afro”
The Cure – “Jumping Someone Else’s Train”
Gary Clail – “Human Nature”
Felt w/ Liz Frasier – “Primitive Painters”
Dumptruck – “Back Where I Belong”
Matthew Sweet – “We’re the Same”
Deee-Lite – “Groove is in the Heart”
David Sylvian – “Red Guitar”
The Pogues – “Dirty Old Town”

9 a.m.
John Hiatt – “Thing Called Love”
Royal Crescent Mob – “Love Rollercoaster”
The Cramps – “Surfin’ Dead”
Television – “Friction”
Pete Shelley – “Homosapien”
Nick Cave – “Deanna”
Love & Rockets – “Haunted When the Minutes Drag”
Gang of Four – “I Love a Man in a Uniform”
Falco – “Rock Me Amadeus”
Edie Brickell – “What I Am”
Circle Jerks – “American Heavy Metal Weekend”
Duran Duran – “Planet Earth”
808 State – “Moses”

10 a.m.
Squeeze – “Take Me I’m Yours”
Talking Heads – “Cities”
Terence Trent D’arby – “She Kissed Me”
Pet Shop Boys – “Suburbia”
Golden Palominos – “Clustering Train”
Flesh for Lulu – “Postcards from Paradise”
Enigma – “Sadeness”
Soho – “Hippie Chick”
(open for request)
The Police – “The Bed’s Too Big Without You”
Stray Cats – “Rock this Town”
The Cucumbers – “My Boyfriend”
Us 3 – “Cantaloop”
(open for request)

Although The Record Store was primarily known first and foremost as a place to buy music and music-related ephemera, we also did a brisk side business selling jewelry and smoking paraphernalia. There were plenty of regulars who never bought music from us at all, but were there each week to buy pipe screens, rolling papers, or one-hitters. Because of the quasi-illegal nature of the paraphernalia side of the business, we were forced to stop selling the harder-core head items like bongs, but we sold whatever we could while still staying on the right side of the law. This included cleanse kits.

The first cleanse kits we carried were “Quick Flush” herbal teas. Even though kits cost nearly $20 a box and users had to drink a couple of quarts of the stuff for it to work, we sold out each and every weekend. In a blue collar steel-and-auto manufacturing city where alcohol and recreational drug use was about the only fun to be had, I guess selling out of piss-test helpers wasn’t all that surprising.

While the herbal teas remained popular, we soon expanded our trade to include vials of a synthetic compound that could be mixed with urine to mask THC, and shampoo kits that stripped the THC out of hair. The teas were most popular with those who knew they were going to have to take a drug test – usually those in the process of job hunting. The chemical vials were most popular with assembly-line workers, who could be pulled from the line for a test at a moments notice. Users were instructed to keep the vials with them at all times – preferably someplace warm, like the front pocket of jeans or inside a bra. This is because the synthetic compound needed to be the same body temperature as urine in order to work.

You are probably wondering by this time why I’m banging on at such length about drug test kits when this post is supposed to be about my old WOXY play lists, and I can only say that the first thing that leapt out at me about this play list was Gang of Four’s “I Love a Man in a Uniform” which reminded me of the inordinate number of military personnel who came into the store in search of those cleanse kits. By far the most requested items for the soldiers and flyboys were the shampoo cleanse-kits. One of them once told me that it was because the government rarely bothered with piss-tests for personnel who had already completed basic training – instead, the U.S. military preferred the hair-strand test for our boys in uniform. I do not know how things are in today’s military, but back then soldiers were tested each time they had been away on leave.

And since most soldiers had their heads shaved during basic and kept it close cropped throughout their tenure in the armed forces, the shampoos we sold were rarely ever used above the shoulders. Mostly, as I was nervously informed by a worried flyboy, hair would be plucked from the legs, arms or – wait for it – the groin area. Ouch. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the chemicals in the shampoo kits tended to burn the, erm, more “sensitive areas” upon which they were applied. Such were the lengths our boys went through in order to serve their country.

Anyway, I couldn’t find a decent video of Gang of Four, so instead I give you another military-inspired song from the 80’s:


Stan Ridgway’s “Camouflage”

"An ocean storm can be still risen by a woman's lips..."

WOXY
Back to the Future Playlist
Saturday, 4 October, 2003

8 a.m.
David Bowie – “DJ”
Fred Schneider – “Monster”
Guadalcanal Diary – “Always Saturday”
Kate Bush – “Babooshka”
Peter Murphy – “Line Between the Devil’s Teeth”
Camper Van Beethoven – “The History of Utah”
X-Ray Spex – “Oh Bondage Up Yours”
Was (Not Was) – “I Feel Better Than James Brown”
Urban Dance Squad – “Deeper Shade of Soul”
PiL – “The Body”
M – “Pop Muzik”
Depeche Mode – “Shake the Disease”
Jerry Harrison – “Rev It Up”
The Ramones – “We’re a Happy Family”
(left blank for request)

9 a.m.
Elvis Costello – “Everyday I Write the Book”
Laurie Anderson – “Language is a Virus”
Let’s Active – “Fell”
Talking Heads – “Television Man”
Young Fresh Fellows – “Amy Grant”
The Pretenders – “Precious”
Charlatans – “White Shirt”
Soul Asylum – “Cartoon”
Firehose – “Sometimes”
Wolfgang Press – “A Girl Like You”
Jesus Jones – “Move Mountains”
The Fall – “Cruiser’s Creek”
The Police – “Driven to Tears”
The Buzzcocks – “Ever Fallen In Love?”

10 a.m.
Sinead O’Connor – “Jerusalem”
Echo & the Bunnymen – “The Cutter”
The Cult – “Revolution”
Ministry – “Work for Love”
XTC – “No Thugs in Our House”
Winter Hours – “Roadside Flowers”
U2 – “Gloria”
Tom Tom Club – “The Man With the 4-way Hips”
Special AKA – “Free Nelson Mandela”
The Clash – “White Riot”
The Replacements – “Here Comes a Regular”

No other band deserved to make the “big time” more than Winter Hours, but like so many others during the heyday of college radio, they got gobbled up and spit out by one of the majors.

Winter Hours originally formed in the early 1980’s and paid their dues playing in clubs up and down the east coast while trying to scrape together the money for demos. They first came across my radar sometime around ’85-‘86 when I stumbled across the Churches EP while flipping through the racks at Renaissance Music. I knew nothing about the band but was willing to take a chance on them based on their song titles and album sleeve artwork. I was blown away from the first listen, and actively sought out everything that came out afterwards.

The band released a couple of EPs and one LP for Link Records – not the U.K. punk label but the American one, which also released albums by The Godfathers, Full Fathom Five and O Positive. When I began working at WWSU I remember how excited I was the day the Wait Til the Morning EP landed on our doorstep. With the sublime “Hyacinth Girl,” I just knew the band would be huge. How could they not, with a song like that?

Their first full-length LP (released on Link), Leaving Time, remains one of my all-time favorites, and that is really saying something – coming from someone who has quite an extensive collection. With each listen I fall in love all over again.

The band signed with Chrysalis and released the self-titled Winter Hours, an album I felt wasn’t a patch on Leaving Time but was still very good. The single “Roadside Flowers” carried the album and could have taken the band to the next level, but Chrysalis had recently been made a public company and was still trying to adjust to a new playing field – they just didn’t have a clue. The label had no idea of how to market the band, they didn’t they recognize the band’s potential, and they looked upon college radio as a “fad” rather than a viable way to get the band’s music heard. Link had done what they could and knew college radio, but they didn’t have the money to really push the band. Chrysalis had the money but disdained college radio and the entire “alternative/modern rock” phenomenon. They were too busy pushing the likes of Pat Benetar, Slaughter and Huey Lewis & the News. That same mindset hurt them when Geffen unleashed Nirvana on the unsuspecting public a few years later and Chrysalis, like most of the majors, scrambled to play catch-up.

If there is one event that I look back on with abject regret, it is that I had the chance to see Winter Hours live at Bogarts (playing with Christmas) and I didn’t go. I had tickets but the weather was really bad and I figured that the show would be cancelled so I didn’t attempt the long drive in the snow and ice. I cannot count the number of times I have looked back on that decision and kicked myself for not going. I thought there would be other chances. How wrong could I have been?

This video of Winter Hours performing "Wait til the Morning" isn't the best of quality, but the song is stellar. Check it out. Likewise for more information on the band visit their tribute page.



Lead singer Joseph Marques died 28 June, 2003 at the age of 40. The beauty of his voice and lyrics will never be forgotten by those of us who loved the band.

"Our nations need new heroes, time to sing a new war song..."

WOXY
Back to the Future playlist
Saturday, 27 September 2003

8 a.m.
Fishbone – “Party at Ground Zero”
Concrete Blonde – “Still in Hollywood”
Graham Parker – “Temporary Beauty”
E.M.F. – “Unbelievable”
John Wesley Harding – “The Devil in Me”
The Replacements – “Waitress in the Sky”
Hindu Love Gods – “Raspberry Beret”
Lightning Seeds – “Pure”
Nick Lowe – “Cruel to be Kind”
Patti Smith – “Because the Night”
Beastie Boys – “Fight for Your Right”
The Church – “Reptile”
Wire – “Eardrum Buzz”
Jimmy Cliff – “The Harder They Come”
Lou Reed – “Sally Can’t Dance”

9 a.m.
Michael Penn – “No Myth”
Peter Gabriel – “Biko”
Stan Ridgway & Stewart Copeland – “Don’t Box Me In”
Material Issue – “Diane”
The Damned – “Alone Again Or”
Sam Phillips – “Standing Still”
The Waterboys – “This is the Sea”
The Stooges – “I Wanna Be Your Dog”
REM – “Don’t Go Back to Rockville”
Midnight Oil – “Best of Both Worlds”
The Godfathers – “Cold Turkey”
Stone Roses – “Elephant Stone”
Tom Waits – “16 Shells from a 30-6”
Kirsty MacColl – “Caroline”

10 a.m.
Boomtown Rats – “I Don’t Like Mondays”
Red Hot Chili Peppers – “Fight Like a Brave”
Morrissey – “Everyday is like Sunday”
Art of Noise – “Close to the Edit”
The Stranglers – “Always the Sun”
The Sisters of Mercy – “This Corrosion”
Throwing Muses – “Dizzy”
A House – “Call Me Blue”
Brian Ritchie – “Sun Ra – Man From Outer Space”
Martha & the Muffins – “Echo Beach”
Bauhaus – “She’s in Parties”
Buzzcocks – “Orgasm Addict”
Josie Cotton – “Johnny Are You Queer?”
Joe Jackson – “Is She Really Going Out With Him?”
They Might be Giants – “Particle Man”

After 9/11 happened I worried that I’d never hear Fishbone’s wonderful “Party at Ground Zero” on the radio again, especially when the knee-jerk reaction of the corporate bullyboys at Clear Channel was to ban a bunch of songs with “questionable” lyrics and other non-CC stations followed their lead. Not that anyone at Clear Channel had a clue about Fishbone, evidenced by it’s omission in the “questionable” list, but I thought that certainly a title like “Party at Ground Zero” would find it’s way to the chopping block.

So imagine my elation when, a few months after those planes hit the World Trade Center, I heard Barb spin the tune while I was driving in my car on a cold, grey November day. WOXY had always had a healthy rebellious streak, and although they always adhered to FCC law they weren’t afraid to do their own thing, and playing “Party at Ground Zero” was testament to that. It’s difficult to describe just how much of a weight I felt had lifted when I heard that song on the radio. The U.S. government was in full war-mode paranoia with civil liberties being snatched away with each passing day, and in cities and towns across the country our newspapers, TV programs and radio stations were jumping on the censorship bandwagon before the white soot in New York had even settled. I thanked my lucky stars that there were still independent stations out there willing to take risks, and that one of them was the little station out of Oxford known as WOXY.

for your listening and viewing pleasure, I give you Fishbone:


I’m so proud to have worked at WOXY, even though my stint was merely a blink in time. This year marks their 25th anniversary; they no longer broadcast over the air but are still flyin’ the flannel via the magic of internet radio. And they still play "Party at Ground Zero!"

Tune in!