Early ’80s Mizzou, Part 2

Late last year, Randall Roberts assigned me a 2000-word piece for my alma mater University of Missouri-Columbia’s alumni magazine about Columbia’s music scene (clubs, record stores, bands, radio) in the early ’80s, when I was a student there as were Sheryl Crow and Brad Pitt. Eventually, after plenty of interviews and legwork, I convinced the…

150 Best Albums of 1981

First to address the pachyderm in the parlor (mastodon in the master bedroom?), yes it is obviously true that “Waiting for a Girl Like You” and “Waiting on a Friend” are, functionally, the exact same power ballad. But that doesn’t mean Foreigner’s 4 is as good as the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You, even if “Emotional”…

On Racist College Radio Playlists, 1981

Wrote this for my college newspaper (the weekly extracurricular not daily Journalism School one) about University of Missouri-Columbia’s student-run radio station when I was 20. Sometime before, I’d been invited on as a guest of KCOU’s Sunday night new wave show and for some reason the host didn’t show up, so I wound up spinning…

Scratch Acid profile, 1986

When Spin magazine flew me to Austin to interview pigfuck progenitors Scratch Acid in 1986, I was only a few months out of the U.S. Army. Not sure precisely how many months, since the (quite long) article doesn’t directly cite a calendar, but I’d been honorably discharged in May, and the piece ran in the…