And welcome back to 35000 Watts, the podcast. My name is Michael Millard. I’m the director of a feature documentary called 35000 Watts: The Story of College Radio. It’s about college radio as is this very podcast that you’re listening to. With me today, our resident music guru, Keith Porterfield.
Thanks for having me. And we didn’t run him off the first time. He has returned once again, Scott Mobley. Thanks for having me again. I really appreciate it.
So this is a little bit of a of a personal thing, and it but I think it’s an interesting discussion to have, and particularly with you guys. And and, obviously, I’d love to hear what, our listeners think about it because I I do think that people were gonna be maybe a little bit polarized on this. I don’t know if my opinion is common or maybe I’m kind of, like, out in left field with it, but the base I mean, the basic opinion, the basic thing that I’m trying to get across is simply that Nirvana was not responsible solely for the alternative movement, the grunge movement, the death of hair metal. However, you may have heard it kind of shorthanded over the last 30 years when people talk about the early nineties, when they talk about the birth of grunge, when they talk about alternative music kind of supplanting pop metal, in the the record players and CD players and cassette players of teenage youths out there. They they talk about smells like teen spirit.
Like, it’s just it’s just a a given. Nirvana came out. They released smells like teen spirit, and suddenly the next day, kids went and burned their poison t shirts and threw away their Motley Crue albums and went and bought flannel, and that was it. Like, it all happened that day on September 24, 1991, the day that nevermind came out. My my take on it is simply that I lived that.
I was a senior in high school in 1991. I was squarely in the demographic, as I mentioned in another episode, of kids that entered high school listening to pot metal and digging Cinderella and Poison and Motley Crue and all of those bands. And by the time I left high school, I had Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and 9 Inch Nails in my car. Everything had kinda changed for me during that time. And for me personally, I wasn’t that big of a Nirvana fan.
That song was part of that. I, you know, it’s not that I didn’t like. It smells like king spirit. For me, it was just one of many things that kinda led me through that transition. And it feels like I’m not alone in that and that there was something already happening before September 24, 1991 that obviously led up to what became a a really, really big, you know, sea change in in music in the United States.
So I was kinda going back and trying to remember again from my personal perspective as a kid in Lubbock, Texas with only a college radio station that I had really barely discovered and really I wasn’t fully bought in to college radio and and exploring music yet. When I was in high school, I was kinda getting there. But I was looking back at that time period and remembering songs that broke through and kind of hit me, whether they were on MTV or maybe on the rock station for 1 or 2 of them. But trying to remember the songs that just like spells like teen spirit broke out and kind of reached the, the larger consciousness. And the more I went back, the more I was, like, starting to just trace the family tree of rock, like, way too far back.
And I was like, well, that’s not really making my argument. So I’m starting with May of 1989, a song by Love and Rockets called so alive. It hit number 3 on the Billboard 100 charts. That is a weird kind of gothy, out of the mainstream kinda song to hit number 3. And it’s a band that had a pedigree in, you know, what at that time was college radio or, like, college rock or whatever you want to call it, certainly in the goth scene.
And for that to to get to my ears as a kid in Lubbock, Texas that really, you know, again, was barely even kind of listening to to college radio at that point, That was kind of a big deal. And that was followed up by by songs that I remember listening to over and over and over again. January of 1990 was Faith No More epic, number 9 on the Billboard 100 charts. That’s a weird song. That’s like a progenitor of rap rock.
It’s one of the only songs that I can remember that combine those 2 after Aerosmith and Run DMC came out in 1985. It was unlike anything else that I was hearing. It it was a sign that there was, like, this deeper well of music that I was only getting, like, the very little tippy tip of, but I started to kinda realize it went deeper than that. 1 month after that, Depeche Mode, enjoy the silence, goes to number 6. Now Depeche Mode, obviously, a lot of people had exposure to if you were into the club scene or if you’re listening to college radio in the US.
If you lived in the UK, you for sure knew about Depeche Mode. For me, that was kind of a revelation. Violator was, like, my entry into that type of music. Another one from 1990, Jane’s Addiction, been caught stealing, was not on the Billboard charts, but, man, they must have played it on MTV every hour and a rock band, but very different from, like, the kind of rock bands that I was familiar with. And then on the on the kind of the total flip side of that, a band that I was starting to be familiar with, but REM, losing my religion, number 4 on the Billboard charts, a quintessential college radio band that had broken through into the mainstream.
And later that year, before Nirvana’s album comes out, Pearl Jam releases 10, and Alive is their the first single off of that. And I remember falling head over heels in love with that song. I remember going out and buying 10 as soon as I had the money to do it. And all of those things happened before I had ever heard an Nirvana song. So for me, you know, the argument is just that if those songs were bubbling up so high and so far to hit the Billboard charts, to get somehow to me who was not digging very deep to find music at that point.
I was still in a phase where I was basically sucking in, you know, whatever the mainstream was giving me. For those songs to get to that point, it tells me that that movement had started long before Nevermind came out. And so I guess, you know, it’s a little bit of a combination of just my personal reflections on how I went from liking this thing over here to liking this thing over here, but also just like a history of songs that were that were bubbling up through college radio or bubbling up through the underground, and we’re managing to get to the point. I mean, when you get to the point where you’re in the top 10 on the Billboard 100, you’re getting played a lot. I mean, that’s though that means those songs are ubiquitous.
Like, you’re gonna hear them in the grocery store. You’re gonna hear them when you go to the mall. You’re gonna hear them every time you turn on the car. So to me, I think you have to take all of that into account, and then you add smells like teen spirit on top of that, which is a smash hit, which I think hit number 5 on the billboard 100 chart. And for a song that heavy, admittedly was kind of crazy.
I mean, Pearl Jam did not get that far to get a song, you know, into the the top ten of billboard charts. But they were standing on top of something and they were a continuation of something that was already in progress, was already gonna happen anyway, I think. But they accelerated the process and deserve a piece of the credit, but not all of the credit. I think it’s an interesting argument. I don’t know that I totally buy it because I think a lot of the songs that you described there or talked about hitting big had other things kind of going for them.
Talk about Lavin’ Rockets with So Alive. I mean, that’s a really like sultry, sexy kind of song. It’s almost got like a soul song, a soul song kind of vibe to it. And there were not things necessarily that sounded just like Love and Rockets, but I think there were other songs that were kind of similar to it that had bubbled up before. Same thing with Losing My Religion, you’ve got kind of the guitar jangle pop thing that existed before.
Faith No More, you had rap really coming along through the 80s, and and although it wasn’t necessarily the rock rap blend, there was a precedent for kind of rap vocal stylings on top 40 radio leading into those songs. So I think even though those songs are definitely kind of off the beaten track, and a little weird, and a little more toward the alternative or college rock side of things, I think there were elements of them that appealed to top 40 type listeners, because they will kind of fit in with other things that had gotten radio airplay before. For me, the proof that it really was Nirvana that launched what would become the grunge and the alternative rock revolution comes from imitators. In the late eighties, how many bands were there out there that were trying to sound like Motley Crue or trying to sound like Poison? You know, there were any time you, you know, picked up a new, record or, you know, whatever, it was somebody that wanted to have that glam metal, you know, hair metal sound.
That was just the big deal at the time. Anybody that already sounded like that was gonna get signed. Anybody that was trying to get signed was going to change their sound to sound like that. That didn’t happen with Faith no more, it didn’t happen with REM, it didn’t happen with 11 Rockets, it didn’t even happen with Pearl Jam, because Pearl Jam to me is more of a roots rock band really than they are kind of the grunge rock scene. But when Nirvana hit, after smells like teen spirit, every rock band out there that already had that kind of grungy sound was immediately signed to contract.
Every aspiring rock band out there immediately started trying to sound like Nirvana. It was the first time since the pop metal, you know, explosion of the late eighties that you had a situation where just about everybody out there that wanted to get signed changed what they were doing to try to be more like this one band that was, you know, kind of, you know, leading the way, changing the way rock music was being thought of. I do think that was largely based strictly on on Smells Like Teen Spirit. And I don’t know that there’s a an analog for the the pop metal scene, quite in a way there is for Nirvana with the grunge scene. But I do think, you know, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and you had that in the pop metal world, and then you had it in the grunge world.
But all those other bands, although they were alternative bands, college rock bands, whatever you wanna call them, they did have their moments, they did have their hits, but they didn’t have the industry and other bands falling all over themselves to reproduce that sound the way that it happened with Nirvana and Smells Like Teen Spirit. Okay. So I’m gonna meet you guys in the middle here because I kind of agree with with both sides of this, and I’ll I’ll take you on a short journey through my experience with all of that. I recently watched a documentary about Hair Metal. It’s called nothing but a good time.
I think it’s on prime. It’s pretty good. It’s 3 episodes. It’s kinda about the history of the sunset strip and Hair Metal and Glam Rock and all that stuff. It’s it’s good.
But it’s in 3 parts. Part 1, Motley Crude and Quiet Riot. Part 2, Poison, you know, what it developed into. And then part 3, I realized about 50 minutes into it, was a bunch of bands I had never heard of. And I realized that what had happened with, you know, hair metal sort of dying, happened to me way before it happened to the rest of the world.
When they talk about the moment that grunge took over and hair metal died, they are specifically talking about TRL on MTV. That’s where that the argument comes from. There was a band on TRL. They were, like, number 2 one day. They’re called Tuff, t u f f.
Great band. Check them out if you haven’t. I’m kidding. They, had a song that was climbing up the charts. Smells like teen spirit comes out, and Tuff is gone.
And every other band that looks like Poison is gone. And Grunge is now taking over. So that’s what they’re talking about specifically. But again, you’re talking about 1991. I bought Jane’s Addiction’s Nothing Shocking in 1987.
I had ministries, Land of Rape and Honey in 1988. I was already into this stuff. I was way into REM back then. You know, I bought, I was standing in line to buy grain the day it came out. That’s 2 years before this.
And so, it wasn’t that Nirvana flipped a switch and everything changed. It was already happening. Alternative music was already happening. But it hadn’t happened quite yet in the mainstream. And that’s kind of what I think we’re we’re talking about is, they talk about this moment that hair metal died and and grunge came in, but it was gonna happen anyway.
Nirvana was just the right band in the right place at the right time. Now if you look at grunge, if you back up and you look at grunge, was Mudhoney gonna be that band? Was Tad gonna be that band? You know, no. They’re they weren’t.
Mudhoney still can’t sell the record. And, you know, and grunge happened and left, and they never got popular. And they are arguably the best grunge band. Right? So it wasn’t about the sound, it wasn’t about anything.
I think it was about marketing. I think it was about the record industry saying, this, we can sell. And what it was, I think, was with hair metal, you had people in costumes, you know. They were wearing spandex pants, and teased hair, and makeup. And people liked the sort of earthiness of the grunge bands.
But that was already happening too. Metallica was doing that. You know, Metallica got on stage wearing what they went to Taco Bell with earlier in the day. You could make that argument for Guns N’ Roses that, you know, they were a little bit in costume, but they, you know and Jane’s Addiction. You know, these bands were already coming along that were kind of going away from the aesthetic of of glam rock.
So it was gonna happen anyway. So why does it happen to Nirvana? Well, two reasons, I think. 1, they were chosen. The record labels looked at them and said, this is it.
This is the look that’s gonna sell this new thing to the masses. And then second, it smells like teen spirit, guys. Remember the first moment you heard that song. Yes, it’s played out now. Yes, we’ve overheard it now.
Yes, it’s tired. It’s been, you know, Weird Al parodied it, all that stuff. But remember that moment in 1991, when you heard smells like teen spirit for the first time. Your ears almost exploded. It’s it’s mentioned in your film, Michael, that, you know, people talked about we heard this and we ran into the studio and put it on.
There’s a song by Nirvana called Sliver. And the you know, it’s a song that Kurt used to sing about being stuck with his grandma. You got grandma taking me home song? You know that song? Yeah.
I love that song. Yeah. When they got this new thing, we played it in the offices before, and it was smells like teen spirit. And we sat there, and our heads just exploded. What do we do?
Can we play this? What’s he saying? Is it cuss words? I don’t know. We should just play it.
We didn’t wait to get it in rotation. We just went in to the DJ on the on the air at the time and said, hey, play this. That was my reaction to it too. And so were they the best grunge band? No.
Were they the reason alternative music took over? Absolutely not. They just were a perfect storm of the right thing at the right time, the right look, the right image, and that’s all. And you have the perfect storm, and you get Nirvana. I love Nirvana.
I like them way more than you do, I think. But I don’t think they’re the greatest grunge band of all time. I don’t think they’re the greatest alternative band of all time. I would never try to make that argument, but I can certainly understand why what happened happened to them. I also wouldn’t necessarily argue that they’re the greatest grunge band of all time, but you had weird music all through, you know, the the eighties and seventies as well.
I mean, like, bands like television weren’t getting a lot of airplay, and they were just kinda weird and out there. In the eighties, you know, you had the new wave stuff in the early part, of the of the decade, some of which did get big, but some a lot of a lot of it didn’t. I think the, you know, the difference with Nirvana is maybe something was gonna happen. Maybe there was gonna be a sea change. Maybe Hair Metal had had its day, but I don’t think it was by any any means set in stone that that thing was gonna be grunge, you know.
It could have been a lot of different things. It took that particular band and that particular song, Smells Like Teen Spirit, to ensure that the transition out of hair metal was going to be into grunge. You know, you can say that there was a change brewing. Absolutely. I I agree.
And I think the songs that Mike brought up earlier, Getting Big tells you that something was kind of happening, that maybe hair metal was falling out and people were looking for something new, but that something was not always ordained to be the grunge movement. It took Nirvana. It took that song to make that happen, And so do they get all of the credit? No. Should they get the lion’s share of the credit?
I had yeah. I believe that they should. I agree. And I I I’ll tell you another brief story. When I lived in, the dorms at Texas Tech, I had a guy that lived down the hall from me that was kind of this weird alternative dude.
You know, this is 1989, 1990. He was a member of the Sub Pop Singles Club, which is now, you know, notorious. At the time, I didn’t know what it was. But he got a 45 single in the mail every month that we would sit down and listen to. And it was these grunge bands from Seattle that was you know, there were other bands and artists, musical styles coming out of sub pop, but not really.
It was mostly grunge. And of all those ones that I listened to, Nirvana was the band that I was probably the least impressed with. They they sounded a little less raw than these other bands, a little less aggressive than these other bands. I think they always had a sort of pop aesthetic to them, that, you know, the right producer could make sound the way they wanted it to sound. And that’s pretty much what happened.
But, yeah, you’re you’re absolutely right. They they weren’t you know, there was no guarantee that it was gonna be grunge that was the next thing. But but there they were, you know, there were these these normal seeming guys that had that angst that we talked about and the the sort of things that appeals to young people. And yet they seemed, whether or not it was true, they seemed very genuine. They seemed like these were guys that you could walk into the coffee shop and and chat with, you know, and talk about how much life sucks or whatever.
You know, it they they seemed like they were the right band to be that next thing. And then, like I said, you you know, the icing on the cake is that song. You know? It just it just works. You hit on you both actually hit on something that kinda ring true for me, which was, in a larger sense, this was a shift from the kind of fakeness and plasticity, if you wanna call it that, of glam metal and pop metal and hair metal and a shift towards, like, authenticity.
And I think it it incorporated a lot more than just Nirvana, but they certainly exemplified that. But, you know, when you mentioned guns and roses, I mean, use your illusion 1 and 2 came out 1 week before nevermind 1 week. That album did not disappear after being on the charts for 1 week. I mean, use your illusion. 1 and 2 were big even into 93, though they they were still, you know, singles coming out.
Guns N’ Roses was possibly the biggest band on the planet during that that time, certainly one of. If they weren’t, it might have been Metallica. Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, while they come from a lot of the same roots that a band like Motley Crue or Poison or whatever, you’re not gonna confuse those bands for each other. They both show up on stage dressed in what they possibly fell asleep in the night before. Like you said, they are certainly presenting themselves to be more authentic and more like this is who we are.
And I think Nirvana fit that, but, again, brought what what was happening in Seattle, which was in 91, a very isolated music scene. I think people forget how isolated places could be before the internet, where you could have an entire music scene brewing and an entire aesthetic happening that, that really didn’t spill over until someone was able to kind of break out of that bubble a little bit. But in my mind, it was still happening with a group of, of bands, Alice and chains, mud honey, pearl jam, sound garden. You know, it was a movement that was bigger than just Nirvana. And I get why that one song kind of pushed them to the forefront.
I certainly don’t think that what happens later in Nirvana’s history hurts their being seen retrospectively as, like, the pinnacle of that that movement. So, yeah, I I definitely kind of agree with with some of the arguments, but it’s still hard for me to kinda wrap my head around why that one song has become shorthand for virtually every music critic or every YouTuber who talks about music. It seems like nobody cares to dig deeper than that anymore and and has forgotten some of those other bands. And maybe that’s where I I get, like, my ears perk up when I hear someone say it because I I feel like other bands aren’t getting the credit that they should, maybe. I think it’s easy to put labels on things like that.
And I think that’s what you’re talking about, is that you get this you get this thing with you you have to put a label on it. This is when it happened, and this is the band that did it. And you make an interesting point. We’ve been talking about the moment when it happened. But let’s talk about 30 years down the road.
You know, what happened with Nirvana? The last thing we ever heard from them was one of the greatest unplugged performances of all time on the heels of In Utero, which is a masterpiece of an album. If if Kurt Cobain doesn’t kill himself, and we’re still getting Nirvana records now, is their legacy what it is? I’m I’m not sure that it is. Because, you know, they I’m not sure how much they could have perpetuated that.
You’ve seen the other bands from that era that have survived. Pearl Jam is a perfect example. Pearl Jam has basically turned into the Grateful Dead. They’re they’re not doing grunge anymore. You know, they become a blues rock band that does jams.
You know, that’s what they do. And they’re making a great living doing it, and people love them, they have a huge fan base, but they’re not still making grunge records. So what would Nirvana have done? We don’t know. Would we have gotten, you know, some weird, off the beat, you know, we’re gonna do a chamber music album, or whatever, you know.
It’s not, you don’t know the answer to those questions. So you have this perfect little window of what Nirvana was, and when they were, and how they were. And we get to look back on it and go, this is that. It’s kind of, but you’re what you’re talking about is sort of the way we like to write history in these tight little boxes, you know. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the first ever concept album.
No, it’s not. But it’s the one we all know launched that as a thing. So we we hold it up on this pedestal and say that’s it, that’s where it started, whatever. And everybody just kinda nods and agrees that. If you do a little digging, it’s not really true.
And the same can be said of Givonna. They’re not as responsible for all of this as they get the credit for. But I think they deserve some of it, if not a lot of it. I I think they were the right band at the right time, and that’s, you know. I also wanna say before I pass that I am shocked that losing my religion only went to number 4.
Is that what you said? That song was massive. It it’s hard to imagine how big a song has to get to be a number 1 Billboard song in the nineties. It’s so different now with streaming and the way they do it, but it’s back then. It’s the the tracking or whatever.
But It’s I I mean, at that time and I admit I was into the alternative stuff, and I was already into REM, so I bought that album the minute it came out too. I was that song was gonna get me one way or the other. But I you turned on MTV then, you could not go 45 minutes without seeing the video for Losing My Religion. It was everywhere. Top 40 radio was playing it.
People I knew that didn’t like alternative music at all knew that song. I just I’m shocked then. I would have bet money that that was a number one song. It feels yeah. It feels that way for sure looking back.
When I see songs like, Pearl Jam Alive and Bink Caught Stealing, which didn’t even hit the Billboard 100 at all, but to me felt ubiquitous. And then a song like Losing My Religion where you literally could not escape that song, and yet it still didn’t get there. Yeah. It it’s pretty interesting. How many mandolin driven songs did you hear after, Losing My Religion got you?
You know what I’m saying? But you sure heard a lot of songs that sounded loud and raw and grungy after smells like teen spirit got huge. You mentioned that that a lot of bands tried to do that, and and that list is almost comical to look at. Like, KISS tried to record a grunge album in the early nineties, you know. Don’t listen to it, please.
Yeah. Don’t don’t tell people about that. That’s just that’s just malpractice. Yeah. Plea please don’t think that I am in any way suggesting anyone listen to that one.
Don’t. But that was the influence of it, you know. It was the record labels, like you said, were coming out and going, this is now what we want you to do. You know, this forget forget what Motley Crue was doing, forget what Poison was doing. It’s this now.
Put on a flannel shirt and downtune the guitars, and, you know, slow it down a little bit, and take some of the polish off the production, and let’s make grunge records. And thankfully, most of them didn’t stick. You know, we actually get the the real grunge out there that’s that’s worth listening to. Well, I think, you know, to take it back to RM again, even above and beyond talking about all the imitator bands that bubbled up after that, think about REM themselves. Habitide came out 91, same year that, Nevermind did.
92, REM releases automatic for the people. Again, very much an REM record, slow paced, largely acoustic, or I say slow paced, slower, tempo to a lot of the songs. Beautiful record. One of my favorite REM albums. But those songs were getting recorded about the same time that, that smells like teen spirits hitting and all that.
So they were already working on those songs. What did their 1994 album sound like? That album was monster. It was the 1st guitar rock album they had done since Raistritz pageant back in the 83, 84 in that era, you know, somewhere around there. Is it a grunge album?
No. But would REM have put out an overtly loud rock album with a lot of guitars cranked up if the grunge scene hadn’t been going on, if if Nirvana hadn’t come along and kinda had all of the imitators, that they did, I you know, who knows? Who knows what that next record would have sounded like? But what we do know is because Nirvana was out there and because the kind of zeitgeist of what was big in rock music at the time changed, even a band like REM changed what they were doing to kind of more reflect, you know, what was going on, at the time. I do wanna circle back to, losing my religion on the charts.
I looked it up just now. I probably should’ve done it sooner, but Losing My Religion hit number 4 on June 22, 1991. So 4 months after the release of out of, Out of Time. Do you guys wanna wanna hear what was number 1, number 2, and number 3? I’d love to.
The number 3. Yeah. And this says a lot about US music. And when we talk about a band like REM breaking through to the Billboard 100, again, in retrospect, you’re like, well, of course, REM. Like, it’s REM.
They were on the Billboard 100. Blah blah blah. Blah. When you hear the songs that are around them, you’re gonna understand what pop music actually did encompass in 1991 and what they were the world that these albums were being released into. So number 3, extreme more than words.
It’s a jam. Not a not a terrible song. Number 2, a band called color me bad with a song called I wanna sex you up. You know, color me bad famously was the inspiration for the the video that Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake make for dick in a box. That is absolutely a color me bad parody, the video of absolutely.
So if you don’t know color me bad, believe me, they have worked their way into pop culture in that way. And then the number one track in June June 22, 1991, the number one song in United States was rush rush by Paula Abdul. Yeah. So, I mean, you’ve got a a straight up pop song from Paula Abdul. You have whatever the hell you wanna call color me bad doing back then.
I mean, I guess it was r and b. Oh, yeah. I yeah. I don’t I don’t wanna solely any genre by putting color me bad in there. You know what I mean?
But, like, a little bit of new jack swing, maybe, I guess. I I don’t even I a new jack swing is way too cool for color me bad, but that was happening at that time. And then extreme, which was kind of the last vestiges of of hair metal hanging on with the ballads that were usually the only songs really from those bands that did hit that high. A lot of pop metal would hit the Billboard 100 and maybe the top 40, but very few of the non ballad tracks would ever get to that point. So, shout out to them.
The rest of the top 10, by the way, love is a wonderful thing at number 5 by Michael Bolton. And then EMF, unbelievable. An interesting song that kinda And you got a good one in there. Yeah. Luther Vandross power of love, which I I’m not gonna front on that.
Black box, strike it up, an interesting entry into, like, the dance world, which I think we wanted to do an episode about this. Some of the the dance music that was coming out in the early nineties was a whole other world separate from grunge, but that I think collided on college radio. And I think collided in terms of what became alternative as the nineties move forward because a lot of bands started incorporating more what we now call EDM. What back then we called electronica or or just dance music or house music or whatever. And then Mariah Carey, I don’t wanna cry and Jesus Jones right here right now.
Anyway, it’s an interesting snapshot that tells you again, a lot about the world that Nirvana nevermind and pro jam 10 and out of time by our, the world that those albums found themselves in was, was wild back then, like pop music. Now it feels more of a piece. It feels like pop music is a tighter genre of a specific type of music. A lot of times There’s people that push those boundaries. But back then, like, it was it was more of a grab bag.
It felt like like you could have a hair metal band next to an R and B band, next to a hip hop track. I think that’s the MTV influence. You know? MTV MTV was a little less focused. You know, radio was always kind of focused.
We play this kind of music. We play that kind of music. MTV sort of opened the door on that a little bit. They still a lot of genres they would touch, but they they still, like, kinda made that cool that you could see Paula Abdul and and REM back to back on MTV. I would be remiss if I didn’t say that college radio was doing that way before No.
Anybody. That’s one of the things that was great about college radio was genre didn’t mean anything to us from my memory. And, you know, Keith, you actually programmed the station, so you probably have the best insight into it. But to me, there wasn’t really a genre we didn’t play. You know?
Even if you go into country music, I mean, you know, you had your bands like Uncle Tupelo or the Jayhawks or or bands like that that I feel like we’re doing a better version of country music than what you would maybe hear on, you know, the country station. But, I mean, to my memory, and and correct me if I’m wrong, it was as genreless as you get when it comes to radio. And, you know, from my time at the radio station when I was programming it, my goal was, you know, to have, like, a a really eclectic mix on there. But what I really wanted was to gain enough listeners, and be a big enough of a presence in the radio market that we were in at that time that we could drag the rock station kicking and screaming toward us, that we could drag the pop station toward us, make them play some of the things we were playing because, you know, people would hear on on our station and then wanna hear them elsewhere as well and call these other radio stations. So, well, why aren’t you playing this or that or the other thing?
And I felt like we we did that. But, yes, I do think that, college radio was onto that long before commercial radio was. And I agree that MTV had a lot to do with that as well. Well, you guys made some good points. I’m I have to say that, I am thinking about this a little differently than I was when the episode started.
Listeners out there, you know, if you’ve always thought of the early nineties as as kind of a very simple time where Nirvana came along and, you know, dig deeper. There’s definitely more there. Dig deeper. Go go dig into go listen to Mudhoney and see why Scott said that maybe maybe they’re the better grunge band. And listen to your local college radio station, see what’s going on these days.
I bet below the the sheen of pop music that we hear on top 40 radio or, you know, that bubbles up to the top of your algorithm if you’re, you know, stream your music. There’s a whole world of music that we’re probably missing out on that’s getting played on college radio because that’s how it’s always been. And if you wanna know more about college radio, guess what? There’s a film about it. Somebody made a film about college radio.
I know. I know. That is that somebody? I’m serious. It’s called 35,000 Watts, the story of college radio.
It’s right there in the title. And you can download it right now at 35,000 watts.com and watch it at your leisure. We have, lots of social media on Instagram, on Facebook. I think we might actually be dipping our toes into TikTok. I’m not I can’t say that I’m personally doing that part, but somebody might be at some point.
We have a, and we have a website, 35,000watts.com/podcast if it has a feedback form. So you can tell us why we’re wrong, what we should talk about, why we need to talk to you. Maybe maybe we should interview you. Maybe you were in college radio and you want us to talk to you about it. Let us know on the website, on the socials, and go watch the film.
Thanks once again to Keith Porterfield and Scott Mobley for joining me for this episode of 35,000 Watts, the podcast.