The Boo Radleys, "Lazarus"
It took effort and initiative to find good new music in the ’80s and ’90s. FM radio in and around Youngstown, Ohio was … unadventurous. New wave videos had rocked our worlds through our early teens, but at some point in the mid-1980s the record industry found its footing and moved to colonize MTV, so that by end of the decade the network’s waking hours were given over entirely to SoCal hair metal, R&B song-and-dance acts, and mid-career Madonna—when they were showing videos at all. In those days there were of course no algorithms to lead you gently from Songs You Liked to More Songs You Might Like. Shazam wasn’t parked on your phone to tell you what you were hearing over the PA system in the café. And there were no streaming services offering you 100 million songs at a monthly subscription. When you did come across a new band or song you liked, you next had to consider whether to drop fifteen dollars—three times mowing the lawn, at my piddling and non-negotiable rate of payment—to buy the full album on compact disc.
In times of trial and scarcity, you become resourceful. You keep your eyes and ears open, all the time. You find like-minded hunting partners, and you collaborate and coordinate with them. And back in our high school days, amid the aesthetic desolation of The Rust Belt (1985-1995), we were a pack of hyenas. We scrounged, we hustled, we picked through trash to find what we needed. At least once a week we dropped in on each of the two record stores at the Eastwood Mall, Musicland and National Record Mart, to pick through their meager modern rock offerings. Certain of the clerks at NRM had tastes similar to ours: they knew what we stood for and would tip us off to a record they liked. Or they’d let us root through the big book they had behind the counter that would tell you the name of every U.S. release that had, say, an OMD song on it:
LPs: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (1980), Organisation (1980), Junk Culture (1984), Crush (1985), The Pacific Age (1986).
Compilations: Urgh! A Music War (original soundtrack, 1981), Pretty in Pink (original soundtrack, 1986).
Singles: …
You would then beat your brains in looking for Urgh! A Music War—or for that matter figuring out what it even was. Soundtracks and compilations were high-leverage options, because you could buy one album and tap into a dozen bands. Pretty in Pink sold on cassette for just eight dollars, and it turned me on to New Order, Echo & the Bunnymen, Suzanne Vega, and INXS. Sire Records’ Just Say Yes sampler series (see also Just Say Yo! Just Say Mao! Just Say Da! and Just Say Anything) surfaced countless bands for all of us. You bought them for the remixes and B-sides of bands you liked (Depeche Mode, the Smiths, Erasure), and the next thing you knew, you’d found James, the Wild Swans, Throwing Muses, My Bloody Valentine, John Wesley Harding, and the Farm.
We gave and got word-of-mouth tips to and from Elsewhere on the Scene—kids you’d seen around wearing Cure or Bauhaus T-shirts, or floppy skater haircuts that looked like ours. These markers signaled membership in the Trumbull/ Mahoning County alt-rock underground; you’d see them, you’d start a conversation, and you’d talk music. A kid named Don bused tables at my family restaurant and had all kinds of recommendations:
Have you heard the Stone Roses? Have you heard Lush?
Within school we grew our networks by inscribing arcane symbols and text in pen and pencil on the grocery-bag paper our mothers used to wrap our algebra and civics textbooks. Our schoolbooks were tattooed with band logos, excerpted lyrics (sometimes translated into Latin, to make them still more obscure), and copied or traced renditions of album art. At times we might go so cryptic as to write the catalog numbers of LPs we deemed essential, or non sequitur slogans pulled from their liner notes. The right people could read the symbology and respond with their own, so that you learned to pull music recommendations off the covers and spines of passing students’ books. (The metal kids were more straightforward: they carved their preferences into the study-hall desks.)
For every CD we bought at the record store, we bought at least two blank cassette tapes. We made buys around each other’s collections to maximize our coverage—I’ll buy the B-52s, you buy Sinead O’Connor … but who’s getting the Happy Mondays single?—and then we would dub one another’s CDs to cassette. Maxell, TDK, Memorex. C30, C60, C90, Go! (Apple Music, Spotify).
For a brief time there was an indie record store in the Great East Plaza at the corner of Market Street and Youngstown Road, right next to Barney Macali’s supermarket. It carried imports. It turned out that in addition to the OMD records listed in NRM’s Big Book, there were two more albums, Architecture & Morality and Dazzle Ships, that had not been released in the United States. The Great East Plaza record store stocked these albums on vinyl. Not our preferred medium at the time, but no matter: we plunked down our cash and blitzed home to the nearest working turntable to drop the needle. We listened like our lives depended on it and, of course, dubbed these records to tape.
The filtration of these OMD records and other obscure works into Warren, Ohio, drip by drip, gave us the sense that we were only scratching the surface, that there was a vast wealth of rock music and culture out there waiting for us, if we could just get out of town. We heard reports of a stretch of road in Coventry, outside Cleveland, where the record stores were loaded. Getting there was another matter entirely.
I slagged off MTV nine paragraphs ago, but it’s essential to this post, so I’m circling back to it now. Cards on the table: the format changes to MTV in the mid- to late 1980s felt like a betrayal to us. But that betrayal wasn’t complete, and we still had reason to watch, hold out hope, even rely on MTV to airlift supplies to us in our time of want. This was because as hard as its corporate side pushed to beat the good music out of public view, someone in MTV Studios kept just enough of their nerve to allot two hours per week on the programming schedule to alternative/ modern/ college rock. The show was called 120 Minutes, and it aired between midnight and 2 AM on Monday mornings.
120 Minutes stuck it out on MTV for a full fourteen years, from 1986 to 2000. That it lasted this long was astonishing. Two full hours of industry-be-damned, anything-goes music video programming in an alt-/ indie rock format? Let’s hear it! A number of VJs worked this gig, but Dave Kendall was at the helm in the show’s heyday—or at least when it meant the most to us, between 1988 and 1992. Not everything we saw reached out and grabbed us, but so much of it was just what we needed. Mixed in with videos for songs we already knew and loved, Dave Kendall introduced us to the Sundays, Public Image Limited, Inspiral Carpets, World Party, the Soup Dragons, the Darling Buds, and countless others.
It was a cruel irony that once a week the floodgates opened, pouring the best and brightest music into the 44484—with video, too—but we could only have it in the wee hours of the morning before the start of the school week. It’s true that some of our peers bit the bullet and stayed up to watch anyway. We would hear the buzz about what they saw Monday morning in school. But the rest of us clocked out at 10:30 or 11 PM on a Sunday night, when the videos we wanted so badly to see were just out of our reach.
At some point it did occur to us to set our VCRs to record 120 Minutes, but we weren’t disciplined or consistent about doing it. Looking back I wonder why. I know I was strictly prohibited from programming anything into the VCR that could interfere with my mother’s taping of Days of Our Lives, but this wouldn’t have held back my comrades in other houses. The best answer I have for why we didn’t dub 120 Minutes to VHS each week is that we were inured to the deprivation. Nowadays it’s different. You want to hear a song? You log on and get it. The idea that it might not be immediately available is alien and anathema. By contrast, thirty-five years ago we were content to punt on most of the 120 Minutes broadcasts, because we could still leverage each year’s handful of three-day weekends to get an occasional fix. On those holiday Sundays we’d gather with sleeping bags at one of our houses, settle in front of the TV, and take it all in. What better way to honor America’s veterans, war dead, Presidents, and civil rights leaders than to catch the new Ocean Blue video on MTV at 1:15 AM?
When we got to college, we better understood the thinking behind the 120 Minutes time slot. This content was targeted to college and graduate students, and between midnight and 2 AM was the time of day when that demographic—and importantly, no one else—was awake. But now we were awake. We lived in or near big cities (Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, New York), where there were bars and clubs committed to playing modern rock, and we were up and fully caffeinated on Sunday nights, to watch 120 Minutes. The sad tradeoff was that although we were finally positioned to receive these benefits, we were separate and couldn’t share in them together. We were scattered across a handful of universities, keeping in touch only by phone—and at considerable cost, we would find, when the long-distance charges were posted at the end of the month.
So it was that when I first heard “Lazarus” (Apple Music, Spotify) by the Boo Radleys, I was watching 120 Minutes by myself on the couch in the basement of Kate’s family’s vacation home on Hilton Head Island, while Kate and her family slept upstairs. This was the summer after my sophomore year in college. A minute ago I discovered this essential (at least to me) online resource, which, if you input the name of a song, will tell you whether and on what dates that song’s video was played on 120 Minutes. The 120 Minutes Archive tells me “Lazarus” was played on August 1, August 22, and September 12, 1993. Just now I consulted with Kate, and she agrees that of these three dates, August 1 is most likely the date we were together in Hilton Head.
August 1 it is, then. On August 1, 1993 I first heard “Lazarus,” in a basement by myself. A month later I had bought the album, Giant Steps, on CD. Giant Steps is one of my all-time favorite records. I talk about it at length in this podcast episode (Apple Podcasts, Spotify) with Mark and Bob, two of my best and oldest friends—and card-carrying members of the samizdat alt-rock network I’ve spent most of this post describing. Because I found it after we’d gone our separate ways to college, I can’t say whether it means as much to them as it did to me. Hence my determination to sell them on the record, almost thirty years after I bought it. Seventeen perfect songs, cutting across a vast expanse of musical territory, from shoegaze to psychedelia to dub reggae to avant-garde to [gasp] jazz. Martin Carr’s composition, sound engineering, and mammoth guitars augmented by Sice’s clear-as-angels vocals. Giant Steps is a proverbial Desert Island Record for me.
“Lazarus” is here today not just because it happened to be the single off Giant Steps that appeared on 120 Minutes. I could have picked any of dozens of terrific songs that vaulted into my life in the darkest hours of a Monday morning between 1985 and 1995. “Lazarus” in particular is here because of these words, which rang true for me in 1993, and maybe still do thirty years later:
When I start to think back, I feel like I’ve spent my whole life just kicking round and not getting in the way. And now, maybe now I should change.
So not just beautiful and perfect and evocative and powerful, but something to think about, too, on a cold, clear Monday in February.