Radio Free Europe

It sounded unlike anything I had heard before. From the echoing buried chorus to the bell-tone hi-hat cymbals at the end, it was way cooler than what I had heard before.

The Boog had it going on. Besides "college music" (REM in this case), there was a wall-lining shelf full of beer cans, many of which were defunct, surrounding his room at just above eye-level.

If coolness could radiate, it would have done so towards me. The album (REMs' "Murmur") was so far beyond what my friends knew that I started worshiping College Rock. I felt like I was in some kind of secret society just knowing about it.

When I got to actual college (Tulane) I was shocked to find most of my classmates still listed to high-school oriented Top-40. I can remember talking about some crap Duran Duran song, trashing it, then having the other people in the room ask me what was wrong with it? I was so flustered that anyone at that level could enjoy that pap all I could offer was "it would take too log to explain."

The college had a perfectly good radio station, one that suffered from the hipper-than-thou syndrome. The challenge among the DJs was to find a song that was so obscure than no one had ever heard it. Usually for good reason. As a friend said, they were so avant-garde that they sucked.

At Madison, my second (and better) university, some in-state schmuck wrote an us-vs.-them article in the Badger-Herald, the competition for our left-wing rag The Daily Cardinal.

First, you have to understand that the out-of-state people ran everything. The student government, the student union programming, the film society, the two (!) student newspapers; and practically everything worthwhile, though we constituted about one-third of all undergrads.

Anyhow, this columnist talked about how "they" listed to Natalie Merchant and REM, while "we" listed to various god-awful bands like Styx and Journey. This was doubly amusing since those two bands (REM and Merchant) had long ago been picked up by major labels.

There was a certain Deer-in-the-Lights quality to rural or even suburban Wisconsinites. They couldn't believe what you did, whether it was putting together a piece like this or a Fellini movie in an unused classroom.

I can vividly remember going to a free preview of a terrible Kevin Costner movie at Social Sciences hall. I fully expected that maybe 20-30 people would show up, like in the film society flicks. Instead, the place was packed.

Who were these people? The answer was that they were the two-thirds of the campus population that never appeared in the papers, and didn't hang out at the student union at all hours like everyone else we knew.

My belief in my cultural superiority was reinforced by a scene where Costner jumps off the Whitehurst Freeway in DC and into the Georgetown metro subway station. Besides the logistics involved, there was one great problem in the scene: Georgetown does not have a metro subway stop.

Back to the Boog. I can live without him, but I cannot forget the good times we had: going to the Adirondacks, the Catskills, and Montreal. Searching NYC for the last German neighborhood (somewhere in Queens), traveling by ferry and Staten Island Transit to Killmayers, a beerhall on the southern end of that benighted borough.

We conquered the North Bronx, Woodlawn and the rest, and partied with the immigrants when Ireland won a certain round in the world cup. One to nothing, and the crowd took over the streets in pint-smashing celebration.

You don't need to know that I miss those times, only I don't resent anything. I have frustrated multiple mental health professionals: I don't expect you to be any different (just don't charge me as much).