I'm not scared, I'm outta here

A few reminders about this song, especially this time of year...never have I seen, more so heard, so many people misunderstand the concept of a "false ending."

The phrase is self-explanatory (or so I thought). You’re a DJ and the song you’re playing starts to wind down. You’re paying attention and you think you can guess as to when it will end. But – hold on - it’s not really the end, so you have to be ready for the real ending that will follow, either a second later or longer. Electrolite ends with Michael Stipe singing, "I'm not scared, I'm outta here." The music is trailing off and the impending end of the song is close at hand and just when you think he’s done singing whatever it is the song is about, he adds one more "I'm not scared." The music has ended by now and following a brief pause, he adds a final, "I'm outta here."

Perhaps, as student management, we had chastised anything remotely similar to "dead air" upon our fellow undergraduates. Perhaps these DJs wanted to tighten their board and not waste those precious seconds of empty airtime. Whatever the case, no sooner had we entered Electrolite into rotation did we discover that DJs were assuming that once the music was over that the song was over. No, that would be a false assumption – similar in concept to the aforementioned false ending. Yes, once they assumed the song had ended, people were beginning another song, running a station liner or sweeper, or (funniest yet) opening the microphone and talking – just to be interrupted by Stipe's singing a few seconds later.

In an attempt to make things easier on the staff – since these same DJs were not bothering to put the CD into the cue channel and listen to the ending before they played it on the air, which would have solved this problem – the music director added a note to the playlist that this song had a false ending. From there it was always a hoot to hear which people read the playlist verses those who didn't. If we, as station management, "magically" showed up a few minutes later, more often than not the DJ would mutter something about the trick ending of the song throwing them off. After a while you could only smile and nod – and then point out the note on the playlist. That is, if you wanted to spend that time beating it back into their head.

I personally knew about the ending because I owned a copy of the album and had listened to the song numerous times, becoming familiar with the nursery rhyme-like simplicity of its wistful lyrics. You wanted to sing-along with phrases like Steve McQueen and James Dean – know what I mean? It spoke of a loss and of how things could have been and sounded anything-but-upbeat and thus was the perfect song for me to sign-off with when ending a melancholy Halloween evening a decade ago –

Descanse en la paz.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
Electrolite
(Bill Berry/Peter Buck/Mike Mills/Michael Stipe)
R.E.M.
From the album New Adventures in High-Fi
1996

Your eyes are burning holes through me
I'm gasoline
I'm burnin' clean

Twentieth century go and sleep
You're Pleistocene
That is obscene
That is obscene

(chorus)
You are the star tonight
Your sun electric, outta sight
Your light eclipsed the moon tonight
Electrolite
You're outta sight

If I ever want to fly
Mulholland Drive
I am alive

Hollywood is under me
I'm Martin Sheen
I'm Steve McQueen
I'm Jimmy Dean

(repeat chorus)

If you ever want to fly
Mulholland Drive
Up in the sky
Stand on a cliff and look down there
Don't be scared, you are alive
You are alive

(repeat chorus)

Twentieth century go and sleep
Really deep
We won't blink

Your eyes are burning holes through me
I'm not scared
I'm outta here
I'm not scared
I'm outta here

Can't wait for tomorrow, I might not have that long

Halloween at the undergraduate radio station didn't always come across as the big deal that one might think it would. One might think we would spend all our time "spookifying" the station both in looks and sounds to give it that haunted edge. I think about it and assume the reason we didn't go too wild was because we were students and needed to focus our time on other things. Halloween was just one day – one night, in reality – and to go into all that prep work just to give ourselves that satisfaction, however small, probably wasn't worth the overall effort.

I seem to recall a few people dressed-up here and there in costumes, but no costume really stands out all these years later. There were some girls in the department who liked dying their hair green or magenta year-round but when October 31 rolled around we didn't know if it was part of their costume or just a fresh scalp recoloring. No Thriller dancers, either.

We did try to find songs or music groups that had a certain "autumn" feel to them. We didn't go as far as playing Monster Mash (...though that might have been an interesting idea...) but I know a few of us tried to ensnare the Smashing Pumpkins into the mix. That's the band, mind you, and not broken pieces of gourds.

Which reminds me that I did have a roommate at one point who thought it would be cool to see what kind of damage he could do with a pumpkin and a screen-less fourth story window. His name was Benjamin Hale and I think he thought himself pretty slick in pulling this "trick" off. He might have gotten away with it, too, had it not been for a few things he overlooked. One was the fact our window was the only one without a screen. Not an earth-shattering point, I know, but these old aluminum frames were locked on to the window so they couldn't be removed precisely for this reason. And since every other window in the housing complex had an outside screen, it wasn't going to take long for even the dimmest Resident Advisor (that being Carlos Maña, the third floor RA) to figure out what happened.

Ben's second problem was not something immediately noticed because it did not present itself until after the fact. Fact is Ben had gotten a fairly large pumpkin. More so, I think Ben had stolen this large gourd from one of the outside displays at Conglomo and smuggled back into the room with the "assistance" of our neighbors, Artie and Jerry, with the full intent of tossing it out of the window. Allow me to insert another small point: Ben liked it warm in the room and kept the heater on. So by the time Ben got up the nerve to throw the thing out the window, it had been subject to many a warm day and night and gave me another reason to dislike the taste – and smell – of pumpkins.

I chose to be elsewhere the fateful night – probably across the street at the radio station – and therefore missed what I heard turned into a bigger mess than expected. Because of the pumpkin's size and weight, Ben's attempt to lob the thing didn't quite work the way he wanted. First, it snagged our air conditioner unit. Then, because it didn't have much in the way of forward motion, it fell straight downward – directly in the path of the air conditioner unit below us. A large metallic clang echoed throughout the parking lot, I was told later. That didn't help its trajectory, nor did the two air conditioner units on the first and second floor. Thankfully each hit did worse wear to the pumpkin than the air conditioners.

The next morning all the evidence of autumn was there for all to see: the tell-tale orange marks from the fourth floor window downward, and the foul-smelling remnants of a pumpkin directly below our window. Ben, at least, had the decency to take responsibility for it and saved me for paying the damage fee (something like 10 or 20 bucks to clean up the mess and replace the screen).

Elsewhere...nobody wanted to dress up like Billy Corgan. I thought it would have been fun for someone to shave his (or her) head and walk around all angst-ridden though still trying not to be confused for Kowalczyk or O'Connor or Stipe. I never gauged my peers to figure out whether people were into the Smashing Pumpkins or not, but I think a lot of people were perplexed at the amount of music he could create that just sorted of droned on and on and on....

- - - - - - - - - - - -
Today
(Corgan)
Smashing Pumpkins
From the album Siamese Dream
1993

Today is the greatest
Day I've ever known
Can't live for tomorrow,
Tomorrow's much too long
I'll burn my eyes out
Before I get out

I wanted more
Than life could ever grant me
Bored by the chore
Of saving face

Today is the greatest
Day I've ever known
Can't wait for tomorrow
I might not have that long
I'll tear my heart out
Before I get out

Pink ribbon scars
That never forget
I tried so hard
To cleanse these regrets
My angel wings
Were bruised and restrained
My belly stings

Today is
Today is
Today is
The greatest day

I want to turn you on
I want to turn you on
I want to turn you on
I want to turn you

Today is the greatest
Today is the greatest day
Today is the greatest day
That I have ever really known.

You have to believe you can do it if you wanna just do what you please

It's sort of hard to believe that ten years ago I first heard of Ray Wilson.

When I got back from summer vacation – back when I was a senior – I met up with some of the cronies who had put in time over the summer at the radio station. I don't think there was ever anyone to work exclusively at the station, but there were always a few who liked to pull a few extra shifts closer to the start of the fall semester.

I stopped in to announce my return and visit with whomever I found, as well as to take a peek at the weekly preview discs that we had received over the summer months. One thing caught my eye: Genesis. I was keenly aware of the group, after hearing Invisible Touch-era music for years on the radio, and after playing the only non-scratched cut off their 1983 album during our classic rock programming (sigh - Illegal Alien). But this was something new – Congo – and should sound vastly different since Phil Collins was no longer part of the band, having been replaced by...and then there was who? Ah, the aforementioned Ray Wilson.

I remember someone made the comment that the album was doomed because it didn't have that "P-Sound." It took me a second for that to sink in (when did Genesis ever sound like George Clinton?) until I realized "Ray" didn't start with the letter "P" the way "Phil" and "Peter" did. Therefore the puzzle piqued my interest: who was Ray Wilson? Where did Mike and Tony find this guy?

Well, I suppose if I knew more about 90's rock in the UK, then I would have heard of Stiltskin and Wilson's association with that outfit. But I hadn't. And I don't think many people at the radio station were too eager to seek out Stiltskin's 1994 album, either. If anything, Ray made me want to seek out some of the Peter-era music and see what was going on before I was born. It also made me want to hear more of the Collins-era that I thought I knew something about (based solely on his last three studio albums). Calling All Stations – or as we quipped, "Calling Any Station" – apparently did not make the impact it thought it would.

But I think that's a bit unfair. As I said, it's hard to believe ten years have passed since I first heard Congo and in that time, the song's grown on me. So has the album, which I found secondhand a few years ago and have turned on more than a few times. Having heard the entire Genesis studio output from their...well...literal Genesis forward, I must confess to finding Wilson's album a welcome change. With no ill will to Collins, Calling All Stations is somewhat refreshing in places, without those flourishes that made later day Genesis albums and solo-Collins output indistinguishable. Many reviews have noted an attempted return to the band's progressive roots and those comments are not arguable. Pockets of uncertainty bubble up in places – a couple tracks sound like one extended lament for a better life somewhere else – but on the whole the album isn’t bad and could have been the third stage of the band - had the thoughts and gestures of the band’s remaining core not crawled off into obscurity.

The Genesis of today is out on tour and again fronted by Collins. Wilson has continued his musical endeavors, too, with the 1999 album Millionairhead and a second Stiltskin album in 2006.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
Congo
(Tony Banks/Mike Rutherford)
Genesis
From the album Calling All Stations
1997

You say that I put chains on you
But I don't think that's really true
But if you want to be free from me
You gotta lose me in another world

Send me to the Congo I'm free to leave
There's always somewhere anybody can lead
Send me to the Congo you have to believe
You can do it if you wanna just do what you please

Like a soldier ant
I will wait for the signal to act
To take a walk right through the door
If you don't want me here any more

Send me to the Congo I'm free to leave
There's always somewhere anybody can lead
Send me to the Congo you have to believe
You can do it if you wanna just do what you please

Into my heart you came
And gave a whole new meaning to my life
Into my world you brought a light
I thought it never would go out

Send me to the Congo I'm free to leave
There's always somewhere anybody can lead
Send me to the Congo you have to believe
You can do it if you wanna just do what you please

You can send me to the Congo I'm free to leave
There's always somewhere anybody can lead
Yes you can send me to the Congo, you have to believe
You can do it if you wanna just do what you please

I would never be the one to say you had no reason
To want me somewhere else far far away
But someday you may understand, someday you will see
That someone who would die for you is all I've ever been

Congo the Congo, if that's how it's got to be
Congo the Congo, if that's what you want from me

I would never be the one to say you had no reason
To want me somewhere else far far away
Someday you may understand someday you will see...

You get caught up in all the motion and never hear the simple things when they call

Our Saturday morning folk show (see Jesse James behind the wheel) at the undergraduate station was a hybrid of music, a juxtaposition of sounds that didn't always sound the best together but we made them work the best we could. The majority of music played during the four hours was generally referred to as "contemporary folk." In reality, I suspect most of it could have easily been played during the "softer" rock shifts; the only reason why it wasn't probably had to do with popularity. That is, Counting Crows could sound folkie but were still thought of a rock group. Sons of the Never Wrong were classified as folk and it was the folk show that highlighted them. Regularly.

Brad Phasner, the originator of the folk program, had sent word to records labels and magazines promoting this as well as asking for complimentary copies of albums to help boost our fledging library. One of the discs received was Three Good Reasons by a Chicago-based group called Sons of the Never Wrong. It did not take long for the title track to garner airplay and become a fast favorite of Brad, me, and listeners who called in asking who they were.

They were Sue Demel, Bruce Roper, and Nancy Walker, taking their collective name from mumbling through The Guns of Navarone. Three Good Reasons was their debut release on the Waterbug label, and four more albums have followed, the most recent being 2005’s Nuthatch Suite. Walker has since been replaced by Deborah Lader.

Three good things about listeners during the folk show that I never got from other shifts? One, listeners actually seemed generally interested in the music. There was no other format I was aware of that had people calling in and wanting to know where we got the album. Could they get a copy? (No.) Could we tell them how to buy a copy? (Yes.) Which is why Brad always gave out record label information in the early days of the program. Second, listeners seldom sounded like students, which all but proved that this type of music was attracting a community-wide audience that had only been assumed. Now we had proof. And certain people called often enough you might recognize voices. Third, and most bizarre to me, was that listeners went to bat for us. When the folk show was bumped from Saturday to Sunday mornings because of the Foreign Language department, I was told a few people called to protest – one going as far to say he would skip church for this music. I always assumed he ended up missing church because, while appreciated, his one call didn't sway station management.

There may have been a fourth reason but I couldn't think of it at the moment.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
Three Good Reasons
(Roper)
Sons of the Never Wrong
From the album Three Good Reasons
1995

And Mary was amazed that they would ever even meet
But god her help he sought his trinity to complete
And god said to Mary
Dear Mary please trust me what I’m about to do
But I’ve got three good reasons
Three good reasons
Three good reasons
And one of them is you

And there are three sisters
One prayer, one hymn, one graces
Whose countenance is required in whole or part
And often found in quite places
They will stand and watch over your shoulder
Smile on and see you through
Cause they’ve got three good reasons
Three good reasons
Three good reasons
And one of them is you

And where the ocean meets the land everything seems to rise and fall
You get caught up in all the motion
And never hear the simple things when they call
Oh you can stand out on a mountain top
And why the sky’s so blue
But that’s cause there are three good reasons
Three good reasons
Three good reasons
And one of them is you