Here’s a sign of how old I am. All these groups and organizations in Madison are celebrating 50th anniversaries this year.
Or last year, like Willy Street Co-op.
WORT, our community radio station where I was a volunteer and then a volunteer programmer and then a Board member from about 1984-1991, is 50 this year.
I made a cake for the reunion picnic on Sunday afternoon.
WORT cake
WORT cake dished up
I took the first set of music I played on the air at WORT to the picnic, on my iPod, and when I saw the audio set up at the picnic, I could tell that I actually had the right connectors to hook it up. There was a panel of founding WORTsters, and everyone was talking about the political importance of WORT and how it was important to do community radio, back porch radio, “with the seams showing” one of WORT’s taglines. I was on the air at a time period when WORT was basically college radio in Madison, indie rock – there weren’t any other stations playing that kind of (more commercial) music. Bands like REM and U2 and Elvis Costello and X, who got big later, and a tier more esoteric bands like Robyn Hitchcock and Dream Syndicate and Lets Active and Pylon and Long Ryders. And local bands, like Spooner. Anyways, after all the talk, I didn’t think anyone wanted to listen to 18 minutes of jangly guitar that starts with the Byrds and ends with Spooner. So here’s the set list and you can recreate if you like.
John & Al’s dad was on the air at WORT, too. Here he is in a WORT windbreaker when we went to Chicago to see the Grateful Dead at UIC Pavilion, in April of 1987, when John was only about 4 weeks old.
Here’s me using a WORT hoodie (tho we called them sweatshirts back then) as maternity wear. This is as big as I got – it’s the Sunday before John was born the following Wednesday.
And then there was the big one – Spooner’s 50th reunion, a live show, a week ago Saturday, at the new concert hall in town, the Atwood Music Hall. It was fun and bittersweet and gone too fast. The member of the band that we were the closest with when Jeff and I were married and owned a record store and were really part of the Madison music scene is Dave Benton. I always ran down and stood on Dave’s side of the stage. Which I think in the old days tended to be stage right, but was stage left for the reunion show, possibly because he played sitting down.
I’m in this one, over to the left behind the guy in the striped shirt with his arm upraised.
I’m in this one too, though what you really need to see here is Marco, dancing
Dave & Marco
Dave in front of the cover of Every Corner Dance, that was designed by a Mike Tincher, a member of a silkscreen collective I belonged to, too, Survival Graphics
Spooner takes a bow
The local newspaper did an article about the show, and I saved a pdf in case the link stops working.
Setlist
And I guess, since I’ve been trying to get all this written down for over a week, not too much else to say here. Or more like I have a lot of thoughts that I can’t quite put into writing here. I’m listening to Harry Rag’s show on WORT, the stream from last Friday, Jingle Jangle July. Really impressive, 3 hours of jangly guitar. None of my jangly guitar playlists is longer than an hour. Harry a.k.a. Doug was at the Spooner show, too.
So, to close, here’s a cherry pie I made the Sunday after Spooner because some friends brought me a bag of cherries from their tree. It was just about perfect – sweet, but you could still taste the tartness of the cherries. I took them a hunk on my way to yoga last Tuesday.
And oh yea, TIFF is 50 this year, too. And we’re going. 