@VinceFinemMusic

1 month ago

In the late 90s, just before the internet really blew up, it was an adventure to find new music that fit my taste. Or, more importantly, finding a new taste I didn't know I had! Putting on those gross headphones in the record (really CDs and cassettes by then) store and hoping for the best when you punched in the song number. I remember at the time, I was big into what was called alternative and indie rock. I subscribed to huH magazine and found a ton of great music through their sample CDs that came in the mail.

I think it was Columbia House or maybe a competitor had a phone system set up so you could call a 1-800 number, punch in a code and listen to sample snippets of songs. You could tell if at -least one song was good enough to buy the CD and hope the others were worth the $10-15.

Finally, there was Rage TV on WSBK, channel 38 out of Boston on our new cable company that came to my rural town. Very late on Saturday nights, they had an hour show called Rage TV full of awesome songs that I would record on VHS so I knew what albums to hunt down. That's where I found Therapy? Troublegum and listened to some of the bigger band's less popular songs I was already fond of, like Smashing Pumpkins and NIN. There's only two pieces of proof this show even existed: A blog post from 2010 and a brief YouTube clip of the Allstonians.

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