I stumbled on a piece of nostalgic gold tonight.

As I have mentioned in past posts, when I was in college frmphferumph years ago, I volunteered at a wonderful radio station in Minneapolis called REV105.  It was the most refreshing commercial radio station many of us had heard, running right during the prime of the alternative music boom in the mid-1990s (I was so fortunate to be in school at that time!).  It competed with a Disney-owned mega-watt mainstream alternative rock station, to which it was eventually sold.

                                                

Initially I was an avid listener of the mega-watt giant.  When REV first went on air, I toyed with it a bit.  I called once for a request, but told the screener I was still sticking with the big boys.  I was asked what it would take to convert me; I didn't have a good answer.  Sooner after, I was listening to the corporate beast and decided to call in for a request, the new Juliana Hatfield single if I remember correctly.  Their screener flatly said "Who?"  I was floored a radio station who called itself the "leader" in a market for a particular format didn't know one of its more-famous faces.  From that moment on, I was a dedicated REV105 listener, spending hours and hours with my obsession, probably irritating the snot out of my family and friends because I refused to listen to anything else.

I began thinking I wanted to steer away from my lifelong goal of becoming a professional actor to pursuing a career as an on-air personality in alternative radio, and I decided it was going to happen at the REV.  I got up the nerve to call the station and offer my volunteer services to the Program Director, the esteemed Kevin Cole, thinking it would be my way in to eventually just being handed an actual job.  For the next two years, all the staff at the station put up with my annoying clinging and begging to be a part of everything I could, from parades to comps to shows to almost getting to engineer during the State Fair.  In hindsight, they all couldn't have been more generous and patient with an obnoxious little wannabe from the south suburbs who really had no idea what the business was really about and just wanted to hang with the cool kids.

Tonight, this Soundcloud mix was posted on Facebook by a couple of actual former employees of the station who have continued having very successful radio careers.  It is a 90-minute splice of on-air and studio recordings as well as samples of the music, album tracks and in-studio rarities, that made the station so great.

The posts were accompanied by the melancholy reminder that it was twenty years ago this weekend that the station was ripped away from us.  No fanfare, no warning; just an hour of even more unusual and eclectic programming than we were already used to, then suddenly getting blasted out by The Scorpions as Disney decided it was going to change the format to hard rock.  No one knew what was happening.  The staff had just been told themselves.  There were mourning parties soon after.  We had all lost something very dear to us.  It was a travesty and we all hurt for a long time.

If you choose to listen, it may not mean as much to you if you weren't down with the Revolution at the time, but at least some of the music may bring a nostalgic smile to your face.  The whole thing did for me.  If I weren't working my suit job on Saturday and it weren't getting prematurely hot here in the desert, I might wear my REV hoodie all day in memorium; it's the only piece of memorabilia I have left, but I still proudly wear it when the weather permits.  Maybe I'll just have to break out some of my favorite albums from that period to reminisce further.  I hope you'll spare some time and take a listen to what was truly one of the highlights of my life.  Peace, love, and rock and roll.