In honor of the first WXNA Record Fair on Sunday, March 23 at Eastside Bowl, March 17-23, 2025 is Crate Digger’s Week on WXNA! Watch this space for stories from our DJs about some of their favorite record finds!
The Great Society With Grace Slick – Conspicuous Only In Its Absence
Michael Roark – Hazy Ways & The Friday Afternoon Club
I can endlessly tell stories (as I’m sure everyone can) about how this song or that album or which artist hit me, hurt me, or healed me. I do it every week in some capacity on both of my shows (Hazy Ways and The Friday Afternoon Club) whether consciously or not.
I was the youngest of five, living in a small town in Southern Colorado that housed the state penitentiary. We were Irish quintuplets. You do the math. I was introduced to music, as most people are who have both parents and older siblings in their life, and to an array of artists and albums.
It was a classic early-70s split level home. I shared one room with my brother closest in age, one year my senior. The two eldest boys (also a year a part) shared a room next door. My sister — in the middle, age-wise — had her own room squeezed in nearby. My parents were downstairs and from their turntable in the family room I was turned on to Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, Carole King’s Tapestry, and The Beatles’ Abbey Road, among others. I recall my sister playing The Best of Bread and the soundtrack to Grease on her stereo. It seems my brother and I were always listening to ABBA in our room, the closest I ever came to musical theater. But the music from my older brothers’ bedroom had a different patina, which eventually led me down roads I will forever travel. Not to say the music from my parents stereo or Bread or ABBA or the soundtrack to Grease won’t always color the edges of my musical journey.
Two albums stand out from my elder brothers’ room. First, was Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s You’re Gonna Get It. My brother played it one day, and when he left, I snuck into his room, took it, and listened to it in mine for the rest of the afternoon, flipping each side over several times. When he came home and heard me playing it, he immediately took it back with a light scold, as he was probably secretly pleased I glommed on to his new favorite band. A year or so later my other brother put on a record and I recall the first song rattled my little mind. I never imagined it possible that I would hear my mother’s favorite expletive sung out loud in a song. “Precious” was the song from The Pretenders debut album.
As I got older, years passed and music filtered in, as music always does. At some point, I became smitten with Jefferson Starship, which led to Jefferson Airplane. I loved Grace Slick. Her album Software was a favorite of mine my senior year in high school. One day in spring of 1985, coming back from a Speech and Debate meet in Denver, our school bus stopped in Colorado Springs for lunch. It so happened that one of southern Colorado’s best record stores, Independent Records (which is still there today 40 years later), was across the street. I hit the bins and looked through the stacks. In the Jefferson Airplane section I found a curiosity, The Great Society with Grace Slick – Conspicuous Only In Its Absence. I wondered what this was. Curiously, “White Rabbit” was on it. “Somebody To Love,” too. I was unsure if it was real. The cover had this nearly absent, faded overlay of Grace Slick, while prominently displaying four young men with shaggy hair. Was this some kind of ruse? I presented it to my favorite friend, one who turned me on to Talking Heads, and asked if I should get it. He said that I definitely should get it, probably knowing that this gem, which was said to be pre-Jefferson Airplane, might knock me out of my flighty gravitational pull towards mid-‘80s synthesized Grace Slick. (For the record, the cheese of Software still holds a kind of sticky-fondue love in my heart.)
So, digging through crates, bins, or stacks can lead to life-changing roads to travel down. Conspicuous Only In Its Absence opened up my imagination to a time and place gone by. Suddenly I was hanging out at The Matrix in San Francisco circa 1965. Its raw sound was startling to me on first listen. Was it good? I wasn’t sure. But I knew after subsequent turns it was realigning synapses in my brain. Not unlike digging through these memories has reminded me of the inroads of my mind at a time when everything was new. But music is never old. It is always new, forever reverberating, always and anon, like a tsunami in the atavistic ocean of being. Oh, boy. I think it’s time to end there. Dig, Lazarus, Dig!
Watch this space for more Crate Digger’s stories all week long!
