It was early 1989, and I was working for the community radio station at the university I was attending out in the snowy hinterlands of western Pennsylvania, a town where squirrels outnumbered humans in such numbers that the little vermin owned businesses on Main Street and occupied three seats on the town council.
Those of us who worked at the station were in our late teens or early twenties, and we yearned first to develop the skills required to work in radio, and second, to share our good taste in music with the station’s audience (fellow university students, working-class townies, squirrels). It was a great time for cool sounds: during the fall of ‘88, the spring of ‘89, and the winter that bridged the two. I recall being whispered to by Cowboy Junkies, snarled at by Lou Reed, blindfolded and spun around by XTC and Elvis Costello. There was a smattering of excellent singles impacting the charts (and our station’s morning Top 40 program) by the likes of Bobby Brown, Fine Young Cannibals, Madonna, and Roxette. We debated about whether U2 (Rattle and Hum) and REM (Green) were sell-outs or commercial geniuses. We wondered whether the Replacements (Don’t Tell a Soul) were done, or just close to it.
We had trouble playing any of these on the air, though, because record companies thought it unwise to send valuable copies of their wares to the snowy hinterlands of western Pennsylvania. No, labels treated our little outpost as a dumping point for records we didn’t want. An armful of Al Hirt, rescued from some warehouse in the sticks. Seven copies of Chuck Mangione’s Eyes of the Veiled Temptress. Lots of Ferrante & Teicher. Tom Jones had a hit around that time, with a cover of Prince’s “Kiss,” but we didn’t get that one – we got a box of overstock copies of Fever Zone, which arrived via time machine from 1968. A package from K-Tel (still a thing, to our surprise) yielded 12 copies of a two-record disco tutorial, complete with instructions from Deney Terrio.
One afternoon in March, we received a box from Capitol Records – the label of the Beatles, Heart, and Glass Tiger! We opened it and were immediately disappointed. Inside were 10 copies of a new Bonnie Raitt album, Nick of Time. Some of our staff had to be told who Bonnie Raitt was.
The next day, 10 more copies arrived. Two days later, 15 more. Every second or third day brought another parcel from Capitol, and another stash of Nick of Time LPs. Our music director called the label, asking them to stop. They didn’t. We asked UPS to stop delivering them; they ignored us. Within weeks, we had hundreds of copies of Nick of Time. Our little management office was overrun quickly, with every flat surface (all three of them) covered in stacks of Nick of Time albums. The piles poked through the drop ceiling and covered our meager heating vent, which dropped the temperature in the office at least 20 degrees.
Then things got weird. The albums began mating to keep warm; every couple days there’d be dozens more of them spilling from the piles (vinyl has a short gestation period – who knew?). It was disgusting.
Station management ordered us to give away as many copies of Nick of Time as we could, as quickly as possible, and I and my fellow on-air talent tried to oblige, coming up with increasingly desperate ways of enticing listeners to take one, to no avail. “First caller named Nick wins a copy of the new Bonnie Raitt record.” “First caller who knows what station this is wins …” “First caller who can tell me what time it is – anywhere – wins …” There were no calls. No one wanted it.
I absconded with a copy, pulling it free from another copy, to which it was stuck, but not in a gross way. Or maybe a little in a gross way.
I listened to it. It was a really good album. The title track was a deeply felt number about growing older and changing and the choices one makes as those changes do their thing. There were straight-up bluesy tracks like the cover of John Hiatt’s “Thing Called Love,” “I Will Not Be Denied,” “Real Man,” and the groovy “Love Letter.”
The ballads were crushing, though. “Too Soon to Tell” is a heartbreaking, lost-love song, the kind you play on the jukebox in the bar when you’re on your fourth drink, a couple days after the breakup. The kind you have in your head as you look over the ledge, to the precipice below. The kind Ray Charles or Otis Redding or Aretha Franklin would have sung 20 or 25 years before to soundtrack an evening’s trudge through the regrets in one’s life.
“Cry on My Shoulder” provided comfort during times when “things seem larger than they are” – just the kind of moments “Too Soon to Tell” described. “I Ain’t Gonna Let You Break My Heart Again” – a piano ballad, of all things – juxtaposes a lyrical tenacity with the kind of spare instrumentation that you’d find on the fourth track of Side Two of any given ‘70s Laurel Canyon singer/songwriter album. Just the kind of thing you’d figure a blues enthusiast like Raitt would avoid, even though it worked so well.
I played Nick of Time songs on the air, trying to gin up listener support, and suggested tracks for others to play, too – fruitless gestures all. The station wound up having to spend a good chunk of its budget to move thousands of copulating Nick of Times to a nearby abandoned cogeneration plant, which had mysteriously continued to belch yellow clouds of something nasty, years after it had been shuttered.
Then another weird thing happened the following February. Nick of Time won the Grammy for Album of the Year, besting efforts from Don Henley, Fine Young Cannibals, the Traveling Wilburys, and the Wilburys’ youngest member, Tom Petty, for the honor.
Suddenly, everyone wanted it. The demand was such that a few of us ventured back to the cogen plant in a boosted university van and filled it with LPs. A week later, we did it again, and the week after that. Listeners called in with answers to the most difficult trivia questions imaginable, to get a copy of their own. Our phone lines were jammed.
The university took 3,000 copies, to give one to each incoming freshman in the fall. Outgoing seniors demanded their own, and staged a weeklong protest prior to graduation to get them.
The squirrels on the town council drafted legislation to name “Thing Called Love” the official town anthem, and ordered the university to pass out copies of Nick of Time to every citizen who wanted one. Thousands took advantage, requiring campus security to stop raiding keg parties and take up crowd control.
The plant was emptied. Our station gave away every last Nick of Time LP we had.
Thirty-five years later, there’s still a key to the town awaiting Bonnie Raitt, whenever she decides to visit the snowy hinterlands of western Pennsylvania.
My copy of Nick of Time sits on a shelf in my living room. It reminds me of days when I was younger, had more hair, and got to spend time spinning records for listeners who tuned in to hear them. I’m the age of the people Raitt was trying to reach when she made the album … maybe a little older. The Bonnie Raitt infestation is a thing of legend now, but if I close my eyes and allow the music to take me away for a bit, I can experience the whole thing all over again, every cold, sticky, squirrely moment.
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