[Editor’s note: Liner Notes chronicles how Chelsea Schlievert Yates discovered music through the ’80s and ’90s while growing up in Norfolk, Neb. We hope to post a new installment every other week. Read more here.]
by Chelsea Schlievert Yates
“You’ve gotta check this out,” my boyfriend Phil said to me as I unlocked the doors of my car in the Norfolk High School parking lot after class. He jumped in the passenger seat, and as soon as I put the key in the ignition, he tuned the radio to a new channel, 101.9 FM. There, to my surprise, was Weezer.
We listened as “The Sweater Song” ended and the Meat Puppets’ “Backwater” began. These songs were familiar to me, but not commonly heard on the radio at the time. I thought they only existed in my friends’ CD collections and on MTV’s 120 Minutes. “What is this?” I asked.
“Something new,” he said. “It’s called The Edge. It broadcasts out of Omaha or Lincoln, I’m not sure which. And it’s been playing songs like this all afternoon. Earlier I heard Alice in Chains, Veruca Salt and Nine Inch Nails!”
The Edge wasn’t the first radio station in Nebraska to play what we referred to as “alternative” music in 1995. Stations like 104.1 FM The Planet, first out of Crete and then Lincoln, and Omaha’s K-Rock 93.3 FM had been experimenting with alternative music formats for a few years by then. Others such as 90.3 KRNU didn’t reach very far outside Lincoln either. But The Edge must have been the only one with a frequency strong enough to carry it to Norfolk. Teenage me found it a refreshing change from the other regional stations of the day, most of which centered on the formats of soft rock and Top 40, classic rock, country, oldies and talk radio.
The emergence of The Edge on Nebraska radio waves paralleled something else major in my life: Earlier that year, I was given keys to an ’87 Nissan Maxima. Though my dad’s name appeared on the title and registration, it was understood to be my car, provided that I maintained it, kept my grades up at school and didn’t break curfew. In my first days of driving, there were additional stipulations: I was to use the car only between home, school and work, and with my friends on weekend nights by permission only. I also had to agree to drop my sister off at the junior high school every morning. I soon realized that, as long as I met all of these requirements, what my parents didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. The Maxima offered me a taste of independence I’d never experienced before. I had a license, a set of wheels, and with 101.9 FM fueling the journey, that little red car and I went everywhere.
I loved the Maxima as much as I loved Eddie Vedder . I hung fuzzy dice from its rearview mirror and decorated it with leopard-print license plate frames and a matching steering wheel cover. It had a decent speaker system and a tape deck, which was great for the mixtapes I created from some of my favorite CDs of the day — Beck’s Mellow Gold, Green Day’s Dookie, The Lemonheads’ Come on Feel the Lemonheads, Cracker’s Kerosene Hat, the Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream. I owned a cheap Discman, the kind with an adapter that fed into the car’s tape player, connecting the two devices by a cable. Mine always seemed to short out, so I’d have to figure out the exact way to position the cord to avoid the short — looping it around the gear shift and up and over the rearview mirror, sometimes pinning it under the sun visor. Whenever I hit a bump, the Discman would inevitably skip, and I worried about scratching my precious discs.
When I didn’t feel like listening to tapes or rigging up the Discman, I tuned into The Edge. I figured out which roads to take around town to ensure I’d not lose reception and which of the high school’s parking lots guaranteed clarity. I favored one of Norfolk’s two Burger Kings simply based on radio reception, and I knew the precise angle at which to place the antenna of the radio at work so I could listen to The Edge during my shifts. It’s embarrassing to admit these days, but I would tolerate a fair amount of static just to hear something on the radio by Sonic Youth, the Pixies or the Flaming Lips (pictured below, to the right).
Alternative music was new to me in high school, and I just assumed it was new to everyone else, too. It didn’t occur to me that it was rooted in the independent underground music scenes of the 1980s or that many of the “new” artists I loved had been playing together for years. I also didn’t realize how the crossover successes experienced by bands like Nirvana and R.E.M. opened the floodgates for mass-commercialization. Major record labels initially scrambled to sign bands that existed off of popular music’s grid, and later, began engineering groups that could look and sound like them.
I began listening to alternative music as it was being turned inside out. I had no context for what it had been or where it had come from before its mass appeal grew, and in 1995, as much as I tried to position myself outside of the mainstream, I was also very much informed by it. In fact, as a teenager with spending money thanks to my part-time job and an interest in music, in a lot of ways I represented one of the key demographics targeted by the corporate music industry.
As a lot of teenagers do, I spent a great deal of time navigating between the periphery and the established, the outsiders and the in-crowds, between sub- and dominant music cultures. What was mainstream cool and how did I want to position myself in relation to it? In some cases, I’d be right alongside and in others as far removed as possible. But on what grounds? And when did it matter? Though not always conscious of them, these sorts of questions consumed me in my quest to come to terms with my own teenage identity.
Take, for example, The Edge. Though it played alternative music — what I wanted to hear — it was a commercial radio station. I knew this, and that mattered. But it also didn’t matter. There was just something so exciting about hearing bands like Rancid and the Beastie Boys on the radio. In a weird way, it validated that this music — the music that I cared about — was more than just a blip on the screen. It was real, and it had staying power.
And The Edge’s deejays seemed cool. I listened to Chris Baker on the way to school, and Ian McCain (who I mistook for Ian MacKaye for the first few months he was on the air) in the afternoons. At least in The Edge’s early days, I don’t remember a lot of talk or annoying radio sound effects, and it seemed like the deejays played whatever they felt like. They sounded in-the-know about the Omaha and Lincoln music scenes; some performed with local bands, like Nikki Boulay and Blue Moon Ghetto, and others casually dropped names of venues where shows they wanted to check out were happening. I’m sure it was all carefully crafted — the playlists, the promotions, the on-air personalities — but it seemed so real, and I wanted to believe it.
During its brief existence, The Edge sponsored day-long outdoor music showcases in the Omaha area. Held around Labor Day weekend and known as “Edgefests,” they featured bands that were in heavy rotation on the station. I went to three of them. In 1995, Phil and I checked out the first Edgefest. I took place at the now-closed Ak-sar-ben racetrack and featured an interesting pair of headliners: alternative rock veterans the Violent Femmes and local act 311, who had just released the self-titled album that would bring them commercial success within the next year. I suffered my first concert-related injury during 311’s set when the chain wallet of a crowd-surfing fan managed to wrap itself around my wrist. The crowd tossed him one way as I was pushed the other. I wore the bruise on my arm proudly the week following the show.
I took my sister Cammie to the 1996 Edgefest as a present for her 15th birthday. It was her first concert (not counting the Beach Boys concert to which our parents had taken us in six years earlier, and I was thrilled to be playing the part of cool big sister). The weather was cold and drizzly, and we stood together in the wind and rain to watch bands like Goldfinger, Local H, Stabbing Westward and Semisonic. In the following months, Cammie played Juliana Hatfield’s song “My Sister” whenever she saw me, turning up the volume for the verse when Juliana sings about wishing her sister would have taken her to her first all-ages show. I think it was her way of saying thanks.
But around that time, I’d started to lose interest in The Edge. I’d moved to Lincoln to attend the University of Nebraska, and suddenly the resources to learn about music seemed more expansive than ever. I made new friends who were into different sorts of sounds: punk, hip-hop, soul, swing, ska, rockabilly. I could listen to all kinds of discs at Homer’s listening stations, and my friend Jennie and I could walk to Recycled Sounds from our dorm on campus to peruse the posters and talk about bands like U2 with Stuart, the shop’s owner.
In addition to my interest in The Edge, I lost something else that year: the keys to my Maxima. My dad decided that it would remain in Norfolk to be driven by my sister when she turned 16. In its place, I drove a 1990 Ford Tempo, which I’d inherited from my grandfather. Grandpa had bought it new and hardly drove it, and though it may have been the most reliable car I ever owned, it was also the most boring. Tan with tan interior. The kind of windows I had to roll down manually. Hardly any giddy-up when I stepped on the gas. And it stunk of the Salem cigarettes Grandpa chain-smoked. In an effort to cover up the many cigarette burn holes he had left, my dad covered the seats with camouflage seat covers. (Why he selected camouflage, I’ll never know. Maybe he thought I’d think it was ironic and cool or something.) I had a CD player installed in the car, but all my music sounded small and tinny out of the terrible factory speakers (on my college kid budget, I couldn’t afford to spring for new speakers as well). I was grateful to have some wheels, and although I was living away from my parents, in a city bigger and seemingly more interesting than Norfolk, I never felt as free in the Tempo as I had in the Maxima.
Yet through the car’s pathetic-sounding speakers, I discovered airwaves beyond the commercial stations. One of my favorites became 90.3 KRNU, the university’s radio station. I made a new friend, Tyler, who hosted a show called “Hip-Hop 101” on Friday nights for KRNU. It focused on underground hip-hop and its roots: funk, soul, jazz and classic R&B, and it featured Tyler’s interviews with artists like the Grouch, Capitol D from All Natural, the guys from Blackalicious and Andy Cooper from Ugly Duckling, who later gave Tyler and his “Big Red posse” a shout-out at the end of the group’s 2001 single “Cardiff.”
I didn’t know much about hip-hop, but some Friday nights I’d hang out with Tyler and a few of our friends at the KRNU studio. The sessions usually involved a pre-show visit to La Bamba Burritos on O Street to eat “burritos as big as our heads” (as was the restaurant’s slogan), lugging crates of Tyler’s vinyl to the studio, and then sitting around the cramped deejay booth, trying not to make too much noise in between songs when he was on-air. As soon as Tyler turned off the microphone, we’d flip on a record player to practice scratching over swear words. If we could prove we could get it at just the right moment on a particular track, there was a chance Tyler would let us share our elementary scratching skills on the air.
I attended my final Edgefest in 1997 with a few college friends. That year it moved to the Westfair Amphitheater near Council Bluffs and featured a line-up including Nebraska native Matthew Sweet, Sugar Ray, Smash Mouth, the Refreshments and the Nixons. I wore a “Save Ferris” T-shirt that I had created, thinking my reference to the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was rather clever. On the way to the festival, someone pointed out that Save Ferris was also the name of a new California ska band. I didn’t know them, so as soon as we made our way through the gates, I flipped my T-shirt inside out in a port-a-potty. I was on my way to becoming a pretty big (and, I’m sure, annoying) music snob by then, and I couldn’t risk promoting some band I knew nothing about.
Around this time, The Edge began referring to its format as “modern rock” instead of “alternative,” possibly to reflect that that which had been alternative to mainstream channels now was, in fact, the mainstream. I didn’t connect with many of the bands that the station played during its final years of existence, and I probably used words like “lame,” “contrived,” “unoriginal” and “sell out” to describe them. But today I want to give The Edge — and other stations like it — credit. For a brief time, The Edge provided small town Nebraska teens like me with a pop punk, post-grunge, shoegaze, college rock and janglepop alternative. And it gave me a launch pad: I traced many Edge musicians back through time, and I began to learn about older and lesser-known bands whose sounds were new to me. No Doubt led me to Hepcat, then to the Specials and the Skatalites. Through Bad Religion and Social Distortion, I found the Clash and the Ramones. Bands like Sponge, Green Day and the Presidents of the United States of America introduced me to the Replacements, the Buzzcocks, the Jam and Stiff Little Fingers.
When the Edge signed off the airwaves in the spring of 1998, it played R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” continuously for five hours to mark its departure. I remember hearing that deejay Ian McCain supposedly threw a killer party at the station during his last shift. Though I never found out if this was true, I decided to believe it really happened; it seemed like a pretty cool way to go out.
By 1998, alternative, modern rock, whatever you called it, was conventional. Typical, accepted, established, the status quo. It wasn’t hiding on college radio stations, in small clubs, or on the obscure cds strewn about on the floors of friends’ cars. It was winning Grammys and American Music Awards. Even R.E.M. — the band responsible for the song with which The Edge chose to ride off into the radio sunset — was a household name.
Around that time, I remember reading that they had signed a deal with Warner Bros. Records rumored to be one of the largest dollar amounts in recording contract history.
Chelsea Schlievert Yates is a Hear Nebraska contributor. She grew up in northeast Nebraska and now lives in Seattle, Washington. Reach her at cdschlievert@gmail.com.