This piece originally appeared here as part of a longer post. I subsequently gave it a fresh shine for potential inclusion in my long-threatened book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1), but it is not part of that book's current plan. For now.
An infinite number of songs can each be THE greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Today, this is THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE!
Produced by Nick Lowe and Jake Rivera
Single, Stiff Records [U. K.], 1976
A recurring point in my writing about pop music is my gratitude for people and things that went before, friends and periodicals and radio stations that turned me on to some specific sound or some particular purveyor of that sound. I consider myself lucky to have been at the right age and in the right place at the right time to experience so much transcendent music. This pervasive thankfulness goes from the serendipity of having older siblings during the British Invasion to the happy coincidence of discovering a tabloid rock rag called Phonograph Record Magazine at the precise moment for those pages of newsprint to introduce me to punk rock. And it includes a lot of radio stations.
One such station was WOUR-FM in Utica, NY, whose signal was readily accessible in the Syracuse market. After years of devoted AM radio worship, I grew disenchanted with Top 40 around 1976, when I was 16. I certainly couldn’t give up on listening to the radio—let’s not get crazy—so I migrated to freer-form airwaves. WOUR looms largest in my legend for providing me with my first spin of the Sex Pistols in the summer of '77. But before that, amidst the wealth of introductions to songs and/or artists both new and old--Graham Parker's "Hotel Chambermaid," Greg Kihn's "For You," the J. Geils Band's "Musta Got Lost," Michael Nesmith's "Rio," Joan Baez's "Time Rag," the Kinks' "No More Looking Back," the Yardbirds' "Heart Full Of Soul," the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's "The Intro And The Outro," and so much more--WOUR played "So It Goes" by Nick Lowe.
"So It Goes" was the first single released by the upstart British label Stiff Records, a feisty U. K.-only issue in August of 1976. WOUR jumped on that import single, and I heard it frequently, loving it more and more each time. It wasn't released in America until Lowe's debut LP Pure Pop For Now People (or Jesus Of Cool, as it was named in its native England) came out in 1978, in the spring semester of my freshman year in college. By then, it was a golden oldie to me, but still as current as the rest of my beloved new wave.
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