College radio tribute website Little Records has put together a monster podcast playlist chronicling various underground and indie Boston music scenes. Titled Bands That Could Be God, the Baltimore-based podcast stream has collected 144 tracks and broken the series down into four parts.
“Boston’s success in creating the sort of ‘college rock scene’ we wax nostalgically about is essential to the Our Band Could Be Your Life narrative, the awakening of underground rock in the USA during the ’80s,” Little Records writes. “You can divide the conversation as it pertains to Boston into quarters.”
The podcast begins in the late ’70s, tracing the punk, proto-punk, garage rock, and power-pop scenes around town, and concludes in the ’90s with the alternative and indie rock explosion. In between are looks at the post-punk and new wave scenes of the early ’80s, and the college rock circuit a few years later. There is a lot here.
“Act 1 begins with ‘proto-punks’ The Modern Lovers in the early ’70s, who laid a foundation for the fabulous punk, hardcore, garage, and power-pop scene to come,” Little Records add. “Act 2 starts around 1980 with Mission of Burma, a band that distilled post-punk into its own distinctly American, aggressive flavor. Act 3 begins half a decade later with the emergence of a trio of bands with wholly singular visions whose influence was widespread: the Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., and Throwing Muses. The final Act gets kicked off in the late ’80s and illustrates Boston’s role in the Alternative Rock landscape, with acts like the Lemonheads, Breeders, Blake Babies, Gigolo Aunts, and Buffalo Tom making a big splash during MTV’s alternative programming heyday in the early ’90s. As Act 3 bleeds into Act 4, the Boston scene produced a slew of outstanding bands that would make routine appearances on college radio playlists: Christmas, Big Dipper, The Cavedogs, Galaxie 500, The Neighborhoods, Salem 66, Scruffy the Cat, The Del Fuegos, Dumptruck, and the Volcano Suns, to name a few. In this podcast series, we’ll loosely adhere to these four Acts in shaping each of our four episodes.”
Listen to it all here, and be sure to read Little Records’ entire written report, which is a pretty good read.
