26-July-99 EFO @ WUMB
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Aw, once in a while I need to be cryptic. We went to a member's concert at the UMass Boston radio station last night to hear Eddie from Ohio.
WUMB is deep in the shadow of the big public radio stations in Boston. WGBH, channel 2, channel 44, and 89.7 FM, is a public broadcasting empire by itself and imports several of the BBC shows for PBS. WBUR, Boston University radio, has been getting bigger and bigger. You'll often hear it credited for the reports from this area on All Things Considered, and it's in cahoots with several small stations on Cape Cod. It still broadcasts Boston University athletic events, but there's barely a trace of college radio station left to it. WERS, Emerson College, is real college radio and plays a wide variety of folk, jazz, hip-hop, and ethnic music. WZBC, Boston College, is Charley's favorite for the variety in its programming; “Winter, spring, summer, or fall, ZBC plays it all!” WUMB is mostly folk. About once a month they have a one-hour concert on a weekday evening which is free to station contributors and is broadcast some Sunday afternoon afterwards. We go as often as Arlene gets tickets for it, which is more often than not.
I was teaching math at UM/B in, um, 1974 when they moved from downtown to the present campus on Dorchester Bay and hadn't been on campus for about 15 years before we started going to the WUMB concerts. The campus hasn't grown much since 1974, but it sure isn't new any more. It's one big complex, about four big brick buildings built over a two story parking garage. The concrete in the parking garage has cracked under 25 years of tires, the paint on the cinderblock walls just isn't as bright as when it was new, and the woodwork shows wear and tear. I guess if I had first seen the campus when it was five years old I wouldn't notice so much difference, but I remember it from the first semester it was open.
Sigh. I used to have an office with a window. Overlooking Boston Harbor. I didn't appreciate it then. Another sigh.
Well, back to the concert. Eddie from Ohio is the name of the band. Most of these folk concerts are solo, or solo singer with back-up bass at most. EFO has vocalist (full-time vocalist, not singer-guitarist. She does shake a tambourine some of the time, but basically concentrates on singing and moving), guitarist, bass, and percussionist. The percussion kit has congas, bongos, a small snare drum, hi-hat and two other cymbals, triangle, and one of those things with thirty or fifty strips of metal hanging down that you run your finger along and get a shimmery glissando of bells. The music has loads of energy, lots of words and imagination in the songwriting, and tremendous variety. It ranges from a capella gospel through folk to almost rock and ska. These guys can do precise four part a capella harmony when they want and be as raucous as you could ask at other times. Their imagination made me think of They Might be Giants and their harmony made me realize that even if we've lost Bok, Trickett, and Muir as a performing group, there's still hope.
Give EFO a listen. They're on their own label, Virginia Soul Records. We came home with a copy of their newest CD (of six), Looking Out the Fishbowl. Try www.efohio.com. When the WUMB hostess asked them if they had ever had offers from bigger record labels, they said, actually, yes. Columbia had offered them 10 records for a dollar.
Oh, here's something that doesn't happen to everyone you know. Our credit card machine (from the stamp business) was kaput last night. Normally as soon as we power up the power strip for the computer, the credit card terminal (on the same power strip) comes up, runs a self-test, and says, “Swipe customer card.” When we got back last night and tried to get caught up on the stamp business after our trip, it was showing “Please initialize or call help.” I pushed a button that said “Initialize,” but that didn't fix it. I looked in the manual and saw “If this message appears, please call the NOVUS Help Desk at 1-800-.... immediately,” so I called. There was one message on voicemail -- if you have a question about your statement, press 1. If you need supplies, press 2. If you have a question about your terminal, press 3. I pressed 3, and with no hold music, there was a human being! Now maybe she does this twenty times a day, but she ran me right through a few tests and then said that we'd have to reload the program and it would take about half an hour. I pushed all the buttons and told her what was on the display, and pretty soon the terminal was showing Program Load and a hex number was counting up. 35 minutes later the tech support woman called back and had me run another test to see that the load had been successful, and we're back in business. Once in a while these hi-tech systems work.
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