I Will Recall It All for You

Album: The Connells, Boylan Heights, 1987

Acquired: I have no clue when or where I acquired this cassette. I know I owned it before I started my freshman year of college. Let's say I got this exactly the same way Indiana Jones got the golden statue at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Pretty cool, huh?

Best Track: "If It Crumbles"

Lasting Memory: I first heard The Connells in the spring of 1988 on a pioneering, independent alternative music station called 92.1 WOPM out of Moyock, N.C. OPM was a commercial station, but it's playlist was that of a student-run college station. Rather than Clapton, OPM would play Captain Beefheart. Def Leppard? How about some Dead Milkmen instead? I first hear a lot of bands that would become lifelong favorites on OPM.

Alas, the station was to good for this world of Tidewater and was in operation for only about two years. What doomed it was a hypocritical, mean-spirited, and shortsighted decision by the Virginia Beach City Council to deny OPM's request for a waiver of restrictions on building structures over a certain height below the Green Line. The Green Line was, and theoretically still is, an arbitrary boundary running across the middle of Virginia Beach that prevents the commercial and residential development of the Great Dismal Swamp and Back Bay.

OPM went silent in 1990 because its management wasn't allowed to set up a 25-foot radio tower on property that had existing structures. I currently live in a seven-year-old townhouse that is located below the Green Line, situated on marshland that used to be a semi-free range hog farm, and the realization of yet another Levittown daydream of one the East Coast's wealthiest developers. Score another one for the bad guys.

(My house is pretty sweet, though. Chances are excellent that I am sitting behind the windows with the red shutters even as you read this, and I'm saluting you. I'm even using all five fingers.)
In addition to lamenting the poor decisions of our elected leaders, I offer the above story in the spirit of making good on this post's title, which comes from the chorus of Boylan Heights' "Home Today":

Let's do it again
I will recall
There are things
I could have done
I will recall
There are things
I should have shown
I will recall
It all for you

I can't recall it all, though, which I'll have to lament. I will also have to someday get around to lamenting my own small part in sealing OPM's untimely fate. I never quite found the time to sign the petition the station circulated at Tidewater area record and guitar shops to get the City Council to reconsider. I will not, however, give voice to "Scotty's Lament":

It's you I swear
It's you I swear
I delight in your despair
(I'll wait for you)
It's you I swear
It's you I swear
Giving me the right
(I'll wait for you)
It's you who lied
It's you who lied
When you had to swallow pride
(I'll wait for you)
It's you I swear
It's you I swear...

I mean, you didn't do anything wrong, and I'll be damned if I'm going to just stand around until you do. I have my own inactions to take and later decry.

Exactly what those will be, I can't say. All will be known in the fullness of times, as The Connells acknowledged in "If It Crumbles":

And for the first and
for the last time
I'll wait and see.
And if it crumbles all around me
Then we'll wait and see

Listen to "If It Crumbles"

Up Next: The Connells, Fun & Games, 1989

Editor's Note: The Fun & Games post will make more sense. I am just feeling very stream-of-consciousy today. Thanks for playing along.