16 June 2023 - Tribe - Here At The Home

This is our 1,400th post, and for that, I wanted to share a story with y'all.  

I was a DJ at WSBU, the Saint Bonaventure University college radio station, from 1990 until 1993.  

Now, we were a classic rock formatted station - not the so-called "alternative" or "college music" format you saw at most university radio stations of that time period.  The classic rock format was underrepresented in the rural Southern Tier of New York state - we literally had a country station on the university's front lawn - and so that decision was made.  However, as a concession to all us punks, the late night hours - 11PM until 7AM - were dedicated to that fringe music that wasn't so popular on rock radio in the early 90's.   

We used to get all the best fringe music from all the record labels, including all the Warner Bros. imprints.  I already talked about the greatest thing we ever got from Elektra Records (apologies to Jonathan Falls, who was kind enough to hand me our station's copy of  the "Counting Backwards" single by Throwing Muses (who were signed to Sire Records, which was also a Warner imprint) so I could debut it on my show (and lent me his copy of Lonely Is An Eyesore which I'm going to have to write about someday soon)).  

As I came back to school for my second year, in the fall of 1991, the album Abort by a band from Boston called Tribe that I had never heard of showed up at the station.  I don't know that I was the first to play this album, but when I did, I played the very first track, which was not the single, but rather a song called "Here At The Home."  This was a band with harmonzied vocals that still managed to rock really hard.  

I was blown away, needless to say, and played that song a lot for the next couple of years.   And, well, we're still talking about it now, so I guess I'm still playing it.  

What I didn't know then was that this was their 2nd album - mostly made up of songs from their self-produced first album.  The title of that album?  Here At The Home.  

Here they are at Boston College performing the song in 1993.