Mr. Squish and sucky music.

When I was a kid my musical choices were all over the place. I listened, as most kids do, to what my parents listened to. Unfortunately, in the 1970s, that was disco. And I wasn’t all that into disco. Apparently I had some taste. Not much though. Kids have no taste, as you can tell by their musical choices, and the fact the Disney Channel gets the ratings it does. They’re learning taste. Exposure to crap helps.

When I started listening to the radio, it was San Francisco’s KFRC, which was still on the AM dial (which was how I could pick it up in San Jose), and still doing the Boss Radio format: Top 30 songs, wacky disc jockeys like Dr. Donald D. Rose, and tons of commercials. Tons. Commercials after every song.

We moved to Vacaville; I switched to Sacramento’s FM 102 (KSFM), which was Morning Zoo format: Top 40 songs (the top 15 in heavy rotation, the other 25 from time to time), and deejays with a roomful of goofy sidekicks—most of them just the jocks doing funny voices.

Around this time, Billboard rejiggered how it was calculating its Top 100 list. Instead of taking the record stores’ word for what their best-selling albums and artists were, they used literal sales figures. They discovered Americans were listening to a lot more country and rap than anyone had previously known—and these groups started making it into the Top 100. At first, the Top 40 stations actually began to include country and rap songs in their playlists, but the backlash was huge. So they switched to one of the other Billboard charts, like Top 20 Adult Contemporary. Or in FM 102’s case, Top 20 Urban Contemporary: More R&B and hip-hop; less rock.

After a while, I grew to miss the rock, and switched to San Francisco’s KRQR 96.5, “The Rocker,” a “classic rock” station. (’Twasn’t all that classic. We’re talking ’70s and ’80s rock.) But when I moved to Sacramento, I couldn’t pull in any San Francisco FM stations, and went back to Top 40—this time Sacramento’s KWOD 106.5, which had just switched to Top 40 “alternative rock.” (In other words, harder rock bands and mainstream punk. It was the “alternative” to all the hip-hop on the Top 100 charts.)

KWOD was still at heart a Top 40 station. So every once in a while they’d slip a boy band into the playlist. In between R.E.M., Violent Femmes, Nine Inch Nails, and Jesus Jones, you’d get a New Kids on the Block song. It was, as Leonard describes in the above strip, like taking a fork to a chalkboard. Usually I’d turn off the radio, pop in a U2 or Midnight Oil or Peter Gabriel cassette, and wait ’em out. Although I wasn’t always right next to my stereo, so sometimes I had to suffer several seconds of screechy Joey McIntyre before I finally was able to silence the damn thing. If you’ve never heard of NKOTB, you’re so blessed.

After the 20th time of having my station interrupt my favorite angry white kids to aurally assault me with nasal falsetto, I decided enough was enough and drew the above strip.

I was tempted to just single out KWOD, but I decided to expand the campaign to the top three FM stations in the Sacramento market, and leave it at that. I have no idea whether this strip had any impact. Likely not. College students have far better things to do than to cut out a comic strip, stick it in an envelope, splurge for a stamp, and mail it to their favorite station. Possibly more of them called the stations’ request lines and said, “I’m mad as hell and not going to take this anymore! Stop playing the damn New Kids!” without identifying Mr. Squish as the provocateur.

Fun fact: I used to have a “New Kids Suck” T-shirt, which got me stopped by the campus police once, ’cause they only saw the -uck part of the shirt and wanted to make sure it began with an appropriate consonant.

“Bo knows your sister” refers to a Nike ad campaign of the day. Vincent Edward “Bo” Jackson, at the time, played baseball for the Kansas City Royals, and simultaneously played football for the L.A. Raiders. So Nike’s ads showed he was familiar with all sorts of other activities. “Bo knows basketball. Bo knows tennis. Bo knows auto-erotic asphyxiation.” At the end of the commercial, Bo would struggle and fail to play guitar, and Bo Diddley would appear and quip, “Bo, you don’t know Diddley.”

Anyway, this was my little poke at that campaign. Yep, these old strips really don’t age well. Oh well.

Special bonus strip!

I can’t abide country music. It’s the twang. Using your vocal cords to approximate the sound of bottleneck guitar—sliding it from note to note, in the way poor singers do when they don’t hit their notes the first time, so they glide into it, and pretend they mean to do that—reminds me far too much of whining. It just grates on me. So I don’t listen to country. I’m not saying country music isn’t music, or that country artists can’t sing, or wish to disparage the genre at all: I’m just telling you why it rubs me the wrong way.

Country singers are the most notorious example, but they’re not the only ones. Certain rock bands have lead singers that are just too whiny for my taste. Like Mike Love, Morrissey, Michael Stipe, Robin Gibb, or Geddy Lee. Or men who insist on singing in falsetto all the time, like Smokey Robinson or Aaron Neville. And of course there are boy bands.

I realize certain music fans are gonna want to take my head off for even mentioning such a thing. They love these artists and their bands. Or they love country music. Love love love. If it were a woman, they would so put their tongue in her mouth. Speak evil of their beloved bands, and the primal creature within will feel the mighty urge to disembowel you, and scream over your gory corpse with their foot on your neck.

So that’s where the above strip came from. I used to carpool to Sac State with a fellow churchgoer named Michael. Michael was a huge fan of Rush. As are pretty much all Rush fans; I’ve never met a halfhearted one. Certain bands inspire particularly high levels of devotion: You can’t just like ’em a little bit.

First time I got in the car with Michael, he asked, “So what do you think of Rush?”

“Meh,” I said. “I think the lead singer is a little too whiny for my taste.”

Utter horror crossed his face.

Y'see, he had five or six Rush cassettes in the car. He expected to play them along the 40-minute ride from Vacaville to Sacramento, and later, back. One after the other. Then start again from the beginning. And again, and again, and again, until Rush produced another album, which would be added to the cycle.

My disapproval bollixed his entire plan. And threw a giant monkey wrench into any future relationship we’d ever develop. He still won’t “friend” me on Facebook.

He settled for the radio. Classic rock stations will play Rush on request, so he had a chance of hearing his beloved band. And even though we weren’t actively listening to the albums, we still had maybe 20 different discussions about Rush’s merits. They were his favorite band, after all, so if you’re gonna talk music with Michael, Rush would inevitably come up. I could talk semi-knowledgeably about six or seven of my favorite groups, but he was pretty much limited to Rush. I must’ve been like purgatory to him.

Michael never tossed me bodily across a room. The strip was inspired by our difference in musical tastes, but he was a good Christian, and never lost his cool over it. Other people had. This one kid in junior high simply went insane when I had called David Lee Roth a doo-wop musician pretending to be a rocker. (Of course, Roth later proved me right with “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” but I was basing my statement more on what would irritate that particular classmate. Worked great.)