Access to Indie Music In The 80's and 90's

Back in the 80's and 90's, access to music was often limited to your local radio and your neighbourhood record stores and mostly there were mainstream pop music. One may get to know more about a few obscure bands by word of mouth from friends and school mates. And then there were the imported magazines featuring different genres of music. Guitar World, Keyboard, Mixmag, Future Music, DJ just to name a few that I tried to buy with my limited finances (and for the most part, the imported magazines were insanely over-priced here).

KEYBOARD magazine from April 1993, came with free sound patches for the Korg M1 synthesizer.

To feed the hungry local scene of new music, there was an affordable local magazine that was published around the late 80's that introduced indie rock bands, both local and foreign to its readers. The BigO (Before I Get Old) magazine was one that introduced me to the music of the indie band from Hershey, Philadelphia, "The Ocean Blue" back in 1991 or so. A red demo cassette tape came with one of the issues, excerpt versions of songs from the Cerulean album.

Clean tone, simple and repetitive chord progression, combined with melancholic vocals was a sweet contrast to the flashy glam rock/metal and pop of the time. They didn't sound American to begin with, not that it's a bad thing.  It became one of my favorite albums that year.

Demo cassette "Exerpts from "THE OCEAN BLUE / CERULEAN" from 1991

As the city went into semi-lockdown twice, first in 2020 and then in 2021, I've covered two songs from the Cerulean that remained some of my favorites of all time.

"Marigold"

"Ballerina Out Of Control"