Tough city Love at second (or third) sight BY ROB TANNENBAUM

When I strolled barefoot into Providence in the late summer of 1979, the city was very different, still years away from its Xtreme Makeover. It was Bridgeport with an accent, Hartford with back hair, a speed bump on I-95 built out of costume jewelry and rusted Department of Public Works trucks. Men wore hats, the trolley cost tuppence, and the mayor was merely a local embarrassment. Like I said, very different.

As a Brown freshman, I was disoriented. I’d thought I’d signed up for college in Long Island, not Rhode Island. How to sort out the local customs? Why was it spelled Cranston but pronounced Cvanston? Why were coffee and milk not separate beverages? Why was spring merely a weekend in June? I fell in love, though not at first.

To lose my virginity during college, I had to travel to Boston; to find a job, later, I had to move to New York. Providence didn’t leave me with any similar milestones or post card moments. I remember DJing one night at the Living Room ("Behind the big bubble," for those of you with turtle memories), and being offered a free beer if I would play something by the Clash. After agreeing, I looked up from my crate of vinyl to see the Clash fan surreptitiously walking along the bar, pouring leftover beers into a plastic cup for me. Tough city.

Another miserable story: Before I wrote for the NewPaper, the less-polished predecessor of the Phoenix, I had my first professional writing bylines, a few weeks after graduation, in the Providence Eagle. The lesser of the city’s two alternative weeklies, the long-defunct Eagle seemed to publish mostly restaurant coupons, horse-racing results, and anniversary announcements. For $20 a week, I wrote a column about local musicians, a dangerous task, since the singer of one undistinguished combo had responded to an unsympathetic notice written by my predecessor by threatening him with a grisly death.

After a few months, the Eagle stopped paying me, but continued to publish my articles, an arrangement that, no matter how common in journalism, struck me as unfair. I took my delinquent patron to court, which I now consider a cautionary first-year lesson in the ethics of editors and publishers.

Providence, I came to realize, was the New Orleans of the Northeast, a lawless outpost populated by people too indifferent for Massachusetts and too indigent for Connecticut. Even working for cheap at a Thayer Street record store — the late Goldy Records, a plausible model for Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, a store where, if we didn’t like the record you were looking for, or your sweater or, well, you, we’d play Captain Beefheart at a volume loud enough to make you leave — I could still afford a regular routine of bohemian gourmandizing. I saw R.E.M. at the Living Room with 100 people, U2 at Center Stage, playing "I Will Follow" twice because they were out of songs, also for 100 people. XTC, the Dead Kennedys, the Go-Go’s, and Jonathan Richman as often as I saw my own family.

I was also, history can corroborate, the final DJ at the original free-form version of WBRU-FM, then a magnificent radio station with no playlist to dictate what records should air, and hardly any listeners or advertisers either. Our notion of WBRU was hopeful and democratic — play good music, and people will listen. It proved to not be true and, in 1983, with WHJY new in town and our Arbitron ratings looking like the score a Serbian Olympic judge would give a Croatian ice skater, we began to hand over the station’s reins to the first of a series of radio consultants, who advised us to play what we clearly understood was not good music.

Two years later — after losing my job at Goldy Records, writing for my first national magazine, and being banished even from weekend overnight shifts at WBRU because I’d refused to play a live Genesis concert that had cost the station lots of money — I left Providence the way some people leave home — angry, in a hurry, swearing I’d never go back. I moved to New York, a city far less lawless than it appears to visitors, and kept writing, except now at Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, the New York Times, GQ, Blender, and other places that paid better than $20 an article. And soon, I was coming back regularly to Rhode Island: for the vintage stores, for reunions, for the PawSox, for the memories, for summers in Newport, for the Italian food. All along, while I’ve written, I’ve tried to reconcile the failure of my experience at WBRU — why is it, given the choice, that people prefer bad music to good? That’s still a puzzle to me, and I suspect it always will be. And why is it, for that matter, that people will try to cheat you out of a free beer, even if you’ve offered to play a Clash song for their pleasure? I have Providence to thank, for making me contemplate such wonderful questions.