Rate Your Music score: 3.5 out of 5!
More egg is caking the face of Q-102, as this was yet another big hit the station eschewed for no apparent reason. To add insult to injury, it was a hit right around the same time Q-102 placed "Right Here Waiting" by Richard Marx at #1 on its survey for 7 weeks in a row.
When Stevie Nicks's "Rooms On Fire" was first issued, I saw a column in a student newspaper from one of the local universities that gave this record a rave review. But the article fretted that it would be at least 6 months before Cincinnati radio picked up this record.
This turned out to be pretty accurate. We lived just far south enough that we could receive Lexington's Power 94½, which picked up the song right away. But Q-102 remained asleep at the switch - and never woke up. In Cincinnati, album rock radio eventually caught on to the track, but top 40 radio never did. Just about 6 months after that review, I put the car radio on WEBN, and they were playing this record. I was actually surprised, because at the time, the album rock format seemed to be geared to old hippies who "grew up" (Newspeak for "sold out") and went to work for big financial firms downtown. The format didn't seem to play hardly any recent music unless it was by people much older than Stevie Nicks.
Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence that the title of Stevie's hit inspired the toilet paper fires at my high school. It's about as likely as people being inspired to clog the toilets with assorted items by George H.W. Bush talking in a muffled voice in his dumb campaign ads. Nonetheless, when I was a college DJ a few years after "Rooms On Fire", I used the song to preface a bit where I imitated my high school principal saying, "The only room that's on fire at this school is the bathroom!"
Long nets of White Cloud my memory.
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