On Friday night, The Wife and I attended a class reunion of sorts. We didn’t really know anyone there. But we still knew everybody pretty well.

For about a month, I have been holding tickets to a WXXP-FM reunion show at the Rex Theater on the South Side. The Wife had always raved about the Double X, an alternative station on the air in Pittsburgh for just a couple of years in the late 1980s, and the folks who worked there – as well as people from the local bands who got their first and best exposure on the station – had been working for almost a full year to put together a reunion concert this weekend.

The really big deal for The Wife was the promise of an hour-long set from the Affordable Floors, a Pittsburgh band that teetered on the precipice of stardom into the early 1990s before it all blew up. For as long as we’ve known each other, I’ve had standing orders to buy Drumming on the Walls, their second album, if I ever came across it in a store or online. She had only seen them once, at some kind of free show at Point State Park, but had heard them a bunch – on the Double X, as you might imagine.

I was hoping to keep this a surprise until we walked up to the Rex Friday night, but I knew she would see stuff about the shows in the PG or the City Paper the day before. She found out, just like I thought, but wasn’t any less excited.

I was impressed by the Floors, who sound like REM with a new-wavey twist. The Wife tried to be cool for a song or two, but was soon standing in front of the stage, pogoing along to the music. After the Floors were done, a all-star group of musicians who played in local bands of that era re-created the XXP playlist on stage. Covers of Depeche Mode, Madness, The Smiths, Siouxsie, B-52s, New Order … stuff that I didn’t listen to much at the time, but have come to appreciate since … And they played and played and played …
This station was a huge deal in Pittsburgh, because the big FM station in town, WDVE, never played local bands, and almost never played anything but the kind of classic rock you find on the big FM station in any decent-sized city in the country. Back then, Pittsburgh was (and still is) a Led Zeppelin town … but there were still plenty of people looking for something different.

In fact, that was the station’s tagline: It “Dared to be Different.”

XXP was it. A college-radio format on commercial radio. They never got the numbers – which is part of the reason they were on the air for about two years — but they sold out every show they promoted, and they found plenty of people who were looking for something different.

And I think every one of those folks showed up at the Rex on Friday. The Wife and I weren’t the oldest people there, but if you think about the target audience of a college-radio format in the late 1980s … and then you do the math … you can imagine a theater full of 40-year-olds trying to dance for four hours. Yeah. By the time we left, around 12:30, the crowd was looking as thin as some of the hairlines onstage. And there was The Wife, griping about her aching knees…

No matter. A celebration of what was probably the last era of truly original music. A high-school reunion in a room full of strangers. My real high-school reunions tend to serve as reminders of my advancing age. This one made me feel like I was 21 again.