So there we were, at the bar before the show, and one word was on everybody’s lips: Wussy! The beloved Cincinnati band was playing a hometown concert to celebrate the release of their new album – called Cincinnati Ohio, of course –  across the street, and the smaller bar where we had posted up to grab food and beers was full of fans with similar plans, swapping stories about their local heroes. It was the second week in November and a buddy and I had flown into the Queen City specifically for this show after catching Wussy half a dozen times over the years on the East Coast. Those shows had enthusiastic fans but the Woodward Theater that night had an atmosphere from a different universe, one where Wussy was selling out stadiums as the biggest rock band of the past 20 years instead of just the best. The roar of the crowd when the band walked out was overwhelming, and the release as they finished opening song “Airborne” felt like we were levitating. We threw the noise the band made back at them in a communal rapture, and they took a second to soak in the response. Bassist Mark Messerly grinned at us and the whole theater could see his shirt, which displayed in large white letters YOU BELONG HERE.

It felt good to be in Cincinnati, with that welcome. I was glad to get some distance from Massachusetts, where one of our stupider backbencher congressmen had just tried to seize the political moment by opportunistically backing hateful bigoted exclusion against young trans women athletes. And I wasn’t the only Masshole at the show — the opening act was Chris Brokaw, the longtime Boston-area guitarist who had opened for Wussy the first time I saw them, 15 years ago at a tiny Somerville bar. Then he was solo, now he was rocking hard in a trio with drums and bass (Mission of Burma’s Clint Conley on the latter) and raising the bar at the start of the show. At one point, Brokaw talked about being introduced to Wussy via a friend doing the “you gotta hear these guys” pitch, someone in his world making a connection to theirs.

Brokaw came out during Wussy’s set during “Pizza King,” Joe Klug’s resounding and resolute drums laying the groundwork for the now four guitars on stage to lift off. Was Feelies bassist Brenda Sauter sitting in at that point too? Things got a little hazy that night. “Pizza King” is about the purgatory of hanging out and having a crush, being trapped in yourself in a crowd; when it hits live at a show it is large enough to envelop and connect everyone there.

***

When I left Boston to go to the show, WMBR was in the middle of its fundraising week. The station is licensed through MIT and managed by students, so it’s technically college radio — but many of the DJs have long since graduated, if they even went to MIT in the first place, and it is generally referred to by DJs as community radio. The Friday host of the morning indie rock show, Jon Bernhardt, was one of two DJs celebrating his 40th anniversary this year (the other, Ré Antoine, has a Sunday evening slow jam show), and he had recently been playing a fair amount of Wussy in advance of the new record. On Friday’s show he talked about how he used to buy punk records from Wussy co-founder and guitarist/vocalist Chuck Cleaver back when Cleaver led the old Cincinnati band the Ass Ponys. And he admitted that while the new record is good, he preferred “Cellar Door,” another song just released by Cleaver and fellow Wussy co-founder/guitarist/vocalist Lisa Walker as a semi-solo project and he spun that track instead.

This is one of the things I’ve come to enjoy and expect from MBR DJs, honesty about what they’re playing and why — skipping the single for an album track, or going back to an older release because the new one was a disappointment, as well as enthusiasm over a new discovery. And Bernhardt had an additional critique for people of his cohort complaining about how there’s no good new music any more — at least half of his two-hour show every week is new music, from veteran bands like Wussy or newer folks like Corker (another Cincinnati band played during that fundraising show). “You’re all part of this semi-secret club” getting hip to new sounds, Bernhardt said, but that club is open to anyone who wants to tune in. Even those without actual radios; the station streams as well as broadcasts and DJs thanking donors were giving shout-outs to listeners around the world.

Community radio with a community that isn’t limited by boundaries, at least not those of nation or programming. While WMBR’s individual shows generally focus on one genre or style, a week’s worth of shows covers jazz, metal, African pop, goth, noise, hip-hop, country, classical, Mayan, you name it. People pushing 60 play contemporary punk and hardcore; “The Hot Rats Sessions” is a current student spinning her favorite 70s prog. Not everything may be to the listener’s liking at every moment — woe betide the person who tunes into “Subject To Change,” a two-hour show that plays nothing but covers of a single song, if that day’s tune is not your speed — but something will be, some time. “The only qualification we have for playing a song is that we like it and think it’s worth sharing with you,” Bernhardt told listeners during his show, and that generosity is what unifies the community here..

***

That’s not enough, of course. A day after the Wussy show, David Roth surveyed the wreckage of the presidential election and put his finger on one of the larger forces at work: “Everywhere, in every way, American culture works to prise people apart and keep them confused and worried and mean; this is much easier to do when people think of themselves only as themselves, and not as part of any greater community or project, which is why America’s reactionaries have so dedicated themselves to tearing down or splitting up those kinds of communities and projects.” And the other part of that is how Donald Trump and his goons do create a community — a diseased and top-down one that is predicated on destroying all other communities, one defined by fear instead of generosity, but an in-group nonetheless. Maybe if you join it you can do the hurt instead of hurting yourself.

At the top of his fundraising show, Bernhardt acknowledged a radio station asking for money feels unfair when other groups need it much more — he listed the Immigration Law Center, Planned Parenthood and the Trevor Project as places listeners could donate to. As a nonprofit, WMBR does not officially take political positions, but that doesn’t mean no positions are taken — I have a fun time anticipating when a DJ will have to throw out the disclaimer “The views and opinions expressed on this show do not necessarily reflect those of MIT and the Technology Broadcasting Corporation,” which I was able to type from memory, to give you an idea of the frequency with which I have heard it. It airs segments from Democracy Now! every weekday and over the past year I’ve heard increasing coverage of and reference to the genocide in Palestine on the show’s programming — from student reporters covering demonstations to recorded shows mixing protest songs and actual voices of protest.

None of this was present at the Wussy show, at least not overtly. There were definitely times of ungenerosity in the crowd as people jostled for viewpoints, some pointed words exchanged but ultimately everyone was able to get along. There was a reason we were all here, and it wasn’t to fight for space. But a community can make space for fighting, for defending everyone in it instead of looking to expel them. I’m thinking of Messerly’s YOU BELONG HERE shirt, which has no equivocation in its inclusion. And of Brokaw taking an already ferocious song in his set and absolutely going off on guitar, one of those times where you can physically see and hear a musician finding and exploring a different place. The rhythm section followed along as he sought out uncharted territory of dissonant and jagged wrath, waiting to see where he would land. “Chris was getting some demons out there,” Conley remarked at the song’s close.

***

Wussy’s set that night was more resilient than furious. That is not to say they didn’t rock, they brought the cure for rigor mortis and stood up straight and tall and shouted about it. And they closed the night with their joyous cover of The Twinkeyz’ gay punk anthem “Aliens In Our Midst,” a celebration of outsiders longing for a place and finding one. But for all their love of classic rock and its swagger, Wussy shoots from behind the eight ball. There is uncertainty and desperation in their music, love and life not playing out the way they should. And they know from sadness. Several years ago, Ass Ponys guitarist John Erhardt joined the band and his slide opened up new frontiers in their music. Erhardt was the opposite of a phantom limb, he was the sinew that was always waiting to flex, and his death in 2020 was a body blow. Travis Talbert has since taken over slide guitar duties, finding a new way to fill that space and as a superb profile in Stereogum makes clear, he was integral in the band continuing. Both he and Erhardt are heard on the new album, paying tribute to the past and taking the future step by step.

Sometimes it is hard to see the future, especially on your own. On November 9, 2016, I was driving back from New York City after spending the previous day and night and much of the new morning covering the presidential election. I was in unfamiliar territory, radio-wise and otherwise, exhausted and despondent. I always have at least a dozen CDs in my car but I had no idea what to play until I saw Shellac’s “Excellent Italian Greyhound” and shoved it in the player to hear “The End Of Radio.” It was the only thing that could encompass the doom I felt, this song where the last man to man a station goes insane on the air as he sends out the last transmission on Earth. “THIS IS A REAL GOD DAMN EMERGENCY!” Steve Albini shouts, but the emergency is gone, the moment failed. There is only a final broadcast to give an echo to what was lost. And what is hiding in the song is the real despair, that no one is driving past the Stop and Shop, no one is trying to be less alone with the radio on. I’ve been playing it a lot this year and around midnight of November 5 this year, I put it on again, listening on headphones by myself.

I first heard “Inhaler,’ the third single from Wussy’s new album, on the radio — on Bernhardt’s show, in fact. And while he prefers “Cellar Door,” I prefer this track. Both songs use one of the band’s greatest strengths, how the voices of Walker and Cleaver complement each other (it’s not unusual for Cleaver’s tenor to be higher than Walker’s alto) and how their vocal lines don’t just harmonize, but sing different parts in an urgent combination. Walker sings how “it’s time to get up and fight the terror,” but also describes a heart hardened by fear; she’s anxiously on the move but is still stopped by a stranger’s kindness. Klug’s insistent drums and Messerly’s low drone underpin the skirl and crunch of Talbert and Walker’s guitars, while Cleaver plays a delicate acoustic figure that threads it all together. The song is more than the sum of its parts and builds to a distortion-washed chorus where Walker and Cleaver sing over and under and through each other, Cleaver taking care to “say I love you as I wave goodbye” while Walker takes off in a different direction. But despite that, they’re still singing together, and we were singing with them in Cincinnati:

Now it’s 5 p.m. and Gideon Coe is live, turn it up if you’re gonna survive

It’s not cold comfort when you’re far from home  

And nothing else to do but turn the radio on again