New Jersey Nostalgia

FMU’s Beware of the Blog alerts me to a little piece of Jersey nostalgia in the form of the website of Randy Now, former promoter for the great City Gardens club in Trenton, NJ, where I went to college in the early 90s. And Randy’s still at DJ at WTSR, radio station for The College of New Jersey, better known as Trenton State College when I was there.

City Gardens was a great place to see a wide variety of touring punk, indie and metal bands without going to Philly or Manhattan. I have to admit that I didn’t go to CGs as much as I wished I had in retrospect. But I did see some great shows nevertheless.

Randy’s site has some pics from CGs as well as scans of the old punk cards listing the upcoming shows. Where else could you see Venom and Black Flag on the same bill?

My show actually came on right after Randy’s during the last semester of my senior year of college, the spring of 1993. Randy was an old timer when I arrived, and had been doing a ska show way before ska became the next big thing in the mid-90s. But aside from from my being the program director at ‘TSR and seeing him for a few minutes once a week, I didn’t particularly know Randy, and doubt he’d remember me.

City Gardens is gone now, and I don’t think Trenton’s quite the burnt-out post-industrial city it was in 1992 (and to be fair, the College is actually in the neighboring suburb of Ewing, NJ). There are times when I kind of miss Trenton and college radio.