The Alternative Number Ones: Live’s “Selling The Drama”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

For most of my childhood, my family lived in a small and leafy north Baltimore neighborhood called Radnor-Winston, right next to the two colleges where my parents taught. It's a quiet, secluded spot even though it's right off one of the city's main north-south arteries. That big street is called Greenmount Avenue in most of the city, but it turns into York Road when you're about to hit my old neighborhood. To little-kid me, York Road was where everything was -- our church, the Popeye's, the McDonald's, the video store, the movie theater, every other business establishment that had any importance to my life. At some point, I asked my parents why it was called York Road, and they said it was because you could drive on York Road all the way up to York, Pennsylvania. This seemed impossibly exciting to me -- a road so big that you could take it to another city, in another state. I asked if we could maybe drive up York Road to York one day. Then we did it, and I instantly learned why we weren't always going to York.

York, Pennsylvania is not a terribly exciting place. It's one of many small, run-down industrial-ish towns that you'll encounter all up and down the East Coast -- the places that you drive through on your way to other places and think to yourself, "Whoof, good thing I don't live here." It's too small for anything to actually be happening there, but it's too big to be quaint. It's just big enough to be sketchy. When my family station wagon arrived in York and my parents told me that we were there, I had no reaction. York just looked like the road up to York, which got really boring as soon as we got north of Towson.