Sense of Place: WUMB’s Albert O picks his quintessential Boston tracks

On our Sense of Place series, we try to really dig into a city’s music scene. Sometimes, it helps to turn to the experts.

Albert O is the afternoon drive host and the host of the show Highway 61 Revisted, at WUMB, World Cafe’s affiliate station in Boston. Albert has been a radio host in Boston for decades, so he’s the perfect person to come up with a list of five songs that define Boston beyond some of the more obvious picks from bands like The Cars, Aerosmith or, well, Boston!

“Five O’Clock Angel” by Peter Wolf

“He is a fixture here in Greater Boston, and he goes all the way back to the ’60s, really … I used to see and go to the Middle East, up and down all the time in Central Square, and he was always skulking around. He would always just kind of blow into a room quietly, all dressed in black.”

“Cure for Pain” by Morphine

“There’s another one who was a fixture and beloved. Mark Sandman, who died, as you well know, suddenly and scarily on stage in Italy … He owned Central Square Cambridge. He had a loft there and a recording studio. He was the first person in town to not only have one band, he always had a minimum of five bands going at the same time. To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything remotely like them.”

“Monkey Gone to Heaven” by Pixies

“When they started, nobody took them seriously. I still have their original demo cassette from the mid-to-late ’80s. There’s a lot of great college stations in Greater Boston, and most of them passed on it. But [the band] sent it to the right people — the 4AD people, over in England — and all of a sudden, that little cassette was a beautiful 12-inch EP. We were, like, ‘How did we miss this?’

“Two 6’s Upside Down” by Dropkick Murphys

“They were much more of a hardcore band when they started off, but they were the hardcore band that took it to the next level — you hear their songs at sporting events. Ken [Casey] has started his own record label … “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” has Woody Guthrie influences and all that. Two or three years ago, they stripped down, went to Oklahoma, to the home of Woody Guthrie, in Okemah, and recorded the first of two albums that are all Woody Guthrie covers. It’s surprisingly really, really good. They pulled it off. It’s almost like an Irish, punk, Woody Guthrie approach.”

“Roadrunner” by Jonathan Richman

“This is more of a song that is Boston … Now, Jonathan Richman wrote this when he was hanging out with John Felice of The Real Kids. He fashioned it after a Velvet Underground song.”

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Miguel Perez. Our senior producer is Kimberly Junod and our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.