Were you involved in college radio?

it was great. I got to tape a lot of records I never would have been able to find otherwise, hang out late at night playing records, etc.

i was a DJ for all four years, plus assistant music director my sophomore year and music director my junior and senior years. it was pretty great, considering i went to a somewhat conservative school without a lot of kids who were into independent music, it was a great way to meet like-minded people and things felt pretty tight-knit. i think our programming was fairly adventurous given the environment and the state of college radio in the late 90s. it was also how i met my wife.

Had a show the fall of my freshman year before I realized that hardly anybody listened to our campus station, which was barely audible beyond the perimeters of the campus. Each fall I watched the same thing happen: excited first-year students signing up for a show and then drifting away by Christmas. I'm not even sure who ran the place, which was buried deep within the basement of the student union.

(Now of course they've renovated the building and moved the station to a much more public area, and there's actually a window where you can watch the DJ. Not sure if the wattage has increased -- there was a rumor that its FCC license was revoked years ago after a student somehow connected a wire to a nearby railroad track to boost the frequency.)

I did mostly late night shows. The station had one semi-legendary fan that all the DJs knew who went by the name of "Rodent". He worked the nightshift at a gas station downtown, listened to the station round the clock, called in for requests, occasionally visited the station, had a weird meth-freak/white trash vibe about him, into 80s metal. Rodent would call in all the time, sometimes it seemed like he was the only dude listening.

Anyway, the only thing I really remember is that one week I played, back-to-back, Sonic Youth's "The Diamond Sea," Tortoise's "Djed," Polvo's "When Will You Die for the Last Time in My Dreams," and one other 10:00+ track I don't remember and thought I was being clever.

one semester i had a 6am-9am slot and the program director or whoever had scheduled a ticket giveaway lol. happily one person called.

i was less involved than i should have been -- only did it my senior year and first year out when i was still in the area. it was a pretty exciting time and place for it (early 90s in the nc triangle)

Loved it. My show was called The All-Skate Direction. My senior year, it ran from midnight until I felt like shutting down the station. Not much bad college alternative.

one time I had a morning show and every time I was on, at like 7am, this girl would call in because her alarm was set to the radio station, and she would ask me what the show was called, every week

Loved it -- two of the best years of my life. At the time (1998-2000) I has the only post-punk show in the programming schedule. It's weird thinking of a time when in certain markets Gang of Four, Wire, Ultravox, etc were not part of the rotation.

I did like three or four different kinds of shows over the years with different people, had a jazz show where I sang along with any horns, I thought I was being clever

some friends had a regular college rock show that morphed into a roving band of bros doing the late night freeform freakout thang, one guy at the controls while the rest fed media into the machines. tons'o'fun, like any improv there were alot of rough spots with 5 things playing at once but a few times each show we'd hit the third mind and reach audio epiphany.

the station I was on (and I'm guessing most stations) attracted a lot of ~strange~ people, but I made a couple friends there. I mainly just brought people I knew on with me because I didn't think I was as ~strange~ as they were. Probably was tho.

I wasn't involved on the music side - although I'm sure I would've enjoyed it - but I tried to start a Kermode & Mayo style film show. We did one and then it finished. I want another shot.

fav name of one of my shows was Music Loves Company

the politics at our station were INSANE. typical 90s identity-politics stuff: every show must have a theme, a certain percentage of the programming was mandated to center minorities, women, etc. The weirdest result of this to me was that there was one DJ who had a major speech impediment stemming from cerebral palsy, and as a result was nearly impossible to understand. She had some womyn's/world music sorta show.

it was like an exceptionally cruel bad Kids in the Hall sketch

talking on the radio is overrated anyway

did you guys have stations where anyone in the community could have a show, or only students

Only students.

ours was pretty much only students, there was one "cool" professor who had a show and my wife stayed on a year after she graduated.

i don't know why i put "cool" in quotes, he was actually pretty cool.

we were mandated to include a certain percentage of non-student programming. it was kind of a pain for students to get slots, tbh. which is probably why I always ended up with my friends doing midnight-3am

mine had community people. but while the students could be clueless newbs (like me), they had to have some knowledge or connection. they were far more likely to do specialty shows on the weekends.

Our media adviser wanted a show, and at the time we couldn't say no (although now as a media adviser myself I know it's illegal in Florida). It was called "Swingin' Sounds!" He played Glenn Miller, Count Basie, etc.

Even though my station's hanging by a thread right now--financially, legally, in terms of morale--I'm still doing a show I've been doing since 2005. I also did two years at a different university station in '88 and '89.

btw being an adviser of a college radio station at a Florida public university is a huge pain in the ass: fighting off threats from student government, administration, plus negotiating with the FCC and paying rent.

DJed at KLA at UCLA from 1989 to 1992 and then immediately thereafter at KUCI at UC Irvine from 1992 to 2000 -- and I would probably still be going if it weren't for the fact that I got a bit burned out around 2000 given my workday schedule limiting when I could come in to the weekends -- and then having to spend a lot of time on the weekends getting there and back as well via bus. (Plus my writing was really taking off so I'd found a better medium in the end.)

Essential part of my life, met many wonderful friends through it all, had a blast all twelve years. Allegedly I always possessed this 'great radio voice' but I don't know. I do have a couple of airchecks around...

Yes!!!

I had a radio show at the school I went to for the first two years.

It was called the subterranean sideshow and we were on from like 12-2 and then finally 10-12. It was my friend Jodie and I who only did it w/ me cause I said she could play 1 REM song per show. We would get stoned and then order pizza to the studio. We started every show with this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z70jVUTAbo4 lol and it was awesome. Most fun ever.

Oh and we had two fans who always called in named Jim and Yogi who were townies and we actually went on a date with them once. To Dunkin Donuts. It was ... not good.

Oh and I had a tremendous crush on the director of programming who I thought was so dreamy and then like two years later when he was graduating and I had a bf he professed similar feelings and it was so heartbreaking. Oh man. Youth.

But yeah - radio!

Alas, our programming directors have usually been the type to wear ill-fitting tight silver pants and orange nail polish -- guys and girls.

DJ'ed at the Ole Miss student station from 1994 to 1997. A semester-long Frank Zappa show (I wrote a letter to Barfko-Swill and they sent me the entire discography), then two semesters of a "Desert Island Discs" ripoff, then a couple of years of a freeform show. I was staff, not a student; it was very generous of the station managers to let me have the airtime.

Okay some random samples from the past via YSI:

A test snippet for KLA from 1989

A typical KLA aircheck from 1991

And another typical aircheck from KUCI 1993

Also have a slew of interviews I did on the air around but I have other plans for those...

DJed at iowa (KRUI - iowa city's sound alternative!) thursday night bar time. one night i played "fun house" and a girl called, asked, "what is this SHIT?" and hung up before i could even say anything. another time a guy who sounded like he was in his forties called and very sincerely profusely thanked me for playing the thinking fellers after sebadoh, like it saved his life or something. never really got to the bottom of that one. another night despite/because of my continuing refusals i kept getting increasingly drunken belligerent calls from frat boys requesting i play "black hole sun." they ended up threatening to come down to the station and jump me after i got off my shift. i guess they passed out before i left because i made it home safe

I probably would have done this if I had gone to college in the 80s

not to be 'that guy' (the one who is always posting poems), but I wrote this last week and dedicated it to 'college radio':

late-night
crunching coffee beans between
our teeth like precious ores
we dug up from the earth
and set to work,
the metal tape and discs of
glowing oil, props for
youthful dreaming,
unalarmed and unsurprising,
tuned to resonate on frequencies
that sung of happenings
beyond our own horizons,
hard to wrap our heads around,
like words we could not
quite pronounce;
tracks relayed and followed paths
to the crises and their afterclaps

(despite hints of bitterness/cynicism in that poem, I am extremely grateful for wxyc and the many wonderful people and places and things and songs it brought into my orbit during the 2+ years I was seriously involved with it)

like I think I had basically the platonic ideal of the college radio experience (cocky-wannabe-muso gets schooled by wise-yet-chill elders, forges lasting friendships with other newbies during the prolonged 'apprenticeship' of shared suffering and 3AM shows, gets invited to older DJs' badass parties, falls in love w/ a girl who works at the station, etc etc)
so I can't really complain

Was part of two half-hour comedy 'pilots' by the humor magazine staff. That never went anywhere, as the station was a musical tastemaker in NYC (or so I presume; you had to live in a dorm to get it downtown).

Started the summer of 98, just about the same time I got a job at a sports bar about 4 blocks up the street. This fact would influence my programming choices for years.

Did it pretty much every week or every other week for 5 years, including three after I'd graduated. So completely important to the post-junior year formation of how I became me. Hell, there are still threads on here where I bug people to listen to my show.

i loved doing college radio, especially in the middle of the night and regardless of whether i was any good at it (i wasn't, but i had a nice speaking voice and was an OK engineer).

No, because our college radio station was not your typical college station, it was basically a junior version of Q101 (big alt-rock station in Chicago) that stuck to pretty rigid playlists. I tried to get involved as a freshman, but it became very clear early on that unless you were in the right crowd (i.e. the weird strain of journalist students that were also in with the athletes) then you would be stuck doing shit work for 4 years and not even come close to being on the air or doing anything exciting.

i do community radio in nyc and it's fun to play records and drink beer and hang with friends and stuff but no one really listens. but you do meet some very interesting people.

during my freshman year I put in some kind of application with the campus station and went down there and talked to someone about it, but it quickly became clear that there was very little freedom to play whatever you want and there were pretty rigid formats and playlists, and that my fantasy of college radio was probably a little unrealistic and antiquated (this was about 10 years ago), so I never really followed through with it.

I did for a couple of years as an undergrad; like most things in college I didn't take as much advantage of it / didn't take it as seriously as I should have. I shouldn't have been going to school where I was at that time so college was kind of a mess. I had shows but didn't really connect with anyone else there, kind of did my own thing, played a lot of shitty (and some good) music.

Later my wife ended up getting her master's and PhD at the same school and I had a show there as a "student" and it was a lot more fun. My music tastes had gotten a lot broader and I tried to play more interesting things and find more obscure stuff in the library, plus I got to know a lot of the people involved in the station, was on the station staff, and had a good time.

The station was and is pretty great though, or can be if you make it so. No real format or structure, nothing really required in terms of what you had to play, lots of freedom to do what you want. The downside is that there are always a lot of horrible shows and 3rd wave ska-punk soldiers on to this very day uninterrupted.

It was the best part of college. My fondest memories happened in that basement space below an abandoned cafeteria.

I've talked about working there once or twice on here, but in general, I very content to leave my experiences there alone. They were that good and I really don't want to bring them out into the cold hard light of the 21st century just yet.

Maybe I'm romanticizing things a bit. No, no, wait. I'm definitely romanticizing things.

Last I heard, the station was playing the hits of Mr. Big.

I am currently involved in one, and I'll probably keep my show for quite a while post-uni.

I didn't do much radio in university, except minorly help friends out a few times (and one of my good friends was editor of the station's music paper). But I've been doing a science&culture show (and occasional music show fill-ins) for a few years on a community/university station - it's quite a community in itself and I've met lots of good people through it. I love radio :)

first of all, i'm hardly the first person to make a gay joke, which this really isn't
secondly, one of my co-hosts wasn't straight, so the idea that this was "straight priviledge" is bullshit
thirdly, we never really claimed to be brave or particularly hilarious (or rightwing)
fourthly, I don't know why you feel the need to bring my economic status into it when you have no idea how I grew up

it's not like we actively made fun of gays the way so many other radio programs or television shows do on a regular basis. it's a dumb joke but the idea was that it kind of disarms people in a way. it made the debates so much more better (for us) when you start and end on the wrong foot. we didn't WANT to be right about everything.

Janet Reno's clit

a queercore band

we didn't WANT to be right about everything.

or left, apparently

Did it, loved it, musical tastes are still paying for it.

I can imagine a gay college show being called "fags" but I imagine they'd face protests anyway and a visit from administration.

I was a DJ for one semester at my university. Had a four-hour show on Sunday nights. But I never had any real interest in DJing; rather, I had an ulterior motive to join up.

One day the campus radio station had an open house, and I decided to go. We toured the studio, and briefly the entirety of their digs. Mostly dull stuff, but one part had me entranced - they walked us by their record collection. This was a few years before downloadable music and online CD sales, so finding obscure music meant trolling record shows, shady mail order firms, and indie and/or used record stores. And suddenly here I was, surrounded by roomfuls of walls of records on shelves stacked to the ceiling, decades of records sent from the record labels in hopes of airplay, none of them for sale which meant nearly everything released since the late 1950s was there. They were neatly in alphabetical order, so I searched for a few impossible-to-find obscurities as I walked through. They were all there. I had to get a job here! I had no desire to man the radio waves, I just wanted access to their record collection so I could tape my long-searched-for faves.

About 30 people showed up for the audition. I was one of about 4 that were selected. I must have learned something on the job, since several complete strangers over the years since have stopped me after hearing me, say, order a meal at a restaurant, and asked if I was in radio.

i dont know about the content of your radio show or anything but calling your radio talk show "fags" and making people say "im a fag" is like... it would be hard to find something that was closer to the platonic ideal of dumb college bullshit.

xpost yeah it's weird, i was at my station just before the whole mp3 revolution. the station was pretty hardline about no music being removed from the premises (unless someone was reviewing a new CD) so there were so many things I wished i could take and tape, but had no way of doing it. right after i graduated, i'm sure everyone was just bringing in their laptops and loading up on music.

xp yeah and people judging the show without ever having heard it was kind of what we got off on. I think it led to us getting some interesting guests

BTW it wouldn't be that hard. you just have to think a little more.

I was at KXLU for 2 years, probably the most significant moment was when we "broke" Beck a good 18 months before MTV.

My personal high-water mark was having Boredoms perform Super AE material live for the first time outside of Japan on my show, the shift in the band's sound was pretty legendary.

It's a good station, I hope they last.

ha, yeah, i totally heard beck for the first time on kxlu! and then there was something about him in the LA Reader and then the rest is history. magical times.

If you guys remember further... I believe sales of their first single on Bongload went to the financing the original pressing of "Loser".

i saw one of his first shows. he was opening! for the treepeople (dug's pre-Built2Spill band) and further. i think "the reverend bud green" was also on the bill. it was at a downstairs bar in midtown LA (?) which closed after the 94 northridge quake. he covered BS's the wizard and his finale was blowing a bag of leaves with a leaf blower all over the stage... brief footage of which ended up in the Loser video. i thought it was kinda LOL, had no idea he would mainline into the zeitgeist of Alternative Nation within a few years... muchless have a record released 10 years later that ILM would deem "great". also he had yet to convert to scientology and he was much weirder before the e-meter took over, my dear thetans.

― _▂▅▇█▓▒░◕‿‿◕░▒▓█▇▅▂_ (Steve Shasta), Friday, May 14, 2010 2:30 PM (10 months ago)

frogbs, guess what? no one cares. your show sounds like it sucked for all of the reasons mention by previous posters. please stop trying to defend yourself, as it only makes you seem more shitty.

Phil D., to be perfectly honest, i don't even know where BWC is. oh wait, it's in Berea? why the fuck would there be a college in Berea? (sorry, i'm not trying to be insulting, i'm just actually astounded. Berea always seemed chi-chi stripmall to me, was i in the 'wrong' parts or something?)

i really don't give a shit what you think about me but telling someone to stop defending themselves when people attack them is kind of low

if only there was a hidden forum where you could judge in peace

you don't really seem fun or awesome at all tbh

you're a guy tho i'll give you that

thanks elmo

i was at my station just before the whole mp3 revolution. the station was pretty hardline about no music being removed from the premises

The only thing I couldn't figure out how to copy were those "carts" that were ubiquitous until the late '90s when digital finally took over (these were sort of like a pro version of 8-track cartridges, a continuous loop of tape). They were used for some songs, but mostly for adverts and those short radio-station jingles that seemed to have not changed since the 1970s, and were frickinhilarious.

yeah we had some great old carts. i assume those no longer exist. they seemed super-archaic even in the late 90s.

The only cart I ever played on my show had Kraftwerk's "The Model," which gave the song an otherdimensional aural.

*aura. Haha -- maybe aural too.

Actually, now that I've jogged my memory some, I recall being given lots of leeway as to what songs I played; all the management was very strict about was playing the right advertisements at the right times, and logging them correctly. That was their source of income. The radio station was piped into the student union and a few other campus buildings, so it's not like anyone could veto my choice of music if they didn't like it.

i think that the other thing that happened with the advent of the internet was the ability to do webcasts. wobc has had a webcast since i was a student there, at least. like, i used to get calls and IMs from Austria and England and stuff. it was weird.

I wouldn't listen to the straight priviledge guys radio show

He shouldn't feel need to defend himself tho

i got a request to play the cure, once

Phil D., to be perfectly honest, i don't even know where BWC is. oh wait, it's in Berea? why the fuck would there be a college in Berea? (sorry, i'm not trying to be insulting, i'm just actually astounded. Berea always seemed chi-chi stripmall to me, was i in the 'wrong' parts or something?)

It certainly wasn't "chi chi stripmall" when I was there -- there was the K-Mart down Bagley Rd near I-71 and, uh . . . that's really about it. The B-W campus is right in the middle of the older residential part of town, and just a short hop from the Rocky River Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks. Anyway, it's one of the older colleges in the state (1845), and has a world-renowned music conservatory. Surprised you wouldn't have heard of it, going to school in Ohio.

Maybe you're thinking of Strongsville, which borders Berea on the east and south and is very much strip-mall-y. And actually mall-y now, with some gigantic monstrosity of a mall there.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Exactly 100 people voted. That seems somehow noteworthy.

oh man I was a DJ pretty much JUST BECAUSE it gave me an opportunity to raid the stacks and tape stuff. Things I got that were otherwise completely unavailable at the time:
Big Star - 3rd/Sister Lovers
Beastie Boys - An Evening at Home With Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and Love American Style EPs
Neil Young - Journey Through the Past (sdtk), Time Fades Away (but NOT On the Beach! arrgh)
a bunch of other stuff I'm blanking on right now

oh Wattstax: The Living Word

i think that might another big change in college radio; it used to be the easiest way to have that quintessential college experience of learning about your own music tastes by listening to lots of different obscure stuff you'd only heard about and figuring out what you liked and what you didn't and why. i guess i was on napster by my sophomore year but still if i wanted to hear albert ayler and figure out if i was an avante-garde jazz guy or get into photek to see if i was an electronic music kind of guy, the easiest place to do it was the college radio station. now that's not really necessary since you can DL all that stuff easily.

Oh man carts - we had those for PSAs and liners and sometimes for edited versions of songs that got played constantly. Like Op Ivy's Sound System which got played a couple times a day for some reason.

I swear my music taste got shittier and narrower when I was doing shows the first time around.

Phil D., I'd heard of Baldwin-Wallace, but tbh, the only connection Oberlin had to it was through sports, and during college, I was a drug-addled music obsessive who couldn't have cared less. and now that i'm looking at a map, i realize that i HAVE been in a nice part of Berea. i took a lovely walk in a part there once while waiting for a friend's flight to get in. sorry to be so dismissive. ha.

n/a, trust when i say that we were still mining the record and CD vaults for shit in the early to mid-2000s. i feel like that might be happening less and less now, as it seemed the younger DJs were almost exclusively using their computers by the time i left, but man, if it hadn't been for those World music or 80s pop/r&b vaults, i would have a much less awesome music collection.

(not that i stole them, i was a vicious digitizer)

how did I miss this thread? oh yeah, I'm in another country.

I STILL do college radio at age 44, one of the lone community member holdouts.

started on a community cable FM station in '84, then did the 90's on a station that is technically part of the local high school district. moved to University of Oregon's KWVA in '98, still there.

everybody who talks about how great it is to be able to increase yr collection is OTM, I probably have 300-400 CDRs at this point. many of them have since been stolen.

Maybe you're thinking of Strongsville, which borders Berea on the east and south and is very much strip-mall-y. And actually mall-y now, with some gigantic monstrosity of a mall there.

Or Middleburgh Heights, which lies between Berea and I-71. Strongsville only got that way recently. I think Berea is one of the nicest west side suburbs. My parents met at BW and I studied violin at the conservatory when I was a kid.

xpost

xp hey awesome! i just discovered KWVA a few weeks ago (and i've lived here for six years now, lol shame). if you don't mind saying, which show do you do?

hey that's cool! I recognize your username but didn´t know you were in Eugene. I am in Peru for the month but we should FAP after I return on the 27th.

I am (no surprise) DJ Sleeve, Mondays 4-6 PM.

I hung out at the station/regularly attended music meetings/was pals w all the DJs/guested on my friend's show a bunch of times but never actually got my own show myself, even though I'd already come up with a name ("Blood on the Microphone") and I'd trained + attempted to do my demo tape 2 or 3x; I still voted "yes" bcz IMO I was somewhat involved.

And I know I'm a little late to this frogbs thing, but as the tune in space pointed out, your humor comes from the fact that it is undesirable or funny to be called as a "fag". I mean, obviously it wouldn't be funny if it was something innocuous. Also, it's very reductive to just say "oh we were doing it to be offensive or shocking and that's why it's funny" without actually trying to dissect it and consider why it's "funny", which we are attempting to do for you. I mean, I'm gay, and it sort of bums me out when people are like "Let's laugh at the idea that someone might be gay". Also, we are not some huge monolithic entity; just because one of your co-hosts was queer, it doesn't mean I and a bunch of other's don't have a right to find this tasteless or offensive or homophobic.

The reason "why" it was funny had a lot more to do with it just being a terrible name for a show. Like naming your band "Holy Fuck" or "Gay Dad" or something. I admit that making the guests say it is taking it too far, and of course a number of them sort of got away from it, but yeah I know why that's offensive, just saying it's not really that big of a deal and definitely was not what led to us getting in trouble, and now that I'm nearly 25 I probably wouldn't do that today. But fuck my ass I loved doing that show

in the future i would just lie to people about what the name of the show was

But fuck my ass I loved doing that show

so is this you trying to be "ironic" or...?

"nearly 25" is surely the threshold of wise old age, yes

oh yeah, my show was called "rebellious jukebox" lol

I kind of want to rent frogbs a backhoe to make it a little easier to dig that hole deeper.

max/gods of college radio,

i once played boredoms - noise ramones on my radio show as an april fools prank

i'm sorry

yrs,

-dj flops1

wait isn't that just like 30 seconds long?

the first track off Super Ae would be pretty entertaining if you could see the responses of your listeners

of course you probably wouldn't have any after about 5 minutes