July 2015 - Page 2 of 2 - WPRB History
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July 2015, Page 2

WPRB DJs Arrested in Washington, 1970

[Jeff Weiser (left) and Bruce Snyder help cover the 1972 election live on the air.]

By Douglas B. Quine

I joined WPRB in my freshman year of 1969-1970 and trained on WPRB-AM before serving as a newsman at the May Day protest demonstration in Washington (1970) and the election night headquarters of Nixon and McGovern (1972). In Princeton, I took on the folk & blues shows on WPRB-FM, served as Traffic Director and assistant business manager, and finally served on the Ivy Network Board of Directors.

I have many memories of WPRB, including lighting fluorescent lamps by the radiated antenna power on Holder Tower, talking with stoned listeners who called into the studios, organizing the Beach Boys, Fish, Jean Shepherd, Weather Report, & Poco concerts, and the first WPRB Tee Shirts (blue shirts with a yellow smudge at the bottom which was supposed to represent a voice print). The stories that I’ve retold the most times, however, must be the “WPRB arrests in Washington” and “The Do Me Bird”.

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WPRB at the DNC, Sting from the Police, and Freeform vs. Format

By Jordan Becker

I started at WPRB during the second semester of my freshman year in 1979. The ability to have the entire record library—and it was still all vinyl—at my disposal was intoxicating. Unless that was the fumes from the records.

At the time, the station’s rock programming was still very much beholden to the freeform model of the late 1960s-early 1970s. In fact, to my memory, the only requirement that we had was the obligation to play a certain amount of jazz during a rock show. That all changed, though, when Ashley Ellott became station manager, and Jason Meyer became program director. They attempted to turn the rock programming into something more consistent and more rock oriented. To me, there is something to be said for listeners having a general sense of what they might hear when they turn on the radio, and having some consistency from day to day and time slot to time slot theoretically results in listeners staying with the station for longer periods. On the other hand, they also insisted that we use the slogan “Your Music,” which was generally reviled—it might have worked at a professional commercial station, but was a bad idea for a college radio station.

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Friday WPRB DJ Pinup: Dan Ruccia!

Years on air: 2001-2005

Favorite bands: Sonic Youth, US Maple, Gun Club, Cannibal Ox, Lightning Bolt, Sleater-Kinney, Arthur Russell.

Memorable on-air moment: The crazy Halloween noise sculpture I made one year with Narin Dickerson. I remember it involving lots of Shadow Ring records being played at the wrong speed.

Advice for current WPRB DJs: Play as many things that you don’t know or have never heard of as things that you do; there is so much good music out there, and the WPRB library happens to have a bunch of it.

LISTEN: Anyway/Datapanik Records Spotlight promo

Here’s WPRB’s Dan Gabbe (with production wizardry and pre-take snarkiness from Hugh Hynes) promoting a 1993 edition of Spotlight. As previously noted, Spotlight was a weekly show that allowed programmers to devote an hour to a favorite band, record label, or scene. Dan was from Columbus Ohio, and his arrival at WPRB ignited a staff-wide obsession with bands like Gaunt, V-3, Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, and the New Bomb Turks (all of whom recorded for the Ohio-based Anyway and/or Datapanik labels.) Given his credentials, a thusly-focused edition of the show was inevitable.

 

Superchunk Interview, 1991

On February 3rd of 1991, the mighty Superchunk visited WPRB (inbetween gigs at Maxwell’s and CBGBs) where they were interviewed by WPRB’s Scott Crater. Here’s the interview, in which the band dishes on the Chapel Hill scene, wide-belled trousers, Honor Role, No Idea Fanzine, and the disgusting, DNA-crusted floor of WPRB’s old lobby.


You can also download the interview by clicking here. (Reel digitized by Jon Solomon on 10/15/14) (more…)