Strange Beauty in the Radio Graveyard
By Alex Wood ’02, WPRB Station Manager ’01
After completing DJ training the fall of my freshman year, I was eager to get on the air. While most new trainees were relegated to graveyard shifts for their first shows, my first show was at something like 5pm the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. As a “townie”, I was one of the few DJs who did not have to travel that evening. What a thrill it was to be on-air when there might actually be some listeners! I imagined hoards of drivers stuck for hours in Thanksgiving traffic, all tuning in to WPRB. I was hooked.
Despite the rush of that first drive-time show, my most favorite memories come from late night shifts, where after finishing homework in the office, I might stroll down to the studio at 2am and tell the DJ not to bother turning the station off – I would take over and play music for a few hours. Now the idea that there might only be a few lonely listeners, driving down a deserted New Jersey road in the middle of the night with only the radio to keep them company seemed strangely beautiful. Those late-night broadcasts were special; I was able to relax in a way I didn’t during my regular afternoon timeslot. Perhaps the fact that the station would have been off-air anyhow, or that there were only a few listeners out there, freed me to experiment.
One late-night haunt that WPRBers often visited was the Crystal Diner on old Route 1, towards Trenton. If it wasn’t open 24-hours, it had to have been close. Upon returning to campus, sometimes we’d finish the night with a trip to the top of Holder Tower. Some station engineer from well before our time had managed to borrow the key from building services and never returned it. Behind the locked door, the stairwell up to the roof was filled with WPRB graffiti. (See slideshow, below.) Emerging into the night, you got the best view from anywhere on campus. Nassau Street runs along a hill, which meant that the top of Holder was even taller than the top of Fine tower. Perhaps the only other campus building that could rival it was the University Chapel. Standing there in the dark, looking out at the glittering lights of central NJ stretching into the distance, the mysterious shadows of the radio tower and other transmission equipment looming over you in the dark – what was cooler than that?
On the morning of the September 11th attacks, I was awakened by my girlfriend calling me and telling me to find a TV – somebody had flown airplanes into the World Trade Towers. I headed over to the newly built Frist Campus Center which was one of the few places I knew to have a TV, and found a crowd of students gathered around watching the coverage. My uncle worked on the eighty-somethingth floor of one of the towers, and I had no idea whether he was all right or not. As all of this was happening, I remembered that I was scheduled to sub for someone on WPRB, so after a few minutes of watching the news, I headed over to the station. On my way there, I passed two construction workers listening to coverage of the attacks on a portable radio. They were talking about how the towers had collapsed. I stopped and told them that they must be mistaken – I had just seen the towers on TV minutes ago, and they were still standing.
In 2001, we did not have a computer in the studio, let alone an internet connection. Upon getting on air, I tried to give some sort of news update, but quickly realized how ridiculous it sounded – in the basement of Holder Hall, I was cut off from the world. None of my friends had cell phones, and they were all at Frist watching the news, so I couldn’t even reach them in their rooms. Preoccupied, I grabbed a random compilation CD from the New Emph Bin – “Bombay the Hard Way: Guns, Cars, and Sitars”, a series of remixes of 1970 Bollywood soundtracks – and threw it on. Suddenly from the speakers spilled the maniacal laughter of excited foreign-sounding men with an occasional gunshot or explosion mixed in. After a few minutes I realized, “I probably shouldn’t be playing this right now…” I replaced it with something less likely to be misinterpreted as support for terrorists, managed to find someone to take over the rest of the show, and left to figure out what had happened to my uncle. (Fortunately he was okay, having gone to vote in that morning’s primary elections rather than go to the office.) “Guns, Cars, and Sitars” is a great album, by the way. (Listen below, via Bandcamp.)
These days whenever I get stressed about all the ways humans are destroying the Earth and wondering how much longer we’ll make it as a species, I think about WPRB’s radio signal traveling out into space, light waves dispersing but never truly being destroyed. Those freshman year shows are now 16 light years out and counting. It’s nice to think that whatever happens to us here, that something as beautiful as WPRB, our voices and the music we played, has become part of the universe.