Tug McGraw Station ID
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you foul-mouthed champion of great community radio, the legendary Tug McGraw.
“Pretension Ltd”, “Vast Bunch of Grapes”, and Spin Magazine honors, by Chris Mohr
I first started listening to WPRB in the winter of 1980-1981. I was bored to tears with the sameness of the dinosaur rock of WMMR, WYSP, and WPLJ. So here was this cool station down at the other end of the dial that played Elvis Costello, Devo, and all sorts of other stuff that was never played on other stations. It was tremendous.
The summer of ‘81 I listened to WPRB as much as eight hours a day. I did jigsaw puzzles and listened to Tom Burka, who played a new album every day at noon, Bill Rosenblatt, Alan Flippen, Jordan Becker, and Mark Dickinson (I think), who were the regular rock DJ’s. The airsound was excellent–polished but not too professional, loose enough to be entertaining but yet everyone knew what he was doing (I don’t recall any women DJ’s that summer.)
That fall I wrote to Bill Rosenblatt to say how much I liked the station and to ask whether it was a professional station. It wasn’t clear once the school year started, since there seemed to be a larger airstaff. To my delight, he wrote back and explained that WPRB was in fact run by Princeton students and that its studios were in the basement of a dorm called Holder Hall, which at that point was still a sophomore slum.
(more…)
Welcome!
Welcome to wprbhistory.org! This site gathers stories, photographs, archival recordings, and other ephemera pertaining to WPRB—Princeton University’s student-run radio station, now entering its 75th year of broadcasting.
With so much history under our belt, the 75th anniversary emerged as a great opportunity to finally put it to work for us. Last summer, we mounted an effort to begin organizing and cataloging the 1000+ 1/4 inch audio reels that had been sitting in deep storage here at the station. Among the treasures unearthed were archival airchecks and show promos which reveal WPRB’s long term trajectory from an ambitious station serving the immediate community, to the 14,000 watt broadcasting and online powerhouse it is today. (more…)