Here’s a promo for an early 80s record giveaway coordinated between WPRB and the once-omnipresent I.R.S. Record Label. Listen carefully for recorded evidence of The Music Cellar—a great record shop that existed in the basement of Titles Unlimited booksellers, at the Princeton Shopping Center.
Promo voiced by Jordan Becker ’82, digitized by Bill Rosenblatt ’83.
Here’s another classic City Gardens promo, this one hyping gigs from the Ramones (who at that point in their career were playing the club every 3-4 months), and whose local appearances were frequently announced on WPRB with three-hour, all-Ramones broadcasts helmed by DJ Greg Savage.
The promo also touts an appearance from the Bad Brains. This recording dates from 1991 and is an interesting document of the brief time when Bad Brains vocalist HR and been replaced by Chuck Mosley, original singer of Faith No More.
By Teri Noel Towe
[aka “TNT” or Teri “The Animal” Towe]
The late 60’s were a Golden Age for classical music at the station. WPRB was blessed with a string of committed and sensitive Classical Music Directors: Jeff Schaefer, Hal Abelson, Greg Petsko, and Alan Konefsky. I myself had the pleasure of serving in that capacity for a year and a half. The Classical Department had four hours every weekday evening (7 to 11) and several hours on Sunday afternoon. As a record collector and classical music nut, I found at WPRB the perfect forum for the grinding of my personal axes. For two years (my junior and senior years), I did two shows a week (Tuesday and Thursday evenings). In addition to series devoted to all the recordings of the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska and the cellist and conductor Pablo Casals, I regularly presented “The Age of Shellac”, a series devoted to historic 78 RPM recordings, which I transferred to tape on my own equipment in my dorm room, first in ’41 Hall, and then in ’03.
Photo by Dan Ungar ’74
Years on air: 2010-2014
Favorite band/artist: Okkervil River. Will Sheff is a brilliant lyricist, which appeals to the poet in me.
Memorable on-air moment: The first happened during a sub that I was doing my freshman year with two other new DJs who had recently passed their tests. We were dancing in the studio and I, impassioned by the spirit of radio, dropped it so hard that I split my pants. Really cemented my status as a top dog among the freshman DJs.
Advice for current WPRB DJs: Understand that the station is a glorious combination of a monied institution and a startup over which you have full creative control, and milk that for all it’s worth.
By Henry Yu
(Above, L-R: Yuval Taylor 85, Nicola Ginzler 85, Colin Iosso 84, Henry Yu 84, Bob Bruce 85. On the road to an REM/Hüsker Dü gig in WPRB’s VW Rabbit. Photo by Kristin Belz ’84))
1980-1984 was such a great time period musically. First generation punk rock may have already been declared dead by the cognoscenti, but those four years would mark the heyday of the post-punk and hardcore eras, the advent of college rock, and the birth of what would come to be known fondly as 80’s rock. To have been at WPRB when so many incredible records were coming out, while clubs like City Gardens and Maxwell’s played host to these bands tours, and their records could be bought at the Princeton Record Exchange or a Saturday bus ride to NYC from in front of Nassau Hall, was an incredible experience. And to have shared it with fellow DJs who became lifelong friends has made WPRB much more than a four year experience.
I began my DJ-ing as one half of the self-proclaimed “no future glimmer twins”, since neither one of us was competent enough to both talk and engineer at the same time, it took both of us to get us through a show. We even walked around campus handcuffed together on occasion. Eventually, we got our own shows.
This is one of the oldest original photos we’ve discovered in the station’s archives, but no details as to the subjects, location, or year it was taken have been revealed. The mic setup suggests a remote broadcast, the WPRU banner places it somewhere between 1940 and 1955, and the combo’s setup indicates a live jazz gig at a… University eating club? Some long-shuttered venue in Princeton?
Do you recognize any of the subjects in this photo or have any information on the event it depicts? Please comment below and help us unravel this mystery!
UPDATE: Rob Schuman says: “I don’t, of course, recognize the group, but the station aired live jazz from very early on in its existence. I doubt its the same group, but here’s a clip from the Princetonian, October 9, 1941.”
By Sean Murphy ’94 [photo: Nicole Scheller]
I’m definitely not the first, and I hope I’m not the last, to be able to say that I majored in WPRB. Officially, I graduated with a degree in Politics, but my independent work and thesis focused on regulatory processes at the Federal Communications Commission. And that work resulted from many long and late nights spent playing and talking about records and bands and radio and what it meant to be non-profit, commercial, and independent all at the same time. From the music to the management lessons to the friendships, my WPRB experiences still reverberate nearly 25 years later.
I arrived at the basement of Holder Hall’s 11th entry in September 1990. I had some idea of what I might be getting into, as I’d spent the previous spring and summer interning at WMBR, 88.1 Cambridge, MA (MIT’s radio station). WPRB was different, from the rigidity of the program logs and actual paid 30- and 60-second ads to the presence of the main record library right in the control room. But the most important similarity was that WPRB saw and understood itself as an institution at, but not of, the university.
Years on air: 1979-1984.
Favorite Bands: The Ramones. And also, The Ramones.
Memorable On-Air Moment: 12-hour shift on Thanksgiving, played “In A Gadda Da Vida” twice in a row.
Advice for current WPRB DJs: Play lots of Ramones. Ease off the Partridge Family (but still play them.)
If there’s one thing I’ve learned since initiating this history project, it’s that once the research bug bites you, the related fever is hard to shake. Case in point: these just-rediscovered artifacts from the mid 1940s, when WPRB (then called WPRU) was still in its infancy, which sent a considerable thrill up my spine. A huge part of the fun of digging into the deepest recesses of the station’s history is noting how doing so keeps moving the marker for the oldest-known (document/photo/recording/etc) further back.
While we have unearthed a few yellowed letters and documents from station founder H Grant Theis that detail the plans which lead up to the station’s launch in December of 1940, the assortment of scans presented here offers one of the oldest-known insights into what the station’s programming was like.
These clippings were discovered by current WPRB staffers Zenala and Misha in the bottom of a filthy file cabinet during an otherwise routine cleaning project. The documents were actually sent to the station back in 1992 by Stanley Abensur ’42. Huge thanks to Stanley for anticipating their relevance 25 years ahead of time, and to Zenala and Misha for bringing them to my attention!
Without further delay, we are pleased to present the following:
Exhibit A: Early floorplan of the station’s old studios in Holder Hall. (See above)
By Rupert Macnee ’69
When I arrived at Princeton in the fall of 1966, I brought a suitcase full of British pop records of the era. I very quickly realized that all these records were knock-offs of what was happening in the United States. Motown was flourishing. I discovered Blues and Jazz and even though Chuck Berry was a disappointment at one of our dances, I was deeply in awe of the rich heritage of American music.
WPRB was at that time firmly devoted to MOR – easy listening like Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, classics in their way, but not exactly 1966 teenage stuff. I got a spot on the WPRB roster because Boyd Britten, (later “Doc on the Rock” at KROQ in Los Angeles), thought my voice sounded like the world service of the BBC.
After a year of this dreadful music – well I thought it was then – I went back to England for the summer of 1967. Apart from Sergeant Pepper, it was the summer of Jimi Hendrix, the Who, and Cream. When I got back to Princeton in the fall of 1967 the playlist opened up a bit, and for a few months we did daily shows featuring loud rock and roll from a mobile set-up in one window of the University Store. It was fun to wander around on the sidewalk with a microphone interviewing passers-by and playing the latest batch of records from England. I’m firmly convinced that WPRB actually premiered a good many records that didn’t really kick off in the U.S. until early 1968.
WPRB was also a great facility for recording and mixing. I did the music for several films in that tiny studio – Barry Miles playing Harpsichord, Al Price, Oliver Whitehead, Jim Floyd, Lindsay Holland, Vincent Gregory, all were much-appreciated contributors to some less than memorable epics!
