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The Legend of WPRB’s Hypnotized Cheese

Few on-air promos enjoy the kind of reputation this pair of early 90s WPRB recordings promoting the station’s “Hypnotized Cheese” t-shirts do. Apart from being one of the most popular shirts ever produced by the station (in its day, the Hypnotized Cheese guy could be frequently spotted in the crowd on any given night at Maxwell’s or the Khyber Pass), the on-air spots used to hawk them were almost as ubiquitous as the shirts themselves. (Listeners would routinely call and request them. Jon Solomon claims to have received one such request within the last year!)

To properly honor the legacy of WPRB’s Hypnotized Cheese mascot (who also appeared on the cover of a printed program guide which you can check out in our upcoming exhibit of station history at Princeton University’s Mudd Library), here are the two original promos. These spots were voiced, written, and produced by Matthew Robb (Myron), John Clements (Robin Leach impersonator), and Hugh Hynes (production).

Hypnotized Cheese Promo #1


Hypnotized Cheese Promo #2

Bonus: Here are scans of the original scripts and production notes for each.

Promo 1 || Promo 2

A limited-run, 20th anniversary edition of the Hypnotized Cheese t-shirt was produced as a special fundraising item back in 2012. It sold out rapidly, proving the design’s enduring appeal. Will there be a third edition? Time will tell…

In the meantime, here’s the video for Spectrum’s “How You Satisfy Me”, which served as background music in Promo #1 and was, by all accounts, one of the biggest WPRB hits of the era.

“All those records—Who knew what they might hold?”

By Matthew H. Robb ’94 (center, looking skeptical at Maxwell’s, Hoboken, NJ)
DJ from 1991-1997; 1999-2000
Jazz Director ’92; Program Director ’93
Also pictured above: Greg Lyon (left), Evan Bates (right)

I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks now and it’s funny to me how non-specific most of my WPRB memories are. There are definitely some concrete ones – I’m pretty sure I was in the old studio A / aux sorting records when the on-air DJ, who I am confident was Scott Crater, put on Superchunk’s Cool 7” and that just pretty much changed my life. It somehow coalesced everything I knew about music (well, alternative and punk music) up until that point and blew it wide open. But maybe that’s getting ahead of things.

I knew a little about radio when I was high school, volunteering at the local public radio station, and I was was of those alternative music teenagers—lots of New Order, the Cure, etc. Add to that an older brother whose tastes ran to the Jam, Elvis Costello, the Clash, and the Replacements, and growing up in the south with a certain familiarity with the Athens scene. I was definitely a pop kid more than a punk kid – the glasses made going to hardcore shows a little nerve-wracking when I was in high school, and the punk scene in north Alabama felt a little too aggro for me. So Josh Wise and I would listen to a lot of Pixies and REM and trade notes and records. That mixtape culture, way too may VHS recordings of 120 Minutes and IRS’ the Cutting Edge – that’s what I had when I walked into my first DJ training sessions (with Mike Graff, I believe). And seeing those stacks I started to realize how little I knew.

(more…)

Friday WPRB DJ Pinup: Jen Moyse!

[Photo from the “Hey You Kids Get Off My Lawn” archives]
 

Years on air: 1990-1999 (living nearby had its perks.)

Favorite bands: The Life and Times, Caspian, Moving Mountains, MC5, The Appleseed Cast, Shiner, Trail of Dead…there are so many.

Memorable on-air moment: When I was a sophomore, I made a casual request over the air for someone to help me locate a hard-to-find 7″ single I had just played, and coveted. A short while later, I got a call from a nice guy who offered to come down to the station and give me his copy. That was the day I discovered that people really *were* listening — and met my future longtime cohost and fanzine cofounder (and the mastermind behind the WPRB archive project), Mike Lupica. I still treasure that single.

Advice for current WPRB DJs: Explore the stacks, play everything, learn all you can, get involved, and have fun! If you’re having a great time, your listeners will, too.

Bonus content! Here’s a quick mic break of Jen back-announcing a set of music from 5.29.93.

 

 

 


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…)

LISTEN: Captain Beefheart “Spotlight” Promo

Spotlight was a weekly, early-90s program that enabled WPRB programmers to play the deep fields of self-indulgence by dedicating an entire hour to a specific artist, scene, or record label. (My earliest understandings of Einstürzende Neubauten were informed by a thusly-dedicated edition of the show. I can also remember Spotlights on Galaxie 500, Ohio garage rock, and the Residents. I hosted one dedicated to the Canadian punk band Nomeansno.)

Direct from WPRB’s reel-to-reel archives, here is a promo for an edition of the show where Captain Beefheart was the distinguished point of focus.

 

Spotlight promos like this one were traditionally voiced by the host who’d later present the actual show. In this case, the host was Adam Gottlieb, who was one of the first people I ever met when I started volunteering at WPRB. I’ll never forget arriving at the station in the middle of the night and finding him in the production studio, armed with a brick of Z-grade blank cassettes. His mission? To tape WPRB’s entire catalog of Jandek records. This may have something to do with why I haven’t seen or heard from Adam in 20+ years.

“Gaining Confidence from the Edgy & Strange”

(L-R: John Monroe ’95 & Jon Solera (Snitow) ’97, Studio C renovations)

[By John Monroe ’95.]

WPRB was such a huge part of my life as an undergraduate that it’s really difficult to even know where to begin. I first heard about the station in August 1991, during Outdoor Action, the week-long backpacking trip that used to be – and probably still is – recommended to incoming students as a way of forming preliminary friendships and thereby taking some of the social edge off the first weeks of freshman fall. One of the group leaders was a DJ at WPRB, jazz if I remember right, and told me about how the show’s programming worked, with classical in the morning, jazz at mid-day, and rock in the afternoon and evening, followed by various specialty shows at night.

It hadn’t occurred to me that Princeton would have a radio station – one that “could be heard in Philly,” no less, as I was told – and from the moment I first heard about it, I was intrigued. All through high school, I’d listened to “twentieth-century classical” music pretty much exclusively. I even looked composers up in Who’s Who and sent them fan mail (you’d be amazed who responded: Cage, George Crumb, Lutoslawski, Stockhausen, Tippett, Berio). At the same time, though, in I suppose typical geeky teenager fashion, I felt this odd social shame about how much I loved it. For me, the great revelation of college was discovering that one could find people who appreciated idiosyncrasies of this kind, rather than turning them into some kind of stigma. (more…)

Mudhoney interview, 1991

In 1991, Mudhoney stopped by WPRB prior to their show with Gas Huffer and Superchunk at City Gardens. On the inside of 13 minutes, DJ Corey (whose great radio show I’ve written about elsewhere) interviewed the band, and got them to dish on  Sub Pop, death metal, and Thurston Moore being stalked by crazed fans in Tokyo.

Here’s the interview:

 

(Corey was also the co-host of a great show called “Three Bad Sisters” with a grad student named Julianne. Each of the hosts comprised 1.5 of the sisters.)

Somewhere between “scattered” and “shattered”, by Lily Prillinger

[Left to right: Frank Shepard ’96, Sarah Teasley ’95, Lily Prillinger ’97]

Back in the 90’s, I arrived at Princeton with a fistful of dubious ambitions. I actively brooded.

While svelte coeds were friskily tossing lacrosse sticks and sporting diamond stud earrings, I lumbered around campus draped in a long coat and self-loathing. While the Prep-zillas were having ragingly banal keg parties and blasting bland yet thoroughly emetic sonic sludge like ‘Dave Matthews’ and ‘The Spin Doctors’ — I listened valiantly (and alone)  to a gargantuan beast of a Walkman which furiously chewed up my ‘exotically-acquired’ yet terminally fragile mixed tapes. It was a lonely existence.

One day while skulking around campus,  I met this cool-blooded, long-haired guy who was wearing an “Eraserhead” t-shirt. His name was Frank and he was the Clyde to my self-styled Bonnie. I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually follow the proverbial flannel-cloaked Pied Piper, down into to the subterranean universe of WPRB.

I still remember the warm fustiness of the basement air — a strange blend of dustiness and dampness which emanated from the ubiquitous and crumbling orange acoustical foam.  I remember the heavy walls of dense vinyl, each album meticulously reviewed by ardent loyalists who penned their critiques. At WPRB I was a fairly inept deejay: neither particularly erudite nor technically proficient. My style was fast and loose and my artistic sensibilities hovered between “scattered” and “shattered.” I remember playing long, apoplectic interspersions of Edgar Allen Poe and David Allen Coe, which likely yielded no sonic value other than pure irritation of my long-suffering friend, Frank.

And then of course, there were the many serious discoveries — songs and albums which become the sonic armature for my own thought process, shaping the way I though about life and art. When I was a hack deejay at WPRB, I was probably more entrenched in the rhapsodic cacophony of young adulthood than than the finer nuances of music…but even so, how very sweet…LONG LIVE WPRB!

-Lily Prillinger ’97

 

“Hey You Kids Get Off My Lawn” promo, circa 1994

555_Hey_You_Kids_box1-page-001In WPRB’s 1000+ piece collection of moldy old 1/4 inch reels (which I spent last summer sorting and fending off a case of Legionnaires’ Disease for), I discovered this hot take for “Hey You Kids, Get Off My Lawn” the punk rock show I hosted with Jen Moyse ’94 during the mid-90s.

The sound quality is pretty bad, but keep in mind, the source reel had been decomposing in a filthy USPS mail tub in a damp basement for twenty years before I rescued it. This show was a ridiculous consequence of a Rhino Records-sponsored contest we entered following the release of the “Faster & Louder: Hardcore Punk” comps, and in which the label challenged college radio stations around the country to host 80s punk tributes. If I recall correctly, we finally got around to doing the special at 2 or 3 AM, taped it on overdubbed promo cassettes from major labels, and subsequently missed the entry deadline due to some postal holiday the following day which we’d forgotten all about. Oh well. We never made it into the contest, but we had so much fun doing the show, it became our musical focus for the next few years. Background music and soundbytes courtesy of Die Kreuzen, Schlong, and F.O.D.