“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.
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