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Friday WPRB DJ Pinup: Ray Gonzalez!

[AKA “The Death Ray”]

Years on air: 1982-84

Favorite Bands: REM, The Fleshtones, The Funstigators

Memorable on-air moment: Terrible live on-air interview with Wall Of Voodoo. Stan Ridgway wasn’t there for some reason and I was completely unprepared and ill-equipped to speak with the rest of the band. I made a couple of lame jokes and ended up pissing them off.

Advice for current WPRB DJs: This was originally passed along to me from Billy Disease (Kevin Hensley): Never just play one Ramones track when you can play two back-to-back.


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…)

The Sound of WPRB in 1972 (Part One)

Here is a selection of station IDs and announcements from 1972. These were all sourced from a single 1/4″ reel (pictured above), and provide a good snapshot of WPRB’s airsound from that era. Stay tuned for more in part two! (All selections digitized by Rob Schuman on 11.17.14)

1. Morning sign-on message.

 

2. The Alice Coltrane ID. (At least I think the background music is Alice Coltrane. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong.)

 

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“WPRB and Me”

[By Chris Fine]

LISTEN: Mic breaks and news reports from Chris Fine’s rock show on WPRB, February 25th, 1980.

 

Introduction
I write these words about WPRB because I love the station. The people of WPRB were some of my best friends during my years at Princeton. WPRB was the single best activity (including courses – as my transcript reflects) in which I participated during my undergraduate years. My interest in radio, and technology in general, dates back well before my journey to Princeton University in September, 1976. Encouraged by my father, who was an audio engineer and inventor, I started tinkering with electronics and chemistry at a young age. Predictably, a number of shocks and small fires resulted – but fortunately no major injuries, and my family was always patient with me.

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1989 NCAA Tournament interviews with Pete Carril and Bob Scrabis

princetongeorgetownstub

March 17, 1989 is the date of one of the most famous first round NCAA Tournament games of all time – 16 seed Princeton’s one point loss to top-ranked powerhouse Georgetown.

While the contest has only grown in legend since it was played, re-airing hundreds of times on ESPN Classic and being called “The Game That Saved March Madness” by Sports Illustrated, the following recordings have been heard by only an exclusive few since original broadcast.

From WPRB’s transmission of this famous game, here are pre-game interviews with senior captain Bob Scrabis and head coach Pete Carril.

Both were taped between Selection Sunday and the Tigers’ trip to Providence.

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Singing Telegram does “Hip Priest” by The Fall

the_fall

In 2002, a big chunk of the WPRB airstaff engineered an on-air birthday prank by hiring a singing telegram artist to serenade beloved DJ Greg Lyon with “Hip Priest” by The Fall. In order to maximize Greg’s mortification, this had to occur A) without any warning, and B) on the air.

As such, the crafty perpetrators disguised the prank’s introduction as a scheduled announcement in that day’s program logs for Greg to play on the air. As the time approached, and unbeknownst to Greg, the conspirators hid just outside the studio with the singing telegram guy, and waited for their cue.

Here is audio of the incident as it transpired on the air. The first voice you will hear is Greg’s, unknowingly setting the wheels in motion. (Followed by the voices of Dan Ruccia and Jannon Stein.)

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Two “Thanx IV Sharin'” listener postcards.

TIVS

Thanx IV Sharin’ was an Internet phenomenon in a pre-Internet world.

A talk show that aired Sunday nights into Monday mornings on WPRB in the mid-to-late 1980s, the program was one of the few in the station’s history to take live phone calls from listeners – a jerry-rigged hand-crafted “seven second delay” involving two reel-to-reel machines and a well-placed pencil pushed into a wall the only safety net keeping potential obscenity from getting over the air.

Since the immediacy of the computer age and social networking was at least a decade away, interaction between audience and the show’s many hosts beyond the telephone line was primarily made up of letters sent to the station during the week (a fair percentage courtesy the incarcerated) that would then be read on the air – often requesting other fans of the show to contact them directly.

If you listened to Thanx IV Sharin’ on a regular basis, repeat callers began to pop up frequently, almost all under aliases I can still rattle off today such as “Dad,” “Packy Vomit,” “God,” “Jane Pod,” her brother “Bill Pod” and “Chris Makepeace” (not the Canadian actor of the same name).

I can only imagine how this underground community of unconnected misfits would have flourished further with the Internet at its disposal.

As a grade schooler growing up in central New Jersey, I would try to stay up late on Sunday nights, pressing “record” on the longest cassette I had when my eyes became heavy so I could listen to as much Thanx IV Sharin’ as possible on the way to school the next day.

I have fond memories of walking around Europe with my family one summer with a tape (or two) of TIVS in my Walkman on repeat.

Even though I would become a DJ at WPRB in 1988 and have always been fairly comfortable speaking into a microphone, I was terrified of calling Thanx IV Sharin’ and could never bring myself to phone in. In my young mind the show’s rotating hosts were impossibly quick-witted and I’ve always been a subpar improviser.

Going through old boxes at my parents’ house recently, I’ve found several letters I started writing to “Arlo,” “Beetle Bailey,” “Gordon Wu” and “Golf Ball Head” Ken Katkin that I never felt were decent enough to add a stamp to.

As a longtime admirer of Thanx IV Sharin’ from afar, I’m delighted to instead present this pair of beautiful listener postcards sent to the station during the show’s initial run. To me they exemplify how creative and devoted the show’s listeners were.

You can read some of Ken Katkin’s Thanx IV Sharin’ remembrances here.

If you have old airchecks, recordings or ephemera related to Thanx IV Sharin’, please contact us as they would make for great WPRB History posts!

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Curtis Mayfield at McCarter Theater, April 1972

In 1972, Curtis Mayfield performed live at Princeton’s McCarter Theater in what appears to have been a benefit for Sickle Cell Anemia research. The event does not seem to have been sponsored by WPRB (quick web research suggests it was a collaboration between McCarter and Princeton’s Association of Black Collegians), but the station aired this commercial in the run up to the April 15th performance.

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