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WPRB DJs Arrested in Washington, 1970

[Jeff Weiser (left) and Bruce Snyder help cover the 1972 election live on the air.]

By Douglas B. Quine

I joined WPRB in my freshman year of 1969-1970 and trained on WPRB-AM before serving as a newsman at the May Day protest demonstration in Washington (1970) and the election night headquarters of Nixon and McGovern (1972). In Princeton, I took on the folk & blues shows on WPRB-FM, served as Traffic Director and assistant business manager, and finally served on the Ivy Network Board of Directors.

I have many memories of WPRB, including lighting fluorescent lamps by the radiated antenna power on Holder Tower, talking with stoned listeners who called into the studios, organizing the Beach Boys, Fish, Jean Shepherd, Weather Report, & Poco concerts, and the first WPRB Tee Shirts (blue shirts with a yellow smudge at the bottom which was supposed to represent a voice print). The stories that I’ve retold the most times, however, must be the “WPRB arrests in Washington” and “The Do Me Bird”.

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WPRB at the DNC, Sting from the Police, and Freeform vs. Format

By Jordan Becker

I started at WPRB during the second semester of my freshman year in 1979. The ability to have the entire record library—and it was still all vinyl—at my disposal was intoxicating. Unless that was the fumes from the records.

At the time, the station’s rock programming was still very much beholden to the freeform model of the late 1960s-early 1970s. In fact, to my memory, the only requirement that we had was the obligation to play a certain amount of jazz during a rock show. That all changed, though, when Ashley Ellott became station manager, and Jason Meyer became program director. They attempted to turn the rock programming into something more consistent and more rock oriented. To me, there is something to be said for listeners having a general sense of what they might hear when they turn on the radio, and having some consistency from day to day and time slot to time slot theoretically results in listeners staying with the station for longer periods. On the other hand, they also insisted that we use the slogan “Your Music,” which was generally reviled—it might have worked at a professional commercial station, but was a bad idea for a college radio station.

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Friday WPRB DJ Pinup: Dan Ruccia!

Years on air: 2001-2005

Favorite bands: Sonic Youth, US Maple, Gun Club, Cannibal Ox, Lightning Bolt, Sleater-Kinney, Arthur Russell.

Memorable on-air moment: The crazy Halloween noise sculpture I made one year with Narin Dickerson. I remember it involving lots of Shadow Ring records being played at the wrong speed.

Advice for current WPRB DJs: Play as many things that you don’t know or have never heard of as things that you do; there is so much good music out there, and the WPRB library happens to have a bunch of it.

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…)

Friday WPRB DJ Pinup: Evie Ward!

Years on air: 1978-1984 (took time off to pursue radio career before graduation.)

Favorite bands: Bauhaus, Killing Joke, Wire, Flipper, Pere Ubu, Joy Division, P.I.L., Throbbing Gristle.

Memorable on-air moment: When the AP wire sounded OMG alert to announce John Lennon’s death …and walking home and hearing “Imagine’ from every dorm window…

Advice for current WPRB DJs: Have fun, use the experience to learn how to speak without ever saying “um” or “er” , and don’t be like me and turn the ‘PRB hobby into a career as a DJ.



Strange Beauty in the Radio Graveyard

 

By Alex Wood ’02, WPRB Station Manager ’01

After completing DJ training the fall of my freshman year, I was eager to get on the air. While most new trainees were relegated to graveyard shifts for their first shows, my first show was at something like 5pm the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. As a “townie”, I was one of the few DJs who did not have to travel that evening. What a thrill it was to be on-air when there might actually be some listeners! I imagined hoards of drivers stuck for hours in Thanksgiving traffic, all tuning in to WPRB. I was hooked.

Despite the rush of that first drive-time show, my most favorite memories come from late night shifts, where after finishing homework in the office, I might stroll down to the studio at 2am and tell the DJ not to bother turning the station off – I would take over and play music for a few hours. Now the idea that there might only be a few lonely listeners, driving down a deserted New Jersey road in the middle of the night with only the radio to keep them company seemed strangely beautiful. Those late-night broadcasts were special; I was able to relax in a way I didn’t during my regular afternoon timeslot. Perhaps the fact that the station would have been off-air anyhow, or that there were only a few listeners out there, freed me to experiment.

One late-night haunt that WPRBers often visited was the Crystal Diner on old Route 1, towards Trenton. If it wasn’t open 24-hours, it had to have been close. Upon returning to campus, sometimes we’d finish the night with a trip to the top of Holder Tower. Some station engineer from well before our time had managed to borrow the key from building services and never returned it. Behind the locked door, the stairwell up to the roof was filled with WPRB graffiti. (See slideshow, below.) Emerging into the night, you got the best view from anywhere on campus. Nassau Street runs along a hill, which meant that the top of Holder was even taller than the top of Fine tower. Perhaps the only other campus building that could rival it was the University Chapel. Standing there in the dark, looking out at the glittering lights of central NJ stretching into the distance, the mysterious shadows of the radio tower and other transmission equipment looming over you in the dark – what was cooler than that?

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Pierre Moerlen (Gong) Interview, 1980

By Bill Rosenblatt ’83

This was my first ever interview with a musician on the air. There I was, a wide-eyed sophomore, treating this obscure French drummer like he was a huge rock star. The drummer was Pierre Moerlen, leader of Gong. They were in Princeton for a WPRB-sponsored stop at Alexander Hall (now Richardson Auditorium) on their first US tour ever.

[LISTEN or DOWNLOAD: Pierre Moerlen interview, 8.28.80]

 

[Digitized 11.25.14 by Bill Rosenblatt]

If you have no idea who Gong was, you are far from alone. Gong was originally a band from France that started in the late 60s, led by Australian guitarist/singer Daevid Allen, formerly of the seminal British psychedelic band Soft Machine. They had a cult following through the early-mid 70s as a wacky, spaced-out post-hippie band, along the lines of early Pink Floyd (but zanier) or Hawkwind (but softer and proggier). Gong’s “Radio Gnome Invisible Trilogy” of 1973-74 is its best-known work and remains a favorite of mine to this day. (more…)

WPRU Bulletin, Winter 1955

[Click here to download the 4-page PDF version]

From 1940-1955, WPRB’s call letters were “WPRU”. The station was heard on-campus at 640 AM and for a time, its staff created a weekly, printed bulletin. Paul Dunn ’58 recalls: “I believe we distributed [the bulletin] to dorms and at commons. This was the time when our signal reached only a few dorms, and we were trying to increase station awareness on campus. John Norton, known as Dopey, along with freshmen Ned Irons and Dave Meginity had developed black boxes—small transmitters which were installed in dorm basements.”