Friday WPRB DJ Pinup: Ron Coleman!
Years on air: 1981-1985. I started doing [late night] graveyard [shows] — lots of them; it was like a drug! — my first semester of freshman year and came back to do Christmas shows when everyone else left campus and any help with filling air slots was appreciated. (Before I got married, I still lived with my parents in East Windsor and of course was home for breaks during law school.)
Favorite Bands: In my salad days on ‘PRB I was always certain to play Elvis Costello, The Clash, Joe Jackson and DEVO. I recognize how pedestrian that comes across now; it did then also. Thank God for the rotation system by which the PD’s taught me a thing or two! I also liked to play the Sex Pistols, Laurie Anderson and even Run-DMC. Unlike any other jock at the time, I’d also play Springsteen.
“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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