Jazz Archives - WPRB History
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Stanley Jordan, and the Battle Against “Your Music”

By Kenneth McCarthy ’81

I first got involved with PRB in the spring of my freshman year (1978). It was an interesting time for the station. Though there were a lot of talented individuals in areas like engineering and programming, other area like sales, training, and scheduling were a bit shaky to say the least.

As best as I can remember, the station had only one sponsor, the University Store and one ad, the “These Are My Favorite Things” spot. Thank God it was a good spot because we played it twice an hour, every hour. And we didn’t log that many hours. It wasn’t unusual for the station to sign off after Morning Classical at 10 AM due to a lack of DJ’s.

The details of what happened the next year when the new management group took over could fill a book. It was a complex situation. As an organization, PRB had to be rebuilt from scratch. We had very few members and new people had to be attracted, brought in, and trained fast. There was also a major ideological split among the managers. You had one group that wanted the station to have a top 40 sound and another group that wanted the station to be an alternative to what was available on commercial radio.

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“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…)

“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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