Here’s a promo for an early 80s record giveaway coordinated between WPRB and the once-omnipresent I.R.S. Record Label. Listen carefully for recorded evidence of The Music Cellar—a great record shop that existed in the basement of Titles Unlimited booksellers, at the Princeton Shopping Center.
Promo voiced by Jordan Becker ’82, digitized by Bill Rosenblatt ’83.
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.
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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