Speaking of that WPRB-sponsored Tsunami/Spent gig at the Princeton Arts Council, here’s the hastily cut promo which aired on the station during the run up to Thursday, November 19th, 1992. Also rescued from deep-freeze: the flyer for the show that was circulated around Princeton, New Brunswick, Hoboken, and beyond. (Above.)
[By Justine Heilner 96, above, with Matthew Robb 94. Working the door at the WPRB-sponsored Tsunami/Spent show at the Princeton Arts Council]
I knew first thing freshman year that I wanted to be a DJ at WPRB because my brother Alex Heilner, three years my senior, was one too. I lived just around the corner from the studio in Hamilton Hall. Jen Moyse trained me—what an intimidatingly cool person to learn from! I was ‘lucky’ to never have to do a graveyard [late night] shift because Matthew Robb and Sean Murphy tricked me into being Traffic Director in exchange for a better time slot. What the hell did I do as Traffic Director?! I recall a lot of dot matrix printouts and a computer in a small room down the hall…
The first time I had a show my hands were shaking so much I had a hard time cueing the record. I had never done any kind of public speaking and I am not particularly into performance. I didn’t do banter and I didn’t have a sidekick or partner so I decided to just keep my speaking to a minimum and play the music. Listening to tapes of my first shows I thought I sounded like a really young girl. I created a radio voice—when I listen to young women DJs on college radio now, I know exactly what they’re doing. (more…)
By Matthew H. Robb ’94 (center, looking skeptical at Maxwell’s, Hoboken, NJ)
DJ from 1991-1997; 1999-2000
Jazz Director ’92; Program Director ’93
Also pictured above: Greg Lyon (left), Evan Bates (right)
I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks now and it’s funny to me how non-specific most of my WPRB memories are. There are definitely some concrete ones – I’m pretty sure I was in the old studio A / aux sorting records when the on-air DJ, who I am confident was Scott Crater, put on Superchunk’s Cool 7” and that just pretty much changed my life. It somehow coalesced everything I knew about music (well, alternative and punk music) up until that point and blew it wide open. But maybe that’s getting ahead of things.
I knew a little about radio when I was high school, volunteering at the local public radio station, and I was was of those alternative music teenagers—lots of New Order, the Cure, etc. Add to that an older brother whose tastes ran to the Jam, Elvis Costello, the Clash, and the Replacements, and growing up in the south with a certain familiarity with the Athens scene. I was definitely a pop kid more than a punk kid – the glasses made going to hardcore shows a little nerve-wracking when I was in high school, and the punk scene in north Alabama felt a little too aggro for me. So Josh Wise and I would listen to a lot of Pixies and REM and trade notes and records. That mixtape culture, way too may VHS recordings of 120 Minutes and IRS’ the Cutting Edge – that’s what I had when I walked into my first DJ training sessions (with Mike Graff, I believe). And seeing those stacks I started to realize how little I knew.
