“The Gravitational Pull” by Daniel Gabbe
I was young when I fell for radio. I fell asleep listening to Phillies games and reruns of radio serials like The Shadow on the local AM station. I got my broadcasting license at a summer camp in the Poconos and waged a one-man war on behalf of heavy metal at age 11, even though people had to be within a few hundred yards to hear it. A local alternative station in Ohio introduced me to Nirvana and Joy Division. My father had done play-by-play on WPRB for Princeton basketball as an undergraduate in the 60s. I loved radio, and I knew about PRB, but I didn’t know that the radio station would bend the course of my whole life.
I ended up there because I love music. Once I got my foot in the door I realized that 1) I didn’t know anything, or near enough, about music 2) the answers were all there waiting for me in the basement of Rockefeller. They said I could come by just to hang out. They said I could use the idle studio B to dub old 45s onto cassette. I made myself a pretty regular fixture down there. The people who ran WPRB became my friends, and, for a time, I became one of the people who ran WPRB.
Just opening the station’s mail became a thrill for me. A weekly avalanche of cardboard boxes and padded mailers might hold the next record that could change my life. I’d listen to my friend’s shows on headphones while I practiced pinball in the basement of the student center. I probably had a paper due the next day. It was probably past 11pm. I’d be up all night, again, with the radio on.
Once, I was on the air when I heard a commotion. I walked to the end of the studio and looked through the glass square in the door into WPRB’s lounge. What I saw didn’t make any sense. There were eight students out there, and they were stripping. They left their clothes in untidy piles and ran naked into the hall. The first snow of the winter must have fallen while I was on the air. A few meters above me, hundreds of my classmates were nude and inebriated and up to no good. The Nude Olympics. Certainly something to see. But I had made my choice. After all, back in the studio the song was coming to an end. I didn’t get my kicks the same way those kids upstairs did. I turned back to the studio and started the next record.
The people I met at WPRB were my role models, my friends, my roomates. The place kept me out of the darkness and made me feel, somehow, like I belonged at Princeton. We drove to shows and slept on floors and started bands and stayed up all night and argued about music and movies. We plundered the Record Exchange and we got to meet our musical heroes. I got to Princeton determined to resist the gravitational pull of all of it’s traditions and history. But I followed in my Dad’s footsteps and ended up at WPRB. That was one tradition I just couldn’t resist.