The Musical Box, and Prog vs. Punk at WPRB
[By Bill Rosenblatt]
When I first showed up at WPRB in the Fall of 1979, the station’s musical center of gravity was shifting from progressive rock to punk and new wave. I was a prog fanatic – thanks in part to listening to WPRB during my senior year of high school in Philadelphia, especially late at night when the signal was stronger (this was before the early 1990s power increase) and DJs were more likely to play 10-minute epic prog tracks. But by the time I had gone through DJ training, I was one of the few remaining people who was still into prog. So I started a specialty show called “The Musical Box”, named after an early Genesis tune, which focused on prog rock as well as jazz-rock fusion. I believe I did the show from 1980 through 1982. Later on, Kevin Boyce ’83 joined me as cohost.
LISTEN: Musical Box Promo #1 (featuring stylish use of “Heart of the Sunrise” by Yes.)
LISTEN: Musical Box promo #2 (with great re-purposing of “California Über Alles ” by the Dead Kennedys”
We had an on-air “rivalry” between Mark Dickinson ’84 and myself. Mark was the resident expert on hardcore punk; he did a specialty show on it called “Decline and Fall”. The rivalry was “Punk is not music, the musicians can’t even play their instruments” vs. “Prog is pretentious, self-indulgent dinosaur music that isn’t real rock ‘n’ roll.” It was nothing personal; I had great respect for Mark, and he even got me to fill in for his show once.
The high point for me on the air was a fake Genesis live concert that Kevin and I put together, “Genesis Live Via Satellite from Tierra del Fuego,” which was a sort of satirical protest of Genesis’s “selling out” as a top-40 pop act. It featured me as the on-the-scene reporter (talking through a graphic equalizer set up to sound like a bad phone line), Kevin as the in-studio DJ, and David Becker ’85 as “Generalissimo Esteban Lopez,” the local Argentinian DJ who introduced the band onstage. We even produced a fake commercial for the “sponsor,” Guevara Wines, which parodied the cheesy beer ads that we had to play on the air because of our relationship with the ABC radio news network.
The high point for me off air was one time when WPRB sponsored a Three Stooges film night (can’t remember where, much less why) and a few of us showed up for a meet-and-greet. I said hi to a listener and gave my name; he answered, “Oh, wow, Mr. Progressive Music of New Jersey!” Yet the audience for prog was clearly diminishing during my time at WPRB. During the first year of “The Musical Box”, I asked listeners to call in with their votes for Top 10 progressive rock albums of all time, and I compiled the results. I got lots of calls with vigorous debates as to which album should be Number One (the winner: “Close to the Edge” by Yes). I tried the same thing next year… not so many calls. I think I eventually switched to doing a morning jazz show.