“Pretension Ltd”, “Vast Bunch of Grapes”, and Spin Magazine honors, by Chris Mohr
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.
The summers of 1982 and 1983 were great to listen to. Ray Gonzalez, aka the Death Ray, Chuck Steidel, and Mark Dickinson were the regular DJ’s both summers, with some spots done by Rosenblatt, Flippen, and Hal Stern.
There were some memorable shows. One Wednesday night in the summer of 1982, Mark Dickinson hosted an anonymous rock band on the Decline and Fall. They played a version of Flipper’s “Sex Bomb,” complete with screaming by Mark Crimmins and feedback created in Control B, apparently. An hour later they came back on and did an a capella version. Truly ridiculous. It’s my impression that the band was the Fuck-Ups, who later changed their name to the Funstigators when they got a little more serious. The Fuck-Ups did a commercial for Chuck’s Spring Street Cafe in which they sounded amazingly like the Buzzcocks.
Listen: The Fuck-Ups perform “Chuck’s Spring Street Cafe”
One Monday night in the summer of ‘82, Rosenblatt hosted The Musical Box, the art rock show, on the night of a total lunar eclipse. The theme was Italian art rock. I sat outside on a picnic bench with my binoculars and a transistor radio and watched the eclipse. It was pretty nice, though the Italian art rock wasn’t that great.
In the summer of 1983 (or was it ‘82?) Mark Dickinson trumpeted Jed Speare and Eazy Teeth as the Beatles of the 1980’s. They had two ‘songs,’ “Twinkies” and “Rotator Cuff” on a compilation called “Red Spot” that featured music from San Francisco (including the song with the chorus, “Wanna buy some fucking heroin, wanna buy some fucking dust? Dust! Dust!”) Both songs were just minute-long white noise collages. It was an amusing bit.
In the fall of 1986, Spin magazine named WPRB the best commercial college station in the country. Ken Katkin made the original contact with Spin and Vickie Gonzales was the one who convinced them to pick us. They gave us a writeup a few paragraphs long in an issue featuring radio stations, and they printed a promotional poster for the issue with a huge photo of David Lee Roth and a WPRB logo in the lower right corner.
Did anyone write about Ted the Psycho? He was a mentally ill guy from town who had a maniacal desire for one of our DJs in ‘87. He came down to the station one day in an overwrought condition and started kicking and hitting things. Jeff Gordinier was on the air, and when he realized there was a maniac there, he went on mike to say, “There’s a psycho down here, I’m not kidding. Anybody who can help please come down.” Ethan Stein was listening in his room on the other side of Holder and immediately left to run over to the station. He said later he realized halfway down the stairs that he was running to meet a psycho, but he kept going anyway. Somehow he alerted the proctors and they came running. Since this wasn’t the first incident, they knew to respond quickly. The incident later made it to the banquet tape.
In the spring of ‘88, Jeff Gordinier and I did a show starting at midnight Sunday called “Pretension, Ltd.” It started off erratically as a combination of us doing readings and playing usually atrocious music, such as Cybill Shepard’s album of torch songs. We got sick of making fun of bad music and just tried to use good atmospheric music to complement the readings. In one of our best shows, Beethoven’s “Pastorale” played while Assaf Josh Henig read a bucolic brochure about New Jersey tourism that he had just happened to pick up from the mail boxes. It was a good combination.
For our last show, we asked seven writers to come up with a script for a radio play. Each piece was written entirely separately. There were seven characters and they had the same names as the writers; otherwise, the seven parts had nothing to do with each other. It was performed by the seven as a single work called “The Mollusk Man.”
The promo for that show was fun to make. Jeff Gordinier read a section of Moby Dick. I then cut out parts of the monologue to come up with a next text that was mysterious and funny. I taped Jeremy Toback, bassist of Noise Petals, reading the promo part twice. He read them both at almost exactly the same pace, so I put both versions on the master for a stereo effect, mixing each with a little different equalization. The text from Moby Dick provided the memorable line, “Vast bunch of grapes, winding through these intricacies, the great blubber hook–” That lead in 1989 to the show Vast Bunch of Grapes, which Rob Maxwell and Ethan Stein among others did that was similar to Pretension, Ltd.
-By Chris Mohr
Listen: WPRB’s “Pretension Limited” promo