Student Affairs
On-Line
The on-line magazine about
technology and Student Affairs
Gary D. Malaney - Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst
Editor
Stuart Brown - StudentAffairs.com
Executive Editor
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Student Affairs Gary D. Malaney - Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst Editor Stuart Brown - StudentAffairs.com |
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The Golden Age of Radio
Brian Cremins And if I don't see you for a long long while, I'll try to find you Left of the dial...--The Replacements, "Left of the Dial," 1985 "No one will hear us, right?" I asked, and when I discovered we'd have plenty of listeners, I panicked. Recently, I served as a fill-in DJ on the college radio station here at the University of Connecticut. A friend of mine called me one morning and asked if I'd help him spin records for a couple of hours before I went to the library for my daily routine of grading student papers. I thought it would be a nice distraction. When I got to the station, Ken informed me that, aside from all the clock radios which would feature us that morning, our show would be streamed over the Internet. Anyone around the world could log on to the station's webpage and tune in. "What are we going to play?" I asked. "Well," Ken explained, "we're filling in for a friend of mine who plays songs about food and then pretends he's cooking exotic dishes in the spots between the music. He reads the weather every twenty minutes, too." After telling him that I didn't have any music in my collection which had anything remotely to do with food, except maybe Harry Belafonte's "Banana Boat Song," I agreed to help. No one is going to listen to us anyway, I told myself, except for a few undergraduates with fancy laptops and that high school kid at the local Dunkin' Donuts who might request the latest song from The Dismemberment Plan. Of course, I had underestimated the power--and the reach--of the Internet. Not only did people listen to us, but they listened carefully, so carefully that we started to get phone calls. People were ready to argue about music at 8 o'clock in the morning! And some of them were calling from Florida... Ken and I were told to remind listeners about the station's newly revamped website. It's all there: a daily program, concert listings, the request line, and, of course, the weather. If weather did not exist, radio programmers would have to invent it. The local forecast is the source of endless commentary on most college radio programs. Don't have a thing to say about the last record you played? Talk about the weather or, better yet, ask listeners to call in and provide a report about what is happening outside. We had the weather covered, but next we had to decide what music we were going to play. Since it was an overcast, rainy morning, we decided to play overcast, rainy music. I decided we should play a selection of songs from early 1980s arena rockers like Journey, best known for a string of Top 40 power ballads and notable as the first rock band to have a video game based on their music. I also suggested we play some music from the Doobie Brothers, but Ken voted for Journey because he hadn't slow-danced to their hit song "Faithfully" since junior high. Perhaps there are some things best left to memory, but, having provided listeners with all the weather they would need for days, we dusted off a vinyl copy of Journey's 1983 album Frontiers and let it rip. I laughed as we introduced the song. What would the kid at the Dunkin' Donuts think? When one is listening to radio stations found, as the old Replacements song says, "left of the dial," one expects certain kinds of music and programming. College radio is known for playing obscure jazz, punk, classical music and the occasional polka, not 1980s proto-heavy metal guitar rock originally designed for junior proms, hair salons, and car radios in the days before CD players and power windows. Ken and I were breaking down barriers. If only more people were listening, I thought, to the beauty and sheer audacity of this watershed moment in broadcasting history. Then, a few bars into the song, just before the first guitar solo, it happened. A small yellow light began to flash just over Ken's shoulder. It stopped, then flashed again, more insistently this time. Ken traced the light to the receiver of an old beige office phone. We had...a caller. Ken's face turned bright red. Judging by Ken's expression, the conversation was not a pleasant one. He winced, closed his eyes, and put the palm of his hand over the mouthpiece. Just as he started to say something, the light flashed again. "There's people out there!" he exclaimed. "And they won't be satisfied until we play Van Halen!" "Where are they calling from?" "That guy was from Florida. I guess he finished his BA here last year and he's streaming us from his laptop -- somewhere in Florida. He wants to know what happened to the food guy." Somewhere in Florida? To placate this listener from the sunshine state, I suggested we play Van Halen's classic blooze-based stomper, "Ice Cream Man." "They must have a copy somewhere here at the station," I said but Ken wasn't listening. He was taking another call. As Ken answered each of the calls patiently and politely, Journey's lead singer Steve Perry wailed from the huge speakers mounted on the walls of the control room. Just near the phone is the booth's computer, which earlier had given us the local forecast. Now the screen was filled with e-mails from listeners requesting songs by everyone from seventies rockers Foghat to eighties heavy metal or "hair" bands like Whitesnake and Cinderella. Like Orson Welles with his infamous 1938 Halloween radio broadcast of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, which caused many listeners to believe that New Jersey really was being invaded by little green men from the red planet, we had inadvertently stirred up the imaginations of our listeners. One caller excitedly proclaimed, "This is what public radio should be! Close musical analysis of Eddie Van Halen's use of suspended chords in his rhythm guitar playing...beautiful man, just beautiful -- When can I hear some REO Speedwagon?" The death of radio? I don't think so. Many people say that the golden age of radio died with the advent of television, but, as I pillaged through the station's collections of classic rock records, I could feel the revolution coming. Why stop with Journey and Bachman-Turner Overdrive? Why not resurrect radio shows and performers who hadn't been heard from since the days when you could buy vacuum tubes for your radio at the corner convenience store? As a friend of mine once said, what could stop us from taking modern technology and screaming backwards into the nineteenth century? Then the station manager called. "When are you guys going to read the weather again?" By the end of the show we'd received several e-mails asking when we'd have our next show and just as many begging the Food Guy to return. When I decided to join Ken as a guest DJ, I pictured students cutting class and listening to us on pocket transistor radios or old men in plaid shirts dialing us up on a vintage Philco. Instead, people in offices across campus had typed the station's call letters into Google; Journey was blaring in the Admissions Office, in the Co-Op, in the English department. UConn alumni, many of them former DJs themselves, were listening to us all over the Eastern seaboard (late in the show we got a call from a guy in New York who, not surprisingly, wanted to hear The Ramones). I once thought the speakers on my iMac were there to remind me if my printer cartridge had run out of ink. My one morning as a DJ for the new golden age of radio had opened my ears. Now I could listen to Journey all the time with my computer. At last, I could leave my beat-up old cassette Walkman at home.
On my way to the library that morning after the show, I decided to stop and visit the kid at the Dunkin' Donuts. He was grinning as he filled my order for a Boston creme (I thought I deserved some sugar and coffee after bringing our listeners musical bliss for the previous two hours). As I left the convenience store, I could hear him humming a few bars from "Faithfully." Later that day, I was certain, he would do a Google search and track down all of Steve Perry's solo albums. And he would be a better man for it.
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