Greg Lyon Archives - WPRB History
Currently browsing tag

Greg Lyon

The Fall / Mark E. Smith / WPRB Mega-Post

As you’ve probably heard by now, Mark E. Smith, the leader of iconic post-punk stalwarts The Fall, passed away last week at the age of 60. His health had been in decline for some time, as evidenced by the band’s last two American tours being abruptly canceled, as well as recent stage entrances being made by wheelchair.

Within the pantheon of WPRB, the Fall are an act of unique prominence. I can’t think of another cult band that’s existed continuously for so many years and which has been adored by so many WPRB DJs spread across four different decades. As such, when the news of Smith’s death broke, I started seeing a lot of Fall-related waxing from current and former PRB folks in my social media feeds. (A trend including content from early 80s alums, as well as folks who graduated from college as recently as two years ago.) This post attempts to gather as many of those images, words, and related gushings as possible into a singular MES/Fall/WPRB content depot.

Before we go any further, let it be stated quite clearly: Mark E. Smith was a hugely problematic character. He was arrested and charged with assaulting bandmate Julia Nagle in 1998, and there are numerous accounts of awful behavior on his part over the years. But as he was the only constant member of the band through countless lineups, any notion or idea of the Fall continuing without him is simply absurd. (As Smith once famously declared “If it’s me and yer granny on bongos, it’s the Fall.“)

As such, think of this post not as a deification of Smith—a man whose inexcusable actions should be neither forgotten nor sugar-coated—but rather, a summary of how his band’s music shaped the lives, experiences, and musical travels of so many WPRB DJs across multiple generations.

To begin, I present the above slideshow which comprises fresh scans of every piece of available Fall vinyl from WPRB’s record library. (Except the ‘Slates’ 10″, which I forgot to grab before hoofing all those records across town to scan them… apologies.) Many of the hastily taped (and re-taped) spines should give you a sense of how heavily WPRB’s airstaff has hit these LPs over the years. Note that you can pause the slideshow by mousing over any of the images.

Below are other various Fall-related pieces of media and writing from or involving a slew of WPRB DJs from the 1980s-now.

RIP Mark E. Smith. And farewell to a criterion WPRB band.

(more…)

“All those records—Who knew what they might hold?”

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.

(more…)

Xenakis Liner Notes of the Gods

By Narin Dickerson (above)

I started out listening to WPRB during my freshman year (1999), but I didn’t become involved as a DJ until, I think, 2001. One of my first recollections of WPRB was tuning in shortly after I’d moved into my dorm and hearing someone read from the Q section of the dictionary. I’d grown up with somewhat experimental radio theatre sneaking into the overnight hours of my now-all-too-tame local NPR affiliate, so this made me excited and curious for more.  (more…)

“Gaining Confidence from the Edgy & Strange”

(L-R: John Monroe ’95 & Jon Solera (Snitow) ’97, Studio C renovations)

[By John Monroe ’95.]

WPRB was such a huge part of my life as an undergraduate that it’s really difficult to even know where to begin. I first heard about the station in August 1991, during Outdoor Action, the week-long backpacking trip that used to be – and probably still is – recommended to incoming students as a way of forming preliminary friendships and thereby taking some of the social edge off the first weeks of freshman fall. One of the group leaders was a DJ at WPRB, jazz if I remember right, and told me about how the show’s programming worked, with classical in the morning, jazz at mid-day, and rock in the afternoon and evening, followed by various specialty shows at night.

It hadn’t occurred to me that Princeton would have a radio station – one that “could be heard in Philly,” no less, as I was told – and from the moment I first heard about it, I was intrigued. All through high school, I’d listened to “twentieth-century classical” music pretty much exclusively. I even looked composers up in Who’s Who and sent them fan mail (you’d be amazed who responded: Cage, George Crumb, Lutoslawski, Stockhausen, Tippett, Berio). At the same time, though, in I suppose typical geeky teenager fashion, I felt this odd social shame about how much I loved it. For me, the great revelation of college was discovering that one could find people who appreciated idiosyncrasies of this kind, rather than turning them into some kind of stigma. (more…)

Singing Telegram does “Hip Priest” by The Fall

the_fall

In 2002, a big chunk of the WPRB airstaff engineered an on-air birthday prank by hiring a singing telegram artist to serenade beloved DJ Greg Lyon with “Hip Priest” by The Fall. In order to maximize Greg’s mortification, this had to occur A) without any warning, and B) on the air.

As such, the crafty perpetrators disguised the prank’s introduction as a scheduled announcement in that day’s program logs for Greg to play on the air. As the time approached, and unbeknownst to Greg, the conspirators hid just outside the studio with the singing telegram guy, and waited for their cue.

Here is audio of the incident as it transpired on the air. The first voice you will hear is Greg’s, unknowingly setting the wheels in motion. (Followed by the voices of Dan Ruccia and Jannon Stein.)

(more…)