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Kicking Mainstream Taste to the Curb

[By Justine Heilner 96, above, with Matthew Robb 94. Working the door at the WPRB-sponsored Tsunami/Spent show at the Princeton Arts Council]

I knew first thing freshman year that I wanted to be a DJ at WPRB because my brother Alex Heilner, three years my senior, was one too. I lived just around the corner from the studio in Hamilton Hall. Jen Moyse trained me—what an intimidatingly cool person to learn from! I was ‘lucky’ to never have to do a graveyard [late night] shift because Matthew Robb and Sean Murphy tricked me into being Traffic Director in exchange for a better time slot. What the hell did I do as Traffic Director?! I recall a lot of dot matrix printouts and a computer in a small room down the hall…

The first time I had a show my hands were shaking so much I had a hard time cueing the record. I had never done any kind of public speaking and I am not particularly into performance. I didn’t do banter and I didn’t have a sidekick or partner so I decided to just keep my speaking to a minimum and play the music. Listening to tapes of my first shows I thought I sounded like a really young girl. I created a radio voice—when I listen to young women DJs on college radio now, I know exactly what they’re doing. (more…)

Friday WPRB DJ Pinup: Tim Kastelle!

[aka “Rockin'” Tim Kastelle]

Years on air: 1982-1989

Favorite bands: This is kind of like asking which oxygen molecule I like best when I’m breathing.

Memorable on-air moment: [My wife] Nancy and I had joint bachelor and bachelorette parties by doing a graveyard (late night show) with our friends the night before we got married. It was a Saturday night, so we started early at around 11 pm. It was a cool thing for many reasons. Everyone that was there did something – the 12 or so ex-DJs all played a set, while everyone else picked songs, or read the weather or news, or something. And all through the night we were getting calls from people who were happy to hear voices they hadn’t heard in years. Like Sean Murphy said in his post last week, I majored in radio, and this ended up being the last show I ever did. It was a great combination of friendship and connection that were the hallmarks of all of my great WPRB memories.

Advice for current WPRB DJs: Experiment with everything. The station gives an amazing opportunity to try out every idea you have, even the stupid ones. And the stupid ones often end up be the best. So much of university life is regimented, but at the station you have unbelievable autonomy – take full advantage of that!


On the Lasting Benefits of the WPRB Experience

[By Dave Forrest ’60]

Reminiscences of the heroic age of PRB in the late 50’s retain their noble lustre beneath the encrusted molluscs and other crud of time. Other contributors to this [project] will no doubt limn the brilliant PRB trajectories of such mythic figures as Siggins, Crowther, McGuire, Dunn, Fuellhart, McCracken, Miller, McGiffert, Fleishhaker, Medina, et al. and the promulgated joys of midcult and masscult offerings of the station.

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Oh God, My God, I Left my Key to Heaven at Home

By Teri Noel Towe
[aka “TNT” or Teri “The Animal” Towe]

The late 60’s were a Golden Age for classical music at the station. WPRB was blessed with a string of committed and sensitive Classical Music Directors: Jeff Schaefer, Hal Abelson, Greg Petsko, and Alan Konefsky. I myself had the pleasure of serving in that capacity for a year and a half. The Classical Department had four hours every weekday evening (7 to 11) and several hours on Sunday afternoon. As a record collector and classical music nut, I found at WPRB the perfect forum for the grinding of my personal axes. For two years (my junior and senior years), I did two shows a week (Tuesday and Thursday evenings). In addition to series devoted to all the recordings of the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska and the cellist and conductor Pablo Casals, I regularly presented “The Age of Shellac”, a series devoted to historic 78 RPM recordings, which I transferred to tape on my own equipment in my dorm room, first in ’41 Hall, and then in ’03.

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Friday WPRB DJ Pinup: Adoley!

Photo by Dan Ungar ’74

Years on air: 2010-2014

Favorite band/artist: Okkervil River. Will Sheff is a brilliant lyricist, which appeals to the poet in me.

Memorable on-air moment: The first happened during a sub that I was doing my freshman year with two other new DJs who had recently passed their tests. We were dancing in the studio and I, impassioned by the spirit of radio, dropped it so hard that I split my pants. Really cemented my status as a top dog among the freshman DJs.

Advice for current WPRB DJs: Understand that the station is a glorious combination of a monied institution and a startup over which you have full creative control, and milk that for all it’s worth.

Welcome Back—Fall of ’83

By Henry Yu
(Above, L-R: Yuval Taylor 85, Nicola Ginzler 85, Colin Iosso 84, Henry Yu 84, Bob Bruce 85. On the road to an REM/Hüsker Dü gig in WPRB’s VW Rabbit. Photo by Kristin Belz ’84))

1980-1984 was such a great time period musically. First generation punk rock may have already been declared dead by the cognoscenti, but those four years would mark the heyday of the post-punk and hardcore eras, the advent of college rock, and the birth of what would come to be known fondly as 80’s rock. To have been at WPRB when so many incredible records were coming out, while clubs like City Gardens and Maxwell’s played host to these bands tours, and their records could be bought at the Princeton Record Exchange or a Saturday bus ride to NYC from in front of Nassau Hall, was an incredible experience. And to have shared it with fellow DJs who became lifelong friends has made WPRB much more than a four year experience.

I began my DJ-ing as one half of the self-proclaimed “no future glimmer twins”, since neither one of us was competent enough to both talk and engineer at the same time, it took both of us to get us through a show. We even walked around campus handcuffed together on occasion. Eventually, we got our own shows.

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WPRU Remote Broadcast Mystery

This is one of the oldest original photos we’ve discovered in the station’s archives, but no details as to the subjects, location, or year it was taken have been revealed. The mic setup suggests a remote broadcast, the WPRU banner places it somewhere between 1940 and 1955, and the combo’s setup indicates a live jazz gig at a… University eating club? Some long-shuttered venue in Princeton?

Do you recognize any of the subjects in this photo or have any information on the event it depicts? Please comment below and help us unravel this mystery!

UPDATE: Rob Schuman says: “I don’t, of course, recognize the group, but the station aired live jazz from very early on in its existence. I doubt its the same group, but here’s a clip from the Princetonian, October 9, 1941.”

 

WPRB and Me—Perfect Together!

By Sean Murphy ’94 [photo: Nicole Scheller]

I’m definitely not the first, and I hope I’m not the last, to be able to say that I majored in WPRB. Officially, I graduated with a degree in Politics, but my independent work and thesis focused on regulatory processes at the Federal Communications Commission. And that work resulted from many long and late nights spent playing and talking about records and bands and radio and what it meant to be non-profit, commercial, and independent all at the same time. From the music to the management lessons to the friendships, my WPRB experiences still reverberate nearly 25 years later.

I arrived at the basement of Holder Hall’s 11th entry in September 1990. I had some idea of what I might be getting into, as I’d spent the previous spring and summer interning at WMBR, 88.1 Cambridge, MA (MIT’s radio station). WPRB was different, from the rigidity of the program logs and actual paid 30- and 60-second ads to the presence of the main record library right in the control room. But the most important similarity was that WPRB saw and understood itself as an institution at, but not of, the university.

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Friday WPRB DJ Pinup: Billy Disease!

Years on air: 1979-1984.

Favorite Bands: The Ramones. And also, The Ramones.

Memorable On-Air Moment: 12-hour shift on Thanksgiving, played “In A Gadda Da Vida” twice in a row.

Advice for current WPRB DJs: Play lots of Ramones. Ease off the Partridge Family (but still play them.)

Friday WPRB DJ Pinup: Julia Factorial!

Years on air: 2002-2006: Mixtape Maker/Heartbreaker. 2006-2014: Clean Yr Room (w/ Art Andrews) and Born Inflamed.

Favorite bands: Modern Lovers, Dead Moon, The Replacements, Arthur Russell, Kate Bush, Screaming Females, Beat Happening. Favorite bands I found through WPRB: Half Man Half Biscuit, Red Krayola, The Mekons, Television Personalities, The Soft Boys, Desperate Bicycles, Silkworm, Meredith Monk, that crazy closed-loop record that has 500 tracks on it.

Memorable on-air moment: The time I tried to explain to Wilbo that I self-identified with the cover of Blurt’s In Berlin LP in deep deep ways. It was, needless to say, a confusing moment for both of us.

Advice for current WPRB DJs: Keep it weird, and DON’T DRINK THE BLEACH. Outside of the WPRB studios and on the rest of the dial, life can get pretty bland and bleached out. Your show can be a portal or it can be par-for-the-course. In the style of Hawkwind’s weirdly delivered monologues: “CHOOSE WISELY, MORTAL BEING.”*

*Not an actual endorsement of Hawkwind.

Bonus audio! Here’s Julia providing a non-verbal impression of the drum fill from Big Star’s “September Gurls” in WPRB’s infamous “Fish Fingers” station ID.