Herewith a a post that is bound to be somewhat strenuously niche.
It should probably come as no surprise that I was one of those annoying kids that hosted a college radio show. Given the one-two punch of my penchant for insufferable pedantry in the music-trivia department and my veritable “face made for radio,” it was a perfect fit, as far as I was concerned. I’d spend hours that, in hindsight, would have been better devoted to studying plotting out my playlists, painstakingly curating a trio of two-hour shifts a week on WDUB, 91.1 FM in Granville, Ohio for a comparably diminutive listening audience that was blithely disinterested in my selections on a good day. In a nutshell, despite my best, emphatic efforts to introduce WDUB’s listeners to the joys of bands like Kraut, The March Violets and The Screaming Blue Messiahs, they were otherwise perfectly content with the brazenly steady diet of The Allman Brothers, Little Feat and the Grateful Goddamn Dead that most of my fellow WDUB disc-jockeys dutifully doled out. Envelope-pushing was not really a priority at “The Doobie.”
Regardless, I really didn’t care about what WDUB played when I wasn’t on it. For me, the whole experience was ultimately just about self-indulgence. Given free rein to lord my musical tastes over an anaemic sliver of Central Ohio’s Licking County, I often went out of my way to make the transitions from preceding shifts as jarring as possible, segueing from an umpteenth airing of Don McLean’s laborious warhorse, “American Pie” and straight into something like “Kill Surf City” by the Jesus & Mary Chain or “Sweat Loaf” by the Butthole Surfers. Anything it took to antagonize Denison’s robust demographic of ersatz-hippies was the order of my show, and I reveled in it.
I spun records and blabbed into the microphone at WDUB -- whose tagline for the last two years I was on it, was the somewhat ignominious “We Don’t Suck!” — for three of my four years, but did not, in the end, pursue a career in broadcasting afterwards. At no point during my time at WDUB did the consideration of “going pro” cross my mind. I harbored no desire to go into commercial radio which, as far as I could tell, bore absolutely zero resemblance to the free-form, anything-goes realm of college radio. Apart from some brief stints backing up my high school pal Rob B. on his show at Fordham University’s WFUV, I haven’t set foot in a radio studio since.
Fast forward three decades….
In rummaging around in my mom’s basement over Thanksgiving, I came across a clutch of cassettes filled with recordings of my shows on WDUB. Dating back to 1988, these tapes hadn’t seen the insides of a player since shortly after they were recorded by this kid who lived down the hall from me during my junior year. I decided to exhume them from the dank wilderness of Mom’s basement, despite no longer having a device on which to play them.
Earlier this week, I bought myself an audio converter for the purposes of making digital files out of them to host here on my stupid blog. After setting everything up, I cracked open the first tape and started the process, re-living the show as I converted it.
Suffice to say, it wasn’t a revelation so much as an exercise in acute embarrassment. A morning show captured in the early spring, this tape finds what would have been the 19-year-old me speedily slurring through my announcements in between tracks by somewhat predictable bands like The Cure, The Mission, The Lords of the New Church, The Plimsouls, The Cult, Pop Will Eat Itself, The Feelies and several others.
I cannot vouch for the fidelity and, given the age of this tape, proceedings do sort of wobble and drag at certain points, finding certain songs practically changing key. This is only one show — I evidently have several others to plough through. As a period-specific document of a certain time and place, it’s amusing.
If you care, please avail yourselves…. ADDENDUM: Might not work with Safari, but try Firefox.
WDUB Morning Show - First Part
WDUB Morning Show - Second Part
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