By way of dispensing with my barrage of recent threats, I'm pleased to announce that I've begun digitizing the mountain of radio aircheck tapes in my closet. These tapes were accumulated during my years of DJing at and listening to WPRB, the 30,000 watt commercial FM station that broadcasts from the campus of Princeton University. I'm nearly certain I discovered WPRB during the summer of 1985, and thusly began augmenting my collection of hip-hop radio airchecks with the decidedly more amateur (but no less enthralling) sounds of the international rock and roll underground.
The great thing about this highly-romanticized era in American broadcasting -- and a detail that's often overlooked in the numerous re-tellings it has since suffered -- is that the programming was considerably more freeform than it would become during the alt-rock dominated 90s, when genres were more rigidly codified. At WPRB, as with many other college stations, shows gradually became "indie", "pop", or "punk" in nature, and DJs who were willing to stretch out and really explore a broad cross-section of sounds became something of a rarity. (Though certainly not extinct.) However, in the years surrounding 1987, such programmers were in full bloom at WPRB. Armed with a brick of z-grade cassettes from the Route 18 Two Guys department store, I was able to lap up everything from British reggae to Big Black to obscure Los Angeles metal bands. (The first time I heard Guns n' Roses was on WPRB, from their Live Like a Suicide EP which was released well before their meteoric ascent in the mainstream.)
As was the case for many people my age, taping songs from the radio was a cheap way to collect new music when money was either scarce or non-existent. My tape making was highly ritualistic, but also tragically disorganized. If I was called away while a great radio show was in progress, I'd load a fresh tape into the stereo, hit record, and leave specific instructions with a family member to flip it over 45 minutes later so as not to miss anything. Later on, I'd review these recordings and hastily decide which songs were good enough to bounce over to more carefully crafted "best of"-type cassettes. Problems only emerged when I neglected to note artist or song titles, even for things I knew I liked. The sheer urgency that is specific to young people at the cusp of discovering their interests was to blame for this carelessness, and in some cases it was years before I learned who the purveyors of these alluring sounds were. In hindsight, however, it's become clear to me that I was just so caught up in the excitement of something that I perceived as new and dangerous, that stopping to care too deeply about any one thing might cause me to miss whatever was coming next. Make no mistake, it was an exhausting time to hang around with me while in close proximity to the stereo.
Listening back to these tapes more than twenty years on, there are three observations that I'm immediately compelled to make. First, I'm struck by the primitivism of it all. The stone-age nature of cassette media adds an evocative layer of hiss to the music, and somehow
validates my then-held notion that such art could only emanate from someplace truly exotic. At the risk of being melodramatic, it's fair to say that I regarded my favorite shows in a way that's probably not too far afield from the amateur astronomer who believes he's just observed a sign of intelligent life from somewhere in deep space. Secondly, I still like almost all of the music these tapes contain. A lot! There's a common theory which identifies one's early 20s as the time in which long-term musical preferences are established, but because of my early exposure to WPRB, my taste for left-of-center sounds was forged a few years in advance of my peers. It would not be at all unusual to hear the songs these tapes contain on my more recent WFMU playlists, albeit surrounded by plenty of genres that weren't prevalent at that time.
But most of all, when listening back through these mini documentaries of my early teens, I'm astonished by the different models of political thought I was accidentally introduced to via WPRB's programming. I grew up in a conservative Italian-Catholic household, and was barely out of middle school at the same time that I was first hearing the radically leftist ideologies contained in some of the music that PRB played -- Ideologies which I don't need to tell you stood in stark contrast to the Reagan models that typified the era (for me). If suburban Rage Against the Machine fans in Che Guevara t-shirts seemed funny to you in 1996, try imagining me as a 15 year old who knew about Blair Peach (the Socialist Worker's Party member who was killed during a 1979 Anti-Nazi League demonstration) because he'd heard about him in a song on the radio. This isn't to say that one listen to Sandinista transported me to the political left, but the music's influence certainly opened the door to my consideration of issues that many others don't get around to until their third year of college, if ever. In the pre-internet age, the arrival of such radical information in my parents' house never would have occurred without the aid of cloak and dagger tactics. As such, it was the music played on WPRB that first clued me in to matters well beyond the confines of the bucolic Jersey 'burbs, and the debt of gratitude I owe to the programmers who enabled this realization is considerable. Although WPRB's DJs may have been nothing more than bored college students who were simply killing time between political science seminars and Buckaroo Banzai screenings, to an impressionable kid who hadn't yet established a strong sense of identity, their voices and the records they back-announced were nothing short of revelatory.
For illustrative purposes, and to invite a long-desired discussion of these matters, I present this selection of songs originally taped from WPRB and culled from the cassette pictured above. This Certron C-90 was one of my aforementioned "best of" cassettes, which is to say it was a collection of favorites originally recorded on other tapes, and then re-dubbed to this one for posterity. The abrupt transitions and lo-fidelity encoding is intentional so as to preserve the music as I experienced it. Furthermore, I'm purposefully withholding the song/track information, so as to symbolize the years of frustration I experienced trying to ID all this stuff. However, you're welcome to shout 'em out in the comment field, should you be so inclined.
LISTEN:
Many thanks to my good pal Chad for loaning me the first working cassette deck this house has seen in more than ten years. This post, as well as similar ones yet to come, would not have been possible without his kindness and generosity.
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