Like, in 1996. So that’s what, fourteen years ago?
My friend Drew and I tried to get involved with Virginia Tech’s WUVT radio station. It was pretty awful. The drill was that freshman and rookies – basically anybody not already in the radio clique – got duty on the AM station, which could be heard by approximately four people, but only if they were standing under a certain tree, with the antenna oriented just so, and only at certain times of the day.
But wait, it gets worse – the time slots they gave for this AM station that nobody could hear were at wonderful hours such as 12am -4am. Or in our case, Saturday mornings at 9am. As a freshman in college – how many of you looked forward to getting up prior to 9am on a Saturday morning? Especially when you knew you were going to sit in a radio station and play bad music for three hours that nobody could actually hear?
And it got even worse – the powers of the FM dial claimed they recorded all airtime on AM for review. I don’t know that I believe that they actually did that.
And even more worser – we couldn’t actually play any good music. The AM station was required to play nothing but independent music. It wasn’t always so bad. For instance, there was one song by a band named Moe called Meat. It was actually a great song. Even greater was that it was approximately fifty-six minutes long, so we could put that song on at 9am and sleep for fifty-six minutes. Well, not quite fifty-six minutes, because of the FCC regulations that required us to:
- Read PSAs every fifteen minutes, since we were on the air because of the FCC’s donation of frequency
- Read the stations callsign on the hour, every hour
We played one Led Zeppelin song and one Red Hot Chili Peppers song to our associated high school sweethearts who had zero chance of hearing the songs at their schools in Michigan and Boston – but dang we thought we were cool. The radio powers did not. Out of all the terrible things we did as radio hosts on a station that nobody listened to, those were the only two that we got in trouble for.
Some things we did not get in trouble for:
- Failing to show up a few times
- The AM radio station was in the junk room, where all the music and stuff that was donated that nobody ever listened to would be placed. There was an entire wall of ratty classical records. One hour of one show on one day was dedicated to doing awesome record scratches of various terrible renditions of classical music. Never heard a word about it.
- Inviting friends into the studio with us. Kenny, the Mulcahy’s, and a dude named Eric Krone who had a tattoo of his own name on his back came into studio with us, and we basically just talked and swore for a while, on the air.
We actually got a phone call once. A real phone call from a person who wasn’t one of our friends who was messing with us, or actually giving a rare voice of support. They wanted us to play a good song, but as shown above, we weren’t allowed to do so. The rule was, if you could hear the song on the radio, or the song was even remotely popular in the last few decades, you couldn’t play it.
It turns out that the AM feed was what they played in the dead time before the VT PSA-broadcasting TV station started actually running. That didn’t start until about 10am on Saturday morning. I think that tripled our audience to about three people.
I think we actually “graduated” from the bullcrap assignment to move up to a terrible 2-4am slot doing international radio or something like that – playing … cultural music. I don’t actually know that, I only heard it through rumors. We never bothered to show up to see if we “made” it.
And, because I like to close the loop – here’s what made me think about that today. At the gym, I have Jessica Radio on Pandora:
Pandora picked a live version of Jessica that was twenty-one minutes long. Not fifty-six minute Meat, but still long enough.
