Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio

By Katherine Rye Jewell

Bands like R.E.M., U2, Public Enemy, and Nirvana found success as darlings of college radio, but the extraordinary influence of these stations and their DJs on musical culture since the 1970s was anything but inevitable. As media deregulation and political conflict over obscenity and censorship transformed the business and politics of culture, students and community DJs turned to college radio to defy the mainstream—and they ended up disrupting popular music and commercial radio in the process. In this first history of US college radio, Katherine Rye Jewell reveals that these eclectic stations in major cities and college towns across the United States owed their collective cultural power to the politics of higher education as much as they did to upstart bohemian music scenes coast to coast.

Jewell uncovers how battles to control college radio were about more than music—they were an influential, if unexpected, front in the nation's culture wars. These battles created unintended consequences and overlooked contributions to popular culture that students, DJs, and listeners never anticipated. More than an ode to beloved stations, this book will resonate with both music fans and observers of the politics of culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781469676210

Katherine Rye Jewell

Katherine Rye Jewell is professor of history at Fitchburg State University.

Book preview

Cover: Live from the Underground, A History of College Radio by Katherine Rye Jewell

Live from the Underground

Live from the Underground

A History of College Radio

KATHERINE RYE JEWELL

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Anniversary Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2023 Katherine Rye Jewell

All rights reserved

Set in Charis by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jewell, Katherine Rye, author.

Title: Live from the underground : a history of college radio / Katherine Rye Jewell.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023014311 | ISBN 9781469676203 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469677255 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469676210 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: College radio stations—United States—History— 20th century. | United States—Social life and customs—20th century. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / 20th Century | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / American / General

Classification: LCC PN1991.67.C64 J49 2023 | DDC 791.44/3—dc23/eng/20230422

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014311

Cover illustrations: Top, Live message by Bits and Splits/stock.adobe.com; bottom, record spines.

Chapter 13 was previously published in a different form as ‘Specialty’ Listening: Creating Space for Queer Programming on American College Radio in the Long 1980s, in Resist, Organize, Build: Feminist and Queer Activism in Britain and the United States during the Long 1980s, ed. Sarah Cook and Charlie Jeffries (Albany: SUNY Press, 2022).

For Caroline and Elizabeth and the DJs of WRVU 91.1 Nashville

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Liner Notes

Introduction

Part I

Out of the Alternative 1970s

1  Redefining College Radio in the Late 1970s

2  College Radio’s New Wave

3  How the FCC Inadvertently Created Modern College Radio

4  Major Labels and College Radio in Economic Crisis

5  Connecting the Indie Rock Underground in the 1980s

6  Students, Communities, Markets, and the Limits of Radio Democracy

Part II

National Connections, 1983–1989

7  The New Business Model for College Radio

8  College Radio in the Political Spotlight

9  The Political Left of the Dial

10  Cultivating a Public

Radio Alternative in the 1980s

11  Saving the Sound Alternative

Part III

The College Radio Paradox, 1989–2003

12  The Golden Age of Indie Rock Radio

13  College Radio and Communities in the 1990s

14  College Radio Confronts Selling Out in the 1990s

15  Silencing the Harvard of Long Island

Hidden Tracks

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Figures and Tables

Figures

    0.1  WUOG date auction cartoon, 2003 xii

    3.1  Drugged-out DJ at KAOS cartoon, Cooper Point Journal, December 4, 1981 69

    3.2  R.E.M. photograph in Red and Black, April 10, 1981 73

    5.1  KAOS program guide, Cooper Point Journal, November 18, 1982 103

    5.2  REO to R.E.M. cartoon, 1983 108

    8.1  KCSB and the FCC cartoon, April 21, 1987 173

    9.1  Joe Strummer visits WRVU, March 1984 188

   11.1  Photograph of Steve Doocy and KJHK DJs in the 1970s 224

   11.2  Who Wants a Bite of KJHK?, 1988 234

   12.1  Ray Shea, music director at KTRU, Rice University, 1986 257

  HT.1  KTRU DJs and supporters protest, 2000 353

  HT.2  Chuck D at Save WRVU event, 2011 363

Tables

     3.1  WHPK’s Top 20, Chicago Maroon, August 7, 1981 62

     7.1  CMJ New Music Report, November 12, 1984 141

Liner Notes

The first quiz I took in college was on the seven words I can’t say on the radio.

In August 1997, I landed at a student activities fair table with the letters WRVU—standing for Radio Vanderbilt University—emblazoned on a makeshift sign. I had always loved music; my tastes had been mostly defined by my dad’s record collection and by the radio stations that made it to my hometown in Vermont, including, occasionally at night, the sounds of modern rock alternative WEQX. For me, as for most young people of the 1980s and 1990s, radio (the source of free music before the internet) offered few opportunities for sounds far outside the mainstream of popular music, save those on the left of the FM dial. In the mountains, the only college outlet I could tune into was WFRD out of Dartmouth College, a commercial station that mostly played classic rock (though it did host a Sunday night metal show). Unlike those more tightly formatted stations, as a DJ, WRVU’s general manager told me, I could play whatever I wanted.

Picturing myself at the helm of a Sixties-throwback show, I attended the training meeting and took the quiz, gleefully writing down the naughty words. I studied the rules. I learned to operate the board. By the time I took to the airwaves, my musical horizons had expanded, and I became yet another denizen of the 1990s indie-rock scene, worshipping the Pixies, Pavement, Helium, Riot Grrrl bands, and the latest Jon Spencer Blues Explosion or Guided by Voices record (figure 0.1). All-ages venue Lucy’s Record Shop closed after my first year, but there were plenty of other small, local clubs for catching a show by Nashville’s Lambchop or other touring bands.

My teachers were the host of fellow students who had been sustained in their high school days by college radio and all-ages clubs like Lucy’s. These freaks in the larger fraternity-dominated culture at Vanderbilt nursed their iconoclasm with postpunk indie rock or soul, funk, and hip-hop (though the majority were middle- and upper-class white kids). Those from the suburbs or exurbs of Nashville, Houston, Washington, D.C., or Atlanta, with famed music scenes or stations at Rice University or Georgia Tech, had been introduced to college radio long before I had been. Such FM signals reached the suburbs, linking kids listening on their headphones to underground scenes in nearby cities. They provided a lifeline for those who either didn’t fit in or shunned mainstream popular culture, fashion, and other teenage social rituals.

FIGURE 0.1    WUOG hosted a fundraiser in 2003 that auctioned off dates with DJs. The cartoon captures the station’s indie-rock and often elitist image compared with the majority of the UGA student body. Mack Williams, Red and Black, April 3, 2003.

I graduated and became a historian. I returned to college radio to study its historical development when I learned in 2011 that WRVU was being sold. A bastion of opposition to the Vanderbilt fraternity scene drifted online. While station alumni protested its sale, no savior emerged. WRVU’s sale yielded another event in the ongoing transformation of popular music amid technological change. I had watched as Napster came and went during my college years, altering expectations for music consumption and channeling music fans’ frustration with the gouging prices of CDs. MTV had already been lost to reality TV and glorified gameshows. Yet the technological disruption narrative belied the complexity of college radio culture that existed before mp3s and file sharing.

Radio historians know the long-standing diversity of college radio. Whether through carrier current, AM, FM, digital streaming, or podcasting, it had always been and remains a vibrant and diverse space, with an identity extending far beyond indie rock. This book, while claiming status as a history of college radio, cannot hope to reconstruct this vast historical landscape in its entirety.

But it can explore the origins, meaning, and transformation of this modern college radio culture. In 1985, the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg penned an ode to college radio, the stations populating the left of the dial on the FM spectrum. Westerberg sang, Passin’ through and it’s late, the station started to fade / Picked another one up in the very next state. The song celebrated college radio and its patchwork coverage from college towns to major cities across the country, piecing together a network of like-minded students and musical communities uninterested in the offerings of commercial radio. Road trippers, if not listening to self-made mix tapes, would often turn their dials to the left, exploring what college stations in range offered. Such ritual offered serendipitous musical discovery of local and regional culture that reflected the nation’s cultural diversity.

College radio’s market power and identity—the sometimes-reviled reputation of elitist indie-rock kids spinning records and manning mics—was a product of historical forces, and it was transient. This book traces the fraught process of college radio’s emergence as a cultural and market force, with a recognizable identity, and the ongoing and newly emerging challenges to that identity.

This soundscape’s history engages with key developments in the last half of the twentieth century, particularly how Americans considered the nation’s cultural diversity and how these debates existed at the nexus of the business of the music industry, politics, media deregulation, and the changing structure and place of higher education within the nation. All reveal shifts in political culture and processes of self-discovery and artistic expression as the business and politics of culture evolved. College radio gave ordinary music fans an entry point to participate in and, maybe, challenge these transformations.

College radio’s modern history starts when student-run educational stations proliferated on the FM dial in the 1960s. Stations remained distinct and diverse from one another, even as numbers expanded and a collective, though eclectic, musical reputation emerged. By the late 1980s, this network consisted of roughly 1,200 individual stations. Some were on wired, carrier-current signals or were a mere ten watts, enough power to reach the farthest dorm on campus; some projected music with 50,000 watts, airing to potentially millions of listeners. Each offered a unique format to its institutional home or radio market. Some connected to local underground music scenes; some emulated commercial radio as much as possible. Yet these stations offered—and still do—a cross-class, cross-community forum for the clash and, sometimes, resolution of issues meaningful to an array of claimants to public space.

What this book can’t do is tell every DJ’s story or chronicle each station’s history. In recounting the history of a beloved medium like college radio, this and the realities of the historical record present a challenging task for a historian. Some gaps result from archival challenges. Radio continues to be difficult to document. Listeners’ experiences are hard to access, meaning this history focuses primarily on DJs and participants at stations or in surrounding campuses. Not all perspectives appear in the archives. At times, reporters or students might not capture elements of a station’s history with complete accuracy or detail, and sources are scarce to confirm small details. College radio’s collective history remains diffused across institutions of varying organization and degrees of documentation. Most college radio stories remain in the diaries and memories of DJs and listeners, or perhaps on cassette tapes stored in shoeboxes in attics. This book captures some of these. But there are many more stories to tell, voices to highlight, musical and political contributions to assess. College radio stations’ relationships with political and activist groups took many forms and deserve elucidation by scholars. Historically black colleges and universities played a significant role in shaping the culture of college and educational radio as well as commercial AM and FM. There remains much radio history yet to uncover.

From archival documents across institutions, debates captured in student newspapers, and oral histories, I reconstruct and complicate college radio’s history at the twentieth century’s end. It starts in Part I in the 1970s as freeform commercial FM radio settled into album-oriented radio, a narrower format that indicated a fragmenting broadcast (as well as political and cultural) landscape. Within this, college radio emerged as a recognizable—though chaotic—format of its own. Stations collectively developed a national reputation and cultural role but nonetheless remained places of conflict among participants who had divergent expectations for their service. Part II explores college radio’s emergence as a national, influential institution caught up in the political and cultural conflagrations of the 1980s that visited both popular culture and higher education, as well as transformed commercial and public broadcasting. College students, even if engaged in amateur, pedagogical radio play, could not escape the culture wars or the scrutiny tuned to popular music in the Reagan years or the shifting financial realities colleges and universities confronted. By Part III as the 1990s dawned, college radio sparked mainstream attention to alternative rock and hip-hop as media deregulation and creeping market logics in higher education placed additional expectations and strains on these stations. Service to underground music scenes and networks continued, and students trained for professional careers. Throughout these years, college students and community volunteers took to the airwaves. They came with a variety of expectations, musical interests, and aversions and with a desire to engage in a meaningful activity for their community—however they envisioned it.

Readers might be wondering: isn’t college radio’s heyday over, thanks to digital streaming and online media? The answer, in short, is no. But the reasons why are complicated, and this book reveals deep connections between musical culture, US politics and policy, and the history of higher education that transcend technological changes at the end of the century.

Live from the Underground

Introduction

Two friends looked at the camera and smirked as they poured martinis from a silver shaker. The one in a green turtleneck tried to avoid lapsing into riffs about postmodern subjectivity. The other, wearing a blazer and wire-rimmed glasses, explained that their new punk rock– and college radio–inspired magazine articulated how readers could resist the culture industry. As they escorted a filmmaker through the house serving as their fledgling magazine’s headquarters, the two PhD students cued up a seven-inch single by Sabalon Glitz, a local indie band specializing in space-rock.¹ (One member lived upstairs.) Produced via an independent production and distribution system, the record offered an alternative way of consuming music and captured the vibrancy of Chicago’s underground rock scene.² These twenty-seven-year-olds in 1993 hoped to awaken young Americans to their saturation in images of pseudo-rebellion. Perhaps they might even resist major record labels that sought to turn them into ordinary consumers. Their magazine would do this by following the model of college radio.

By the early 1990s, this model suggested that defying, or at least opting out of, the culture industry might yet be possible. These students, David Mulcahy and Thomas Frank, were also DJs at the University of Chicago’s WHPK. They envisioned their magazine The Baffler as extending that station’s transgressive mode. Inspired by punk’s DIY ethos and existing outside of and in opposition to conventional modes of cultural production and distribution, the magazine followed college radio’s example. Both represented youth taking cultural production into our own hands, they explained.³

Frank’s explanation of The Baffler while he was a PhD student drew upon the arguments in his dissertation and subsequent book, The Conquest of Cool. In it, he challenged many baby boomers’ belief that they had rejected midcentury conformity and consumerism through the counterculture. Instead, Frank argued, countercultural types merely bought into hip consumerism to salve the realities of work.⁴ For the next generation to defy these alluring trappings, they could look to punk, postpunk, and hardcore rock to challenge an egregious offender: the music industry.⁵

Sure, punk suffered the same fate as the counterculture, with symbols of rebellion co-opted and incorporated into popular culture. But real punks needed no mohawk, dyed hair, or leather jacket. Frank hosted the hardcore show at WHPK in thrifted blazers. Donning some corporatized symbol of rebellion, he told the filmmaker, would be inherently inauthentic. It wasn’t enough to buy Nirvana records and wallow in angst; pop culture rebels had to consume in a separate market accessed through actually alternative networks—not corporate-driven radio formats.

College radio offered an ideal venue for these attitudes. It could never overtake commercial radio, remaining scarce and subaltern. Pop culture rejects sought sanctuary at these stations by the 1990s. Protected by institutional homes and noncommercial licenses, these stations operated on the public’s airwaves for educational purposes. Such missions offered useful cover for DJs seeking the weird, the unheard, or underappreciated. Such music might never reach, or actively defied, mainstream audiences. Many participants were content with remaining on the outside, in the underground. Stations developed devoted listener bases of engaged music fans and lured college students who didn’t quite fit in on campus. Community DJs turned to college radio, too, seeking purchase on the nation’s airwaves—or at least however far the usually low-wattage collegiate signal reached.

By the early 1990s college radio had earned a national identity that evoked generational dissatisfaction with pop culture even as it remained deeply conversant with it. These signals did offer alternative voices to willing audiences. Yet college radio’s collective status as an alternative, or counterhegemonic, medium is debatable.⁶ Virtually all elements of the college radio model—educational mission, anticommercialism, funding mechanisms, organizational structures, professional practices, content, or audience relationships—were contested in one way or another after the 1970s. Some stations explored the furthest fringes of musical expression, but these were missions shaped historically and through conflict. Numerous DJs sought careers in the news, music, and media industries. Not all stations devoted programming to music lacking broad commercial appeal, but these signals and their participants also shaped the nation’s landscape of collegiate radio. College radio’s status as an alternative medium is thus tenuous, even if in aggregate or individually these stations possessed disruptive potential.⁷

The possibilities and problems inherent in the nation’s system of educational radio were apparent at Chicago’s WHPK, despite its high marks for experimentation and service. DJs aired new music from across genres, new and old. Shows promoted indie rock and hip-hop and supported local underground music scenes. WHPK reached beyond the campus enclave into the South Side neighborhood, but DJs struggled to make the case for community service to the UChicago students. As graduate students, Frank and other DJs claimed positions in student government to ensure WHPK’s funding when the student body president targeted the station for cuts.⁸

They relied on WHPK’s history of breaking musical ground to secure university support. In 1984, DJ Ken Wissoker launched what is widely regarded as the first hip-hop show in the Midwest, drawing aspiring artists to the station.⁹ He and John JP Chill Schauer, DJ of another lauded hip-hop show, received thanks in the liner notes of Public Enemy’s 1988 album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Common, who went by Common Sense until 1995, was a devoted fan. He camped out on the street outside the studio to get his tapes on air.¹⁰ Serving listeners with new music and maintaining an alternative, community-oriented identity put WHPK at the forefront of musical innovation, including hip-hop. Older listeners, too, tuned in for soul music.

These successes did not protect the station from friction, whether from UChicago students not seeing the point of adventurous radio or from nonaffiliated listeners. In one instance WHPK seemingly launched a battle over obscenity and generational differences regarding rap that pitted the station against community members.

At 10:20 P.M. on a Thursday in January 1993, Chicago Defender reporter Chinta Strausberg spun past 88.5 on her FM dial, paused, and hit Record on her tape player to capture the garbage she heard on WHPK.¹¹ At the next city council meeting, Ninth Ward alderman Robert Shaw played Strausberg’s recording. A DJ had aired a twenty-year-old spoken-word piece by comedian and actor Rudy Ray Moore, in which he assumed a sleazy persona replete with irony.¹²

Moore’s explicit description of intercourse shocked the room. Perhaps the DJ felt emboldened by a recent Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decision allowing safe harbor for indecent material after 10 P.M. Or, perhaps, Chicago’s political class saw an opportunity to strike into ongoing culture wars while making an example of a white DJ on a predominantly white station that either presumed to speak for Black audiences or aired what those in power considered harmful representation.¹³ Whatever the motivation, the Joint City Council committee decided unanimously to ask the FCC to investigate WHPK for obscenity.

The station found itself caught in Chicago’s complex political landscape. WHPK’s station manager Greg Lane sent an explanatory letter and did not attend the meeting. Lane likely understood the tenuous position the station occupied: the DJ certainly recognized Moore’s irony, but the expression crossed regulatory boundaries. WHPK, moreover, could not arbitrate cultural conversations among Chicago’s Black community. The station’s governing board sent a supportive statement, but Shaw focused on Lane’s arrogant letter. Lane, another of The Baffler’s founders, defended the broadcast as demonstrating African American rhythm and blues recordings from the 1960s and 1970s in the tradition of Pigmeat Markham, Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor, and Eddie Murphy. Not impressed, Shaw declared the broadcast an affront to the community’s morality. The Chicago Tribune described Lane’s defense as a little too much like a white college kid lecturing them on African American culture.¹⁴ At the center of this incident resided a reality: a predominantly white institution had taken on the responsibility of providing entertainment to a community underserved in many ways, including by media.

Such struggles over the meaning and purpose of college radio transcended any one song, DJ, show, or station. Divergent interests called on stations beyond disgruntled Gen Xers feeling lost in the dreck of commercial radio. Dissonant expectations fueled clashes over content, programming, and allocated airtime, but they also presented the potential for community connection—though they offered surrounding residents no opportunity for media ownership or control.¹⁵

If or how stations served communal functions depended on governing structures. Their institutional homes determined degrees of independence and perhaps even mission and programming.¹⁶ Students usually set the agenda for signals within these parameters. Radio space existed for white students as a normative part of most universities, while Black and minority students had to actively create opportunities, often remaining marginal within institutional media.¹⁷ Station constitutions might prohibit community listeners from setting schedules or participating as DJs. Communities relied on the goodwill and understanding of individual DJs, leaders, or administrators to operate signals in the public interest and represent their voices. All of this required sufficient funding and institutions allowing signals to operate in their name—which grew tenuous amid declining investment, rising corporate logic within university administrations, and national political conversations that scrutinized university curricula, instructional content, and missions.

College radio stations occupying space on the public airwaves were never separate from larger questions about who controls the airwaves—and national culture. Skirmishes over college radio programming in the 1980s and 1990s signaled problems in the nation’s federally regulated media and the potential for disruption. A crowded FM spectrum left fewer spaces for localities to secure representation, compounded by narrow playlists of commercial radio, which grew tighter amid deregulation and consolidation well before the Telecommunications Act of 1996. In that environment, college radio’s disruptive potential took on added significance. Embedded within institutional power structures of higher education, federal regulatory bodies, and the corporate culture industry, college radio offered participation in alternative, underground markets and culture while remaining thoroughly a part of the nation’s dominant political economy and politics of culture. In sum, these stations embodied the paradoxes of higher education’s evolving role in US political and cultural life at the end of the century.

This book explains how college radio got to that point.¹⁸

The Politics of College Radio

College radio involves more than musical influence or good times in one’s undergraduate days. In fact, college radio’s evolution illuminates the United States’ politics of culture and centrality of universities to these debates since the 1970s. More specifically, this history explains why higher education remains so embattled politically and speaks to the business of culture and the challenges presented by digital disruptions and corporate consolidation. But struggles over the airwaves began long before online streaming. Questions over national identity, democracy, and how citizens confront these questions through media shaped college radio’s emergence and its history.

Seventy years of developments in broadcasting technology and regulation gave rise to college radio’s left-of-the-dial reputation in the 1980s and 1990s.¹⁹ College stations existed since radio’s earliest days, founded by student-led radio clubs, electrical engineering departments, and agricultural extension services at land-grant institutions and expanded to create edifying content for circulation on commercial radio by the 1930s. Thanks to regulatory and legislative decisions, however, commercial national networks crowded out small college broadcasters, which dwindled below fifty signals by the decade’s end.²⁰ College radio continued to reach listeners through syndicated content, carrier-current stations on campus (low-power signals transmitted via wires, or even pipes, able to be picked up over short distances with AM receivers), and occasionally via higher-power AM, until FM emerged as an alternative. The FM frequencies most college radio stations occupied resulted from the FCC setting aside 88.1 to 91.9 FM for noncommercial, educational (NCE) radio in 1945, but adoption lagged.²¹

As college stations appeared on FM, they usually did so under a ten-watt, class D, NCE license with limited range and freedom from advertisers’ demands. This license, offered after 1948, provided cheaper access to the airwaves. Lower technology costs and regulatory prodding produced a renaissance in educational broadcasting. By 1967, more than 300 NCE licensed stations existed on FM, most at the low-power class D level.²² Signals offered classical music, faculty lectures, campus sports, and content to enrich, often with a highbrow reputation. Midwestern institutions provided commodity prices to farmers or educational programs, particularly in Wisconsin, which built one of the few statewide educational FM networks. The network embodied the Wisconsin Idea to lower ivory tower walls and make knowledge and its benefits widely available, an idea that informed many college stations.²³ Religious broadcasts sustained faithful listeners unable to attend services. Meanwhile, student DJs capitalized on universities’ promise to provide public service to develop new types of shows.²⁴ Varied evolutions in governance, curricular functions, and funding meant stations developed with diverse arrangements depending on locality and institution.

These were safe spaces, it seemed. They benefited from educational radio proponents who, in the 1930s, secured the noncommercial, educational FM spectrum allocation: a victory against for-profit corporatized, mass media. College stations, whether on carrier-current, AM, or FM signals, defied commercial pressures to please wide swaths of listeners. Universities appeared as havens for self-expression, focused on liberal arts inquiry and exploration—albeit with their own barriers to entry. Their radio signals, consequently, generated edifying content for nonenrolled listeners; news, sports, and study music aired for students.²⁵

College radio was, essentially, a liberal creation of the 1930s.²⁶ These signals symbolized New Dealers’ hopes for radio to enable mass democracy, inspire an enlightened citizenry, and promote cultural pluralism.²⁷ Elites remained in charge, however, with audiences dependent on how much leeway license holders (usually boards of trustees or university presidents) allowed student-run broadcasters.²⁸

Still, stations often operated under a sense of public service, educational mission, and academic freedom—although the latter term rarely came up among participants.²⁹ Signals debuted on FM in the 1960s and early 1970s during years when, as one historian put it, the democratic vision of universal mass higher education evaporated.³⁰ These goals struck a hopeful tone, but college DJs and programmers had several influences.

College stations often took cues from progressive and community radio, which in turn often drew staff from college radio. Progressive radio emerged in 1949, during the deepening Red Scare, from the Pacifica Foundation, which aired dissident voices in defiance of tight Top 40 AM radio playlists that contained cultural pluralism.³¹ Folk music found its way to collegiate signals alongside jazz and classical shows.³² Civil rights organizers benefited from coordination provided by Black-owned radio stations and those at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Students at HBCUs understood radio’s uses beyond entertainment.³³ Social and political activists, from civil rights to feminism to gay rights, expanded their pursuits to culture. A number of college stations followed Pacifica in the 1970s, adding programming for queer communities or to aid social causes. Some broadcast Alan Ginsberg’s poetry or public service announcements for clinics providing abortion services (as happened at Georgetown University, which among other campus conflicts over the radio station culminated with the university gifting the signal to another college in 1979).³⁴

Stations emulated commercial FM as well. Music industry publication Billboard in the 1960s noted how college radio programmed more popular rock as students gravitated away from the highbrow fare of classical, jazz, and folk music, making these stations attractive places to market music.³⁵ But commercial FM and musical culture continued to shift, along with college students’ tastes.

Tom Donohue at KMPX-FM in San Francisco began broadcasting free-form radio, detailed in a scathing 1967 Rolling Stone essay, AM Radio Is Dead and Its Rotting Corpse Is Stinking Up the Airwaves. Freeform meant freedom from format. DJs selected deep cuts (songs not yet hitting the pop charts, or which never would) from rock albums and defied genre boundaries by cuing up blues and electronic music next to reggae, jazz, and classical. Donohue championed rock radio as defiant of the commercialism of pop music, fostering creativity and offering authenticity his listeners craved. AM radio no longer reflected its audience or the quality of recordings from bands like the Beatles, the Byrds, and Bob Dylan.³⁶ Freeform, such as juxtaposing Muddy Waters with Mozart, assimilated diverse expressions, symbolized the nation’s cultural melting-pot idealism, and often drew talent from the ranks of college radio, where DJs felt freer to experiment. College students tuned in, and early freeform FM stations drew talent from the ranks of collegiate DJs.³⁷

By the mid-1970s, however, commercial freeform became increasingly standardized into the album-oriented rock (AOR) format, as for-profit radio programmed for continuity to avoid alienating listeners. That left college radio as the spot on the dial more likely to offer freeform hours—even if only in the wee hours of the morning.

These influences produced a national landscape of college radio by the end of the 1970s broadly considered alternative to commercial radio. Jazz, classical, and folk labels enjoyed good relationships with these signals, and mainstream genres developed interest, but these did not wholly define college radio in that decade. Instead, college radio remained shaped by divided schedules and its many services. It remained a profoundly local and pedagogical medium.

College radio’s dominant schedule structure facilitated its diverse services. Most stations employed block programming, dividing the day into segments dedicated to certain genres, specialty shows, or freeform hours. Most blocks had no reference to time of day, such as drive time in the parlance of dayparting in radio programming. This approach accommodated college students, who had erratic schedules that changed each semester and who still had to go to class and take exams. Blocks allowed stations to pursue divergent visions of US culture on a single signal—though they risked, as commercial and public broadcasting professionals warned, serving no one by attempting to serve everyone.³⁸

The 1971 entrance of National Public Radio (NPR), funded in part thanks to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), offered university administrators an alternative to this student-run mix of eclectic programming. In NPR’s wake, college radio diverged from public broadcasting. NPR’s architects envisioned a network anchored at college stations across the nation, alongside municipal and community broadcasters such as WGBH in Boston or WNYC in New York City. NPR offered attractive and reputable programming to administrators and listeners, whereas student-run radio defied the nationalization of public radio broadcasting.³⁹ Some signals balanced a few hours of NPR programming per day with student and volunteer-run shows. In several instances, universities shifted student-run signals to NPR affiliates only to see students launch secondary signals in their wake.⁴⁰

Student-run stations, these vaguely alternative, amateur sandboxes, diverged in sound and mission from nationally syndicated news, information, and cultural programming. Public broadcasting remained solidly in the hands of professionals with no on-air opportunities for students. Limits to these distinctions persisted, however. Although public broadcasting and student-run college radio separated, they existed within a spectrum of noncommercial radio that vied for listeners with countercultural tastes and politics.

College stations’ status as countercultural icons in the 1980s and 1990s did not owe to their location at sites of political and cultural upheaval in the 1960s. No straight line can be drawn from the Sixties’ counterculture and freeform radio to the breakthrough of college rock bands R.E.M., U2, and Nirvana, fostered by the independence and iconoclasm of college radio. Those institutions, particularly elite private and land-grant public colleges and universities, had become islands of authenticity after the counterculture’s dissolution. But college radio’s culture emerged from more than defiance of—or retreat from—the commercial mainstream.⁴¹ That reputation instead emerged as a new generation confronted how to achieve social change and support cultural and individual authenticity.

Instead, competing expectations, goals, and participants, as well as divergent institutional environments, radio markets, and artistic scenes, produced the left of the dial.⁴² College radio’s narrow reputation as a haven from the pop culture mainstream elevates aspects of its history—particularly its association with mostly white indie rock—above its reality as a diverse, evolving, and contested segment of radio broadcasting that defies identification of any one influence or point of origin.⁴³

DJs took their charge to remain independent from commercial influence seriously but nonetheless remained conversant with mainstream popular culture.⁴⁴ Despite its noncommercialism, college radio developed powerful market influence.⁴⁵ Amateur broadcasters possessed power as cultural arbiters—tastemakers who defined aesthetics that distinguished class status and progressive ideals.⁴⁶ College DJs gravitated to underground music, creating a sense that it was good precisely because few people knew about it.

Regulatory and institutional dynamics governing college radio and shaping mass media contribute to blurry boundaries between mainstream and underground in the late twentieth century.⁴⁷ DJs spent much time and ink debating the nature of those delineations, particularly as college radio helped give rise to commercial alternative radio formats in the 1980s and 1990s.⁴⁸ Increasingly, stations and DJs developed a reputation for abandoning music they helped make popular, contributing to a reputation for musical snobbery. Once their selections became mainstream (if they became mainstream, which was often not the case), DJs moved on to something else.

A prevalent ethos of playing none of the hits, all of the time owed to stations’ homes at institutions of higher education.⁴⁹ College radio served communities and offered students training for professional careers while supporting cultural production not bound for the mass market. Such service defied deepening conflicts with surrounding neighborhood residents. Universities encouraged, especially in urban areas, economic development in technology and knowledge economies. As a result, they acted as agents of urban renewal and expanded policing, encouraging gentrification and neighborhood displacement in the 1980s and 1990s.⁵⁰

In other words, college radio’s programmers and DJs navigated deep divisions and paradoxes regarding the meaning and value of a college education and institutional benefits to communities and society at large. If college trained students for professions, then stations offered hands-on learning experiences. If higher education was for self-discovery and expression, that protected student-run radio as spaces for exploration.⁵¹ Further, if institutions served community and social functions in a diverse democracy, so too would college radio.

Yet not every station hewed to institutional priorities, with some maintaining structural independence despite affiliation and status as a student activity. Collectively, college stations never simply reflected the intellectual project and cultural and knowledge production of universities: they helped create, via the airwaves, substantive connections to higher education that went beyond professional training and disseminating knowledge.

Moreover, broadcasting beyond campus presented marketing potential, offering an aural bridge between colleges and educated, affluent residents or communities seeking access to institutional resources as public investment contracted. Such competing demands produced struggles for control among communities and campuses. Stations were ripe for conflict when, in addition, student DJs brought their own expectations to radio.

DJs often welcomed the ability to air the explorations of their liberal arts journeys, believing they diversified the nation’s sonic profile. Certainly not all DJs held this lofty goal—many focused on developing their professional skills or gaining experience, or on retreating to underground scenes. And some, while believing they generated positive service, nonetheless maintained blinders regarding the cultural representation they provided. But battles over collegiate airwaves had national, political import and connected to questions of power. Even the most iconoclastic DJs seeking refuge from the culture industry benefited from access to their university’s cultural capital, whether revolution ensued or not.

Radio stations didn’t have to be covering elections or policy questions to be sites of politics, and more was happening in radio in the 1980s and 1990s than the rise of conservative talk formats.⁵² Instead, the politics of college radio captures a key turn in US political history that channeled contests over regulation, policy, and power into the realms of media and culture. More than a rejoinder to fights over bias in news media or liberal capture of Hollywood, college radio’s contested landscape reveals competing visions for how to open the public square and realize the promises of a democratic society. Certainly, media and cultural production always had political connections and import.⁵³ But participants in college radio, though not all, brought specific expectations regarding that medium’s potential public service and political influence and pursued that work through cultural expression and representation.

College radio’s history unveils new dimensions of the culture wars that raged after the social revolutions of the 1960s.⁵⁴ Red-faced televangelists railing against secularism or pundits lamenting the decline of western civilization tend to define the culture wars in popular imagination. Hand-wringing about images of the occult or the more complicated concerns regarding sexism and violence in music consumed much oxygen. Nor were battles solely about the decline of the New Deal, the disappearance of the working class, and tribalization of American life—or a smokescreen for matters of political economy.⁵⁵ These narratives don’t capture the culture wars’ blurry partisan lines, nor do they offer a complete picture of how these battles visited upon institutions of education and culture.⁵⁶ The intensifying cultural battles of the 1980s and 1990s involved more than the coarsening effects of fart jokes on TV and raunchy lyrics on the radio: they were fundamentally about power and who wields it to determine the boundaries of belonging and symbols of American culture.

Colleges offered convenient sites of and targets for politics as industrial work ceased to promise middle-class status and new paradigms for US culture arose. Declining funding and new economic roles prompted institutions of higher education to adopt market-oriented rationales for their continued existence. Philanthropy, federal grants, and patent licensing became more central to funding while curricula shifted to answer specific needs of private industry.⁵⁷ During these years, elites lamented fractures in mainstream culture and institutions alongside a fraying sense of national community or a common set of ideals.⁵⁸ Multiculturalists, however, rejected the melting-pot ideal of US culture and reimagined bonds of belonging through group identities.⁵⁹ Culture-war battles over academic freedom and curricula occurred as the workings of universities grew increasingly politicized in that context—and these battles continue to shape the landscape of higher education to the present.⁶⁰

No one can understand the multifaceted culture wars that continue to rage without understanding the business and politics of institutions on the front lines—especially the politics of college radio. Campus stations were in the crosshairs of government regulators, increasingly diverse sets of affluent Americans, and local communities underserved by media in an era of austerity that was already causing social services, media outlets, and public spaces to contract. The culture wars are, echoing Pat Robertson, a war for the soul of America. The culture wars, revealed by college radio, also involved a war for the sound of America. While Americans consumed much national media about these battles, they participated in the culture wars through local institutions and their media outlets.⁶¹

Fighting over radio schedules and student fee allocation might be less sensational than rock stars sniping at Tipper Gore on the Senate floor during 1985’s congressional hearings on lyrical content, but the outcomes affected, arguably, more Americans. Programming decisions involved questions over whose voices would shape national culture and how public resources would honor the nation’s diversity.⁶² College radio repeatedly demonstrates that the pluralistic vision of US culture remains very much alive.

This is not a story of stations merely reflecting and channeling national political and cultural tensions.⁶³ These stations were, this book argues, crossroads for shifting and often conflicting demands on the nation’s media infrastructure, which young people found themselves navigating amid competing conceptions of universities’ role in politics, culture, and economic development. Signals existed (for the most part) on public airwaves, which involved student DJs—often unwittingly—in these intensifying battles regarding national identity and its future.

Mass media created passive consumers of culture, or so the story goes.⁶⁴ Given college radio’s amateurism, where DJs more often identify as cultural consumers than producers or distributors, its influence helped democratize the music industry and offered a participatory entry into media.⁶⁵ Audiences and programmers existed in dialogue regarding what sounds best served their interests and represented the breadth of American culture. This openness and exchange made it seem possible to forge a democratic community via the airwaves. But DJs were all too often oblivious to larger structures and realities outside their studios or campuses. And as austerity loomed, fewer constituencies remained to fight for signals’ independence if they served no clear market function. By the emergence of online broadcasting and accelerating media consolidation in the late 1990s and early 2000s, existential questions about college radio’s purpose had already riven its landscape.

College radio’s modern identity emerged through historical processes. It did not always have a reputation for noncommercialism, aesthetic authenticity, and democratic access. Indeed, on closer reflection, college radio stations that functioned as a free-flowing, utopian public sphere were ephemeral, if not apocryphal.⁶⁶ College radio circumvented existing gatekeepers in the mainstream music industry in the early 1980s but ended up creating new ones. Still, college radio’s modern identity formation was not an inevitable story of corporate co-optation and selling out. Instead, the contested nature of college radio’s history is what made the medium so vibrant and cherished among participants and listeners. Through the stories of stations and the DJs taking to the airwaves, this history of college radio investigates how it defied the mainstream to offer a more authentic musical culture while shaping the very mainstream participants purported to detest—all within a rapidly changing and increasingly politicized educational and media landscape.

Part I  Out of the Alternative 1970s

River of shiiiiit / River of shiiiiiiit / Flow oooooooooon / River of shiiiiiiiit

—The Fugs, Wide, Wide River, It Crawled into my Hand, Honest (1968)

It was winter 1969. Bob Harris held up the beautiful yellow translucent vinyl to the light, placed it on the turntable, cued it to position, and dialed the sound onto the radio. Albert Ayler’s Bells, a cacophonous saxophone piece, set the tone for Harris’s first show on WRCU, the Colgate University radio station.

Sometime that night Harris pulled out the Fugs’ recent, studio-produced album, It Crawled into My Hand, Honest. Two songs stood out: Wide, Wide River, with its hymn-like refrain of river of shit, roll on, and Grope Need. Harris cued the latter up.

Somewhere in Hamilton, New York, a few listeners noticed the song’s lyrics on WRCU’s carrier-current AM signal and penned complaints. Harris packed up his belongings at 2:15 A.M. and walked happily home, unaware of outraged listeners recording their ire on paper, affixing stamps, and directing them to WRCU.

Station manager Ken Bader opened that week’s listener mail and could not ignore the complaints. Lyrics such as sticking my horny candy cane into your existential hole qualified as obscene, as far as Bader was concerned, and the refrain of Horny! Horny horny horny! amounted to sexual content in violation of community standards of decency. Bader, later a respected broadcaster with Public Radio International and National Public Radio, would become known for his exacting professionalism. Horny candy canes would not stand on his watch.¹

Bader called Harris to his dorm room, inviting his guest to take a seat on the bed. As preppy Colgate sophomores wandered by the bland, unmemorable room, Harris shifted to find a comfortable position and receive his reprimand. He had only DJ’d one show and he was already in trouble.²

In the cramped quarters, Bader insisted existential hole and horny candy cane were explicit sexual references. Harris questioned obscenity’s definition—which fluctuated amid ongoing Supreme Court cases and student protests for free speech protections on campus.³ Bader didn’t buy it. Dissidents like Harris threatened WRCU’s reputation and pending FM license, which would reach far more listeners, Bader reasoned.

He fired Harris, there in the dorm room.

There ended my official career in college radio, Harris remembered.

College radio, before and long after 1969, enjoyed a reputation for amateurism. Students such as Harris experimented with new sounds to expand listeners’ minds and tastes. As college stations moved to FM, it wasn’t clear if such amateurism would fly anymore. The previous year, Bader’s predecessors shut down broadcasts of political commentary, including anti–Vietnam War editorials amid 1968’s Tet Offensive.⁴ To satisfy complaining alumni and donors, WRCU’s programming softened to please everybody by playing a little bit of everything.⁵

WRCU’s dissidents persisted. They carved out late-night blocks to air experimental, non-commercial, non-Top 40 rock and roll defying the pablum of mainstream radio.⁶ A campus-based station should avoid teeny bopper music, they argued, and instead educate listeners in the psychedelic rock of Jefferson Airplane and the Mothers of Invention or in John Coltrane and free jazz. In freeform radio, DJs could explore whatever music suited their mood, their trip, or their whims. A Mozart concerto could be followed by Vanilla Fudge, if they so desired. In the mid-1960s, freeform radio formats sprouted at FM stations in San Francisco, New York, Boston, and elsewhere. DJs made overtly political statements, with some stations airing a non-stop anti-war rally, as one radio historian put it, alongside album cuts and instrumentals for listeners to enjoy on higher-quality FM signals. Drug use was common among DJs, prompting Vice President Spiro Agnew’s ire at a White House conference on drugs and the radio industry.⁷

Harris’s countercultural tastes fit the freeform ethos. Bob Fass’s Radio Unnameable on New York City’s progressive Pacifica Foundation station WBAI showed him how radio could be as transgressive as film. He joined WRCU to express himself on the airwaves, part of a convergence between freeform and college radio that students across the nation envisioned.⁸

But college stations also trained future broadcast professionals, such as Bader, who used these radio laboratories to hone their skills, learn regulations, build résumés, and provide edifying content for surrounding areas with the debut of new FM signals such as planned at Colgate. The ten-watt, class D license and decreasing technology costs lowered universities’ barriers to entry, and they could no longer ignore FM’s public relations benefits.

Despite universities’ reputation for harboring protesters and fostering countercultural critics of mainstream values, norms, and expression, most college radio stations remained, well, square. Stations depended on supportive campuses and the students who worked the boards, many of whom saw highbrow musical enlightenment as aligned with college radio’s educational purpose. Still, students pursued radio for numerous reasons, and universities invested in signals for their own, equally varied, purposes.

Where those conflicting desires would lead college radio, even in the counterculture’s peak visibility during 1969 with that summer’s Woodstock Festival, remained unclear. Higher education’s role in American life was unsettled. Claimants to these new FM stations envisioned them providing professional training, cultural representation, democratic access to the airwaves, and educational programming in the public’s interest. As a result, a new idea of alternative radio emerged, one strongly associated—although not exclusively—with college radio. The medium during the 1970s established a separate identity from public radio broadcasting.

Whether Harris programmed obscene music remained an open question, but students like Bader, bent on professionalizing college radio, would not prevail. Others followed in Harris’s footsteps, cementing college radio on FM as a place for alternative sounds. What that meant for college radio’s future remained as vague as the counterculture’s legacy.

As radio’s popularity shifted from AM to FM, college signals remained diverse—much like the nation’s universities themselves. Not all were small, noncommercial ten-watt FM stations, although these were the majority. Commercial college stations, particularly at Ivy League institutions and others in the Northeast, developed an early foothold on FM. These bridged the gap between noncommercial college and commercial radio.

In 1972, WPRB at Princeton University unveiled a new sound that expanded its diverse musical offerings. Leaders announced the format as defining one of the most progressive radio stations in the entire country. WPRB offered the sophisticated sound of progressive rock alongside classical, jazz that’s cool, and soul that’s hot. WPRB relied on advertising revenue, although the institution subsidized rent and electrical service. Programmers targeted community listeners alongside college students.⁹ As the program director explained, We’re aiming for a station that you can listen to, as well as have on in the background when you go about your business.¹⁰ DJs sustained an alternative, progressive station offering a little of everything while achieving financial viability.¹¹

Divisions between college stations and commercial radio were blurry. DJs often graduated to commercial or public radio, thanks to preparation at collegiate stations. And describing alternative radio grew more difficult by 1980. One program director defined it as fluid. It could cause quite a furor with some people, she explained, as everyone has his own concept of what ‘alternative’ programming means. The term progressive circulated, too. In the 1970s, progressive rock experimented with classical forms and electronic instruments, exemplifying virtuosity in musicianship. Progressive radio applied to left-leaning organizations such as the Pacifica Foundation and its programming. Yet by the late 1970s, progressive rock meant the sounds emerging after punk—the rise of a new wave of synthesizers and experimental music often from Great Britain and Europe. Individual program directors might define what went out over the airwaves under the alternative or progressive banner.¹²

The mainstream fragmented. Radio programmers segmented audiences by age, gender, and race. Commercial FM diverged into narrower radio formats and genres. Disco supplanted rock music as that genre lost its connection to partying and dancing, with artists seeking to prove their technical prowess with music for the head rather than the body. Older listeners, a radio consultant explained, looked for the Grateful Dead; a new generation clamored for Ted Nugent; and the mainstream crowd was perfectly happy with Heart and Kansas. By the late 1970s, new wavers demanded XTC; art-rockers wanted the Talking Heads. American popular music both diversified and stagnated, depending on whom you asked. At major record labels, commercial radio, and stadium-sized concerts, the number of true stars narrowed in the risk-averse industry.¹³

Music and radio scholars identify 1978 as when college music emerged as a genre. It included musicians from subcultural bohemian enclaves that would define underground indie music in subsequent years as well as cross over to mainstream success.¹⁴ Music, news, and information lacking broad commercial appeal, or that offered specific communities educational or public service content, might be found on college signals. Some took their cue from freeform, operating as the pipe dream of hippies, as one DJ called the station at the University of Hawaii.

College stations experimented and explored. Reggae and funk were popular. Folk maintained a loyal, if narrow, fan base, before its 1980s pop revival. While most college DJs resisted shouting like Top 40 announcers, many achieved a professional sound. Still, college radio’s reputation as an amateur aural sandbox was well earned, with untrained students mumbling their way through announcements and playlists. Whatever the case, college radio in the 1970s could be characterized roughly as alternative—leaving it to DJs and programmers to determine what the term meant and how they would define the left of the dial.

1  Redefining College Radio in the Late 1970s

Music from The Demi-Monde, Oedipus on WTBS (M.I.T.), 1977¹

The Kinks, Till the End of the Day

Flamin’ Groovies, Teenage Head

The Stranglers, Hanging Around

Cheap Trick, You’re All Talk

The Count Bishops, Route 66

AC/DC, Let There Be Rock

Ramones, Suzy Is a Headbanger

Tweeds, Shortwave

Chris Stamey, The Summer Sun

The Dictators, Science Has Gone Too Far

It’s shitty,