Pop! Goes the Radio

(This little story is just a prelude to a post coming later about ... well, about music.)

When I visited Denison as a senior in high school, I was hosted by a group of guys who – score one for the geniuses in Beth Eden – I came to realize were as nerdy (in their own ways) as I was, though at the time it wasn't obvious. Actually, even after graduation and, I'd wager, even today, it's probably still not obvious ... One of them (I think it was Todd Gutnik) was a bigwig at WDUB, the 50-watt (that's not a typo) radio station that broadcast as far away as Heath. My dad's CB radio had more power, but the station had a professional board and a huge record collection, and I decided during the visit that what I wanted most in life was to be on the radio.

Tryouts were announced in The Bullsheet not long after my first semester started, and I nervously went to the basement of Knapp to fill out the paperwork and be interviewed. DUB's studio was pretty amazing; it didn't look like much from the outside, but it was impressively spacious behind the door. There was a lounge with an absolutely skanky couch and a few offices in the back, an insanely narrow room to the right that housed the record collection ... and straight ahead was the Valhalla, the Holy Grail – the studio.

The board, with all its sliders and dials, intimidated me, though I had to laugh to myself because there actually were two turntables and a microphone, though I was never, ever, not even once, tempted to try my scratching skills ... The board in the studio looked down onto a large, soundproofed room with long tables punctuated by mics and headphones. It was like watching the engineering room on the Enterprise, and I often imagined that's what it was, though the room was usually empty and dark.

During tryouts, though, the senior staff was sitting around down there, and we were ushered into the engineer's studio, which was right next to the main studio upstairs. The windows were taped over – you couldn't see them, and they couldn't see you. I was told to back-announce a few songs I would have just played in my imaginary DJ universe, then to read some on-campus promotional items culled from press releases. I was nervous; I wanted to impress these faceless voices with my oh-so-hip musical tastes, and prove once and for all that the kid with the mullet and paunch was far cooler than he might look at first glance.

It must have worked, because I was called back, tapped on the shoulder and honored by being named as an apprentice for a semester. I was assigned to (if memory serves) Friday Abernethy, on whom I had a massive, major, super-duper crush, made all the more tragic by the fact that I had taken to wearing anti-sexual-attraction cologne for my first year on campus, which made me the pimply equivalent of her nerdy kid brother's even more nerdy friend who always wore that Millenium Falcon t-shirt and started wheezing whenever she smiled.

So I survived not getting ravished on the control room floor, and graduated to full-fledged DJ status to start my sophomore year. I'd been inspired by my good friend Rob (then) Plourde to do an all-Beatles show called "Sitting on a Cornflake," usually on Sunday afternoons – lighter in the first hour, heavier in the second. It was a good show, and had a few off-campus followers. One guy sent me a cassette of some bootlegs that ended up making it onto "Anthology Vol. I" ... the "Whoa love me too" part gave me goosebumps 18 years ago, and listening to it just now, I got 'em again.

I had success, but I got tired of being known as "the Beatles guy" around campus. My good friend Nancy was abroad during our junior year; she and I were active in the theatre department, though I'd say that only one of us actually had talent for it. (I was house manager, if that gives you the answer.) She was stage managing a show, and it was the stage manager's prerogative to play music through the house – she was the boss, and if the boss wanted ABBA, the boss got ABBA.

Which is what she wanted. I hadn't really considered ABBA before that point, but something about the long, October afternoon in Ace Morgan made "Knowing Me, Knowing You" sound like something I should get to know better. She'd brought back "ABBA Gold" from London, and I picked up my copy a few days later. I became transfixed – it was gorgeous, amazing, sugary pop music. The Beatles were pop, of course, but not like this; if the Beatles were chocolate cake, ABBA was cotton candy. And I liked cotton candy.

My final semester, the radio show became "Pop! Goes the Radio," dedicated to a flavor of pop music that didn't get played often on college radio, mainly because only old people were listening to The Turtles and Frank Sinatra and Cyndi Lauper at the time ... but it was all good to me. Something about a catchy hook and an irresistible chorus meant more to me than the latest angst from heroin-thin white men or the Kurt Cobain wannabes that ruled the playlists at the time. I was out of sync with my generation, and I was glad for it.