WUAG
At the intellectual powerhouse that is the University of North Carolina at Greensboro lives a tiny radio station with enough wattage to broadcast literally a mile off of campus.
As a fresh man, my roommate David and I had the valuable and highly in demand slot of 1am to 4am on Wednesday nights our first semester. I think that was right.
Whatever it was, it wrecked havoc on my education career.
The next semester I was able to move to the much more pleasant 10pm to 1am on Tuesday nights. I had a small notebook that I’m sure is in this apartment somewhere where I listed what I wanted to play every week and even had a short list of ‘standards’ that I’d play every week. No idea what was on that list, but I imagine it’d make my cringe something fierce today.
Nerding Out
Like every dumb white guy who had a radio show in college (“Wow! You had a radio show in college?!”, says nobody excitedly) this was a huge opportunity to geek out over music. As a child, I had spent many hours in record stores and spent many allowances on 45 records (I’m old) but working at the radio station was a friggin’ candy store (if I was a kid and liked candy).
Bands were sending us records. There were stacks and stacks of records. Bands sent us little oddball releases that you couldn’t buy.
It was wonderful. I bought a lot of TDK SA90s to record everything and would drown friends and love-interests with cassettes of stuff.
Fired Twice
I was fired twice. That stunk.
Damn Woody! (rest in peace)
In one of those later years (junior or senior) I was offered a “job” on the “executive board”. I was “promotions manager”.
Honestly, I have no idea what I was supposed to do and I fear that I did nothing.
But, what it meant was that I had an office (or a desk in an office) and a phone and a set of keys. Oh, the keys. The keys were the best.
Four Track
Probably my favorite was the four-track in the production room that I spent many late hours with making noisy things. If I had the space and a bit of cash, I’d totally recreate that production room now with the two Technics turntables and the fancy reel-to-reel four track. Good times.
Newspaper Article
The notorious (in that he passed out on our porch once) newspaper columnist in our little city once came by and interviewed me and wrote an article about college radio. I was featured in the newspaper. My grandmother thought that was great.
March 27, 1990 - It's just another manic Tuesday night here in Anti-Radio Land, which means absolutely anything can happen at absolutely any moment.
Sure enough, here it comes.
Rich Robot hosts a weekly exercise in mayhem called ``The Lima Bean Hour'' here on WUAG-FM, the student radio station at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He's just answered a phone call from some goober of a listener who doesn't know...
The article made me sound like a bit of a jerk.
Lima Bean Hour That was my show. Lots of noise. I was inspired by the radio show that the Negativland guys did out on the west coast - except that they didn’t have to do proper station breaks and public service announcements.
This was apparently my last show, although I think I milked the “this is my last show” thing for a few weeks.
