Old Men on the Radio - WRCT Pittsburgh July 3, 2011

Time to revive this zombie with a five-hour mega-post.

Sometime in October 1990, at 3 AM on a Wednesday (if I remember correctly), as a sophomore civil engineering student at Carnegie Mellon, I turned on the radio transmitter for WRCT 88.3 FM in Pittsburgh, PA, and began my 17-year love affair with college radio. To put things in perspective, some of the hot new singles at the station were Nirvana's "Sliver/Dive" and Beat Happening's "Red Head Walking/Secret Picnic Spot" on Sub Pop, Superchunk's "Slack Motherfucker/Night Creatures" on Merge, and Jesus Lizard's "Mouthbreather/Sunday You Need Love" on Touch n Go. It was a magical time...

My last regular radio gig was a summertime shift in 2006. My last radio show was sometime in January 2007 over winter break, during what WRCT calls "random schedule." After that I started spending more of my free time on babies, home improvements, and all the other "adult" responsibilities I managed to put off until my mid-30s.

I turned 40 earlier this year. My wife asked me what I wanted to do. I'm not the "guest of honor" type so I refused any ideas for a party - surprise or otherwise. After a few weeks contemplation it struck me - Radio. I wanted to go back on the air with a couple close friends from back in the day. So we did. This is the bumbling result. Five hours of college radio by three guys with musical tastes obviously rooted in the late-80s/early-90s punk and indie scenes.

Thanks to modern technology you can download a zip file containing five 128 bitrate mp3 files covering the whole nerdly affair. WRCT records mp3 archives of every minute of broadcast in 1:10 blocks. The last 10 minutes of each file roughly overlaps the first ten minutes of the following file. To compensate for this in iTunes I set start/end times for each file to approximate continuity from one file to the next. It's not perfect but for me its close enough... and a hell of a lot easier than recording my shows on c90 cassettes back in the old days. Anyway, I don't know if my start/end times are embedded in the mp3 files here, so I noted them in the Comments field of each files' ID3 metadata just in case.

I hope you enjoy listening to this because I sure as hell enjoyed doing it.

Metalhead phone tree

Playlist: Chavez - top pocket man
Minutemen - shit from an old notebook
Come - car
Bailter Space - splat
The Speaking Canaries - life like homes
The Dead C. - This scary nest
Evergreen - petting the beast
Shorty - Hot for Teacher
Big Star - september girls
My Dad Is Dead - cool rain
The Vaselines - son of a gun
The Celibate Rifles - pretty colours
Implodes - song for fucking damon ii (trap door)
Battles - Dominican Fade
salt chunk mary - You Can't Hang
Zombi - Digitalis
Sludgehammer - Dynamite Lady
Devo - Uncontrollable Urge
thomas jefferson slave appartments - cheater's heaven
Gaunt - bored girls
Death of Samantha - geisha girl
Rocket From the Tombs - ain't it fun
Hot Snakes - hatchet job
The Ex - Burnsome
The Wave Pictures - canary wharf
Deerhunter - basement scene
Pavement - Box Elder
the dynamic truths - you take it all
the Warmers - snake charmer
Silkworm - Wet Firecracker
The Hold Steady - Banging Camp
Prisonshake - Crush Me
The Walkmen - The Rat
Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros - Johnny Appleseed
The Librarians - peace & quiet
Registrators - i call your name
The Jam - in the city
The Mono Men - took that thing
Prisonshake - almost always there
Chavez - nailed to the blank spot
Guided By Voices - jar of cardinals
The Testors - time is mine
Kurt Vile - Peeping Tomboy
Subvert Blaze - Fool
Polvo - bombsthatfallfromyoureyes
The Fall - Hip Priest
John Spencer Blues Explosion - Train #1
Beat Happening / Screaming Trees - Polly Pereguinn
Kustomized - the day i had some fun
The Effigies - body bag
Mclusky - to hell with good intentions
Volcano Suns - jak
Claw Hammer - succotash
The Embarrassment - (i'm a) don juan
Pitchblende - A Penny for the Guy
The Gordons - Sometimes
Dead Moon - Johnny's Got a Gun
Dustdevils - Throw the Bottle Full
Tom Waits - Way Down in the Hole
the 1985 - Deepest Blue
Great Plains - Letter to a Fanzine
LCD Soundsystem - Home
Nirvana - On a Plain