The 12 Days of Radio Station Signs

Happy Impending New Year! Now that I’ve wrapped up my 12 Days of Radio Station Signage series, here’s an opportunity for you to match each sign with its corresponding station. Some of them are obvious if you look closely at the pictures, others may be a bit more challenging. Ready, set, go!

Day 1: Do Not Spray

Day 2: Dead Fish

Day 3: You are Being Monitored

Day 4: Zero Tolerance Graffiti Policy

Day 5: Never Use Swear Words

Day 6: Please Put Records and CDs Back

Day 7: File Your Records Diagram

Day 8: Mic Technique

Day 9: Seven Deadly Words

Day 10: CD and LP Library Alphabetization

Day 11: When this Light is On…Shut Up!

Day 12: Don’t Go Back Here or Touch Anything

Guess Which Station Goes with Which Sign

Here are the stations where these photos were taken (in alphabetical order):

KCSB-FM

KDRT-LP

KDVS-FM

KEAR-AM (Family Radio Headquarters)

KSFS-FM

KSJS-FM

KUSF in Exile

KZSC-FM

KZSU-FM

WGBK-FM

WHRC

WZBC-FM

If you want to guess which station goes with which sign, please include a comment below. Good luck!

So, with that, here’s my list of the top five things that every college radio station MUST have:

Hanging Records at WVFI

1. Record Art:

My favorite example is the 7″ vinyl-decorated hallway at WVFI at University of Notre Dame. The DJs there promised me that the station owned duplicate copies of all of the records used in this art project.

I’ve also seen melted records hanging from ceilings and funky retro albums tacked to walls.

Sticker Cabinet at KUSF

2. Sticker-plastered metal cabinet:

If you go to any college station and check out the spaces occupied by the music directors, no doubt you will find metal cabinets covered with every sticker imaginable.

Many are band stickers that have either come with the promotional CDs and records that get sent to stations or have been brought to the station by visiting musicians. I also keep an eye out for stickers from other college stations, as they often can be found amid the collage as well.

3. Funky old couch:

Every college radio station needs a hand-me-down couch for DJs to lounge and sleep on. At my current station there’s been a series of couches since I’ve been there.

Couch at WHRC

Some were rumored to be soaked with cat pee and others were more glamorous cast-offs from someone’s parents.

When I visited college station Flirt FM in Ireland this past summer, I was warned about their couch as they joked that it was probably infested with swine flu.

4. At least one piece of ancient equipment:

Some stations have graveyards full of dead equipment, including broken cart machines, tape decks, reel-to-reels, and turntables.

Instant Replay Machine at WNYU

I’ve been to several that have retired boards on display, from the cigar-box crafted antique at KALX to the board that I used at WHRC back in the 1980s (which is just hanging out on a shelf amid some old vinyl). The retro technology that’s my personal favorite, though, is an ’80s looking (complete with mauve accents and New Wave swoosh design) instant replay machine that I spotted at WNYU.

5. Pop culture artifacts:

Funky decor is a staple of any self-respecting college radio station and I’ve seen tons of creative uses of weird objects and pop culture artifacts during my visits.

Skull at KALX

I spied a Scooby Doo mystery machine in the KUSF record library, skulls at both KALX and WBAR, and an owl with a stick in its eye at KFJC (there used to be a hanging prosthetic arm there too).

What else do you expect to see at a college radio station?

But the thing that was really fun to find is from the October 15, 1935 issue of Broadcasting. In an editorial called “Murder of Music,” publisher Martin Codel writes about an “ASCAP…propaganda campaign against broadcasting.” Wow. Sounds like 2009! Here’s more text from the editorial:

“In a publicity release issued this month, ASCAP asserts that ‘murder of music’ by radio was accomplished last year when the 85 leading tunes of the year were played 1,255,669 times by the two principal networks. About two years ago ASCAP issued a propaganda blast titled Murder of Music in which it set out to prove that radio had killed sheet music, phonograph record and other musical instrument sales.”

The editorial goes on to point out that ASCAP is arguing that radio should pay up in order to make up for the loss of sheet music sales. And, it also brings up the age-old practice of pay for play:

“ASCAP does not recite in its handout the well known fact that radio tends to popularize the works of composers. Moreover, it does not bring out that composers and publishing houses are constantly plaguing the networks, stations and performers to ‘plug’ their numbers. Innumerable cases of bribery of orchestra leaders and performers have been exposed.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how Twitter and Facebook are the new “radio” for the younger generation. It’s almost hard to believe that way back when we got our breaking news from the radio because today radio is often overlooked as a news source.

WHRC Studio 1987

A few weeks ago I was at my college reunion and revisited the campus radio station WHRC. During my visit I talked to a lot of people about the station and the role that it played on campus in the 1980s. Everyone had bits and pieces of nostalgia to pass along, but what really amazed me was that several people had distinct memories of first hearing about the Challenger disaster in 1986 while listening to WHRC. At the time the campus-only station was piped in to the dining center and, in fact, the main WHRC audience was during meal times. So all of the people who I talked to were probably eating lunch in the dining center when they heard the news together about this tragedy.

Similarly, when Kurt Cobain died in 1994 (another defining tragic moment for my generation), the first people to mention it around my office had heard the news over the radio. However, this was also the first time that I remember hearing that the Internet was actually breaking news, as it was buzzing over word of Cobain’s death. This was during the early days of the Internet (I’m not even sure if we had email at my office yet), when those participating in online communities like The Well were trailblazing true hipster geeks. I’m pretty sure it was my friend’s sister who worked at Wired (a hip magazine about technology? Crazy!) who was getting some of these early reports on Cobain and passing the news along to those of us in technologically-deprived offices.

Flash forward to today, when breaking news spreads like wildfire through mobile devices, online, on Twitter, and through social networking hubs like Facebook. It kind of makes you wonder if these tools are supplanting radio in some way. An interview with Cracker’s David Lowery in Glide touches on this, making the point that Twitter and Facebook may even be the new college radio, not just for their ability to break news, but also in that they facilitate music scenes:

I see you’re on Facebook and fans can follow you guys on Twitter.  Quite different from the 80’s…or is it?

Well, exactly.  It’s different from the ‘80’s in that it’s much easier to maintain a grass roots following now.  But we basically tried all of this networking back then, just in a different way.  We collected people’s addresses, we had mailing lists, we had a newsletter.  We went around to the college radio stations, which to us back in the early’80’s was our underground blog.  We would play on the college stations and then do a show in the college towns and there was this belief that we would associate ourselves with like-minded people, which is a lot like the social networking tools of today.

There was something about the popularity of the college radio station back in the 80’s that made music so special.  Students today have no idea what that was like…

I’ll tell you what it was.  College radio in the ‘80’s was very egalitarian…it was about playing pop music for our generation…

Indeed, radio can (and did) bring people together to help spread news, spread scenes, and even spread music out to a wider audience. Although radio’s declining influence is true overall, I do think that non-commercial radio and college radio in particular, is still a powerful force. Even for breaking news. Just this week, in 2009, I got a call during my college radio show from someone following up on news he’d heard on the radio earlier in the day about the death of surf legend Bob Bogle of the Ventures. He asked if I could verify the news for him. It was like the olden days before the Internet, when people would call radio and TV stations to find out things like “was that an earthquake that I just felt?” and “where is the Sonic Youth show tonight?” And it confirmed my strong belief that radio isn’t dead yet.