Radio Survivor

Recently I was tracking some college radio news when I ran across Greg Blouch’s website, “Radio Sticker of the Day.” Immediately I was taken back to my junior high school years when radio station stickers were a hot commodity. My classmate Ricky Kanazawa would spend most of our English class time focused on a stack of bright yellow and black KOME stickers and an exacto knife, carving up new, inspired, psychedelic creations. I’m not sure if Greg has tapped into this aspect of sticker art; but his website is a testament to the most visible radio station branding that there is.

I dropped Greg a note to find out what fuels his obsession for radio station stickers and learn more about his website, “Radio Sticker of the Day.”

It turns out that his fascination with stickers began in the 1980s, around the same time that my friends and I were plastering KOME, KSJO, and KMEL stickers (with a picture of a camel on them) all over our notebooks, windows, and Pee-Chee folders.

Over the years he’s accumulated around 12,000 stickers and largely credits the Internet for making it easier for him to contact stations. His site only features pictures of stickers that are in his collection. I love that attention to detail! On to the interview:

Jennifer Waits: How did you get started collecting radio stickers and what was your first sticker?

Greg Blouch: When I was 13 years old our family moved from Middleport, New York (in the western part of the state near Niagara Falls/Buffalo) to Celina, Ohio.  I was homesick and wanted to get my hands on something that reminded me of New York.

My favorite radio station had been 107.7 WUWU which was an offbeat, almost freeform, rock station heavy on the new wave music of the time (this was around 1982/1983.)  I wrote to the station and asked for a sticker which I promptly wasted by slapping it on a book cover for school.

(more…)

Before we got married, in the late 90s my wife lived for two years in Dayton, OH. I would drive four hours across Indiana from my Champaign, IL home to see her. I knew that I had exited the radio desert of the Hoosier State when I could just barely tune in WOXY out of the Ohio college town of Oxford. By any measure WOXY was a unique commercial station, made all the more remarkable for being located outside of a major metroplex, though its signal reached into both the greater Cincinnati and Dayton areas.

WOXY’s tag line–then as now–was “the future of Rock N Roll,” playing what we’d call an alternative rock format, but marked by greater variety and less repetition than even other major alternative stations in other cities. Sometimes I’d visit on a Friday when my wife was still at work and I’d move the radio antenna all around her suburban Kettering apartment in order to keep pulling WOXY’s refreshing signal while I’d read and keep myself occupied.

After my wife moved away from Dayton we’d still tune in WOXY’s internet stream to get a different take on alternative rock, even though Champaign has a pretty good radio dial for a small Central Illinois city.

However, in 2004 WOXY’S owners sold their broadcast station–for about 14 times what they paid for it–and went online only. Since then the online WOXY has changed hands and recently announced a move to Austin, TX. But the station successfully soldiers on, continuing to serve up the kind of indie rock unheard on broadcast commercial radio. As a result it’s arguably one of the premiere indie rock stations on the interwebs.

A new short (9 minute) documentary by Zachary Herche explores WOXY’s broadcast to webcast history (via Pop Candy). In it you’ll learn how WOXY gained pre-internet national fame by being prominently featured in a popular 1988 movie starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman.

WOXY DOC from Zachary Herche on Vimeo.