WRVU: AN APPRECIATION
Jun. 13th, 2011 10:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogThe last good radio station in Nashville, TN is off the air.
The spectrum license for WRVU – a.k.a. 91 Rock, a.k.a. the radio station of Vanderbilt University, a.k.a. the best radio station in town – has been sold to Nashville Public Radio for $3.35 million and is now an all-classical music station called WFCL.
Damn.
I first heard about WRVU from a fellow DJ-wannabe inhigh school, but at the time I lived a little too far out of signal range. By mid-1984 – at which time I was living in a roach-infested room in East Nashville, washed out of college, jobless and increasingly broke with nothing but a ten-speed for transportation which someone inevitably stole – I became a regular listener and was hooked by all the incredible music they would play. It opened me up to a whole world of music I never knew existed – it was the first place I heard REM, Laurie Anderson, The Ramones, The Sex Pistols and even obscure 70s bands like Focus, to name but a few. It was like tuning into another dimension (especially when tuning in late at night), and it was everything that I thought radio ought to be – free-form, eclectic, experimental and non-commercial.
When I re-started university four years later, I signed up for the college radio station at both universities I attended (WAPX-FM and WIDB, in that order). In both cases, WRVU was the benchmark I set for myself. And all the while, whenever I was in Nashville, I’d tune into WRVU exclusively, which continued my music education, turning me on to obscure funk, reggae, bluegrass, blues and classic jazz as well as the usual rock-underground sound, to include plenty of Nashville’s underrated alt-music scene at the time.
And I’d attend the WRVU fundraiser concerts whenever I could, partly to support the cause, but also because they had a lot of good local bands. (I even performed in one – if you attended the one where Fun Girls From Mt Pilot had a stripping cop onstage … I was the cop.).
The good news – such as it is – is that it’s not the end of WRVU as such. It will still exist online, and starting this September, will broadcast on one of WPLN’s HD radio channels. That does mean fans will have to splurge on a new radio in order to tune in. Chalk it up to the trade-off of technological progress – online radio and HD radio mean more space for more broadcast voices. But it’ll cost you something. (At least $40 in the case of a new HD radio.)
It’s also only fair to say that while I’m not happy that Nashville Public Radio bought them (ostensibly because they wanted to run separate stations for classical music and the NPR talk programs), better them than, say, Clear Channel or Bott Radio Network. Because the last thing Nashville needs is ANOTHER country music station (there are something like 12 of them now) or Christian station (17!).
On the other hand, they could have handled it better. A lot of WRVU DJs had no idea about the change until they showed up for their next shift and found themselves locked out of the building.
Also, WRVU isn’t the first college radio frequency an NPR affiliate has bought in recent times, and by the looks of things won’t be the last. Which suggests the heyday of college radio as we know it is just about over.
But then that’s true of radio in general, in a way. The industry won’t die, but I’m one of those old farts who grew up with the concept of broadcast radio as a companion – for me, radio was a magic box tuning into the ether to see what and who was there. And as the broadcasting business has morphed horribly into clusters of identikit formats run by the same handful of conglomerates, it was good to have at least one slot on the dial where you could find something unusual.
Those days are ending. That’s a damn shame, Jim. And while it’s nice that HD radio and the Interweb will at least make it possible for the likes of WRVU to continue, it ain’t the same.
Off the air,
This is dF
The spectrum license for WRVU – a.k.a. 91 Rock, a.k.a. the radio station of Vanderbilt University, a.k.a. the best radio station in town – has been sold to Nashville Public Radio for $3.35 million and is now an all-classical music station called WFCL.
Damn.
I first heard about WRVU from a fellow DJ-wannabe inhigh school, but at the time I lived a little too far out of signal range. By mid-1984 – at which time I was living in a roach-infested room in East Nashville, washed out of college, jobless and increasingly broke with nothing but a ten-speed for transportation which someone inevitably stole – I became a regular listener and was hooked by all the incredible music they would play. It opened me up to a whole world of music I never knew existed – it was the first place I heard REM, Laurie Anderson, The Ramones, The Sex Pistols and even obscure 70s bands like Focus, to name but a few. It was like tuning into another dimension (especially when tuning in late at night), and it was everything that I thought radio ought to be – free-form, eclectic, experimental and non-commercial.
When I re-started university four years later, I signed up for the college radio station at both universities I attended (WAPX-FM and WIDB, in that order). In both cases, WRVU was the benchmark I set for myself. And all the while, whenever I was in Nashville, I’d tune into WRVU exclusively, which continued my music education, turning me on to obscure funk, reggae, bluegrass, blues and classic jazz as well as the usual rock-underground sound, to include plenty of Nashville’s underrated alt-music scene at the time.
And I’d attend the WRVU fundraiser concerts whenever I could, partly to support the cause, but also because they had a lot of good local bands. (I even performed in one – if you attended the one where Fun Girls From Mt Pilot had a stripping cop onstage … I was the cop.).
The good news – such as it is – is that it’s not the end of WRVU as such. It will still exist online, and starting this September, will broadcast on one of WPLN’s HD radio channels. That does mean fans will have to splurge on a new radio in order to tune in. Chalk it up to the trade-off of technological progress – online radio and HD radio mean more space for more broadcast voices. But it’ll cost you something. (At least $40 in the case of a new HD radio.)
It’s also only fair to say that while I’m not happy that Nashville Public Radio bought them (ostensibly because they wanted to run separate stations for classical music and the NPR talk programs), better them than, say, Clear Channel or Bott Radio Network. Because the last thing Nashville needs is ANOTHER country music station (there are something like 12 of them now) or Christian station (17!).
On the other hand, they could have handled it better. A lot of WRVU DJs had no idea about the change until they showed up for their next shift and found themselves locked out of the building.
Also, WRVU isn’t the first college radio frequency an NPR affiliate has bought in recent times, and by the looks of things won’t be the last. Which suggests the heyday of college radio as we know it is just about over.
But then that’s true of radio in general, in a way. The industry won’t die, but I’m one of those old farts who grew up with the concept of broadcast radio as a companion – for me, radio was a magic box tuning into the ether to see what and who was there. And as the broadcasting business has morphed horribly into clusters of identikit formats run by the same handful of conglomerates, it was good to have at least one slot on the dial where you could find something unusual.
Those days are ending. That’s a damn shame, Jim. And while it’s nice that HD radio and the Interweb will at least make it possible for the likes of WRVU to continue, it ain’t the same.
Off the air,
This is dF
