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Pomona College Magazine is published three times a year by Pomona College
550 N. College Ave, Claremont, CA 91711
Online Editor: Mark Kendall
For editorial matters:
Editor: Mark Wood
Phone: (909) 621-8158
Fax: (909) 621-8203
PCM Editorial Guidelines
Contact Alumni Records for changes of address, class notes, or notice
of births or deaths.
Phone: (909) 621-8635
Fax: (909) 621-8535
Email: alumni@pomona.edu
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Radio Archeology: Part 3
KSPC took a slide in the '70s, then made
an '80s comeback
Artifact // The Student Life April 19, 1971 //
“KSPC Won’t Obey FCC
Order on ‘Drug Lyrics;’ Agnew Blamed For ‘Blatant Form of Censorship.’” Pomona’s radio station KSPC-FM has no intention of complying with the
controversial “drug lyric law” issued by the Federal Communications
Commission, says station manager Dave Carniglia [’72] …[Vice President]
Spiro Agnew, who fulminated against drug songs like “With a Little Help
From My Friends” by the Beatles, is seen by … Carniglia as the
motivating force behind the FCC’s apparently repressive act.
Artifact // Off the Air, KSPC’s staff newsletter, October 23, 1979 //
Remember fun can go too far. It’s fine to develop a style on the air,
but you have to temper it so that there is an element of control….
[Also] Hattie and Hugh, as well as your fellow “radio personalities,”
urge you to refile your records!!!!!!!!!
“The man” had caught up with underground college radio, and what started
out as well wishes from Vice President Richard Nixon had turned into
universally-ignored invective from his vice president calling for radio
stations to self-censor. By the decade’s end the FCC made a move to push
college radio above ground, requiring broadcast for at least 12 hours a
day, 365 days a year. Musical programming helped fill the hours with FM
radio shifting its focus away from pop hits to entire albums, giving
rise to the decade’s musical focus on album-oriented rock.
Gary Kates by this time had enrolled at Pitzer and joined KSPC’s deejay
staff to fulfill his radio dreams. “It was a really fun environment for
me to express myself through the music I played,” he said. “It was a
very indulgent thing that was a fantasy of every kid.” Kates — a
musician himself who formed a couple bands while on campus — played
mostly from his own record collection, favoring the Beach Boys (but not
the AM hits!), the newly emerging crop of singer-songwriters, and album and B-side “obscurities” from popular artists of
the day — “these hidden little treasures that the corporation didn’t
think would sell” as Kates recalls.
Fellow ’70s deejay Charles Ulrich ’79 remembers his time at the station
as an outlet for personal musical interests as well, offering a chance
to champion ’70s FM radio icons such as Roy Wood, the Bonzo Dog Band,
Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Kinks (whose lyrics provided his
nom de radio, Johnny Thunder). He also favored the music of Frank Zappa.
No stranger to Claremont, Zappa as a “townie” briefly had hosted his own
KSPC program “Uncle Frankie’s Show” in the early ’60s where he explored
his interest in all things musically outré and exercised his bizarre wit
by inviting listeners to write in and “just tell me how many kittens
that your animals have been having.”
This emphasis on personal expression transformed the station. Michael
Mitchell ’75 first came to KSPC as a 13-year-old as a part of Project
Open Future, a program developed in part by Myrlie Evers-Williams ’68 to
help inner-city youth prepare for college. Mitchell got to do some
summer program work at KSPC and he was hooked. He enrolled at the
College and as a freshman helped to organize “Black Nite,” a block of
programming that allowed several African-American deejays to work and
gain recognition as a collective. The group reached out to the community
in 1972 with fliers that explained “Our programming is centered around
music, but we must educate people politically, socially and economically
because this enlightenment is needed and overdue.” The group felt it was
important to bring Black Nite out of the radio station as well and would
provide remote broadcast music from activities such as the Black Student
Union “feast” in the Wash. “When I see these youngsters today with two
turntables and a mixer, well that’s what I did in 1973,” says Mitchell.
But by decade’s end the emphasis on doing one’s own thing was taking its
toll on the station as a unit. Student Life articles, internal
communications, and program guides from the era document that the
station was having trouble meeting FCC guidelines for minimum broadcast
hours and complying with on-air regulations. There were internal efforts
to rein things in, but station’s future looked bleak. Salvation came
from a blue ribbon committee charged with revitalizing the station and a
commitment from the Board of Trustees to endorse radio at Pomona
College.
Artifact // Student Life, October 2, 1981 // “Full-Time Director Hired
at KSPC” KSPC has broken its 25-year tradition of autonomous student
management. Pomona College has created the position of Director of
College Radio, which was filled by Julie Ewens [Frick] in July of this
year.
Artifact // Various deejay comments on the sleeve of the 1984 Sonic
Youth and Lydia Lunch EP “Death Valley ’69” // “One of the best new rock
sounds in music”; “Thrasher garbage! Go play an English Beat record,
dork”; “This is a real band, not a big label’s invention”; “Please play
all the time.”
KSPC got its act together just in time for popular music to begin to
fracture. First things first: The College made a commitment to upgrade
the station’s equipment and staff so that it could meet the stricter FCC
requirements. Julie Ewens Frick signed on as director of college radio,
KSPC’s first full-time, paid position. She provided administrative
continuity for the station and managed the student staff that had grown
to about 100 deejays and volunteers.
In the same year, a little band out of Athens, GA called R.E.M. produced
and “self-released” a single, “Radio Free Europe,” revolutionizing
college radio in the process. The band and single sparked a movement for
small college stations such as KSPC to shift away from music produced
and distributed by record companies to music generated by independent
start-up labels usually run out of the basements and garages of the
recording artists themselves or their die-hard fans. In the span of a
few short years, this renegade movement had spawned its own genre, known
as indie (as in independent) or college rock.
Bill Chen ’86 served as KSPC’s music director in the middle of this
transformation. He recalls that the station kept receiving more and more
records from completely unknown acts on completely unknown labels. They
didn’t know what to do with them all. “After I became the music
director, I decided that I was going to listen to every record that came
into the station,” said Chen. “It was a reckless decision that led to a
decline in my grade-point average.” The station dealt with the abundance
of discs by asking deejays to review releases for consideration. Album
jackets quickly became forums for deejays to converse with each other
about their tastes in music, personal choices that began to diverge as
the idea of a homogenous “top 40” music scene itself began to unravel.
Franklin Bruno ’90 followed Chen as music director and quickly found
himself ensconced in an indie rock scene where deejays and fans defined
themselves through their music (i.e., are you a “hesher” or a “goth?”)
and were more than happy to join in good-natured debate. “KSPC had a
massive impact on my sense of what it is to have real aesthetic and
political debates about what’s valuable in music,” he says, “and the
fact that commerce is not the only measure of success, even in forms
that are more closely connected to ‘mass’ or ‘low’ culture than ‘art’ as
such. A way of treating popular and not-so-popular music as though it
mattered in the larger world: that’s what I’ve taken away from the
station.”
Deejays Mike “E-Z Mike” Simpson (Pitzer) and John “King Gizmo” King
(Harvey Mudd) enlivened the airwaves with “The Funk Show,” blurring the
lines between the record and the deejay by rapping live as they
“scratched” old funk and soul records. (“Yo Gizmo/What up, E-Z?/Fresh
funky beats on KSPC/Gonna tell a little story/And start from the
beginning/About two turntables/And how we keep ’em spinning/From right
to left/And back to right/We rock from 9 to 12 on/Tuesday night!”) E-Z
and King Gizmo in effect helped pioneer the modern art of deejay
“turntablism” on-air at KSPC. The pair later resurfaced on the L.A.
music scene as the Dust Brothers, releasing records in their own right
and producing, among others, Beck and the Beastie Boys.
The lines started to get hazy between the people making records and
those playing them as well. Indie was a lifestyle; Bruno now releases
records as a solo artist, writes frequently about music and culture, and
is involved with two prominent indie rock bands, Nothing Painted Blue
and the Mountain Goats. Both he and Chen remained associated with the
station long after they graduated. KSPC deejays do have a way of
sticking around. Remember Beach Boys–lovin’ Gary Kates from early in the
’70s? He’s now Pomona’s vice president for academic affairs and dean of
the College.
continued ...
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