People Listen and Everything

A very specific memory emerged from the murky ooze at the back of my mind as I was watched MRCH finish their gear setup last Thursday night. “We have a drawing at the end”, explained the Blaze Radio program director, “you can win one of those fancy VR headsets… or some other stuff”. The Trunk Space was three-quarters full, with some stragglers still coming through the door, greeted with red cups of free soda and leftover Valentine’s-themed Sour Patch straws. If those aren’t to your liking, the normal keg of cold brew is there, but it’s four bucks. “You sign up outside”, he continued, “there’s also stickers”. Also present but not mentioned: a Blaze Radio photo op, red carpet, and bouncy house.

The program director turns to the band. Mickey Pangburn adjusts a double decker synth setup while Jesse Pangburn checks the sound on the drum pads. The program director scratches his head. Are they ready? Who knows, but they look rad.

And that’s when it hit me, in that moment of relative quiet, where no words were said, no VR was raffled off, and no song was introduced, and the room just waited for one college student with a microphone to tell them what’s next. Holy shit, I thought to myself, that guy… that’s me.

A million years ago before my first semester of college, I met with a faculty advisor to go over my freshman year slate of classes and make sure it fit neatly into some semblance of a “four year plan”. High school, at least for me, involved very little in the way of planning, so this was one of the first times I truly felt like I was doing something I would eventually regret.

A salt and pepper haired math prof squinted over my slip of paper and nodded. He smiled grimly with coffee stained teeth. “Yeah, that looks about right. It’s a lot of math. You have to take all these classes to get the prerequisites for next year, and then the year after that, and so forth. It’s all pretty linear, but this is a pretty good start.” In this moment, I realized my experience with higher education would be awful. I had been on campus at my future university no more than 30 minutes, and already it felt too long. My next four years would be filled with smug grins from this and other self-righteous academics, and not much else would be noteworthy. I left the meeting feeling like crap.

But one short stop totally redeemed the trip. An excited student volunteer in a “Change the World” t-shirt pointed out a small fair for extra-curricular programs in the cafeteria. This way, she explained, I could get in contact with the appropriate parties before the chaos of week 1 vaporized my brain. Sure, I thought, I’ll stop by. It couldn’t possibly be any more depressing than where I’d just been.

The cafeteria lightly populated, with clusters of prospective students interspersed around a handful of booths. Intramural volleyball, fashion club, a film group, something called Centurions that sent shivers down my spine… Nothing seemed appealing until I found my way towards the back of the room and found a shoddy booth with a disinterested (and very tired looking) student doing poly-sci homework. I read the board: “KSPU Radio”.

“Student radio?” I asked, more as a meager introduction than a fact check. The guy at the booth rubbed his eyes and looked up at me, squinting. “Oh, yeah man, you can like, DJ a show on air and play whatever you want. It’s sweet.” Wow, I thought, that’s a lot of power, more power than I’ve ever held in my short, mostly meaningless lifetime. “And you are really, like, on the radio?” The guy thought about the question. “Um, well, online radio, but yeah! People listen and everything.”

That was enough. I signed up for email notifications as fast as I could. I didn’t care how painful or mediocre my major would be, so long as college radio was in my future. I knew even before I started attending that KSPU would make the entire thing worth it.

It’s more than a curated low-cost night out that brings people together at college radio spring concerts. There are years of social anxiety and awkward relationship engineering that lead to moments like this, where you find 50-100 like-minded individuals for maybe the first time ever. And furthermore, it’s done with relative ease. All you have to do is show up. For the impressionable 18-22 year olds in the room, when was the last time that happened? Somewhere, there’s a chorus of parents singing “College will be better because you’ll find your people” in melancholy harmony.

I owe 80% of my friendships in high school to mix CDs. Trading music was the only venue I knew for equal exchange. For the small price of an 80 pack of blanks at Target, you could instigate an equal number of interactions, where a shiny plastic ring meant an hour of intentional consideration, digging through an mp3 collection, and making sure that the material was perfectly curated for the recipient. I’ve kept every mix CD I’ve ever received, and I’d hope those I’ve given out are still lying around somewhere, scattered and scratched in the trunk of a sedan, waiting to be broken out and rediscovered all over again.

College radio presented a home for the hopeless romantics like me who didn’t ask for much - just a group of friends who felt exactly the same way we did about music. Not taste or style or substance - just the feeling. That’s all that mattered, and suddenly, you weren’t in a room with intimidatingly cool strangers. You were in a room with family.

I walked in for my interview to DJ my first show on KSPU with all the seriousness of a corporate job. I explained my experience with different genres and how the music presented would be united by a desire to fight existing power structures and prevailing social norms. In the tradition of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, it would be called “This Radio Show Kills Fascists”. Aaron and Amber smiled at each other, either at the concept or at my overwhelming naivety. But either way, I got the show. I didn’t care how many people listened or cared, so long as I got to play my songs and speak my mind. My first show, I played the White Stripes “Icky Thump” and Nine Inch Nails “Echoplex”. I was on top of the world.

It’s that eagerness I see in the staff of Blaze radio. The station director brings on two DJs to kill time as Elna Rae is setting up. One does a sports show and brags that he’s topped out the number of simultaneous listeners at the station (always a bragging point, when it’s a miracle anyone can get the simultaneous listener count of a student-run online radio station above 30). Another does a film show, but when put on the spot, can’t name a single one of his favorite movies.

While the braggadocious male disc jockeys are putting in free advertising for their sets, the women of the station are keeping the inner workings of the event running like clockwork, running the ticketing, orchestrating the photo op and the snacks, and pretty much everything that requires even a minimal attention span. The station manager nervously tries to keep everyone entertained while smalltalk and the bouncy house outside are doing that just fine without him. It’s hilarious how familiar it all seems, all freshly emerged independent humans still figuring out how this whole thing works.

College radio offers plenty of opportunities for personal growth like this. My junior year when I was broadcast manager, I had recently discovered the (completely unofficial) inner workings of the college radio promoter favor system, wherein decent manners and top 5 add spots on CMJ adds could result in free stuff - namely, concert tickets. After several successes, I got greedy with my asks and called around to get tickets to the sold out Odd Future show, only to have the promoter use this as an opportunity to chew me out. “You don’t report any of our adds at all and then you have the nerve to call me and ask for free tickets?” I was quick to point out that the new Mars Volta record would go up the next week. Suddenly, all was well. I didn’t get the tickets, but I didn’t care. The promoter and I are now lifelong friends.

Elna Rae finishes up their soundcheck way late, so with the Trunk Space’s hard stop time (and out of fairness to the 3 following acts), they cut their set down to 5 songs and play their hearts out. They sound fantastic, and by the time they wrap up their all-too-short set, the crowd is ready to risk the curfew. But alas, all good things must come to an end, and the station director acknowledges it’s time to move on. Somebody has to make the hard decisions.

MRCH sets up in a hurry as the crowd mulls about. Two more acts will follow: The Sink or Swim, and Blaze Spring concert vets Jane N The Jungle. But no one is waiting out the present looking at their watch or sticking outside to smoke until familiarity greets them. The unknown is more than half the fun in here, and no one is too proud to admit they might find something new.

The station director notes the raffle and the VR and the swag at the outside table before looking to MRCH and deciding it’s time for an introduction. “Hey, um, this is MRCH and they are from here... and they have a great Blondie cover that I hope we can hear tonight. Thanks.” Any amount of basic Internet research would lend so much more information, but that’s beside the point. This is what we get. We get nothing more and nothing less than the present, what we paid for, out of content, out of proportion, behind schedule, turned up loud, and ready to go right now.

And for those that would rather not, there’s always the bouncy house.