What's a guy to do when he can't throw a Frisbee? Spin vinyl, of course.
Extracurriculars were important to
me in high school. So, I wanted to get involved at Union.
Was I bred for the environmental club? Was I mechanical enough for the robotics
team? Could I throw a Frisbee? The answer was a resounding “No.”
However, I knew I liked to listen
to music.
I'm not talking about Britney
Spears or Jessica Simpson here either. I'm talking about the kind of music you hear
in those vintage record stores, like the one in the movie High Fidelity, where
employees' sole purpose in life is to complete their set of bootleg tapes from
the Grateful Dead's 1972 European Tour. I'm talking about meaningful, powerful
music, the kind of music that isn't always played on commercial radio.
I had always enjoyed listening to
independent college radio. Where else could you hear the whole side of an album
commercial free? I felt that Union's historic radio
station, WRUC – “the first station in the nation” – was just the outlet I
needed to share my music with the world (or at least anyone within the
station's 20-mile radius).
I'd
listened to rock radio long enough to know that what I needed was an on-air
partner with some charisma. I found him across the hall in West
College dormitory in the personage
of Peter Wilson. Pete and I shared
similar taste in music and were ready to take the airwaves by storm. We decided to call our show the “Intensive
Care Unit,” hoping our show would help ease the pain of a stressful work
day. Pete graciously agreed to change
his name on the show to “Doc” to go along with the theme. We signed on for the year in a mid-day
timeslot and were told to report to the studio for a training session.
When
we walked into the studio, we both felt as if we had died and gone to heaven. Here,
in three little rooms sat very large speakers; speakers that would send classic
rock and roll throughout the studio and provide us with a nice break from our
studies twice a week. Along with the speakers was the mixer that Pete would be
using to put us on the air while we sat ready at the microphones with headphones
wrapped around our ears. The adjacent room was crammed with equipment and
software that was soon to be used as a recording studio, and the last room was
filled floor to ceiling with records — that's right, vinyl albums. We were
determined to put these relics to use rather than allowing them to collect
dust. Thus was born our “all vinyl hour.”
Throughout the year I thoroughly
enjoyed our hour of song and dialogue. We talked about everything from upcoming
concerts to Rolling Stone magazine to movies. Though we didn't have a large fan
base (most often the streaming connection on the internet told us we had 10
listeners) we knew our small but supportive audience was cheering us on from
the second floor of our dormitory.
We took our job seriously and felt like maybe we were doing
something important. We were keeping alive the independent spirit of college
radio. Every time we would “Get the Led Out” (playing a Led Zeppelin song) or
played a “D-d-double Dose of the Dead” (back-to-back songs by the Grateful
Dead), or told our listeners what happened “Today in Rock History” we were
preserving that classic image of the radio pioneers that first spun an Elvis
Presley single or abandoned the status-quo of playing three-minute pop songs
and let Bob Dylan's “Like a Rolling Stone” reach listeners in all its six-minute
glory.
When we began to notice people
listening to the songs we had played on our show around the dorm, there was a
rewarding feeling of accomplishment. When we would get a rare request for a
song we knew people were really out there listening to what we were doing.
Coming to Union,
I knew I wouldn't be the guy to break athletic records. So I make my
contribution to the college community by spinning records twice a week in the
WRUC studio.
Ross Marvin, a sophomore political science major from Clifton Park,
N.Y., returned to the airwaves this fall with “Intensive Care
Unit.” He also serves as PA announcer at Union's men's
and women's basketball games, and as an intern in the College's Office of Communications.