During Monday’s late afternoon slot on radio station WNUR’s daily Rock Show, Weinberg seniors TJ Spalty and Julian Zlatev are 12 tracks into a set list that has probably never been heard on Chicago airwaves. But that’s the point.
“That’s sort of our M.O. at the station,” says Spalty. “Our goal is to broadcast underrepresented music to the Chicago area.”
The station has built a legacy around high quality student radio production since its creation in the 1950s — one that has transcended generations to maintain WNUR’s status as one of the top college radio stations in the country.
Spalty slides a knob down on the mixing board, and the ambient sounds of Virginian music collective Tanakh fade. For a moment, the Louis Hall studio gets so quiet you can hear a pin drop. Suddenly, Spalty’s classic disc jockey voice breaks the silence.
“You are listening to WNUR 89.3: Chicago’s Sound Experiment.”
WNUR adopted this slogan, which reflects a commitment to underground and experimental music, in 1995. That year, a $750,000 grant from the McCoy Foundation allowed for a complete facility renovation and warranted the station’s departure from the basement of Annie May Swift Hall where WNUR broadcasted for 45 years.
In the ’60s, however, a group of students at WNUR tried to break free of the old-fashioned instruction irrelevant in contemporary radio. To School of Speech (’67) alum Al Rettig, who worked at WNUR all four years of his undergrad career, that meant becoming more youth-oriented, heavier into production and more aggressive to grab students’ attention.
“We were making rudimentary equipment work as best as we could,” says Rettig. “We decided that if learning about radio was any value to us, we had to start doing what radios were doing across the world.”
In 1965, in an attempt to keep up with commercial radio, WNUR became one of the first college stations to broadcast rock music regularly. It was the only Chicago FM station to do so at the time; rock music was played mostly on AM stations then.
This change came with a slew of other broadcasting advances at the station: from on-air promotions and surveys of the top records of the week, to setting up broadcast lines on Long Field to do live coverage of the homecoming parade. Once, a student even broadcasted from a tree to promote a new programming schedule. When the faculty would get angry at their antics, Rettig says the students would let it roll off their backs.
“We were able to bring the station kicking and screaming into the 1960s,” says Rettig. “We were the people who started that march to keeping radio current, in step with what’s going on in the medium instead of behind it.”
Now, with the evolving face of radio decreasing WNUR’s role on campus, Kate Watson, Weinberg senior and general manager of the station, looks to make the station more of a media presence. WNUR updated their website this year and added a blog into the mix to provide more content-generating features that increase music coverage.
“We are not outgrowing radio,” says Watson. “But we want to become more dynamic in how we cover music.”
CDs and vinyl records still pour into the WNUR mailboxes, waiting to be heard. As other college stations build computer databases of MP3s, WNUR maintains its policy not to accept digital submissions. This has made the WNUR music library one of the largest college radio collections in the country.
“I see it as the way that we can integrate music that would be lost otherwise,” says Watson. “Our whole philosophy is that we are playing stuff that wouldn’t get airtime anywhere else. That is the standard in which we choose.”
The stacks are also instrumental in the mentoring process of DJ apprentices whose training consists of finding all types of albums in the library, according to Watson.
“We teach people rather than judge people,” Watson says. After going through the Rock Show’s process of training apprentices, DJs leave WNUR playing very different music from what they played when as freshmen.
Faculty Adviser Paul Riismandel finds this training model to be the key to the station’s success. Though he has only been at the station for three years, he has seen students pass along this passion for carrying on the history and mission of WNUR.
Riismandel says that the students are really good at passing on the WNUR way.
Rettig still remains in contact with people from the station. He says that this legacy of student collaboration has always been integral at WNUR.
“We learned a lot and taught each other,”