A couple of years ago, my college hired a new professor for our Department of Communication and Media Studies. Among her duties was to resuscitate and serve as advisor for WRVG, our college’s small low-power station, which had lain dormant for much of the 2010s. She’s done a lot in a short period, figuring out how to get the station back on the air (first on campus and more recently as a stream), conducting fundraisers to refurbish the studio (yes, there’s a skeleton that serves as a mascot–his name is Otto, in honor of music going on auto-play when there’s no one around), expanding the library, and overseeing a small cadre of student DJs and other workers, mostly in the midst of a pandemic.
Not long after she started, I reached out to my new colleague to learn a little about the task before her. WRVG had been around in some form much longer than I’ve been at Georgetown (it’s actually got quite a history, only part of which is told at the station’s Wikipedia page), and despite my past experience and long-standing interest in radio, I’d never previously sought to become involved. Maybe a combination of things–our nest had just emptied, some of the folks I’ve met through blogging, learning about the demise of the station at my undergrad institution–raised my interest this time. While dealing with COVID’s impact on my teaching duties has kept me plenty occupied for the past eighteen months, I didn’t forget about WRVG; truth be told, I was harboring hope of hosting a weekly show.
My colleague was receptive to the idea when I emailed her over the summer. Last week she showed me how to work the board, yesterday I watched one of the student DJs for a while, and this afternoon, I turned on the mike and let it rip for sixty minutes. In spite of a technical issue or two and stumbling over my own tongue here and there, I had a blast. The current plan for the fall semester is to mine the contents of my digital library from 2:00-3:00pm Eastern each Thursday that school is in session. I can record my shows, and so I’m hoping to post links to them here–we’ll see. In the meantime, you can listen to the stream anytime you like at wrvg.radio12345.com. I’m definitely planning on tuning in more often.
The show today was a mix of pop/AOR tracks from 1979-1986 and songs I discovered after digging on Pandora around 2008. Here’s one of the latter, the delightful “Falling,” from Texan Ben Kweller’s 2002 album Sha Sha.
The Music of My Life 