The Kids Are Alright

WUSC's schedule is online at wusc.sc.edu

It was a hell of a Christmas present for the volunteer staff of WUSC, the local radio station owned by The University of South Carolina and operated primarily by students. On Dec. 26, 1999, a person identifying himself online only as Old DJ launched a broadside against the station on the message boards section of the Free Times web site. His main complaint was the infrequent hours that the station was broadcasting. "It seems like more and more, when perusing the FM dial, I only hear 'white noise' from 90.5," he wrote, adding that "WUSC...can't find enough students to show up a scant three hours a week."

The comments of Old DJ, who identified himself in his posts as a former WUSC DJ, represented a vehement attack on the professionalism of the students operating the station. "Don't the current students realize the privilege it is to hold such a license," he wrote, "especially a non-commercial one? What was once the TRUE music alternative is now more like a pirate station on-the-run from the FCC [Federal Communications Commission], broadcasting infrequently even when school is in session."

To top off the criticism, Old DJ placed the comments on the Free Times music message boards under a heading that he named "Yank WUSC-FM's License: Give the frequency to someone who gives a damn!"

The comments of Old DJ touched off a firestorm of claims and counterclaims on the message boards. DJs leapt to the station's defense. They argued that Old DJ was exaggerating the time that the station was off the air. They pointed out that the station had kept more regular hours during most of the fall semester and would return to more regular hours when the spring semester began. They offered explanations about the University's policy of keeping the Russell House -- the building on campus that houses the station's offices -- locked during Christmas break. They offered explanations on the difficulties of maintaining a consistent broadcast schedule on a student-run station, especially when school is out of session and many of the regular DJs don't live in Columbia year-round. Listeners weighed in pro and con on the performance of the station.

Just weeks after Old DJ's criticism had begun, WUSC also came under fire in Free Times for the inconsistent hours the station was maintaining on the air.

Now, six months later, WUSC is stronger than it has been in years. School is out of session, but the station is broadcasting 21 hours per day, more than it was even during the regular school year. Programming is solid, with free-format and specialty shows covering a full spectrum of music -- dance, hip hop, jazz, indie rock, Latin, punk, metal, folk, reggae, blues and more -- by artists that Columbians cannot hear on other stations. The professionalism of DJs, gradually on the rise over the last few years, now seems to have reached a new level as well: there is more music being presented by DJs with a greater sense of musical history, better announcing skills and less tendency to chatter on the air than at any time in recent memory.

WUSC DJs, understandably, have few kind words for Old DJ. By calling for the station's broadcasting license to be revoked, he also called into question their personal level of commitment and professionalism. And even after the station was regaining its footing in terms of maintaining consistent hours on the air, which was happening by mid-late January, Old DJ's diatribes continued.

But despite the lack of love between WUSC and its Old DJ, many people at the station readily admit that his words had an effect.

"So many people took so much shit to heart from that one guy," says new WUSC Station Manager Taylor Marshall-Greene in a thick, Northeastern accent. A wiry, mid-20s transplant from Providence, R.I., Marshall-Greene speaks quickly and doesn't mince words. Sitting at a coffee shop with his sunglasses pushed back and thin sideburns, he looks and sounds more like a small time bookie than a music aficionado.

"He had a very good point. We were acting like we could put [the station] on whenever we wanted to. It was just choppy shit...people going home [for the holidays] early and not filling their slots, not informing the staff. It was irresponsibility, and with a college station you will have that. But that criticism really motivated a lot of people up here. To have someone out there screaming that we should have our [broadcasting] license taken away...it did wonders for us...it tightened us up."

Clair DeLune, who has hosted the blues show on WUSC since 1990, is less charitable in her comments. "I call him 'Odious DJ'...he deals in half-truths, he makes personal attacks on people. If he were a bar of Ivory soap, he would be the .6 percent that isn't pure," says DeLune, who teaches courses on popular music history at the University. But even she acknowledges that he had an effect: "It's a case of 'the squeaky wheel gets the grease,' ... I don't like his means, but these kids needed to be shaken up a bit. The problem is that he was destructive instead of constructive." She emphasizes that despite the effect Old DJ may have had, "I will never thank him for it or respect him for it."

"At the beginning, [Old DJ's comments] gave us the idea that somebody cared enough about the station to argue," says Jonathan Garrick, music director at WUSC. "But after awhile, I didn't care what he had to say."

Old DJ, who did not respond to numerous inquiries regarding this story, has been identified by longtime WUSC DJ Mark Lyvers as Brian Keller, a WUSC DJ in the late '70s and early '80s.

"I saw Brian [Old DJ] at a show and I said, "You've been awfully hard on Clair on the message boards lately," says Lyvers, who plans out his popular Uncle Gram's Red Bank Bar and Grill show with CDs he takes on the road with him as a truck driver. Old DJ had stridently attacked DeLune's on air style, which includes a lot of historical anecdotes about the music she plays. "He looked at me at first as if he didn't know what I was talking about. Then he said, 'Yeah, well...I'm just trying to light a fire up there.'"

The day after I interview Lyvers, who at 53 is the gentle sage of WUSC, he sends me an email. "Whatever you plan to print [about Old DJ's] input and/or influence, the way he hurt and/or scared some folks is intolerable. It's one thing to be critical but another to be mean spirited about it."

Perhaps one of the reasons that Old DJ's words had such an effect was because of how they resonated in the context of WUSC's modern history. Although most of the students now at WUSC were not around in 1995, they have heard the tales of The Shutdown.

The Shutdown, which has been documented previously in Free Times, occurred just four years before Old DJ's verbal barrage began. In December of 1995, WUSC experienced an unprecedented assault from a USC administrator, former Student Media Director Chris Carroll. The assault eventually resulted in the resignation of the station manager, the ouster of the station's executive board and a complete shutdown of the station for about two months. It also resulted in the obliteration of the station's institutional memory and its reputation in the music industry, both of which have had to be painstakingly rebuilt in the years since.

Carroll lodged various complaints against the station's leadership, but according to Trey Lofton, the station manager at the time, the only specific, documented violation was that "we had played 'Smells Like Queer Spirit' by Pansy Division," a gay punk rock group. The University maintained that playing the song constituted a violation of FCC obscenity rules. This specific allegation was then rolled into the broader charge that the leadership of WUSC "was jeopardizing the University's ability to operate a station and maintain an FCC license," says Lofton.

With a thick, dark beard, a healthy appetite for coffee and cigarettes, and a wealth of stories about the eccentric and precarious business he works in as talent buyer for the Elbow Room, Lofton has the air of a music industry veteran. So it is with the tone of a guy who has been through enough to not get easily rattled that he says, "Looking at it now in retrospect, this is how I can sum it up...me and the Student Media Director did not see eye to eye."

Even with this tone, Lofton's comment comes across as an understatement when compared to the published accounts at the time and the anger with which others recall the incident. At the time Carroll was lodging complaints, Lofton offered his resignation to Carroll in the hope and belief that if he left, the station could get past the controversy and move on. Instead, the constitution of the station was suspended and Carroll led a coup that led to the firing of the entire executive staff; i.e. the music director, program director and others who ran the station.

"When the whole issue got so big that there were student government hearings, Chris Carroll claimed we had been 'red flagged' by the FCC" and would therefore have trouble renewing their license, says Lofton. At the hearings, Lofton produced a letter from Penelope Dade at the FCC refuting Carroll's assertion. "Chris Carroll asserted that our license was in danger of being blocked," he recalls. "It had actually already been fully renewed for a seven-year period."

The students lost the battle with the administration and WUSC's reputation suffered badly, both in the music industry and among local listeners.

"I can still get tears in my eyes over that," says DeLune. "I don't think people realize how devastating that rift was for us...it's like having your house slide down Mt. Everest and into the valley."

With that tumultuous history serving as a context, students at WUSC were quick to mobilize against even the hint of a threat to the station, even if the threat was coming from an anonymous, powerless message board poster rather than a university administrator.

And by almost any measure, the station has tightened up its act and is doing a great job.

"It's really amazing," Lofton says. "It's summer and they've been on consistently and with better programming than [at any time] since 1995." While the station currently broadcasts 21 hours a day, Lofton recalls that "we used to drop to ten hours on the air in the summer."

But even well before Old DJ's missives began, WUSC was working on its performance. "The last two years have seen a lot of positive changes, and I credit Jason Paddock for that," says Lyvers, referring to Marshall-Greene's predecessor as station manager. "Meetings have been a lot more regular, we've been tightening up playlists, and there is more professionalism on the air." Garrick agrees: "Ever since Jason Paddock became station manager there has been a steady improvement. We are at our peak now...we're not flawless, but no college station is."

Jason Paddock was a freshman when he started working at WUSC in January of 1996, during the period he calls "the invite back", which was just before the station returned to the airwaves in February 1996. While some former DJs did return, many previous DJs were not invited back and others refused to return in protest of the takeover.

Paddock started as music librarian, quickly moving his way up the ranks to become RPM (dance music) director in spring of 1997 after a semester as Program Director at a station in Montana, where he studied as part of an exchange program. After stints as Assistant Music Director and Music Director, he became Station Manager in the fall of 1999.

"The low point as far as I know of in WUSC history was February 1996," Paddock says with cautious and deliberate phrasing. "Training [for new DJs after the shutdown] was very quick. The legacy of the station had been lost." Lofton adds that "the core of DJs had been made ineligible, and there weren't another 40 kids waiting in the wings to be DJs."

Paddock had not been a part of the station before the takeover, but his goals for the station were more in line with Lofton's -- to produced high quality, diverse and educational programming -- than with many of the other DJs who joined the station for the first time in 1996. Taking to the airwaves with little training and sometimes even less concept of what alternative radio means, some DJs played mainstream and classic rock and abused their positions behind the microphone with frivolous chatter directed at the buddies in the dorm. "We are not here to take the station up in the Arbitron ratings," says Paddock. "We are educational ... we are not trying to reach a mass audience."

"The point is not to be some celebrity radio host," he adds, "and when WUSC was at its peak, they tried to let people know that. I think we had a lot of problems with that in the last five years, but not too much this last year."

"There has been a lot of ebb and flow" since those tough days in 1996, Paddock says. "We would work on things, and then there would be setbacks ... but it never got as bad as February 1996." Last summer was a turning point. The station was off the air for about nine hours a day, according to Paddock. "Some people have the philosophy that anything on the air is better than nothing. Last summer, I disagreed with that philosophy. I wanted my people to be knowledgeable on the air. We [the station leadership] decided that if people worked against the station, we would not tolerate it for long, and they could not be on the air. We decided to work hard on training and get people who learned WUSC policies and FCC policies. The point wasn't to make it hard, the point was to improve quality. We did this so that no one could plead ignorance [for mistakes on the air]."

Last fall, the station was generally broadcasting from 10 a.m. until 2 a.m., says Paddock. "Our draw for DJs wasn't that large last fall, but when we were on the air, we sounded strong and more people wanted to be a part of it." The appeal of the station for would-be DJs has grown gradually to the point where about 40 interested people showed up from a call for DJs this summer, whereas less than ten showed up last summer.

Station personnel are quick to give Paddock a great deal of credit for getting the station to its current level of performance, but Lofton, as a former station manager, is also quick to point out that no station manager can do it alone." To get to the status of programming that WUSC had [before the takeover] required a long evolution. One station manager can't do that," he says, listing off the names of station managers in the late '80s and early '90s who brought WUSC to the point where it was once ranked by music industry journals as one of the top 5 college stations in the country.

Lyvers and others at the station also credit the Internet for bringing about a higher level of professionalism from DJs. Beginning at the end of 1999, WUSC began broadcasting over the Internet, enabling people all over the world to tune in. Lyvers says this has made DJs realize that "it's not just being heard in their dorm, it's all over the world. We get calls from South America." Adds Marshall-Greene: "I got a call from Melbourne, Australia, about my metal show. It just blew me away."

And in a refreshing rebuttal of the usual generational clichés about "how much better things were in my day," Lyvers also says that "the students are a lot more mature today than they were fifteen years ago....they have had access to so much more information. You've got these nineteen and twenty-year-old kids who have learned as much about music as it's taken me thirty years to learn." DeLune agrees that the kids are a cut above: "When I was their age, I couldn't plan three days in advance. They've already got most of the fall programming scheduled."

With a lot of work and a little luck, WUSC may not have to worry about threats to its broadcasting license, real or imagined, in the future. "The kids are doing everything they need to be doing," says DeLune. "The only things we need to watch for are dead air and obscenities." She points out that watching out for obscenities isn't as easy as one might think. All CDs are pre-screened before they hit the airwaves, but sometimes obscenities are missed because they aren't prominent in a particular song.

But the question still lingers as to how the positive changes that WUSC has made can be maintained in the context of a student staff that is, by definition, constantly shifting. One answer is alumni DJs, such as DeLune and Lyvers. "It makes me happy to have the alumni up here...I ask them all kinds of questions," says Marshall-Greene. "Those guys will help explain things to the younger DJs." Lofton emphasizes that building a strong college station is about "acquired knowledge over time." Alumni DJs provide younger DJs not only with technical know-how, but also with a sense of the station's history and identity. They also help fill out the schedule, especially in the summer.

Another way that professionalism on the air can stay high is with strong training and follow-up, something that WUSC will be focusing on in the fall by bringing back an old staff position called Chief Announcer, according to Marshall-Greene. The Chief Announcer -- a role that was once filled at WUSC by Mark Bryan of Hootie and the Blowfish -- looks out for what DJs are saying, or not saying, on the air. "We had this one DJ who got on the air and read his term paper," says Marshall-Greene. "I called him up and said, 'Who do you think our listening audience is? Who wants to hear that?'"

"The real thing [the students] need to know is that there are people who are very passionate about the station." says Steve Varholy, who was a DJ on WUSC from 1988 to 1991 and went on to work at Rock 93.5 until 1997. "Being consistent is not a bad thing...you don't have to be mainstream to be consistent. And if you are not on the air when the alarm clock goes off at 6 a.m., then you are not on people's minds."

"[But] the most important thing is that the station is there for students to do it, and they will make mistakes...you have to let the kids make mistakes."

Everyone agrees that this is college radio and mistakes will happen. But Marshall-Greene, for one, is determined to keep them to a minimum on his watch. "I love going into the office," he says, and it's easy to believe him as he lists off all the things he hopes to accomplish at WUSC, from improving the station's ties with local clubs and bands to continually working on professionalism on the air. He's been at the station for four years, and his first slot on the air was at 4 a.m. "We try to instill in the DJs that if you stick it out, you'll get good slots." Marshall-Greene has stuck it out for four years, and now he's ready for his shot at the helm." I've got a solid staff...and I'm making sure that they look out for the whole station. My main concern is the long term. Keeping it going after these DJs leave."