Back in the last century, circa 1973, yours truly was a struggling student in college. Well, thats not really true, the struggling part...school was easy, especially if you didn't sign up for anything that taxed your brain too much. Having spent the first 2 1/2 years as a psychology major, I was terrified i would end up working in a psych ward and become one of the inhabitants rather than staff...that and calling one of my professors (a real big fan of BF Skinner) a "mental health nazi" effectively ended this line of study.
I migrated to studying envromental studies, but there was no major at my school, so i became a anthropology major...until my advisor told me i was good at this stuff, but there was no jobs, so unless i was just "going to get married and pop out kids" I should find a new major...but what to do. Then my best friends came into the picture. He was someone i had known in high school, and had been one of those people you hung out with, but I was never really interested in him. He was a nice guy, and we became the dreaded "just" friends..dreaded (to him)because he always was asking me to go places and stuff, so anyway...he being a year ahead of me in high school was suddenly in the same class as me in college because of the draft...he got his notice, so immediately joined the air force reserve, and after training re enrolled in school. He suggested think about being in radio, and majoring in communications. I did.
One of my classes was a class in radio broadcast technique , which simply meant you donated some time to working on the campus FM station in addition to going to 2 classes a week. It was sort of fun, and the only drag was they really didn't let girls on the air, except...ta dah..to read the news or weather, or both. Since I was one of those concurrent students, attending both UC and state college, I chose to work at the less restrained station, KERS 90.7 FM.
My usual was to come in on wednesday night with my friend, and he would spin records, and then eventually would cue me in the opposite studio, and me, I would speak into this giant RCA microphone they must have got donated from the big band era.."Hey everybody out there ,hope you're diggin the sounds...hey, if you haven't heard...fees are going up, hey man, what aint?, and they are planning on charging a fee to park on campus. If you don't dig this, head on down to the quad next Thursday at noon, for a rally against the pig adminsitration...In Nam, more innocent dudes were killed today...."
This went on for several weeks, when one day one of the other girls came running down the stairs and out the door.."those dumb bastards have passed out in the control room!" We ran into the station, and sure enough, the control booth was a)deadbolted shut from the inside and b) looked like a smoke chamber...The two guys inside were sleeping, one in a chair, his mouth open, and head back, the other in a fetal position on a bean bag chair in the corner. We went into the other studio, where i usually read the news from, and started beating on the plate glass windows, to no avail. Finally, our station manager( aka our teacher) showed up. He sent for the janitor, who had a key to the door, and seeing the turntable needle bumping the center of the album, realized this was providing infinite listening pleasure to our audience(who by the way were calling in" Hey, like you dudes know this music is kinda bunk") said to my friend and i "get something on the air now...JL went to the studio board, and making sure the turntable worked, screamed "I need some GD music!!!", and so i fetched a stack from the library, and quickly flipped thru...and found our salvation! Iron Butterfly, the extended cut, the one that when people tried to dance to it, got winded and fell out...
I slapped vinyl on felt, and he started the record, and gave me the cue...the studio light when from dull lifelessness to a brilliant ON AIR, as I tried to sound professional and said something like "We are sorry for the technical problems, here is iron butterfly"...I stayed all shift, since there was no mike for the dj in this studio, and I would intro while he spun records.
The next day we heard the two who had decided to get stoned on air, which they said was an experiement, were kick off the air,and out of school...only to surface across town on a real station, which had recently gone on air as album rock (Quote from one of them ""I was a student at State majoring in speech and journalism. At that time, there was a student operated station, KERS. It was part of the broadcasting curriculum. A fellow student and I started a program that ran on Friday nights from midnight to six. It was a cross between KMPX in San Francisco and Berkeley's KPFA where we played albums - everything from Cream to Eastern music to Firesign Theatre - and invited guests to the studio." and their invited guests usually were high as a kite...meanwhile, JL and I were told to do a show, cause people had called in saying it was "a totally bitchin" ( I never knew what that meant, really)
From a radio history page I found: "...of music flow from one song to the next. In the early seventies KERS (90.7 FM) was the hip college station coming out of Sac State (CSUS) that rivaled KZAP in terms of adventurous experimentation. Many students who went through KERS ended up as jocks on KZAP. Another hotbed for Sacramento air talent was the KDVS at UC Davis...."
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