On the Air
~posted 12.31.2007

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The eclectic, student-run WKNC has a little something for everyone and gives Triangle music fans an alternative to commercial radio.

David Spencer, guitar in hand, pulls a microphone close in the studio at WKNC, 88.1-FM. Daytime music director Kelly Reid, a DJ who goes by the on-air name Mz. Kelly, is interviewing the Nashville, Tenn., singer/songwriter about his new album, Love Like a Symphony.

“I’ve asked a couple of bands in the last couple of months,” she says, “If you were approached by someone who wanted to buy your song, would you sell [it]?”

“Sell is a loose term,” Spencer says. “I would license it to them.”

“License the song doesn’t sound like sell your soul,” Reid responds, laughing.

It’s a tacit acknowledgment that, yes, music is a business and money matters. But it hints at the independent spirit that guides the 25,000-watt student-run station�s programming. “The format is what we make it,” Reid says later. “It’s just whatever’s good.”

During weekdays, that means independent rock—“indie” rock—from bands like Interpol, Sonic Youth, and Peter Bjorn and John. Weeknights, it’s hip-hop and electronica from groups like Jurassic 5 and The Disco Biscuits. Friday nights, it’s heavy metal, and weekends feature specialty shows that play everything from a cappella to South Asian music to blues. “WKNC is always playing something different, and I never get bored,” says Christine DiPietro, a junior who likes punk, folk and alternative rock.

This breadth wasn’t what Harrison Wroton ‘46 had in mind during the 1943-44 school year when, in his Watauga Hall room, he started WOLF, the station that became WKNC. “I didn’t do it because somebody asked me to or because there was any demonstrated need,” he says. “It was just part of being a college student and wanting to experiment with things.”

That experiment has become one of the few outlets for Triangle radio listeners to hear new and local music and performers who don’t get commercial airplay. ”[Commercial radio in the Triangle] is some of the worst I’ve heard anywhere,” says The News & Observer’s music critic David Menconi. “If you are a rock listener here, and you care about anything more recent than 1978, you are pretty much [out of luck]. If not for the college stations. . . I would never listen to the radio here.”

Duke University’s 2,150-watt station and UNC-Chapel Hill’s 400-watt station play similar music but have smaller broadcast radii. WKNC can be heard as far as Rocky Mount to the east, Burlington to the west, almost to Fayetteville and nearly to Virginia, according to Radio-Locator.com, which compiles Federal Communications Commission (FCC) data. Shaw University’s jazz station broadcasts at 50,000 watts, but it has a professional staff and is affiliated with National Public Radio.

For Spencer, who gets some commercial airplay but rarely during prime timeslots, appearances on stations such as WKNC help. “As a musician without the publicity machine of a big label, [a station like WKNC] is that machine for me,” he says.

And record labels pay attention. “Those labels out there that are into that music recognize WKNC as a serious voice,” says Mark Zenow ‘89, station manager in 1988-89 and a partner in Murphy to Manteo, a music-management company with offices in Raleigh, Charlotte and Nashville, Tenn.

But it-s more than an outlet for music. It-s a place for students to be creative and experiment. “It’s a college station, and [students] have the freedom to do stupid stuff and not get in trouble,” says station manager Steve McCreery, who worked about 20 years in commercial radio before returning to school at NC State several years ago. And at a university with broadcasting courses but no broadcast communication major, it provides an education students can’t get in the classroom.

WKNC has an annual budget of $55,000, about half of which comes from student fees. The students determine programming, maintain equipment, oversee the budget, work with the station’s attorney when the FCC license comes up for renewal, train new DJs, deal with complaints from listeners and work with management from other student media outlets.

“The university isn’t looking at ratings and saying, ‘We want to be No. 1,’ ” says Paul Williams, a WKNC DJ who uses the on-air name Uncle Paul. “They’re saying. . . your job is to teach people professional radio skills and provide a service to the university and the community.”

NC State opened its first radio station—the first in eastern North Carolina and the second in the state—in 1922. The first broadcast’s guests included Gov. Cameron Morrison and former secretary of the Navy and owner of The News & Observer Josephus Daniels, who in his talk on the international applications of radio said, “Nobody now fears that a Japanese fleet could deal an unexpected blow on our Pacific possessions . . . . Radio makes surprises impossible.” Broadcasts were spotty, money was tight, and the station lasted a year.

It would be more than 20 years before radio returned. Wroton had been turned down for a part-time announcing job at the WRAL radio station. “I knew I could announce on my own station,” he says. He was interested in electronics and built a carrier-current broadcasting transmitter that would enable an AM signal to flow through the university’s electrical system. He broadcast from his room, spun his own records and for news used teletype pages from WRAL.

By the 1945-46 school year, the university had provided funding, given the station—now WNCS—space in the 1911 Building and moved it under the auspices of the publications board. The station’s call letters changed again in 1947 to WVWP, and it began broadcasting NC State sports. Programming expanded in the 1950s, and the station was on from 6 a.m. to midnight. “Our format was pretty much built around the interests of the people who were willing to spend time to come down and [work],” says Sam Harrell ‘56, station manager from 1953 to 1956, who played big-band music. The American Tobacco Co. provided a teletype for daily news and sports broadcasts that bore the Lucky Strike name. At the end of the decade, a drama group was doing live adaptations of novels and short stories.

It became WKNC in 1958 and began broadcasting at 88.1 FM in 1966. The 10-watt station’s signal covered much of the area around NC State and could be heard as far away as North Hills, says David Brown ‘70, station manager from 1967 to 1969. But a 1967 poll of students showed that while about 95 percent had AM radios, only 47 percent had FM radios. So, WKNC established a carrier-current AM station, WPAK, which broadcast rock and roll, Top 40 and other popular music. WKNC had news and played classical music, jazz, show tunes and education programs. In the evenings, according to Technician, the stations merged and played “easy listening (read, ‘studying’) music.” WPAK was to be a source of ad revenue. “There really wasn’t enough sources for that to make it worth our while,” Brown says. “We couldn’t really simulcast. We really had to do things in two different formats.”

WPAK lasted until 1971. WKNC grew from 10 watts to 1,000 in 1974, and programming included progressive rock, soul, Top 40, jazz and freshman football and basketball games. “We got to know the players and had a pretty good audience listening to us because people had heard the hype about David Thompson ‘75,” says Don Byrnes ‘74, station manager from 1973 to 1974.

Wattage grew again in the 1980s to 3,000. In response to a student survey, WKNC began playing more hard rock and heavy metal—Motley Crue, Judas Priest, KISS—and cut blocks such as jazz. “If it pounded, we were up for it,” says former station manager Chrystal Bartlett ‘85, ‘98 MA.

The changes didn’t sit well with some listeners. “I had a couple of death threats,” she says. But the shift introduced the Triangle to such genres as Christian rock and gave birth to enduring shows such as Chainsaw Rock, which plays intense heavy metal.

In 1991, WKNC moved to Witherspoon Student Center, where it’s housed today. Talk of growing to 25,000 watts began, but the process stalled because other local stations near WKNC’s frequency also were considering growing, which would have created mixed signals. At the end of the 1990s, WKNC switched its daytime format to indie rock, trading Marilyn Manson and Corrosion of Conformity for Pavement and the Flaming Lips, though it kept its heavy metal specialty shows. And finally, in 2003, WKNC got a larger antenna on top of D.H. Hill Library and began broadcasting at 25,000 watts.

The increase gave the station access to more listeners. “Also, [it gave us] more legitimacy compared to other radio stations,” says Jamie Proctor ‘05, station manager at the time. “We went from being a college station that was bigger than a lot to one of the highest-powered and widest rang[ing] college radio stations out there.”

And who’s listening? Because it isn’t a commercial station, WKNC isn’t included in Arbitron ratings, and it doesn’t have demographic data on its listeners. But anecdotal evidence suggests many of the listeners are nonstudent adults who live in Wake and surrounding counties.

Then, there are students. DiPietro started listening after meeting a WKNC DJ in a class. During the fall semester, she studied in South Africa and listened to her friend’s show through the stream on WKNC’s Web site. She even made song requests through Instant Messenger.

Joe Wright, a sophomore, found WKNC when he was a student at Raleigh Charter High School. His favorite show: the Hippie Hour, a Saturday afternoon broadcast that plays bands such as the Grateful Dead, Moe and Medeski, Martin and Wood. “They don’t have the Billboard Top 100 charts telling them what to play,” he says. “It’s a bunch of student DJs who play music that they have their own vested interest in. I really think it’s what the heart of radio should be.”

But there are others listening.

In a small room filled with vinyl records, Williams is sorting CDs for his two-hour show, Friday Night Request Rock. Station manager in 1993-94, he’s finishing his business-management degree as a part-time student. He works in training for Leith Automotive Group, but here, he�s Uncle Paul. “You get to adopt a persona,” he says of being a DJ. “You get a break from your life for a couple of hours.”

He starts his show with the song “YYZ” by the band Rush. Later, the request-line phone rings. He laughs as he repeats the question from a caller who can’t find WKNC. “Are we playing country music? No. Just crank it all the way to the left.”

The music gets heavier as the show goes on. Alice in Chains. Corrosion of Conformity. Megadeth. Tool. Sometimes there’s classic rock. Judas Priest. KISS. At about 9 p.m., he gives the station’s mailing address over the air. It’s an odd thing to do, but each week, he says, he gets nearly 20 letters from inmates at local jails and prisons. The show’s second hour—dubbed Penitentiary Rock—features requests from these prisoners, who live at neighboring Central Prison and institutions in Butner, Orange, Harnett and Warren counties. Tonight, there are about a dozen letters.

One thanks him for the set of Brazilian thrash-metal band Sepultura he played the previous Friday and calls him “DJ Numero Uno.” Another chastises him for playing softer music and gets on other inmates for their requests. One man—Ghost—who was released during the week promised in a letter read last Friday to call tonight. He doesn’t.

Often the language in the letters is salty, he says, and he edits as he reads on the air. Sometimes the prisoners can’t write clearly or spell. Frequently, they include artwork. Tonight, there’s a black-ink drawing of the grim reaper.

The younger prisoners, Williams says, prefer heavier music, and later in the hour, he plays songs from bands such as Crowbar, Hatebreed and Biohazard. The show leads in to Chainsaw Rock, a metal show that has grown heavier since it started in the mid-1980s and now plays music from bands with names such as Annihilator, Venom and Mortician.

What do Williams’ friends and family think about what he does Friday nights? When they find out, he says, “it’s always more of a shock. . . . When they tune in, they’re like, “I don’t think I can listen to that.’ ”

There are going to be some things you just can’t listen to, says station manager McCreery, who admits he isn’t a fan of hip-hop or electronica. “There’s a good chance you’re going to hear something you don’t like,” he says. “But you�re still going to come back.”

Why? The DJs aren’t playing from a 200-song rotation like some commercial stations do, he says. They are required to play some songs that program directors want reported to College Music Journal for that magazine’s charts. But the rest is up to the DJ, as long as it fits the format and complies with FCC rules. The university’s administration doesn’t dictate what’s played, and, though there is a full-time staff member who advises the station, she isn’t involved in its day-to-day operation.

It’s a tradition of independence that has persisted through the decades. “In some ways, because of the creative freedom we had to put together a show of our own and do what we wanted, it was almost like Blog 1.0,” Brown says. “We were showing our personality via the program material we selected, and we were out there for anybody to see and sample.”

That freedom engenders a sense of responsibility and provides management experience many students don�t get until they enter the work force. You can’t get any better experience as a student, says Divakar Shukla ‘88, than managing 100 students. Station manager in 1987-88, he today runs Saathee magazine and Nazar Television and hosts a local music show on WEND, 106.5-FM, in Charlotte.

“WKNC was not simply a college radio station for student enjoyment,” Zenow says. “It was a professional development element of the university. As part of that, there were rules and policies and procedures and continuity, which gave WKNC a lot of its strength because it wasn’t shifting focuses or directions or priorities every year.”

For Brown, the WKNC experience helped shape his personality. He was an introvert, he says, and you have to be outgoing on the air. “I had that kind of reservoir in my innate personality, but my experience up to that point had not brought that out,” he says. “It gave me a lot more confidence, especially as I got recognition from my peers in broadcasting, that we were doing a very good job there.” After graduating, he joined the Navy and became an Arabic linguist. Today, he’s a systems analyst, programmer and Web designer at LabCorp in Burlington.

For others, it’s an avenue into the music business. When he started, Zenow says, WKNC was a training ground for people who wanted to go into radio. But a friend and former WKNC DJ, Rusty Harmon ‘96, was managing a Columbia, S.C., band named Hootie and the Blowfish, which was getting popular. He joined Harmon and helped manage the band through its mid-1990s rise.

Proctor didn’t think a job in music was possible until he started at WKNC and began meeting people in the recording industry. Now, he does publicity for Thrill Jockey Records in Chicago, Ill. “It gave me that spark and got me rolling in that direction.”

The second hour of Friday Night Request Rock is coming to a close. Williams will wrap up with “Pull the Plug” by a band named Death. It’s this kind of show and programming that helps WKNC reach a portion of the audience commercial stations don’t. The aim for students is to build a professional-sounding station, Williams says, not to sound commercial and, of course, not to play commercial music.

“Obviously,” he says, “this isn’t commercial music.”

He reads a few last letters, including one from a man who hasn’t been able to hear WKNC for years. “It does my soul good to hear Penitentiary Rock still going strong,” writes the prisoner at Warren Correctional Institution in Manson. “Keep doing what you’re doing Uncle Paul. You’re a lighthouse in the fog for all of us.”

Chris Richter is associate editor of NC State magazine.