I always loved music and listening to the radio.
This was turning too much into a grown-up job, one that was more about paperwork and office politics than living for the music.
ALL APOLOGIES BY VICTOR VALDIVIA 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 123
Top 5 April 4, 1994: Pavement, Mark Lanegan, The Veldt, Jawbox, Green Day.
Diego entered the college radio station dreading what awaited him. Sure, he escaped the merciless sun and unpleasant discordance of summer. In the office it was cool, air-conditioned , and the ambience was always pleasant, people chatting about music and a song playing in the studio.
Nonetheless, a stack of phone messages from label reps pushing countless “alternative” bands would be waiting for him. He couldn’t blame the label reps, of course. It was their job, and after Nirvana’s breakthrough, every major and even some of the indies had thrown money at any long-haired 20-something white guy with a guitar, hoping lightning would strike twice.
It was a weird time being the music director for a college radio station. Diego started volunteering at KUNG before Nevermind came out and shocked the charts. He worked with the station’s original music director, JR, and he saw what a struggle it was to get labels, even cool, hip indie labels, to send the college radio station CDs or even LPs to play. Most labels saw it as a waste.
To be fair, the station was tiny, with an audience that landed in the lower thousands.
It was always hard to find volunteers for that reason, but those like Diego and JR were there because they loved music, ceaselessly. They lived it, breathed it, ate it and slept it. Classes were secondary.
After Nevermind things changed almost overnight. Suddenly CDs, LPs, and even cassette tapes came pouring in. College radio stations, even a Lilliputian one like KUNG, were suddenly seen as the proving ground for the next superstars. The us-against-the-world, underground feel changed.
The dumpy, smelly studio, the perpetually malfunctioning equipment, and the office that was only big enough for a desk and two chairs, fed the underdog mindset that kept everyone motivated.
Sure, it had been painful having to sit on the floor every time the office was crowded, which was every time Diego went there. Sure, it had been frustrating trying to find a record to play in the middle of a show when so many of the records were piled on the floor in no order.
Now, a few months after Nirvana released their follow-up In Utero, the broom-closet studio was a thing of the past. The station was in a newly re-modeled floor of the Student Union, a large, freshly painted set of rooms, with new carpeting, plenty of chairs and desks, and even a top-of-the-line multi-disc CD changer that was so new that it still had styrofoam packing stuck to it. Now there was a lounge area, a conference table, and even a computer.
Everything was slick and shiny, and Diego was deeply suspicious of all of it. This was turning too much into a grown-up job, one that was more about paperwork and office politics than living for the music.
The number of volunteers had skyrocketed. The station’s staff met once a week in a lecture hall, but before they never filled more than a few rows. Now the hall was packed and there were many people Diego hadn’t seen before, particularly freshmen. The freshmen took up more than half of the hall. Diego reflected that most of them had listened to Nevermind in their high school parking lots, a thought that made him feel faint.
The office was a buzzing hive of activity, people scurrying to and fro. The programming director was redrawing the DJ schedule, balancing people’s availability with the station’s needs for the best DJs at the best possible time slots. The station manager was using a new dry-erase board to assemble a list of producers and a training presentation on what their jobs would entail. His meticulous handwriting was astounding. One volunteer muttered, “It actually pisses me off how neat he writes.” Diego could only smile as he watched the board fill up.
The general manager was on the phone with the head of the student union arguing for a bigger budget. Diego couldn’t actually hear the conversation but he didn’t need to, it was the same every Wednesday afternoon around two, always to no avail.
And all around, the new freshmen volunteers were performing all kinds of tasks, from filing playlists to emptying wastebaskets, to wiping off tables.
It was just like a regular office. Like a real radio station. Or, Diego thought grimly, like Microsoft.