By Elaine McArdle
Photographs by Tracy Powell

Hey, can you close the door? That’s SO LOUD!”

The heavy-metal sound of Probot explodes from the open door to the WRBB on-air studio, where

DJ Tanay Parech, a tall, skinny freshman in a black Rage Against the Machine T-shirt, grins and jerks deliriously to the music, as he lines up his next selection behind the soundboard.

“It’s not that I don’t like the music,” insists Emily Rodrigues, the WRBB promotions director, shutting the soundproof door and turning up the volume of the Pixies song she’s playing on her computer, where she’s also designing a promotional flyer for the station. Tanay, still beaming, continues to dance, then reaches up to switch off the lights, pitching the DJ booth into darkness. Emily sighs. “He always turns off the lights in there,” she says.

Tanay Parech

Tanay’s voice interrupts over the speakers broadcasting his “Tenacious T’s Afternoon Show” throughout the ’RBB offices and out into the Curry Student Center. “That was ‘Ice Cold Man’ off of Probot,” he says. “A really amazing song. Now we’re going to take twenty minutes for a great song. If you play guitar, plug in, and play along to ‘Cortez the Killer’ by Neil Young. Done here by Built to Spill.”

When his show finally ends, Tanay turns the lights back on. His grin is intact. Tanay, it is clear, is in deep. He had no idea college would be this much fun. He’s just a kid from Plainsboro, New Jersey, who came to Northeastern to major in finance and international business. He still can’t believe that for one three-hour stretch every Thursday, he gets to dominate the NU airwaves, inflicting his rock tastes on everyone within earshot. He can’t even believe the transformation in himself.

“I hate speaking,” Tanay explains, as another DJ, middler Karen Gilmore, takes over with a pop-culture show she calls “Remember That Song.” “So this is like overcoming a fear. It’s so much fun! The best part is when you get new music to listen to two weeks before it comes out.”

Karen Gilmore

Tanay had never DJ’ed before, never even thought about joining a college radio station. But a few weeks into his college career last fall, he was walking through Curry, saw the ’RBB studios, and . . . well, why not? Now his show is what he most looks forward to. “It’s the one time I don’t have any work to do,” he says. “I get to just listen to music. It’s a good time to relax.” Flat-out bliss. You hear it a lot at WRBB.

“Whatever mood I’m in”

The walls of the on-air studio, which has a window that overlooks the Curry lounge, carry messages reminding the DJs what they can and cannot do. “Urban DJ’s—How to Use the Mixer. Any questions, call Joe,” says one sign. “Please do not accept any collect calls!!! Thank you!” pleads another. “Don’t Swear on the Air!!!” warns a Post-it above an FCC brochure. (Cursing on air is a fireable offense. One ’RBB DJ recently lost his show and was banned from the station for repeated offenses.)

A larger poster says, “WRBB is a fun and happy place, but we are a responsible, respectful college radio station. Music must be signed [back] immediately after your show. If not, you will be suspended from signing out music for one week. This stealing will not be tolerated!”

With thousands of CDs and records in the library, representing every imaginable music style, including the truly obscure (“death ambient,” for example, a kind of heavy metal), theft is a nagging problem. The DJs are supposed to sign out the music they use, then return it after their shows, but music still goes missing. It’s an age-old nuisance, notes John Vines, AS’84, a speech communication major turned massage therapist, who DJ’ed as a student and for the past eleven years has spun a Saturday morning show on ’RBB called “The Jazz Circle.”

In the ’RBB lobby, surprisingly tidy and clean for a college hangout, a group of DJs and station directors lounge on the couches and chairs. Students wander in and out of the room. Some head back to visit the DJs; visitors are allowed in the on-air studio as long as they don’t interrupt the show. A kid pops his head in to ask if there are any work-study jobs left. No luck. “Try the post office,” says junior Justin King, a DJ who doubles as ’RBB’s engineer.

Justin’s tastes run to the Blood Brothers and the Smiths. “I’m definitely not looking for a future in radio, at least not as a DJ,” he says. “So basically it’s just tons of fun. I enjoy doing it so much. Mostly, I’m just a music fanatic. It’s my favorite thing in the world. Also, it’s a way to de-stress myself. I’ll blast the speakers in the on-air studio. I just go nuts.”

“I’m afraid when he has his show,” deadpans Emily, a sophomore from Exeter, New Hampshire, who, with her white skin, black hair, and dark eyes, has a naturally goth look. She came to Northeastern in part because she knew it had a radio station, and joined ’RBB as a freshman. Today, in addition to her promotions work, Emily has a show where she plays hip-hop, rock and roll, hard-core metal. “Whatever mood I’m in,” she says. “Basically, if it’s underground and it’s good, I have a tendency to like it.”

Emily Rodrigues

Pete Sherratt, a civil-engineering junior wearing a cap with a Black Flag button, has had the Tuesday night 6-to-8 slot for four years. “I play punk metal, hard core,” he says—about thirty songs per show, heavy on Social Distortion and Slayer. “You can’t go wrong with Slayer,” says Pete. He grew up in a small town in western Massachusetts, where finding quality radio wasn’t easy. “I’m a music junkie,” he says. “The first day of freshman year, I applied here for work-study, and I’ve been here ever since.”

Devin Phillip, a sophomore from Dorchester, started a show featuring urban music in December. “Music has always been an influential part of my life,” he says. “What better way to get a chance to do music than to be a radio DJ.” Does he like it? His eyes light up. “I love it! It’s the highlight of my time at Northeastern.”

The group is relaxed. They like hanging out here. ’RBB is their on-campus home. Between classes, they come to listen to whatever is playing on air. They critique one another’s music, challenge one another on music minutiae. Some favor rock; others, punk. A growing group is into urban—reggae, hip-hop, R&B. Many, like Karen with her pop-culture show, have tastes not to everyone’s liking. But that’s the beauty of college radio. You’re never sure what you’re going to get—even the programming schedule provides no guarantee a particular DJ will actually stick to his “Back to the ’80s” format.

Amanda Irons, WRBB’s general manager, is more high-strung than the others in the lounge, probably due to her impossible schedule. This semester, in addition to the fifteen hours a week she spends overseeing the station’s operations and $65,000 annual budget, the senior communication-studies major has five classes. She also has a work-study job at the library, and a weekend job at the Emack & Bolio’s ice cream shop on Newbury Street. Today, though, she takes a moment out to sit with the others. Sometimes people call the ’RBB people cliquey, Amanda notes. But they’re really not, she says; they’re all very different kinds of people, with one common bond—a love of music.

Amanda Irons

Besides hanging out, there are perks unique to belonging to ’RBB: free CDs, free posters, free movie tickets. Every now and then, famous people—or the almost-famous—make the rounds, trying to boost their nascent careers. “Eminem came here,” says Amanda, “but it was before he was famous, so nobody wanted to interview him. They just blew him off!” Sometimes current DJs will run into ’RBB alums—as Pete did while handing out flyers at Newbury Comics for his show, Amanda while on jury duty.

But these students aren’t here to network job opportunities or score free CDs. They’re here because they get to play what they want. They get to tell people what they just played. It’s the music, period.

“Eye of the Tiger” comes over the speakers. Then another song, not easily recognizable. “I don’t know if I like this show. It’s a little too poppy for me,” says Amanda. She pauses. “Wait! It’s from that movie—the Sandra Bullock one.”

“Miss Congeniality,” offers Brian Driscoll, a sophomore English major from Peterborough, New Hampshire. Everybody calls him “Captain Co-op,” because he’s working as the ’RBB office manager this semester for his co-op, overseeing eleven work-study students.

“That’s right!” Amanda says.

Brian turns to a visitor. “Pretty much any conversation here degenerates into what is playing right now,” he explains.

“They don’t even know what this is”

The original WRBB was launched back in 1970, when the university’s AM station, WNEU, decided to follow other college stations into the burgeoning world of FM and album rock. In its early years, WRBB was a 100-watt station located at 91.7 on the dial. “We had a lot more wattage, and a lot more listeners,” Amanda says.

But about twenty years ago, after someone at the university forgot to renew the station’s FCC license, ’RBB lost its spot on the dial. A local jazz station at 104.9 let it borrow some of its bandwidth.

As a result, with very little wattage, WRBB reaches radio listeners only within a two-and-a-half-mile radius of its transmitter. ’RBB staffers hope to apply for a new license in 2006. In the meantime, technology has rescued the station from obscurity: Now anyone anywhere in the world can listen in via the Internet, at http://www.wrbbradio.org.

Still, low power means low visibility. “Kids will look in the station window here, and they don’t even know what this is,” Justin says. Promotions director Emily wants to change that. She’s organizing a street team of students—some volunteers, some on work-study—to pass out flyers all around the city.

The station is 60 percent rock and 40 percent urban, says music director Kristen Wandishion, a mix that fluctuates according to what the various DJs want to play. Though the formatting is somewhat loose, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. is typically rock, 5 to 6 p.m. usually a specialty show like talk or metal (’RBB used to have a sex talk show with two women DJs, but one graduated and the other has a conflicting co-op). Most nights, 6 to 8 is more rock, and 8 to midnight is urban. “After midnight, it’s pretty open—whoever wants to do a show,” says Kristen.

Being on air 24/7 means there are about seventy-five time slots to fill each week; right now, WRBB has about a hundred DJs. The weekend slots are easy to fill because many non-students—“community members” in ’RBB jargon—are eager to play DJ. If no one can be found—or a sleepy or irresponsible DJ simply doesn’t show up—new technology called Winamp, a computer program that broadcasts songs, public-service announcements, and transitions, steps in to prevent dead air. “It meets all the requirements,” Amanda says.

’RBB has a rabid following among sports fans, who enjoy the live broadcasts of NU hockey, baseball, and other sports. “Our sports guys are really good,” says Brian. “They really know how to call plays, and they have charisma.”

But the music DJs aren’t too sure how many fans they have. Says Pete, “The only people I really know are listening are my friends. They’ll say, ‘Oh, man, good show.’ Occasionally, you’ll get someone random to say they liked your show. That’s the best feeling.”

The station owns an enormous library of music, mostly vinyl for the urban-music DJs (who use turntables for “scratching”), CDs for the rock enthusiasts, and old records by Billie Holiday and other classic artists. The library—the art on its walls includes a tattered picture of Che Guevera and a photo of Erik Estrada—is kept locked, of course. Also locked is the small room that contains the servers used for Internet streaming and the delicate broadcasting equipment. A computer program keeps track of how often a particular song is played, data the station reports to the record companies that provide them with free music.

Becoming a DJ requires a “clearance” process. Interested students are trained by current staff and have to observe other DJs in action. Students who want to become members—granting them more preferential time slots and the right to vote on station policy—have to put in thirty hours of work at each of the six departments, which include news, programming, sports, and engineering. One eager freshman finished the process in one quarter, becoming a member in three months.

“Nerd rap, gangsta rap, conscious rap”

Every Tuesday night, ’RBB holds a directors’ meeting in a room on the fourth floor of Curry. Enormous windows overlook the hubbub of activity in the lounge below: four women in white T-shirts practicing dance steps, fraternity brothers posting a banner, groups of kids drinking coffee and studying.

Amanda goes through the week’s business, then calls on the various directors to report their news. Emily is snapping her gum. Steve Ferreira, the urban-music director, and Drew Wright, the loud-rock director, are quietly discussing a music promoter they don’t like.

Steve Ferreira

“There’s been a lot of intentional CD scratching going on,” says Amanda. “I don’t think we need to explain why not to do that.”

A pizza delivery man arrives with six large pizzas and a bag of sodas. As the directors’ meeting ends, students straggle in for a general staff meeting. Devin offers to fill in for any empty slots over spring break. Three older people arrive—community members. Unlike the kids, they don’t race over to the pizza, long past the starving-student phase. In all, about fifteen people are here.

Steve announces that Lil’ Flip, a rap artist out of Houston, will be visiting the station, and will be happy to record “drops” for urban shows. “I’m getting all kinds of free music from promoters,” he says. “I have nerd rap, conscious rap, gansta rap. Any questions?”

“I do!” says Emily. “What was that rap group you were listening to today, and also, can you have Papa-D send me a record?”

“He’s kind of a tight ass,” Steve says. “Why don’t you just buy it?”

“I don’t want to buy it!” she responds.

“Then stop buying that nerd rap like Atmosphere,” he says, smiling.

Ten new DJs have been cleared, Amanda announces. John Vines offers to show a student how to program a particular CD player at the station. In short order, the meeting is over.

As everyone heads downstairs, Donald Smith, forty-three, stops to talk. His show, “The Gospel Connection,” has been on ’RBB for ten years, airing from 6 to 9 Saturday and Sunday mornings. An administrative assistant in a state government office in Boston, Smith just walked into the studio one day to see if he could go on air. Why does he do it? It’s so early in the morning; it’s such a commitment.

He smiles.

“The music,” he says. “Playing records.”

Elaine McArdle is a freelance writer in Watertown, Massachusetts. In the May 2003 issue, she profiled Mark Trouville, special agent in charge at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New England division, and his wife, Mary Ellen, both CJ’79.

WNEU: Some kind of wonderful

“Radio gets in your blood, and it stays there. It’s a fun business. I feel like I’ve never worked a day in my life.” — Ron Frizzell, LA’65

Blame it on rock and roll.

The year was 1961, and Northeastern had no radio station at all, just a microphone and some loudspeakers in the cafeteria known as the Commons, where a student group called the Husky Hi-Liters would broadcast college announcements every noon.

One day, Hi-Liter Joe Scarpato decided to rev things up. He placed a shiny black 45 on a record player, dropped the needle, and spun the university into a whole new world.

“I offered five dollars to the first couple who would dance in the Commons,” Scarpato, LA’62, recalls, laughing. “I put on Chubby Checker’s ‘The Twist,’ and it started a near riot scene.”

Couples leapt to the floor and began twisting away. The administration, not amused, threatened to yank Scarpato out of the Hi-Liters. But his bold move attracted a freshman with big ideas, Ron Frizzell, who in high school had done some news reporting for a Boston radio station. It’s time, Frizzell convinced Scarpato, to start a real college station.

First order of business, Scarpato remembers: Persuade local distributors to give free records to the “Northeastern radio station.” “We didn’t tell them we only went into the cafeteria at the time,” he says. After Sam’s Record Shop, on Mass. Ave., agreed to provide each week’s Top 10 records in exchange for advertising, the fledgling station quickly amassed a library of 45s and albums.

But it needed more power to reach more people, so Frizzell suggested getting a telephone line through which they could broadcast to the dorms. For that, the duo needed the university’s blessing.

Scarpato put together a presentation asking for money and resources for an AM radio station to be called WNEU. To everyone’s surprise, the administration agreed. Under the leadership of engineering professor William King, NU students themselves built the transmitter and the studio equipment in a matter of months.

And in December 1962, WNEU-AM 560 made its broadcast debut, with Ron Frizzell’s voice the first heard on the air (Scarpato had graduated the previous May).

The early days were crazy. Initially, the 10-watt station broadcast sixteen hours a day, six days a week, with more than twenty students involved in the engineering and on-air work. As station manager, Frizzell oversaw programming, which featured pop music, folk, jazz, and classical. A year later, the station went to twenty-four hours.

On November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was shot, WNEU found a way to broadcast the breaking news. “One of our guys called up ABC,” recalls Frizzell, “and within four hours they had a telephone line to us, and we began broadcasting ABC,” a news arrangement that continued for years.

In 1965, recognizing the station’s popularity, the university gave it new offices on the top floor of the student center along with custom-made professional equipment. WNEU’s first woman DJ—Donna Halper, LA’69, MEd’70, MA’73—debuted October 1968. Two years earlier, the station had set a world’s record for marathon broadcasting, after Richard Iwaskiewicz, LA’69, known as “Waxy,” stayed on the air for a hundred straight hours.

But by the late 1960s, students were moving away from pop-filled AM and toward album-oriented rock FM. So, in 1970, the NU station went FM, too—boosted to 100 watts and renamed WRBB (the call letters WNEU were already registered to an FM station in West Virginia).

Still, for many, those inaugural NEU years were life-changing. A number of station alums went on to careers in music or radio, including Bill Aucoin, BA’66, former manager of the rock group KISS. Dick Booth, BA’67, who owned several major radio stations in the South. Marty Brooks, a recording engineer and producer who eventually formed his own e-commerce consulting company. Russ Oasis, CJ’73, a media entrepreneur (see page 21).

Also, Mike Kaye, an ’NEU business manager and DJ, who designed and helped install radio stations for the Vietnamese government during the Vietnam War. Dick Rudman, LA’66, who built much of the station’s original equipment and became a professional radio engineer, recently named one of the most respected in the business by a national magazine. Donna Halper, who became a noted national radio consultant. Kevin Linegan, who “started out as a very nervous announcer” at WNEU, says Frizzell, then became a professional announcer for WJIB in Boston, and now manages a South Shore radio station. Dick Summer, who was a cult figure on WBZ Radio in the 1960s. And Ron Frizzell, who went on to a long and successful radio career, purchasing, with partners, eleven New England stations.

Next month, Bob Ryan, LA’66, one of the station’s first weathermen, is hosting a “fourth decade” WNEU reunion in North Conway, New Hampshire. More than thirty station alums are expected. Activities will include listening to tapes of the early programs.

“I don’t know if any one organization at the school has spawned as many influential people,” says Frizzell, who today has scaled back his radio empire to three New Hampshire stations. “Most of them have been named broadcasters of the year in their state. I know I was. And it all came out of that one itty-bitty radio station.”

— Elaine McArdle