The Agenda

I can help answer that!

Back in the early 80s, the station's music was still programmed by its student staff. Various methods of steering its direction were used, including "the Book" (AKA "the Lardbook") introduced by the program director at the time, Hunt Blair. It consisted of a book full of band names with grids corresponding to the days of the week and on-air timeslots, and you'd check off when you played a track by a certain band. Each band had a quota, so hopefully no one would play too much Clash (for example) on a particular day. Other than having to play a certain number of bands from the Lardbook in a shift, and a certain number of tracks from the New Bin in a shift, the DJ (or as we were called then, programmers) had a lot of latitude in deciding what to play.

It was cumbersome, but it worked fairly well. The station had a pretty consistent sound (at least Mon-Sat between 6 AM and midnight) and you'd often hear stuff you wouldn't hear anywhere else.

Then they hired Lee Abrams. Lorded as the Father of FM radio, he was hired by WBRU in '82 or '83 to boost their ratings. He implemented a strict rotation of what to play, and no deviations from the couple of hundred songs in the index card file was permitted.

I attended a meeting or two with him in which he presented himself as a hip guy who understood where we were coming from, but I had my doubts about the whole rotation thing.

The rotation was implemented for the very first time on a Saturday @ 6:00 AM - which happened to be my timeslot. Now, I was not a Brown student, but a local with a bunch of college radio experience under my belt who happened to be insane enough to get up every Saturday morning at 5:00 AM to head into Providence so I could play music on the air for 4 hours, indulging my tastes and finding out about all this great new music that was coming out.

I was right in my trepidation - the 4 hours I spent that Saturday morning as the very first BRU DJ to play the rotation sucked monkey balls. Something I thought was so much fun had its essence sucked dry as the decision of what to play next was wrenched away from me. It was no fun at all to see that after playing a song from the A1 category, next was B2, and just play the song listed on the next index card. It was mechanical and dull, and I quit after that one shift.

So in answer to the question "When did WBRU start sucking?" It was at the beginning of that Saturday morning back in '83 or so. And I've always regretted the small part I played in its downfall.

I'm sorry, Providence.