Corporate Demands Don’t Affect WDCV
March 17th 1989

The station will shut down to upgrade equipment.  WDCV alums interviewed in article include Mike Kamali, David Brower, & Pete Bilderback. 

If you are a WDCV alum we would love to hear more about you and your time at WDCV. Can you fill out this quick survey ? It would be much appreciated! 

Yesterday, we posted a 1986 letter from a local Carlisle resident who was not pleased when WDCV’s audio was bleeding through on a cable channel.  Our all knowledgable alum, Pete Bilderback, had written about a similar story for the alumni magazine a few years back.  We thought this story was too good to be forgotten.  Enjoy.

NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS
During the late ’80s and early ’90s I served as music director and station manager at WDCV. I enjoyed the radio station so much that I (perhaps foolishly) passed up the opportunity to study abroad during my junior year to continue running the station. Quite simply I was too in love with the mystery and romance of the medium, its simultaneously ephemeral and enduring nature, to tear myself away. Everything I broadcast was instantly lost in the ether, yet it might provide a memory that could last a listener’s lifetime. I loved knowing that I might brighten the evening of someone pulling the late-night shift at a gas station, connect with someone spending time in jail (I got a lot of collect calls from the prison) or provide the soundtrack to someone’s first adventures in the back seat of a car. Of course it was possible that no one at all was listening, but I took pleasure in imagining the possibilities.

During this time WDCV typically broadcast “alternative” rock on weekday mornings and evenings. If you tuned into 88.3 FM in Carlisle you might have heard the mopey splendor of The Smiths, the neurotic buzz of the Throwing Muses, the high-octane bubblegum punk of the Descendents or the soon-to-be-popular “grunge rock” of Nirvana. Afternoons were given over to the music of the ascendant hip-hop culture—the pioneering rap music of Public Enemy, Salt-n-Pepa, Ice-T, Boogie Down Productions and others. Weekends were reserved for the more eclectic jazz, blues, classical, Christian rock and gospel.

Early in the spring 1990 semester, a young woman (whose name I no longer recall) approached me about a Broadway show tunes program. I felt it would be a perfect match for our Sunday-evening programming and gave her a show immediately, bypassing the usual semesterlong apprenticeship. Though my own enthusiasm for show tunes would not blossom until later in life, I was very impressed by her large collection of original cast recordings, as well as her passion for the music. I didn’t know how someone in her late teens had acquired such an encyclopedic knowledge of show tunes, but I imagined that she came from an archetypical American family that retired to the parlor after dinner to sing show tunes around the family piano. I gave her a two-week crash course in radio programming, introduced her to the world of cueing and mixing and explained how to best project her voice over the air. She struck me as very shy and reserved, but by the end of the second week I felt she had gained enough confidence to handle the show on her own.

I checked in with her the fourth week of her program. She told me in a voice that betrayed her distress that things had not gone well. After she announced the station’s phone number for requests, she was instantly bombarded with hundreds of ranting, obscene phone calls demanding that she get off the air immediately. Apparently some wires had gotten crossed at the local cable TV company and, that particular Sunday, viewers who had tuned in to hear Pat Summerall and John Madden comment on Joe Montana and the San Francisco 49ers’ 55-10 dismantling of John Elway and the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXIV were instead treated to show tunes direct from the basement of the HUB.

This must have been a frightening experience for this young woman, but I must confess to a certain perverse pleasure in knowing that the most macho of all-American holidays had been disrupted by show tunes. Imagine the most extreme contrapuntal juxtapositions of sound and image, say Carol Lawrence singing “I Feel Pretty” as Elway gets sacked for the fifth time or Barbara Streisand offering the musical opinion that “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world” as Bobby Humphrey gets stuffed by Matt Millen for a three-yard loss.

Perhaps the incident was more prosaic than what I envisioned and viewers were treated to something more appropriate to the occasion such as the musical pugilism of Ethel Merman and Ray Middleton singing “Anything You Can Do.” No doubt the overwhelming majority of the audience would have preferred to hear from Summerall and Madden, and they weren’t shy about letting her know this. Despite the misery this young woman endured that day, I have to confess a small degree of jealousy, as she reached a larger audience that day than I ever did.
—Willis Peter Bilderback ’91

March 1991

DJ Pete Bilderback

“This is a fairly representative sample of the kind of radio program I was doing at the time. I kept the talk to a minimum and played a lot of music. The show would probably have been on a Tuesday night in the 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM timeslot. The show’s name was “The Tina Yothers Experience,” although I probably never said that on the air and only used the title in promotional posters.”

Here is the playlist:

0:00 PSA Followed by bitter DJ Rant
0:38 Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass - “Green Peppers”
2:05 Tom Zè - “Mã”
5:49 Sly And The Family Stone - “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)”
10:18 Daniel Owino Misiani - “Joshirati Misiani “
15:10 DJ Announcements
15:30 Fugazi - “Waiting Room” *listener request
18:20 Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band - “Ella Guru”
20:48 Robyn Hitchcock - “The Ghost In You” [Psychedelic Furs Cover] *listener request
23:59 Phil Ochs - “Tape From California”
30:38 DJ Announcements
31:25 Chris McGreggor And The Brotherhood Of Breath - “Country Cooking”
36:30 Bad Brains - “Day Tripper/She’s A Rainbow [Live]” [Beatles/Rolling Stones Cover]
41:00 Kip Kyler And His Flips - “Jungle Hop”
43:00 The Busters - “Bust Out”
45:30 Elvis Presley - “Patch It Up [Live]” *listener request
48:56 DJ Announcements
49:35 Rahsaan Roland Kirk - “Multihorn Variations”
54:26 Das Damen - “Sky Yen”
57:05 Gilberto Gil - “Quilombo, o El Dorado Negro”
61:28 Snakefinger - “The Man In The Dark Sedan”
65:46 Tom Waits - “16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought-Six”
70:18 Sun Ra And His Arkestra - “Space Is The Place”
79:10 DJ Announcements
79:51 Sly And The Family Stone - “Ride The Rhythm” and “Family Affair”
85:23 Love - “You I’ll Be Following”
87:40 Yung Wu - “Aspiration”
91:17 The Mekons - “I Can’t Find My Money” [Cuts Off]


If you are a WDCV alum we would love to hear more about you and your time at WDCV. Can you fill out this quick survey ? It would be much appreciated! 

Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth created a WDCV ID!  Circa Late 80’s/Early 90’s 

Thanks again to Pete Bilderback for these amazing files!

If you are a WDCV alum we would love to hear more about you and your time at WDCV. Can you fill out this quick survey ? It would be much appreciated! 

Pete Bilderback’s Playlist FM February 16, 1989

Thursday, 11:00 PM to 2:00 AM

0:00 New Order - “Dream Attack” [From Hillary Fox’s Program]

0:12 DJ Introduction

0:41 The Stump Wizards - “Firemine” [local, Lemyone, PA band]

02:36 Buzzcocks - “Orgasm Addict”

04:32 Camper Van Beethoven - “Harmony In My Head” [Buzzcocks Cover]

07:14 Half Japanese - “Day And Night”

10:01 The Chills - “Bee Bah Bee Bah Be Boe”

12:32 PSA

13:03 DJ Announcements

13:28 Elvis Costello - “Let Him Dangle”

17:54 XTC - “Mayor Of Simpleton”

21:37 Station ID by Vitus Matare of Trotsky Icepick

21:58 Trotsky Icepick - “Mar Vista Bus Stop”

24:53 DJ Announcements

25:31 Angst - “Time To Understand”

28:51 Christmas - “This Is Not A Test”

31:45 Throwing Muses - “Fall Down”

35:18 Lou Reed - “Good Evening Mr. Waldheim”

39:49 DJ Announcements

40:11 Ben Vaughn Combo - “She’s Your Problem Now”

43:39 Spinal Tap - “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight”

46:12 Iggy And The Stooges - “Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell”

50:39 Spinal Tap - “Hell Hole”

53:44 Nine Pound Hammer - “Bye, Bye Glen Frey”

55:32 DJ Announcements

56:19 Chris McGregor Brotherhood of Breath - “Country Cooking”

61:26 Tom Waits - “Swordfishtrombone”

64:20 Bongos, Bass And Bob - “The Clothes Of The Dead”

67:46 Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band - “When I See Mommy I Feel Like A Mummy”

72:21 DJ Announcements

73:19 Sweet Baby - “Pathetic”

75:07 Field Trip - “Tunneling”

78:03 The Divine Horsemen - “Someone Like You”

82:06 Giant Sand - “Mountain Of Love”

86:00 DJ Announcements

86:54 The Feelies - “Slipping (Into Something) [cuts off]

If you are a WDCV alum we would love to hear more about you and your time at WDCV. Can you fill out this quick survey ? It would be much appreciated! 

WDCV Shirt Logo Late 80’s/Early 90’s

Thanks to Pete Bilderback for the image!

If you are a WDCV alum we would love to hear more about you and your time at WDCV. Can you fill out this quick survey ? It would be much appreciated! 

WDCV Shirt Logo Late 80’s/Early 90’s

Taken from Pete Bilderback’s Blog

If you are a WDCV alum we would love to hear more about you and your time at WDCV. Can you fill out this quick survey ? It would be much appreciated! 

Assorted Show Flyers from Pete Bilderback ‘91
These were taken from a rather interesting blog post he wrote about his time as a dj and Station Manager of WDCV. 

If you are a WDCV alum we would love to hear more about you and your time at WDCV. Can you fill out this quick survey ? It would be much appreciated!