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A brief history of one of the best college radio stations in the country

Columbia has never been given its due as a college rock town. But one thing has always set us apart on a national level: our powerhouse college radio station. By any standard, WUSC (“Wussy” to those who know and love her) is one of the best stations in the country, a tireless student-run entity that has launched the careers of regional bands too numerous to name and garnered praise from Rolling Stone, CMJ and even an award from SPIN along the way. But retaining the freewheeling autonomy and progressive format that put 90.5 FM on the map hasn’t come without a fight.

From its humble beginnings in an old slave house near the Horseshoe, through the turbulence of the 1960s, the glory days of college radio in the 1980s and the infamous administrative meltdown of 1995, the history of WUSC has been anything but dull.

The WUSC Alumni Association will celebrate the station’s 60th anniversary this month during USC’s homecoming weekend, September 28 thru 30 and alumni DJs now spread out all over the country and overseas checked in with City Paper to tell the story of the scrappy little station that made such a large impact on their lives.

Birth and Rebirth: 1947-1977

WUSC, some would say, was born on a train. There had been talk of a student-run station at USC as early as 1945 by a handful of students taking a course on radio technology. But the steam behind the idea came to a head on a train ride in February of ‘46 when Sid Liberman, who would become one of the stations first DJs, found himself seated next to an editor from The Gamecock.

The two had heard rumblings of the idea on campus and decided since no one else seemed to be moving forward on it that, hell, they’d pick up the torch themselves. With the help of a student named Sid Wise and friends and under the tutelage of trailblazing professor and local radio personality, Mackie Quave, the group worked busily over the next year to acquire the necessary equipment and permits.

The administration granted the station a location in the old slave quarters behind the faculty Wauchope House on the Horseshoe (now the Presidents home) and the transmitters finally squealed to life on a hot Spring night in ’47 with Liberman signing on. Little did they know that what was to become one of the premier college radio stations in the country had just been born.

That June, the group traveled to New York and were guests of the Collegiate Broadcasting Convention. By fall semester WUSC 640 AM was going strong on a campus-wide carrier current system, meaning the only way to hear it was to plug a radio into a jack in the dorm room wall.

By the 1950s, the little station set up in an ivy-covered shack off the Horseshoe had already built a broadcast schedule that featured everything from zany morning shows to modern jazz. They began to broadcast news, do remote feeds and covered sports. “Music to Study By,” one of the favorite shows of its era, often inspired the students to do a lot more than just hit the books.

Mackie Quave, who had been acting as faculty advisor, continued on a career path in local radio and TV that spanned decades. He is perhaps best remembered as “Cactus Quave” from his WIS radio kids show that began in the 1940s and reportedly drew higher ratings in Columbia than the “The Lone Ranger,” before he moved the show to TV.

“Man, I remember Mackie used to always hang out at a joint called J. B. Gant’s,” recalled Dale Alan Bailes, a WUSC DJ from 1962 through 64. “He’d sit in there drinking Old Milwaukee.”

“Back in the Sixties, everyone was dissing the Kennedys. Mackie was doing a news spot one day on WIS and said ‘Now a bulletin on the Kennedys: No Kennedy anywhere did anything. Thank you.’ And he signed off,” Bailes laughs loudly. “Oh, man, Mackie was great.”

WUSC hit a growth spurt in the 1960s, upgraded its facilities, moved up the AM dial and began to broadcast to the outskirts of campus from its headquarters in the Russell House. In those days, it was still a Top 40 station playing stuff like Perry Como and Johnny Mathis, but there were a few DJs on staff who stepped out of the line, precursors to the progressive format the station would officially adopt in the following decade.

Bailes, now a screenwriter in California, recalls going through a stack of records tucked out of sight at the station in 1963. “I came across an album by a guy I had never heard of named Bob Dylan. There was a sticker on the record that said, ‘Do Not Air!’ I also found a version of ‘We Shall Overcome’ by Joan Baez with the same sticker on it. I listened to them and was blown away. So, of course, I played them on the air right away.”

He was playing “We Shall Overcome” one day when white students were marching in front of the Russell House chanting “2-4-6-8! We don’t want to integrate!” After his shift, Bailes saw a guy named Bob Anderson, one of the first black students at USC, sitting by himself with his lunch, so he went up to him, introduced himself and asked if he could join him for lunch. The two became fast friends. When visiting family in Aiken a few weeks later, Bailes realized just how small South Carolina is.

“A guy I knew came up to me and said, ‘I heard you ate lunch with a black boy at Carolina and if it’s true I’m gonna have to spit on you.’ Well,” Bailes says, “I squared up to him and said, ‘Start spitting.’”

By the 1970s the free thinkers at WUSC prevailed and in ‘71 the station officially adopted a progressive format in its bylaws. Radio, too, was changing. In 1974, the DJs knew it was time to make the jump to FM.

The FCC granted them the use of the 91.9 MHz frequency, but interference from a station in Batesburg forced WUSC to move its antenna site—eventually to the roof of Columbia Hall—and the resulting FCC red tape pushed back their sign-on date for over a year.

At 8:00 a.m. on Monday, January 17, 1977 WUSC FM went live to the greater Columbia area and those who were on hand say the station was crowded with excited DJs as early as 7:00 (no small feat for college kids). Ed Cohen, current vice president of domestic research for the radio ratings company, Arbitron, was a WUSC DJ at the time.

“I’m not sure that we realized whether it was significant at the time or not,” Cohen recalls. “It was just so cool to be able to broadcast to anyone, especially beyond the campus. The old AM carrier current system was pretty much dead by that point…in the Fall of 1976, you weren’t certain if anyone could receive the station, let alone if anyone was listening.”

But they were. Cohen had one of the first shifts and began to get feedback immediately. “I had a shift that night and the big difference was that you were hearing from actual listeners who would call the station. Just having some feedback was a revelation. Remember that we started with a ten watt mono signal at 91.9, so we didn’t have quite the range that WUSC-FM has today.”

The jump to FM also marked the beginning of a friendly “Soc and Greaser” style, student media feud between the more clean-cut Gamecock staff and the wild-eyed hair farmers at WUSC. DJs at the time apparently took issue with the fact that the stations jump to FM wasn’t even mentioned in the student paper, other than a small ad, and believe—though it’s never been confirmed—that the station’s 2-week long album giveaway and instant popularity somehow threatened the newspaper. Whether true or not, one thing is for certain: something big started on that cold day in January up at the Russell House.

Glory Days: 1982-1995

In 1982, WUSC FM upped its power output from 10 watts to 3,000, moved to its current 90.5 MHz frequency and could be heard roughly 30 miles in any direction. The heady days of 1970s mainstream FM radio were quickly being eclipsed by MTV and the music video. Venture to the right end of the radio dial in the 1980s and one risked being subjected to anything from Lionel Richie to Phil Collins or Mister Mister.

It got worse as the decade progressed and schlock like Whitesnake and Winger blared from Camaros from Gaston to Elgin and all points in between. Desperate live remote promos perched hapless DJs atop billboards to wave at traffic, all to move a few extra bumper stickers. Mercifully, tucked away between NPR and the religious stations, WUSC was playing music that would set the standard for decades to come.

Back in the days when Black Flag would come to town, indie rock staples like The Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Husker Du, and scores of others saw regular play on 90.5. A decade later, the programming continued to expand: varying genres of metal; punk and hardcore shows; No Depression-era alt-country; industrial; avant-garde jazz; the blues; hip hop; the techno sounds of the early Nineties rave era; and more.

Not to mention the locals: anything from Lay Quiet Awhile to Blightobody to 49 Reasons or hardcore from Strait Up, In/Humanity and Antischism, most all of whom had radio shows of their own. WUSC alongside Amy Singmaster and her Free Times and clubs like Von Henmon’s and later Greene Streets and Rockafella’s all fostered a thriving rock culture in Columbia that rivaled Athens and Chapel Hill at the time. In 1992, WUSC was awarded SPIN magazine’s “College Radio Station of the Year.”

Brian Poust, a DJ in that era, is the current co-host of Atlanta’s “Sure Shot” funk sessions. He recently hosted a soul music night at a secretive and Freemason-esque soul appreciation society in Columbia called the G.C.S.P.S.

“Among the many good memories of WUSC,” says Poust, “one of the most remarkable memories which has stayed with me over the years was a staff meeting stunt courtesy of then Music Director, Will Kahler.

Compiling our ‘Top 40’ chart one week, he realized that the Smiths were the most played band that week. Will calmly explained that we were on the air to promote new music, not safe, middle-of-the-road stuff from 10 years ago and proceeded to sling the record across the room and it shattered into pieces when it hit the wall. I was a freshman at the time and Will gained my instant respect.”

“My playlists were constantly monitored with respect to the types of bands I was playing,” Emily Sheridan, a DJ from 1991 through 94, recalls. “That way, my show didn’t just slant too much towards indie rock, but exposed other areas of music as well.”

Two of the stations most beloved and long running shows also started in the 1990s and showcase two genres that were precursors to rock. “The Red Bank Bar and Grill,” an alt-country / Americana show hosted by alum Mark Lyvers (a.k.a. Uncle Gram) and a blues show called “Blues Moon with Clair DeLune.”
Both shows, as many fans know, continue to this day.

DeLune says she started a blues show essentially by the luck of the draw. One of her students at the time was the station manager. They needed someone for either the roots rock show or the blues show at the time. DeLune had a class at the same time as the rock show, so she considered doing the blues timeslot.
“We went by the station during the blues show and there was an older gentleman in there playing this stuff that sounded like the Partridge Family. I remember saying, ‘Wow. You really do need me.’”

“And I’m so glad I chose the blues show,” she says. “It’s a genre that’s just endlessly rich.”

DeLune tries not to regularly rotate the same songs on her show and found that she quickly ran out of blues albums in the WUSC library. So, she started to research lesser-known musicians, digging through bins at flea markets and small hole-in-the-wall record stores around the region, sometimes buying 50 albums at a time, until now, over a decade later, she has amassed her own blues library.

She says her boyfriend at the time was aghast. “I remember he said, ‘You’re not a normal girl, not with a record collection like this!’” DeLune laughs. “What can I say, I always hated the girl scouts.”

DeLune was asked to teach classes on the genre at the university and recently wrote the script for a 13 part television series on the blues for a production company overseas.

But WUSC’s reign at the top of the college air waves was not to last and the first era of the trailblazing DJ at 90.5 was about to screech to an abrupt halt.

Breakdown, Buildup: 1995-Present

On January 17, 1995, exactly 18 years to the day after WUSC went live on FM, DJs arrived to do their shifts and found the doors closed with the locks changed. The entire executive staff had been fired. The station was off the air.

It all started after Chris Carroll, the USC director of student media, claimed the station was being flagged by the FCC for airing a song by an overtly gay punk band at the time called Pansy Division. Many believed Carroll’s allegation to be false and fueled by ulterior motives. Trey Lofton, the station manager, other members of the WUSC executive staff and the DJs responded to the allegations by criticizing Carroll and the USC administration over the airwaves.

“I remember that there was a WUSC Halloween party at Trey’s house that year and for some reason he was very late showing up,” says Bin Wilcenski, a DJ at the time. “When he finally did get there, dressed as a pregnant medieval nun, he mentioned that he had been in a meeting with Chris Carroll. I believe Chris called the meeting and Trey knew it was not going to be good. From what I remember being told, it was a very heated discussion and neither Trey nor Chris were happy with the outcome.”

The tension continued to build over the next couple of months and Carroll finally petitioned the university board of publications to make him the interim station manager to clear the matter up. They approved his petition on Jan. 15. Two days later, the entire staff was gone.

“Some of the executive staff were even ‘written up’ by the university to the degree that they were banned from entering the Russell House,” recalls Wilcenski. “Not just the station, not just the third floor where the station is located, but the entire Russell House, Grand Market Place, the mail boxes, everything. I think some grades and transcripts were tied up, as well. A little overboard, if you ask me.”

Shortly thereafter, Chris Carroll’s skeletons began to parade from his closet.

According to journalist Alex Todorovic, writing for the Point at the time, Carroll also presided over the shutdown of WTUL at Tulane in 1991. Carroll was perceived by many as a khakis and blue blazer type of journalism geek who generally clashed with the more alternative college radio crowd. Many believe that at both Tulane and WUSC he was working behind the scenes to clean up what he believed to be overtly rowdy radio stations. At Tulane he had fired key members of the staff and inserted station managers of his own. One DJ at WUSC at the time claims that Carroll planned to turn 90.5 FM into a mainstream country station, though that has yet to be confirmed.

While Carroll and the administration worked out their new plan for the station, Columbia heard nothing but static. The USC Student Senate responded with an open statement: “While we believe that the administration has the authority to make the moves it did, that does not mean that we agree with it. We do not. We fail to see how dismissing the entire Executive Staff, en masse, provides any educational benefits.”

Carroll eventually appointed Steve Gionfriddo, a fraternity guy who did the dance show, as station manager. And though he didn’t quite fit the WUSC manager mold, he started the daunting task of rebuilding the station and won the respect of the few returning DJs.

“Friddo did everything he needed to do to get the station going and generally was a good guy,” says Wilcenski, who was appointed assistant music director alongside Music Director, John Lyons. “We worked hard to rebuild the station in the way that we remembered it, and we didn’t really feel pressure to be anything more or less that what it was in the past.”

Chris Carroll left the university shortly after the WUSC debacle and the university hired Ellen Parsons as the new director of student media. Parsons, according to many former DJs, kept a close watch on the station manager and forced the acceptance of any student who wanted to be on the air, with what some call a “total disregard for sounding good or meeting the set criterion.” It was a time in the station’s history marred by a spotty broadcast schedule and often more banal on-air chatter than music.

The rising tide of DJs eventually squeezed out the veterans and alumni. In 2001, Parsons called for an amendment the station’s constitution that disallowed alumni to have shows.

DeLune says she was on the executive staff at the time. “I fought so hard to keep Uncle Gram on that their new policy ended up incorporating me, too.” According to DeLune, they then amended the constitution again to disallow alumni and faculty/staff. She, Lyvers, and a couple of others were immediately yanked off the air. The backlash from the community was almost instant.

“People were going crazy about it,” Lyvers says. “I didn’t realize Red Bank Bar and Grill had that many fans.”

When Parsons moved on, WUSC asked Lyvers and DeLune to come back. “After all,” Lyvers laughs, “what college student would want the Saturday morning slot anyway?”

“It never needed to get that bad,” DeLune says about the shutdown and rebuilding process. She says there’s a level of branding involved in college radio and that WUSC has had an uphill battle reclaiming their title. “We were on top for so long and now we’re having to work our way back up.”

And they’re on the right track. These days, says DeLune, “the station is running fabulously.”

Many credit Jason Paddock, who took over as station manager in 1999, for laying the groundwork and setting the station back on course. Today, under current station manager Zach Biondo and crew, the station sounds better than it has in years and Rolling Stone’s recent book Schools That Rock claims that WUSC is one of the best reasons to attend Carolina.

“The station has improved greatly over the horrible programming which Columbia was subjected to when WUSC went back on the air,” agrees former DJ, Brian Poust. “I was last in Columbia in July and really enjoyed what I heard.”

And thanks to Web streaming, the station can now reach almost every corner of the globe. Lyvers marvels at the broadening reach of his show. “Man, I’ve gotten requests from Australia and Brazil. How crazy is that?” “WUSC is the only true ‘alternative’ radio station we have in Columbia,” says former DJ Jennifer Lambert. And most DJs agree that the progressive format of the station is something the university, listeners and the musicians need to appreciate and protect.

“I’m in Atlanta now,” says Poust, “and the three biggest college stations here are WRAS, WREK and WCLK. I love them all but they’re not even in the same category as WUSC.”

On Friday, September 28, WUSC alumni are invited to attend a party at The Whig starting at 7:00 p.m. At 11:00 p.m. WUSC Alumni are invited to the New Brookland Tavern for a dance party. Former DJs are invited to bring music on portable music devices and help DJ the party.

talkback@columbiacitypaper.com

Alumni weejend DJ Schedule:

Friday: John Burbage: Noon to 2 p.m. Bob Chapman: 4 – 6 p.m. Bin Wilcenski: 6 – 7 p.m. SinDoolah: 8 – 10 p.m. Jonathan Robinson: 10 p.m. – Midnight

Saturday: Uncle Gram: (Red Bank Bar & Grill Show) Cosmic Evan: Noon – 2 p.m. Ed Cohen: 2 – 4 p.m. Cynthia and Lorel: 6 – 8 p.m.

Sunday: John Hearn: 10 a.m. – Noon Steve Varholy: Noon – 2 p.m. Todd Money: 2 – 4 p.m.