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Former WRFL staff members posed for a Herald-Leader article in the station's early days. Photo credit: Herald-Leader Photo/UK Archive credit
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A group of station founders and other longtime WRFLians –some of them splattered in fresh paint – celebrated the installation of the station’s new tower in 2008, which upped its bandwidth from 250 to 7900 watts.This year marks 30 years that the station has been on the air. Photo by Brian Connors Manke
WRFL 88.1 first hit the airwaves on March 7, 1988, with the Big Audio Dynamite song “C’mon Every Beatbox.” The lyrics, “There’s been a brainwave at the radio station/Old idea from the Woodstock generation/Calling all the kids from across the nation ... Everybody’s welcome, there will be no discrimination,” epitomized the radio station’s mission of bringing alternative music, news and other diverse programming to Lexington.
This year, the University of Kentucky’s student-run radio station celebrates 30 years of doing just that – and doing it non-stop, 24 hours a day. Over the past three decades, with the motto “your only alternative left,” WRFL has become inexorably intertwined in Lexington’s culture, and continues to be an example of some of the best college radio in the country.
Station founder Kakie Urch, currently a UK faculty member who continues to serve on the station’s advisory board, describes WRFL as “everyone’s good idea.” As she tells it, the station’s origins happened organically.
“We were a bunch of creative people with a lot of ideas and different musical backgrounds,” said Urch, a current UK faculty member who continues to serve on the station’s advisory board. “We tried to put something together using best practices, when ‘best practices’ hadn’t been made up yet.”
From the start, the folks running the station were conscious of musical diversity. At a time when a major Lexington radio station was advertising “All the hits and no rap,” WRFL was playing Public Enemy and Schoolly D and sponsoring talks with KRS-One. Since the beginning, playing “the hits” is something the station has largely avoided.
While the station was fueled by heavy momentum from the start, it was far from an overnight success. Urch, like many people who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, remembers the pre-internet world, where discovering new music required trips to the record store, conversations at shows and trading letters and mix tapes.
“In order to make a sound viral, it had to be played on the radio,” she said.
A 1985 article called “Radio Free Lexington: What UK Needs,” written by Urch and published in UK’s campus newspaper, Kentucky Kernel, was what propelled WRFL into motion – but being the founder of a radio station was not Urch’s original intention. In a 2008 ACE Weekly piece, she said that she wrote that early column “not to start a college radio station, but to be able to listen to one.”
Kentucky Kernel editor Liz Caras had included a response coupon that readers could clip out and return.
“There were two boxes, one saying ‘I want college radio’ and one with ‘No, I don’t want college radio’ and their reasons why,” Urch remembers. “I can’t tell you what a radical idea this was.”
As it turns out, the Kernel was flooded with hundreds of coupons saying “Yes!” to college radio. The article amplified an idea that many had been thinking of and talking about.
After writing the piece, Urch says, people started stopping her on campus to ask when she was going to start the radio station. The time had come to form a committee that, over a period of two years, would make WRFL a reality. Urch credits former UK president Otis Singletary and then-councilwoman Debra Hensley as two of the station’s biggest early financial backers. Singletary, according to Urch, “threw us $10,000 on his way out the door,” (i.e., soon before retiring). And Hensley, using city council discretionary funds, put WRFL over the top with another $10,000. (A few years ago, Urch had the opportunity to return the favor, playing an active role in helping Hensley get Lexington Community Radio, which comprises the low-power broadcasting stations WLXU and WLXL, off the ground.) She is also deeply indebted to Mark Beaty, WRFL’s first program director, and Theo Monroe, who secured its FCC license.
Today, WRFL operates with many of the same principles and procedures it’s had since the beginning. In the words of the station’s student media advisor – and longtime DJ – Ben Allen, it continues to be a “real world working laboratory” for students to learn about communications, broadcasting, non-profit administration, marketing, time management and countless other skills.
Allen has been involved with the station in one way or another for the past 20 years. As media advisor, a role he’s held since 2011, he is responsible for the station’s FCC compliance, oversees the student activities board, provides tech support and advises an ever-changing group of student and community DJs.
“I’ve been around long enough that I can provide institutional memory in a place that is constantly going through transitional periods,” Allen said.
In Allen’s eyes, one of the most important aspects of WRFL is its countervailing balance to mainstream culture.
“If you take a snapshot of UK that is representative of the cultural landscape, WRFL provides a space for people who need representation but who don’t necessarily find it in some of the more mainstream places,” he said. “This is not to say that there aren’t any WRFLians who identify with sports or Greek life, but it’s super important to have this place where people are interested in underground forms of culture and are building a community around it.”
Charly Hyden, who served as a student director at the station in 2015-16, echoed that sentiment. During an early training session, a fellow DJ described the station to her as “a home for people without a home,” a description that really resonated with her.
“It was exactly what I needed as a first-generation student from the hills,” said Hyden, an eastern Kentucky native. “WRFL connected me to a wonderful group of weirdos who constantly pushed me to grow, introduced me to new music and made me think about art in a new way.
“The diversity of perspectives altered the way I saw the world,” she added. “We were always challenging and questioning the status quo.”
The station’s current general manager, Maya Collins-Peterson, grew up listening to WRFL. The Lexington native says when she came to UK, where she is now a junior studying forestry, the first test she took was the WRFL DJ exam. From a student’s perspective, she said, “College radio is important because, especially at UK, it’s a place where the weirdos can go. There are about 30,000 students here, and it’s mostly a sorority and fraternity culture, which is fine, but there are people out there like me who have found their place and community through the station.”
WRFL DJs enjoy a huge amount of freedom in terms of what they can play. Each year, Collins-Patterson and her colleagues attend the College Broadcasters Inc. (CBI) conference, where they network with college radio personnel from around the country.
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Station DJs play a blend of vinyl, compact discs and digital recordings. Photo by Ethan Fedele
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Temporarily housed in the University of Kentucky White Hall Classroom Building, WRFL’s headquarters is slated to move to the new campus Student Center in April. Photo by Ethan Fedele
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The longtime host of the station’s Thursday morning talk show “Trivial Thursdays,” Mick Jeffries, is pictured here during a recent guest DJ slot on WRFL’s Alumni DJ Show, hosted by Brian Connors Manke. Photo by Brian Connors Manke
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Photo by Ethan Fedele
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Photo by Ethan Fedele
“What we’ve found is that we are different,” she said, “not only because we’re on 24/7 but because a lot of other stations’ media directors create playlists for the DJs, and a DJ might be able to pick one to five songs per hour. Our general format DJs are only required to play about five songs, or 20 minutes’ worth of music, from our new music playbox per hour.”
Currently, there are about 100 DJs on WRFL’s airwaves, some of whom have been with the station since its early days and all of whom are volunteers. Allen says they try to keep an equal number of students and community members, but that usually happens naturally. The station is run almost entirely by a small staff of student directors who oversee day-to-day duties that range from organizing the station’s massive CD library to updating the current playbox to planning station-run events. RiFLe, the station’s program guide, in the form of an old-school zine (founded by Urch) is still in circulation.
Anyone interested in becoming a DJ, whether student or community member, goes through the same program, Allen explained. It involves about a semester’s worth of training, followed by observations and exams. “It’s a wide-open door for anyone, and we don’t have any intention of changing that,” he said.
So how has the 30-year-old radio station evolved over the years? “Physically, we’ve gone through three broadcasting consoles. We’re currently on our fourth,” said Allen. (The station’s original sound booth was built using plywood that Urch snagged from backstage at a Pink Floyd concert at Rupp Arena in the 1980s.)
“We went from using primarily vinyl and cart [tape-based] machines to CDs, and we’re working on using more digital technology,” Allen continued.
When asked how the digital market is affecting how people discover music, Allen said, “About five or six years ago, we realized that not all new students are familiar with what radio is and how it works. They’re used to downloading music song by song. They’re used to being introduced to stuff through subscription services like Spotify and Pandora or by looking at stuff on YouTube. So, their ability to curate programs is much different than an amateur musicologist or a music collector.”
He mentioned a recent conversation he had with another DJ who was frustrated by this.
“I said that we have to remember that [students today] might not even be familiar with FM radio. It’s up to us to meet them in the middle and figure out what this is going to look like.”
In his view, a WRFL show should always have some form of music curation —ideally in multiple formats.
“As soon as anyone steps up to the broadcast console, with a combination of DJ mixing software, a playlist of mp3 tracks and vinyl, your mindset becomes, ‘How does this flow together?’ and that’s the way I think it should be done.”
Thirty years later, Urch is thrilled to see the station she and her friends fought so hard for alive and thriving. And she believes college radio is still a great place of discovery. “In this case, your Spotify algorithm is a human being,” she said.
The college radio stations that remain relevant tend to be the ones that make deep community connections, like WRFL has – it’s not just a representation of the University of Kentucky but of Lexington as a whole. As part of its mission to “support arts and music in the Lexington area,” WRFL regularly brings artists into town and organizes events that bring music lovers together. The station has been the catalyst for many iconic Lexington events, from the bygone Alternative Music Week to Lexington’s “Thriller” parade, the popular annual Halloween event that WRFL helped launch more than 25 years ago. Other local events the station has organized in more recent years include Boomslang: A Celebration of Sound and Art (a multi-venue music festival that took place from 2009-2013); Queerslang, a celebration of local LGBT culture that started in conjunction with Boomslang and continues today; and FreeKY Fest, the station’s 20th birthday celebration, which took place in 2007 on top of the Lexington Transit Center. The station has been a training ground for countless individuals, many of whom have taken the experience they garnered at the station and gone on to have successful careers in radio, television, music, design and many other related fields.
“This is a place where students are pretty much treated as equals in the field,” Urch said “If you run a great student radio station, people don’t actually care if you’re a student. They treat you like you’re running a great radio station.”
washed out
Washed Out, the music project led by Athens, Georgia-based multi-instrumentalist Ernest Greene, is among the headliners for WRFL's 30th Birthday Bash, March 2-4. The weekend will feature a diverse selection of live music, a reception geared toward DJs from across the station's 30 year history and more.
WRFL’s 30th Birthday Bash
March 2-4, 2018
To celebrate 30 years of “Radio free Lexington,” WRFL will host a diverse lineup of concerts and other special events, geared toward fans of the station and alumni DJs.
More info and tickets available at wrfl.fm.
Friday, March 2
- Washed Out, Helado Negro and Idiot Glee at The Burl (8 p.m.)
- The Yellow Belts, Just a Test, Hellbent Hearts at Green Lantern (9 p.m.)
Saturday, March 3
- WRFL Alumni DJ Reception, featuring a screening of the documentary “WRFL: How It Went Down” and more at the Downtown Arts Center (12-4 p.m.)
- Cults, Ellie Herring, Devine Carama, Hair Police, Thank You for Coming to Our Parties at The Burl (8 p.m.)
Sunday, March 4
- Daytime “Brunch Bash” with Nine Pound Hammer, 10-Foot Pole, Lovely Grandmas and more at The Burl (12-5 p.m.)