It was the early ’90s, and legendary Pittsburgh soul singer Billy Price was headed to a gig when the radio murmured a soft bass line, offset by fluttering violins and a deep, full voice. WYEP’s Rhett Witherspoon was spinning Joe Simon’s “Your Time to Cry,” and Price was transfixed.
“This song knocked me in the solar plexus,” Price laughs. “I pulled off the highway, and I went to a phone booth, called up and said, ‘Rhett! Rhett, what was that record you just played?'” That was all it took for Price to fall for the song; he would later record his own version, which ended up on his Soul Collection album. It’s just one example of the station’s impact on local listeners and musicians alike.
Though it’s inspired some grand endeavors, WYEP’s genesis was hardly a lofty one. The first cracklings over 91.5 FM on April 30, 1974, came from a few friends, a grand idea, and a basement.
When he suggested building an archive to celebrate WYEP’s 40th anniversary, music director and Midday Mix host Mike Sauter met with some opposition: The project was deemed too hard, too time-consuming. Still, he persisted, collecting newsletters, reel-to-reel tapes, and interviews with founders Jeff Smith, John Schwartz and Ellory Schemp. Through it, he’s gained a feel for the climate in 1970s Pittsburgh and the urgency with which WYEP was conceived — and preserved.
“If we waited for another milestone, like the 50th anniversary, who knows how much history is going to be lost in that time?” Sauter points out. He shares discoveries with the public daily, through WYEP’s “Time Capsule” segment.
As Sauter explains it, WYEP was a very different place in the beginning, and not just because of its decrepit Oakland location at 4 Cable Place. “Almost all of the people who were going to be on the air had no experience doing any kind of radio whatsoever.” A sounding board for community announcements, WYEP was not terribly formal. There are accounts of impromptu station keg parties, someone getting mugged on the air, and a DJ almost being electrocuted because of a flash flood.
This early period also made WYEP its own time capsule. Investigative programs were recorded from remote events like a KKK rally, and Sauter has found interviews with folk singer Pete Seeger, science-fiction writer Issac Asimov and Monty Python member Graham Chapman, all now deceased. His research has given Sauter a glimpse into 1970s “society at large, and broadcasting as well.”
Schwartz and Smith poured savings into the station, tirelessly securing grants from organizations across the country. Schemp, a University of Pittsburgh professor, got involved mostly because he was the only one of the bunch who owned a suit. Schemp, Schwartz and a rock-climber friend would eventually install WYEP’s first antenna atop the Cathedral of Learning.
By 1982, WYEP had improved its signal from 850 to 18,200 watts. But a new transmitter in Hazelwood increased costs, since Pitt was no longer footing the bill. “At the time, we thought: You increase the power, you increase the listenership,” recalls former treasurer Bruce Mountjoy, who still hosts the station’s weekly Bluegrass Jam Session show.
Ensuing events proved otherwise. “In 1985, we had raised $12,000 for the whole year,” remembers former president of the board Peter Rosenfeld. “Even back then, a station with our power had about half-a-million-dollar budget. $12,000 wasn’t enough to pay the light bill.” It was a fact that Duquesne Light made very clear. In one instance, Rosenfeld was able to temporarily stave off the bill when an attorney from the power company realized he’d be a guest at Rosenfeld’s wedding. (The attorney, it turned it, was related to the bride.)
It seemed 1970s WYEP had done something better than 1980s WYEP. “It wasn’t just happy hippies on the air,” Rosenfeld reiterates, citing the founders’ ability to secure foundation support. “In public radio, if you’re doing really well, 10 percent of your audience will support you financially.” Support from 10 percent of the station’s estimated 1,000 listeners wasn’t going to cut it, and Rosenfeld says in the ’80s, the do-it-yourself vibe at WYEP made the staff hostile toward grant-seeking.
And with disjointed programming — an Arabic Heritage Hour, an American Indian Hour, Irish music and jazz — listeners weren’t going to tune in all week, let alone support the station. Mountjoy and Rosenfeld found themselves meeting at Silky’s in Squirrel Hill each week, writing a check to the company most likely to shut off their service.
Though WYEP needed a revamp, the idea of bringing in outside help met with resistance from a group accustomed to a DIY mentality. Seated around a table at the old House of Chang, in Oakland, the board considered handing its license over to WQED, the University of Pittsburgh or even a religious broadcaster from Virginia Beach. Eventually, the board dissolved itself, appointing a committee to construct new bylaws. It was better than the alternative, Rosenfeld explains. After all: “We had demonstrated that we weren’t good stewards of the license.”
With permission to renovate from the FCC and a handful of volunteers still dedicated to the cause, WYEP hosted a fundraising event featuring Billy Price and the Keystone Rhythm Band. Eventually, the station was able to outfit a completely new studio at Chatham College.
The basement studio was “like the Starship Enterprise compared to what we had at Cable Place,” Rosenfeld says with a laugh. It featured new equipment, two spaces for live performances, and — Mountjoy emphasizes — air conditioning. By gathering representatives from Chatham into the mix, as well as professionals in marketing and accounting, WYEP found the support it had been missing from the community.
“It was probably in the late ’80s and early ’90s when the station started really becoming the tastemaker on the national music scene,” says current general manager Abby Goldstein, who had corresponded with the station in her days as a music promoter. She laughs upon hearing Mountjoy’s characterization of WYEP: “the station that refused to die.”
“I think it’s very accurate,” Goldstein says. “People probably underestimated the passion of the city to keep the radio station around.”
Former general manager Lee Ferraro “knew they turned the corner, and were doing fairly well,” when he arrived in 1996. He was also aware of a high turnover rate among general managers at the station in the early ’90s. “But I knew there was a passion for the station,” Ferraro claims. “I knew I wasn’t coming into a happy family, fully mature, but I knew Rosemary [Welsch] was very good at her job, and some of the board members I’d talked to were very committed to the station.”
WYEP needed to consolidate its brand to become a uniquely Pittsburgh asset. Instead of being “the granola station, or the lesbian folk station,” Ferraro realized “we had to be more about great music, and building great community.”
During the late ’90s and into the 2000s, WYEP would cement its current format: adult album alternative, with a mix of contemporary indie rock (especially in prime time) and roots music. Most of the daytime blocks adhere to a regular rotation with DJs adding in their favored songs; overnight, the station still has free-form DJ blocks.
Soon after being hired, Ferraro got in touch with the producers at NPR’s syndicated live-music-and-interview show The World Café. The idea was to bring a broadcast to The Andy Warhol Museum, after which the bands would move to an outdoor stage and serenade tailgaters. The nationally broadcast program could bring attention to the Warhol, as well as Pittsburgh’s other cultural offerings. During The World Cafe’s Warhol run, from 1997 through 2007, WYEP’s Summer Music Festival expanded from the museum parking lot to North Shore Riverfront Park, and finally to its current location in Schenley Plaza, where attendance tripled. (The 16th Summer Music Festival takes place Saturday, June 28; see info box.)
Under Ferraro’s leadership, WYEP was gaining recognition on a national level, and it needed a true home base. As the station began planning to build a new studio, green architecture was on the rise, especially in Pittsburgh, where the new convention center was built to be environmentally friendly. As a progressive organization, a green structure “was in our DNA,” Ferarro says. “We were leaders, and our listeners would expect us to do that.”
WYEP had already been in the South Side for eight years when planning began in 2002. The goal was to begin broadcasting from Bedford Square as WYEP entered a new year, but winter of 2005 found the station scrambling again. Though the capital campaign had been successful, receiving endorsement from Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato and former Pittsburgh Steeler Lynn Swann, “We weren’t quite sure if all of the equipment was going to work properly,” remembers content director Kyle Smith. “But it all went off quite well.” After its completion, the building would receive a LEED Silver rating, the first time a radio station’s home was certified green.
In February 2006, the widely recognized voice of WYEP, Rosemary Welsch, announced the first song played out of the new studio: “Radio Radio,” by Elvis Costello.
Its home base firmly situated in the South Side, WYEP was about to become an even bigger force. When mostly-jazz NPR affiliate WDUQ went on the market, administrators at WYEP realized they had the funds to take on a sister station.
“Pittsburgh really deserved an all-NPR news station,” Ferraro explains. The new affiliate, WESA, now runs NPR programming along with two hours of local news per day, and a Saturday-night jazz program.
WYEP still plays a meaningful role in the education of its inspiring musicians. Last fall, the station launched Reimagine Media, a site written and curated by students. WYEP will release a compilation album of local student acts later this summer, and invite each contributor to perform at a station-sponsored concert.
As Ferraro attests, “I don’t think people realized how mature WYEP was, or just what a sophisticated organization it had become over the years.” With 90,000 weekly listeners, it’s not just the station that refused to die: It’s the station Pittsburgh kept alive.
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2014.
Who wrote this article? Doesn’t the author deserve a byline?
Print version of City Paper features this article as its cover story. Carries the byline of Julia Cook. Why she isn’t listed as its author in the on-line edition is a mystery.
Julia’s name was accidentally omitted during the process of uploading content to the web. I’ve restored it. Thanks for pointing out the oversight!
Sadly, this article entirely omits WYEP’s stunning impact on Pittsburgh’s Punk and New Wave scene in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Hell, aside from nurturing its growth locally Dj, WT Koltek and cohorts introduced us to so very many cool sounds that weren’t even necessarily punk or new wave, but all shared an avant edge that superbly expanded one’s musical references. For shame that no mention of this era and its personalities was made.
To me that was the period of WYEP’s golden age. I can very easily say these folks had the same tremendous impact locally as did the legendary underground radio DJ, ” Brother Love ” (Ken Reeth) at WAMO during the late 60’s.
I stopped listening to WYEP years ago back when I heard so much Tom Petty that I thought I was listening to a Clear Channel station. WYEP is a pale ghost of it’s former self and the term “independent” is a misnomer. The playlist is pre-determined by the program director and the bland-out dj’s have no input into what music is selected. In fact, the playlist of WYEP is practically the same as just about every other NPR station across the country. Whether you listen to WFUV of NYC or WXPN of Philadelphia, you will hear an identical playlist. And they all follow the same NPR FORMULA complete with the same safe, vanilla syndicated snoozer programs like ‘This American Life’ and ‘The World Cafe’ et. al. Even the nerdily vapid dj’s all sound the same–after all, you don’t want to risk alienating or offending any yuppie donors or corporate “sponsors” with someone with a ‘personality.’ “Risk,” not predictable insipidity used to be what independent radio embraced. Thank the gods that the true spirit of independent radio still exists in stations like WFMU in Jersey City…
Brilliant off-the-cuff assessment by Alan Zavacky – if only Pittsburgh had a legion of fiftysomethings
as staunchly creative, WYEP would never have become the bland pablum of yuppie-and-lesbian-approved folk-pop that it is today. The “formula”, by the way, is not “NPR”, it’s a radio rotation called Adult Album Alternative (“Triple-A”), which failed as a commercial format in the ’80s, so it wound up being applied to public radio instead in the ’90s to attract the donations of upscale white boomers. The worst thing about the format is that it relentlessly excludes any bands on labels who don’t buy into the Triple-A radio publicist machine (so, for example, you won’t hear a legion of touring independent roots-music acts because they don’t pay into that system..thus, it is essentially a tightly-restricted form of payola).
“NPR” isn’t quite the problem – NPR actually features a lot of music that never gets played on WYEP (to pick a random examples, such Chicago scene legends as Ken Vandermark or Tortoise). But NPR is a news format, not a music format, so it doesn’t play music constantly like WYEP does. Thus, WESA occasionally namechecking interesting music doesn’t cross over into the format on WYEP.
PA Ubu makes a good point – the “golden age” is glossed over in that fluff piece as being a bad time, when in fact, the whole concept of the music changing every few hours is what public radio is *supposed* to be about, not bland commercial pop rotation. Diversity (Arabic hour, Irish music, jazz, reggae, etc.) is treated as a drawback in the piece instead of the benefit that it should be to the community. In reality, the real bogeyman in WYEP’s history went unmentioned: Mikel Ellcessor, who around 89-90 was hired by the station’s ambitious boomers to purge the schedule of anything weird and unusual and to initially institute the Triple-A format which had also recently been put into place at Philly’s WXPN (originator of the execrable World Cafe, which never actually
features any “world” music). Originally singer-songwriter-ish folk-pop of the James Taylor/Carly Simon variety, the Triple-A format was expanded in the 2000s to include the slicker (undistorted) side of indie-pop-rock so Gen-X/Gen-Y would start paying attention. But WYEP ignores as much good indie rock as it does good roots music, as well as dozens of genres which don’t fit into its
homogenized vision.
Later on in the piece, WYEP admits that it had the money to buy WDUQ outright (which became WESA). That’s a lot of friggin’ loot, especially when they had already spent a bunch of other money building an essentially unnecessary fancy new building rather than renovating an old one.
If it had accrued that much money from donations due to its inoffensive format, then it should have used the money to shore up a lot more diversity in its programming instead of buying WDUQ just to get a lock on NPR. WDUQ should have been purchased by that consortium of jazz guys who made an offer so that jazz could have been kept in Pittsburgh, instead of banished to a station currently broadcasting out of Bethany College in West Virginia which barely reaches Pittsburgh’s southern suburbs.
If I was Julia Cook, I wouldn’t want my name associated with that article either. WYEP is really two entirely different stations that just happen to have the same call letters – one existed for the first two decades, and the second existed for the next two. To claim 40 years of continuity is specious at best, especially if the real history is obscured and denigrated.
Whatever YEP’s past was, it’s present is terrible. I cannot believe how lame this station is. KMUD in Redway, CA is TRUE community radio. YEP should offer alternative LOCAL news programming, DJ programmed music that reflects this region/city and in short stop being a complete yawn. Until that happens (and it won’t) I’ll continue to stream KMUD and get my information through coffee shop, blogs and the Coop bulletin board.
Yes, Stovepipe. And another great community station that never changed is WMNF in Tampa. Like WYEP, they broadcast out of an old building in not quite as bad shape as Cable Place was (I was
at WMNF in 1997 and saw it for myself), then bought and paid for a brand new building which they now occupy (just like WYEP did), and yet their programming stayed the same as it was (specialty programming for the community with shows changing every few hours..and featuring various subcultures, subgenres and ethnicities etc). Another great one is WEVL in Memphis. And so on.
It’s not just WFMU – there are plenty of examples of public radio stations that didn’t sell out to Triple-A (which actually imitates “album rock” of the 70s more than it does than 80s).
Here’s a great rant about WYEP from Jay Thurber of Carnegie Mellon’s WRCT:
http://jaythurbershow.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/the-wyep-rant/
While quietly still broadcasting independent music, the college radio stations in Pittsburgh have gone down the tubes as far as their *cultural influence* in Pittsburgh over the past generation or so, and while much of that can be blamed on the Internet, another part can be blamed on WYEP, which has greatly marginalized the college radio DJ community with its powerful corporate might (instead of using WRCT and WPTS as a farm team for DJs aspiring to offer mature and diverse programming, like it should).
The only thing incorrect about Jay’s rant is that (like the terrible City Paper piece) it gives the impression that things changed “in the 80s”. In fact, WYEP was still a great freeform force almost
all the way through the 80s (which is why I remember it – I’m not old enough to have listened
in the 70s). Up until about 89-90 when Mikel E. made the first draconian changes. So “the ’80s” (including the short period at Chatham) were still part of the old WYEP. It’s not a station that “refused to die”. In fact, the station *did* die, and then got reborn as something else entirely unrecognizable. And then later on, it *killed* another station as well (WDUQ/jazz) and *stole* the call letters of a third (Charleroi’s WESA). Very different than the headline implies!
I understand that WYEP may have been cutting edge in the past, but that station, at present, is really of no more use to anyone in the local music scene(except maybe Rusted Root or bands that Hugh guy takes pictures of) than WDVE or 3WS.
When people come to their defense, it sounds to me like people defending smoking in bars here, as if the way things currently are here is the only way ithey can be.
A noisy rock band I am in was recently in St Louis and were able to visit the local WYEP equivalent, KDHX. THey have a shiny new building similar to WYEP. During the day and evening, they play typical bland crap, but they let weirdos play whatever they want at night. They allowed us, at the bequest of one of the late night djs, to do a live-in-the-studio performance. The tracks and photos from this are hosted on their website, along with dozens or hundreds of other bands.
I doubt we would be able to get as far as WYEP’s lobby with a pry bar.
It looks like WYEP does have some kind of “live in house” thing, but I suspect participants are searched at the door and distortion pedals confiscated. Those who resist are handed ukeleles.
Having said all that, I am not a hater, per se. I listen to WESA all the time, especially when driving around for work. I actually prefer the all day news to the previous jazz format, myself.
Ditch Rosemary, bring in some new blood.
https://soundcloud.com/william-forrest/on-repeat
Interesting… you mention getting the new equipment working at Bedford. Should been there with Doug, Peter, Mikel, Michael, Mary Pam, and I back in the late 80’s during the move to Chatham…
I recall Doug Bostrom – then GM and also Chief Engineer – climbing Andy Pato’s tower to tighten ground straps on the Shively 4 bay.
Andy was a local ham radio guy whose tower was also at Hazelwood so we moved the transmitter/antennas to his hamshack (much cheaper rent) and were running under a temporary CP from FCC for being only 85 feet AG. We were so close tot he ground that during wet weather you could hear the AM noise in the chain link fence (sorry Mythbusters – it’s true).
When you shut the fluorescent lights off in the hamshack where the transmitter was the ends of the tubes would still glow and you could put your finger on the glow and drag it across the bulb – cool! (NOT)
I recall the Flamethrower (that’s what they call the “new” RCA BTF10 Doug rebuilt on his kitchen table ) going down about 2 weeks after getting back on the air at Chatham. This link to a pdf can explain why it was called that (Peter – the pic may freak you out a bit):
http://www.abominablefirebug.com/job/rca.pdf
It would do what we called “bipping” – you’d raise the power and poof off the air it’d go. Doug had a collapsed lung and put me in charge – I called up Amil at WQED (I believe that was his name) and he came up to Hazelwood. “Ya gotta bad load…” We mentioned it was a new 4 bay antenna… “I don’t care ya gotta bad load…”
Ended up he was right. Andy climbed the tower – ya hadda stay away from the base, Andy had a penchant for dropping large wrenches – and sure enough, about 20 ft of the new Andrew 1-7/8 transmission line was fried….
There’s a jpg of a 3D model of the transmitter site on my website I did of the tower farm and the new tower that we wanted to put up:
http://ajawamnet.com/ajawamnet/page4/towers.jpg
The ACAD drawing if you have autocad or similar – http://ajawamnet.com/ajawam4/trans.dwg – done in 1992, on a DOS version of ACAD 10 with a monochrome 14″ monitor and no mouse; all command line. This was for a court case that was filed by one of the tenants of the tower site, claiming we would be in the fresnel zone of his towers lessees. Turn out he was just bulling WYEP to get back on the 250′ tower WYEP was originally on (back when the shut Cable Place). I recall Mary Pam getting the new Continental transmitter and eventually moving back.
I recall the Chatham “broadcast furniture” in the production room was actually kitchen cabinets (turns out 19″ rack gear/rails fit quite well). I remember crawling thru the tunnelss under the quad running the STL cables to the library.
Spent many a long night at Chatham and Hazelwood. Learned a lot – for instance that packing tape, when layered up about 4 times, is about 11pF – how we fixed the plate blocker for the final tube after a lightning hit – pic of a similar tube on my marketturd site:
http://www.ajawamnet.com/ajawamnet/Audio%20Voodoo%20and%20Stuff.html
BYW – those are Continental transmitters. I had those at Y97 (also at Hazelwood – how I met Doug)…
I do recall working at Hazelwood when the fire station at the bottom of the hill was robbed. A Pgh police LT saw me there at dusk. He rolled the window of his cruiser down and said, ” You come up here much?”
I’m standing there holding a large blower for the final cavity… “Yea…”
“You come here at night?”
“Yea…”
“You gotta gun?”
“Uh…no…” I stammered.
“You an f’ing asshole….” as rolled the window up and drove away…
http://ajawamnet.com/
Another interesting anecdote about WDUQ, back when they were at Duq U.
I was called by a guy named Humphries to work on one of their Scully reel to reels. We had three at Y97 (ask Sean McDowell – he used them a lot) and I was pretty good at troubleshooting them. He had known me from my stay at Opus One working in the shop for Tasso…
Had some issue with the capstan drive. So I find that the power xtor for the servo is bad, find some old flyback xtor in an old TV they had in pieces in the shop area and get it going.
So I’m in the lobby with the chancellor and on the air monitor I hear they are interviewing some old jazz/blues dude about his recordings. The host, in the typical hoddy-toddy voice asks what his motivations were for using what seemed to be a technique for modulation
“Where you thinking of a diatonic pivot chord for the modulation?”
In a husky, bourbon-laced voice:
“I was thinkin’ ’bout nekked wimmen…”
I thought the chancellor was gonna pass out….