In 1986, the Minneapolis rock group The Replacements (1986) released Left of the Dial, a cri du cœur (cry from the heart) celebrating the indie-rock enclaves that formed across U.S. college campuses the preceding decade. The song, written and sung by guitarist Paul Westerberg, promised post-baby-boom audiences that pockets of anti-mainstream progressivism were discoverable if only one surfed the westernmost hinterlands of FM radio. For 30 years now, the ‘alt-’ subculture of the 1980s and early 1990s (long before ‘alt-’ was co-opted by the far right) has been documented in warmly nostalgic retrospectives that celebrate either its musicians (Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981–1991 (Azerrad Reference Azerrad2001)), its homemade media (Branden W. Joseph and Drew Sawyer’s Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines (Joseph and Sawyer Reference Joseph and Sawyer2024)), or its ‘scenes’ (Grace Elizabeth Hale’s Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture (Hale Reference Hale2020)). Now comes Katherine Rye Jewell’s Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio, which excavates the backstory of the medium the Replacements lionized, exploring how campus broadcasting came to amplify the clarion call of Westerberg’s refrain: ‘What side are you on?’
As Jewell notes, she served a late-nineties stint ‘working the board’ at Vanderbilt University’s WRVU, where her ‘musical horizons’ expanded and she transformed into ‘yet another denizen of the 1990s indie-rock scene, worshipping the Pixies, Pavement, Helmet, Riot Grrrl bands.…’ (p. xi). What she did not then realize, of course, is that college radio as an incubator of alternative culture was only a few Pedro the Lion albums from obsolescence; not only had the breakthrough mass success of R.E.M. and Nirvana c. 1991-92 collapsed the barriers between commercial formats and hipster avant-gardism, but the imminent arrival of Napster was about to herald a new world of mp3 downloads and self-curated streaming (pp. xii-xiii). Although Jewell insists college radio’s heyday has yet to pass, Live from the Underground feels like a threnody. Vanderbilt, for example, sold off WRVU’s 91.1 FM frequency in 2011, and while, like many of its once-influential peers, it ekes out an independent existence online, ‘alternative’ and ‘indie’ endure as arbitrary designations more so than principles. Tuning in to today’s college stations can feel like attending a contemporary Pixies concert: neither can compete with memories of 1989.
That said, Jewell is an excellent historian and an engaging storyteller. Her account traces college radio’s left-leaning politics to its ‘liberal creation [in] the 1930s’ when ‘New Dealers’ earmarked lower airwave frequencies as a public service that would ‘enable mass democracy, inspire an enlightened citizenry, and promote cultural pluralism’ (p. 6). By 1948, as post-WWII college enrolments boomed, the U.S. government issued non-commercial, educational licenses for discount rates that soon numbered in the 300s, most situated between 88.1 and 91.9 on the increasingly popular FM dial (p. 7). Initially, many college stations founded as industry-hopeful boot camps competed for attention with National Public Radio (NPR), the Pacifica Foundation, and the ‘freeform’ rock format popular in the late 1960s. As the latter was ‘standardized’ into album-oriented rock with regulated, repetitive playlists, student DJs took up the mantle of experimentation, ‘welcom[ing] the ability to air the explorations of their liberal arts journeys, believing they diversified the nation’s sonic profile’ (p. 10). Still, it would be a long while before undergraduate staff debated whether they could say ‘Butthole Surfers’ on the air. In 1979, with post-punk only beginning to coalesce into indie rock, the recently founded College Media Journal or CMJ, established by Robert Haber as a ‘tip sheet’ (p. 43) for this burgeoning industry sector, listed such decidedly non-proto-alt acts as the Blues Brothers, Eddie Money, and Rod Stewart as top campus spins (p. 35).
What did it take for college radio to embrace more Angry Samoans and less Aerosmith? The Federal Communications Commission proved one unlikely impetus. As the Reagan era dawned, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) paid ‘increased attention to indecency and obscenity’ as it phased out its 30-year-old ‘entry-level’ Class D licenses that allowed stations to operate under the radar, with signals ‘just-powerful-enough … to cover campus and maybe the surrounding community’ (p. 53). Forced to upgrade their broadcast strength and compete against commercial stations, college outlets faced demands to professionalize and behave. That, in turn, sparked a backlash as undergraduate pranksters taunted decency standards (pp. 68-72, 162-79). Yet other changes were afoot. A profusion of post-punk, New Wave groups produced bodies of unconventional, confrontational music that opposed the evermore-regulated sounds and structures of mainstream rock. Record labels such as I.R.S., SST, and eventually SubPop that were home to such bands marketed directly to college stations, building a listener demographic that coalesced into the cliché of the insufferable indie snob (pp. 69, 76-90). The vibrant zine or homemade fan-magazine culture that kept college-town Kinko’s and other photocopy centres in business became a nexus for underground creators (pp. 95-99). Campus theatres and nearby clubs/bars similarly brought bands, audiences, and student promoters into sweaty alignment (pp. 267-71).
The chapters likeliest to attract attention here are ‘The Golden Age of Indie Rock Radio’ (pp. 249-71) and ‘College Radio Confronts Selling Out in the 1990s’ (pp. 302-24), both of which explore how college radio’s accelerating prominence in the Reagan/Bush era sowed the seeds of the indie scene’s mainstream co-optation. The problem was partly that station managers and DJs were conflicted over the medium’s purpose: Was the goal to maintain ‘alternative’ as a subculture or to change the surrounding culture? Instead of grappling with this identity crisis, as Jewell documents, most stations wasted precious energy squabbling over which artists were and were not ‘real’ and what markers violated the integrity of ‘cult’ as opposed to ‘mass’ popularity: ‘Prominent stations held that if a band reached MTV, college radio’s work was done. [At the same time,] no-play lists emerged because songs received so many requests after an MTV appearance’ (p. 261). By 1991, the so-called ‘year punk broke’ when R.E.M. scored a No. 1 Billboard album and Nirvana followed suit even more spectacularly by dethroning Michael Jackson from that perch, the issue was moot: the revolution was effectively being simulcast on non-commercial and commercial radio.
The trajectory Jewell charts may seem familiar to Gen X-aged audiences who gobble up Gibbon-esque histories of their youth invariably subtitled ‘The Rise and Fall of…’. Instead of Kim Gordon, Michael Stipe, or Kurt Cobain, though, her Roman warriors are in-the-trenches personnel such as WRAS’s Anita Sarko, WESU’s Bob Nowlan, and WKCR’s Pete Nash. Her interviews with these and other largely forgotten figures, along with her archival dives into mouldy station files and campus newspapers, are what truly make Live from the Underground feel as if Jewell’s narrative were being broadcast from some previously undiscovered subterranean realm.
