A Journey to WMPG
– Jeff Kerschner
We didn’t listen to much music growing up. My father was opposed to music in the house. My Mom would play a handful of records during his work day. Johnny Cash, John Denver, and Harry Belafonte played over and over. A high school friend introduced me to the Beatles – whoa… At age 17, I joined the Clyde Beatty Cole Bros Circus. I was on the concessions crew. Our assigned sleeper was the front half of a semi-trailer. One of the guys had an 8-track player in the sleeper. If left alone, 8-track players continuously loop through the tape. There were only about a half dozen 8-track tapes. Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, The New Riders of the Purple Sage, Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, and Foghat often played for hours at a time. They embedded deeply in my mind. Boston and Van Halen’s first albums became revelations – nobody else seemed to be playing their kind of music.
College at St Francis/UNE, in Biddeford exposed me to a much broader range of music and serious audiophiles. The college had a low power FM station with eclectic broadcasts by students. Other radio stations: WBLM, at the time, billed as “progressive rock”, was the best radio station I had ever heard. WJBQ was a popular top 40 station. Walking through a dorm you could tell which rooms had “cool” kids – they were playing BLM. We tended to hurry past the JBQ rooms.
Peggy and I moved many times in our first years together. Circumstances led us further and further south until WBLM was just broken static. We had integrated NPR listening with WBLM and as BLM became too distant we listened to NPR more and more. Neither of us were especially out-going, so we were slow to meet new people. Besides, it seemed we were probably going to move again.
After some years of bouncing around, it occurred to us, that we knew the people of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegone better than we knew any of our real-life neighbors. That was a moment of understanding about radio. In 1989 we left New England for Western Washington. In Concrete, WA there were a few radio stations with a decent signal up the river, but, we soon moved further into the Cascade Mountains. We received an AM station out of Seattle, on the second floor of our house we received an FM station from British Columbia and, if we were in our car, NPR out of Seattle.
NPR’s KUOW had a show called “The Swing Years and Beyond” hosted by Cynthia Doyon. We often heard Cynthia as we headed back upriver after a Saturday of running errands. Her love of the music and her depth of knowledge made the show something special and we found her to be a remarkable person. Her unexpected death felt like losing a family member. Until then, I had never thought that their could be a relationship with a voice in the air. In 2009 we began a move back to Maine to be closer to our families.
For the next few summers we camped on our property in Cornish. Rediscovering BLM was, at first, like finding a long-lost friend. Sadly, it was no longer “progressive” but had become “classic” rock. Turning the dial uncovered Frank FM which was similar, but seemed to have a broader playlist, so was more appealing. By the time we moved back, for good, in 2016, we realized that “classic” rock was a euphemism for “commercial” rock and that their primary purpose was advertising. Advertising was everywhere and it seemed the internet, tv, radio, newspapers, sports stadiums, the sides of vehicles, t-shirts (other clothing too), the open space of some states (SD, especially, comes to mind – however, South Dakota’s billboards do break up the seemingly endless rolling hills of grass), etc; none of the ad purveyors have any concept of “too much”; arguably their thinking is “never enough”. Somewhere over the years, advertising had gone from a necessary(?) evil to a near constant assault on our senses and psyche. Seemingly, no avenue was too small to consider as a way to push ads; some corporate-owned radio stations adapted RDS to display ads on radio screens. It seemed it was time to start disassociating from the constant stream of buy, buy, buy.
We started dialing around for less intrusive radio stations. WMWV out of North Conway was/is an independent station and played a much wider variety of music. Their slogan, “Music without Boundaries” is an extreme exaggeration, but we were introduced to a lot of new music interspersed with, mostly, local ads. We live on top of a hill and WMWV reception was very good, but once off the hill it was unlistenable. While looking for stations, not-Frank and not- BLM, we came across 100.9. They played a lot of the music we’ve known for years, but, being DJ-less lacked any real personality. Their slogan, “We Play Everything” should be “We Play the Same Things Over and Over and Sometimes Mix in Something Different”. I know, kind of a mouthful, and not very catchy. This was also the time when we first started listening to WMPG when out and about on weekends. We particularly started catching the “fast-talker” on Saturday afternoons. WMPG got a preset on our radios. The lead DJ/programming director at WMWV became me/I vs “we”, which rubbed Peggy and I the wrong way. Their format changed to Triple A, tightening their boundaries and the station owner died unexpectedly. They found a new local owner who wanted to keep the station independent, but, there was a philosophical change.
More and more our radios stayed tuned to WMPG. So here/hear we are with WMPG tuned in, on real radios, for most of every day. We feel like we are getting to know DJs (Freaky Fridaze really makes that happen), and, unlike the residents of Lake Wobegone, they are real. Like Cynthia Doyon of The Swing Years and Beyond, ‘MPGs DJs are dedicated to sharing the music they know and love and, like Cynthia, we are glad to have them with us.