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WMSE Celebrates 40 Years
HOW A CAMPUS CLUB BECAME MILWAUKEE’S BEACON FOR UNSCRIPTED, FREEFORM RADIO
By David Luhrssen
Across a faint crackly signal came the soft roar of The Clash. It’s 1979, and I was sitting in the East Side house of an edgy band called Ama Dots—and everyone in the room was amazed at what we heard. FM radio had become a preprogrammed behemoth of boredom, but here it was—this wavering signal carrying the music of our lives.
We identified the source soon enough as WSOE, a student radio club at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. The weak signal found at 91.7 FM wasn’t supposed to be heard off campus but could sometimes be picked up in other neighborhoods. Finding it was a bit like hearing Radio Liberty behind the Iron Curtain—a broadcast from another world of possibility with the message that alternatives existed to the status quo.
Before long, the student radio station became a magnet for fans of punk and other new music. They flocked to its digs in a church basement on the MSOE campus with satchels of their favorite LPs, volunteering to be DJs. In 1981 the station was rechristened as WMSE and its signal boosted to 1,000 watts, enough to reach across Milwaukee. Forty years later, the station can be heard around the globe streaming on the worldwide web. A few of those volunteer DJs are still on air decades later and one of them, Tom Crawford, eventually became station manager, part of WMSE’s paid staff of five full-timers and three part-timers.
Crawford must have been listening the same night I discovered the station. “I was sitting down with my stereo receiver trying to figure out what I’m going to listen to on the radio—just rattling through the dial. All of a sudden, I came across The Clash on the radio,” Crawford recalled. “I lived in a second floor. I ran my antenna out the window, had it nailed to the house and I was able to pick up WSOE. I was blown away. I listened for a while. I heard a student announcer say the call letters W-S-O-E. I needed to know more.”
Although WMSE is owned by MSOE, the resources the college devoted to the station were always slender. Much of the studio was built or rigged together by volunteers. “I worked in the Music Department. I started helping out
doing promotions as well,” Crawford said. “There was a period of time where a number of pieces of equipment broke and we did not have the funds to fix them, so we started to hold a couple of benefit concerts to raise money. Soon I was helping out with program underwriting to help raise money for the station. Eventually, was able to convince MSOE to bring me on board to raise money for the station.”
WMSE is entirely funded by local business underwriting, on-air fund drives, fundraising events and support from its membership organization, the Sound Citizens. The events and other pitches are tailored to the hipster sensibility of WMSE’s core audience. “We started doing community events as a way to raise money for the radio station outside of the traditional ways public media fundraises,” Crawford explained. “Shortly after the turn of the century we started the Rockabilly Chili Contest and throughout the years added other events.” Technology has changed during the station’s long run. At the beginning, DJs spun vinyl and played cassettes. CDs became dominant and then, in the new century, vinyl made a comeback. Along the way, online sources became another option during airtime. The means of distributing music may have grown, but WMSE’s ethos has been consistent. “I’m glad it hasn’t changed,” said longtime volunteer DJ Paul Host. “Tom Crawford has kept the progressive FM spirit, charm, openness and purity intact. One example is that recently I’ve been having Downstairs Dan as a guest programmer [on his show]. He was there on WSOE when I started there. It’s a blast for me because he was one of my early influencers. My favorite improvements are that we are now worldwide and you can see our playlists [online].”
PASSIONATE ABOUT MUSIC
WMSE DJs play the widest possible gamut of styles with shows devoted to big band and blues, dance and metal, punk and classical, jazz and hip-hop. Like the radio hosts of long ago FM rock and jazz stations, each DJ sounds thoroughly committed, even passionate, about the music they chose to play. Milwaukee artists have always been vital to the sonic mix. The first song played when the station became WMSE was a track by local fusion band Sweetbottom.
“Much of what I learned about the local scene came from DJs and their shows on WMSE,” says local musician and writer Blaine Schultz. He adds that for many of the DJs, programming a set of music is an artform involving continuity, counterpoint and telling a story through the song selection. He cites the memorable former Saturday afternoon show, Mickey Mouse Club, as “a blueprint in proving you don’t need a blueprint. The program connected the dots musically or geographically or sociologically or chronologically in ways that were not always apparent until a few songs later. His show could also be a lesson in listening to the end, and at that point having a ‘Aha!’ moment.”
The station has also had an impact on concert promotion in Milwaukee. “Eighty percent of the acts we book are only played on WMSE,” said Peter Jest from the East Side music club Shank Hall. “They always mention the shows or do interviews with musicians. It’s a true community station. The doors are open for everybody. It would be very hard for Shank Hall to exist without WMSE.”
And where better locally than WMSE to observe International Clash Day? The virtual event was launched on February 7, 2013 by a community-supported sister station, KEXP Seattle, to honor a band that stood for “anti-fascism, anti-violence, anti-racism and pro-creativity.” The Clash and its ideals were on the air at WMSE from the beginning,
David Luhrssen is Managing Editor of the Shepherd Express and co-author, with Eric Beaumont, Clancy Carroll and Steve Nodine, of Brick Through the Window: An Oral History of Punk Rock, New Wave and Noise in Milwaukee, 1964-1984.
