Someday final 12 months, Rissa Rogus and Elizabeth Kim discovered a cardboard field within the WUOG music room. There wasn’t something notably odd about that. WUOG—the College of Georgia’s student-run radio station—collects containers like previous paper clips.
However one thing about this field stood out, so the 2 music administrators opened it. They discovered treasure.
Rissa Rogus, WUOG’s native music director, leads the station’s outreach to the Basic Metropolis’s still-vibrant reside music scene. She helps e book bands for WUOG’s Reside within the Foyer collection and highlights Athens-based expertise on her present, Sound of the Metropolis. (Photograph by Peter Frey/UGA)
The neatly filed data and CDs inside included a primary urgent of Substance, a basic two-record compilation from New Order. Further rarities from Blondie, David Bowie, Fugazi, and others—all legends of different music—had been blended in. So was a handwritten word.
Written in cursive on a bit of pocket book paper, Lars Gotrich launched himself as a former WUOG staffer. In 2008, when WUOG was clearing out its studio atop Memorial Corridor and getting ready to maneuver into its present location within the Tate Pupil Middle, stacks of data and CDs had been being thrown out. There was no room within the new archive.
Gotrich AB ’05, who now works for NPR Music, was horrified. He crammed a field with rescued music from the trash bin and took it residence. In 2023, he mailed it again.
Gotrich felt unhealthy about taking every little thing with out permission, and whereas not one of the artists within the field would make immediately’s WUOG playlist—they’re too mainstream for faculty radio nowadays—he needed the station to have its music again.
“One lovely factor about radio is the deal with bodily media,” says Laura Duncan, WUOG’s program director. “We’ve file gamers; we’ve CD gamers and previous cassettes within the archives. We offer a pleasant house for this media for use, and even when folks hearken to us on-line, they nonetheless get that feeling of bodily media and connection.”
The music labeled as “various” is ever-changing, however the spirit behind it’s all the time vibrant. WUOG is now 52 years previous however removed from settling down.
Come as You Are
For so long as she will bear in mind, Katie Sawyer has liked music. She was a drum main in her highschool band, so when Sawyer acquired to UGA, she sought a spot the place she may share that love of music with others. So within the first semester of her first 12 months on campus, Sawyer attended an curiosity assembly at WUOG. And she or he hasn’t left.
Katie Sawyer walked into the WUOG station as a freshman and by no means left. In 2024, she served because the station’s basic supervisor, balancing impressed management with a love for all that WUOG represents. (Photograph by Peter Frey/UGA)
“One thing about this station is simply particular,” says Sawyer, a fourth-year leisure and media research main. “I wanted this to be a part of my life.”
As a freshman, Sawyer skilled to be a DJ and adopted the on-air deal with DJ Muppet Man. (All 132 WUOG DJs have handles.) Then she earned a promotion to inner affairs director and have become basic supervisor in 2024. She oversees the station’s 17-member govt committee in addition to its 300-plus member workers.
“Identical to me, everybody else right here is simply so captivated with radio and music and simply Athens on the whole,” says Sawyer, who spends between 20 and 30 hours every week on station enterprise. “I undoubtedly anticipated a number of the stresses that include the job, however I actually didn’t anticipate how keen everyone seems to be to assist.”
Shiny, Comfortable Folks
Probably the most keen WUOGers (pronounced woo-AWG-ers) are Sawyer’s 17 lieutenants on the manager committee. They function leaders in programming, outreach, operations, digital media, and archives. And so they additionally draw power from these round them.
“I got here right here, and I discovered my folks,” says William Sealy, a third-year double main in enterprise and historical past. As WUOG’s group outreach director, Sealy leads efforts to reconnect with station alumni throughout the nation.
Over time, WUOG alumni outreach has been spotty, however because the station’s fiftieth anniversary celebration in 2022, the present workers’s efforts have met with quite a lot of success.
Present workers incessantly work together with alumni by means of social media teams and in particular person. For instance, former workers come again to campus to host hour-long reveals the place they get to “seize the airwaves” and play the classics, new and previous. Alumni even participate in WUOG-sponsored occasions like concert events and panel discussions with ample room for telling tales.
A spiky humorousness is a WUOG hallmark that dates again to the Seventies. Today, the station’s again room features a collage that memorializes the least inventive, most embarrassing, and easily mind-boggling CD cowl artwork DJs have collected over time. (Photograph by Peter Frey/UGA)
Love Shack
WUOG 90.5 FM first hit the airwaves on Oct. 16, 1972. Since then, it has remained one of the crucial influential faculty radio stations within the nation. Members of R.E.M. had been DJs. So was 2000s super-producer Brian Burton, higher often known as Hazard Mouse.
Athens wasone of the epicenters of the choice music increase, and WUOG each mirrored and drove it. However the station has all the time been greater than only a jukebox. It has lined information, sports activities, climate, and campus actions. It’s additionally given voice to hundreds of scholars.
WUOG launched from the highest flooring of Memorial Corridor on Oct. 16, 1972. The event was so grand that UGA President Fred Davison (seated) was readily available to congratulate the college and WUOG scholar workers concerned. (Photograph Particular)
For 36 years, WUOG broadcast from Memorial Corridor. For the scholars who labored there, the situation was a shrine. As grubby because it was beloved, WUOG’s headquarters resembled the lounge of a Seventies sitcom, and the workers embraced it.
Vogue and music types modified by means of the years, however WUOG all the time saved its edge. And that edginess, that anti-establishment angle, is one thing WUOG alumni nonetheless maintain near coronary heart. However additionally they perceive that occasions change.
“I’m excited by what they’re doing,” says Jennifer Griffith ABJ ’86, MA ’92, PhD ’01, who was a WUOG workers member all 4 years of her undergraduate profession and is now college within the Grady School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Present workers members first reached out to her in the course of the fiftieth anniversary celebration, and now Griffith checks in periodically.
“The scholars have a lot enthusiasm,” she continues. “They don’t do something the best way we did, and you’ll’t maintain their ft to the hearth to get them to, however I’m letting go of that,” she laughs.
Broadcasts from constructing roofs and smoke-filled management rooms are a factor of the previous. “Have enjoyable,” Griffith says. “Do what you need to do. It’s your house now.”
New Adventures in Hello-Fi
Whereas WUOG’s Memorial Corridor studio wore its grime as a badge of honor, the station’s Tate Middle house is shiny, ethereal, welcoming, and effectively put collectively.
Pupil staffers come and go seemingly continuous; they pause to eat lunch, examine, or simply hang around. The raised stage within the nook hosts bands each Tuesday evening for the Reside within the Foyer live performance collection. At different occasions, it serves as ample house to stretch out.
Tuesday nights at WUOG are for Reside within the Foyer, the station’s showcase for native bands. The Howdies carried out final fall and drew a standing-room-only crowd. (Photograph by Peter Frey/UGA)
“I reside right here,” says Megan Dawson, a second-year public relations main and WUOG’s exterior affairs director. “In between lessons, I’ll come into the foyer to speak to folks or do my homework. It doesn’t really feel like a job or a giant time dedication as a result of I like it a lot. That is the place I need to be on a regular basis.
Anybody who claims that radio is dying has by no means visited the studio. And all these workers members deliver their very own views with them. Today, range of style retains WUOG various.
“We’ve some individuals who nerd out to hyper-pop and others who like Thirties union strike music,” says Sealy, pulling two of WUOG’s extra unique genres out of the air.
Whereas various music aficionados have traditionally delighted in breaking guidelines, WUOG does have a serious one. DJs can not play any artist who has made the Billboard 200 album chart or has greater than three million listeners on Spotify. Typically underground artists will play their method off WUOG’s playlist. Chappell Roan is a latest instance.
All of us perceive that we’ve an obligation to uplift smaller voices.” — Katie Sawyer, WUOG basic supervisor
This Should Be the Place
Whereas the foyer is the station’s hub of exercise and the sales space is its flash, the archives are WUOG’s beating coronary heart. Its cabinets comprise hundreds of meticulously filed data and CDs. A lot of them one in every of a form.
“There are such a lot of native bands who despatched us CDs within the ’90s after which simply light away,” says native music director Rissa Rogus. “We’re the one individuals who havea copy of their music, and that’s such a privilege.”
However that’s not all that the archives maintain.
On a backside shelf within the again is a field of journals, a lot of them relationship again a long time. Ultimately, the journals will probably be despatched to UGA’s Particular Collections Libraries as a part of the brand new WUOG Assortment, which is able to embrace a long time of playlists, program guides, promotional materials, and correspondence.
For years, DJs have scribbled their ideas or doodles in these journals, every of which covers a 12 months. A lot of it can’t be reprinted in a household journal.
“We’re nonetheless making the identical jokes,” says Elizabeth Kim. “It actually makes you’re feeling like you’re part of one thing crucial and really particular.”
WUOG doesn’t broadcast 24 hours a day anymore, however that doesn’t imply DJs don’t take the programming schedule severely. And with DJ-produced artwork to promote every present, the workers makes the calendar enjoyable too. (Photograph by Peter Frey/UGA)
As soon as in a Lifetime
With hundreds of data and CDs filed in WUOG’s archive, what’s the govt workforce’s favourite? The reply is unanimous. It’s a first-run copy of Speaking Heads: 77, the band’s landmark debut. WUOG’s copy went lacking, and thru the years, the album achieved one thing approaching mythic standing.
WUOG Music Director Elizabeth Kim. (Photograph by Peter Frey/UGA)
“I bear in mind my freshman 12 months, folks had been speaking about it prefer it was this legendary factor, after which I went and located it,” says Elizabeth Kim (proper), a fourth 12 months double main in English and journalism.“The place did you discover it?!?!?” requested her incredulous co-workers.
“It was within the Speaking Heads part.”
However maybe the most effective a part of the invention was a chippy WUOG assessment from the time that was saved with the file. “Beats are funky. Vocals are somewhat weak.”
Later that fall, Kim leaned into her newfound celeb on the station and dressed as Speaking Heads’ chief (and vocalist) David Byrne, full with the outsized go well with from the live performance movie Cease Making Sense.
“I believe we overlook how essential radio is,” she says. “It’s fascinating to suppose one thing that goes by means of our fingers now and onto the shelf will generate pleasure 20 years from now.”
Spirits within the Materials World
In 1979, a ragtag group of radio workers began their very own band, calling themselves the Wuoggerz. Typically there’d be greater than a dozen folks on stage taking part in a variety of devices with numerous success. Certainly one of them, drummer Invoice Berry, was fairly good. He would quickly be a part of R.E.M.
Needle drop. (Photograph by Peter Frey/UGA)
Expertise apart, the Wuoggerz earned a slot opening for The Police on the Georgia Theatre. The band was so impressed by the Wuoggerz efficiency and the gang’s response—made up primarily of musician girlfriends and different buddies—that The Police invited the group to open for them on the remainder of their southeasterndates.
The Wuoggerz needed to decline. That they had class within the morning.
