Reckless Sets: Brian Kelley Imparts His Wisdom

2003- It was my freshman year and I had the last slot that Friday night. At the time, WCWM was still 90.7 FM, and we weren't smart enough to have the Winamp automatic playlist for 24/7 broadcasting. This meant I had to turn off the transmitter every night.

I had just found a record of sound poems in Ewell's Music Library: 10+2:12 American Text Sound Pieces. What really got me about this album was that at the end of both sides were lock grooves pieces meant to play in a second-long loop indefinitely. The final track on the record, Aram Saroyan's "Crickets", was a loop of Saroyan saying the word "crickets" endlessly. I knew that in a week or two WCWM would be running Winamp and the days of nighttime dead-air would soon be over. I decided to play "Crickets" at the end of my show.

"Crickets" played roughly twelve hours until the next DJ came in to take the next slot. I got up early that morning so that I could pick up the record from him. I considered the whole act worthy of such WCWM historical greats as Jon Rea's sets employing 3 CDs and 2 records playing free jazz and experimental noise simultaneously, Courtney Craig's nine-hour exam shows of nothing but Cure b-sides, or Johnny Scruggs on-air prank phone calls. I wanted something epic out of college radio, something jarring and unexpected, as people went up and down the FM spectrum on their car radios. Something for no particular reason. You might have felt like no one was listening that semester you took a midnight slot, but anyone who has played college radio late at night can attest to the bizarre, complete freedom that comes after the FCC goes to bed.

A year later, I was in conversation with a stranger and I mentioned the time I played "Crickets." He started screaming me. "You're the guy who did that?! I was watching WMTV and in between the movies it switched to the radio station and all I could hear was crickets, crickets, crickets. I must have waited forever for the next movie with all those crickets."

So remember, you can polish up your playlist and deepen your voice for the microphone, but don't forget to loosen up every now and then and try something novel with the radio. None of us, not even the programming director would pass up a chance to listen to a show that was trying something new and inspired. If you decide one day to drop your A-list designation for a single show in order to play songs by strange artists with the first letter X, no one's going to get mad. Put the PSAs and A-list quotas out your head and ask yourself how you can make the next two hours kick ass. Everything else WCWM does, right down to this magazine, can't hold a candle to a reckless set that pulls it off. The fewer the rules to constrict the DJ, the better.