“I knew it was such a cool place,” he said. That job brought him to Atlanta in 1996, where he, too, fell in love with WRAS and had idle dreams of working there.
#Gpb 88.5 political rewind tv
He’s also a fan of once-underground genres like heavy metal, post-punk and industrial and worked at Tulane’s college radio in the 1980s.Ī semi-retired TV news producer, Preuss started his career in radio before eventually spending 25 years at CNN. Preuss is a history-minded sort who hails from New Orleans and, with wife Nonnie, owns what may be the oldest original house in Buckhead. (Special: Andreas Preuss) Some of the vinyl records in the WRAS archives that helped to trigger Preuss’s history-documenting instincts. Some of the vinyl records in the WRAS archives that helped to trigger Preuss’s history-documenting instincts. or U2, these iconic college radio bands - nobody ever would have heard of them if it hadn’t been for college radio.”
“Just holding these records, … the B-52s or R.E.M. “I was surrounded by tens of thousands of records that really nobody plays anymore,” he recalled in a recent interview. Unique circumstances took Preuss from CNN to working the WRAS booth, where decades worth of DJ notes on the old vinyl records got him thinking historically. “The campus station speaks to the larger picture of American college radio impact and experience as a unique yet under-studied field,” Preuss writes in the introduction.
And it puts the GSU station in the context of others around the country, most of which also lack written histories.
“Left of the Dial, Right on the Music: 50 Years of Georgia State FM Radio” follows WRAS’s rise and decline as a music powerhouse, its internal struggles with diversity, and the tensions with its natural predators: commercial and public stations. The station’s 50th anniversary passed in January with virtually no notice, partly due to still-raw feelings about the takeover, but also because of that lack of an official chronicle.Ī step toward changing that is a new master’s thesis by a TV journalist turned GSU history student named Andreas Preuss. But there has been no comparable history of WRAS. Today, there are entire books about those groups and how they defined Atlanta, Georgia and the South. R.E.M., Outkast and the B-52s are among those who got crucial early airplay on WRAS. (Since, as a local indie musician I once heard on WREK put it, “Competition makes everything the same.”) A “#SaveWRAS” protest movement erupted from students and alumni, with much of their outraged commentary constituting an ad hoc oral history of the station’s significance.įrom that, I learned that WRAS wasn’t just where you, the pimple-faced innocent or Yankee transplant, first heard some local band it was the first place the world heard them in a time when Album 88 and its national publicity connections could help turn musicians into legends. Mere months later in 2014, Georgia Public Broadcasting staged an infamous surprise takeover of WRAS and replaced its daytime programming largely with an NPR feed already available on WABE. So I spent my first weeks in ATL, like thousands did for decades before me, driving around listening to music I’d never heard anywhere else. The student-run broadcasts of Georgia State’s WRAS (aka “Album 88”) and Georgia Tech’s WREK were among the ways Atlanta, unlike most every other major city, had not yet been corporatized, homogenized and franchised into clone-hood. to GPB, a student documents the bittersweet history of college radio powerhouse WRAS - SaportaReport CloseĬollege radio is one of the cultural icons that made me fall in love with Atlanta bad enough to move here.
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