washingtonpost.com
Radio Station Put-On Engenders Concern
By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 2, 2005; Page B04
Once the staff of WRNR-FM decided on new call letters, WOMB, the rest of the musical identity fell into place: female disc jockeys playing songs by female artists, interspersed with over-the-top banter about goddesses and birth and the eternal feminine. Testosterone-free radio.
Annapolis's beloved alternative-rock station (103.1) was reborn at 5 a.m. yesterday as an elaborate April Fools' joke, with a new staff of feminist DJs and an apparent format change.
Not everyone got it. The station's voice mail filled with listeners who thought the switch was permanent, or who desperately needed someone to reassure them that it was not.
"I'm trying to find out what's going on over there," one agitated male voice said.
Employee cell phones buzzed with sympathy calls from friends. "These things happen in radio," one told Joe Duley, one of WRNR's on-air personalities, most of whom are male.
One listener, a woman, walked up in tears to the WRNR studios, which are perched atop a fudge shop in a third-floor office near City Dock.
"There's no halfway," said Bob Waugh, operations manager at the 10-year-old station. "Either we were going to do this or we weren't. I'm hoping people won't be too [angry]."
Duley, the host of a weekend blues show, walked around downtown yesterday wearing a WRNR sticker with the added letters RIP.
"Some woman comes up to me," he recounted, "and says, 'Do you work there?' And I say, 'I did.' And I swear she gave me a hug." Duley politely declined her offer to buy him a cup of coffee.
WRNR is a comparatively free-form, independent station in a market saturated with corporate radio. Its 6,000-watt signal is weak, but the audience is loyal, even addicted, to a format that puts into heavy rotation such crossover alternative artists as Beck and such mainstream rock acts as U2 -- and mixes roughly equal shares of archival chestnuts and new releases.
The station's best-known name is Damian Einstein, the decorated weeknight DJ whose recuperation from a near-fatal car crash three decades ago left him with a distinctively slurry voice. His father, Jake Einstein, launched WRNR after selling WHFS, the onetime alternative-radio standout.
Waugh thought of the April Fools' ruse and presented it to his colleagues, a crew of wisecracking music heads who delight in one-upmanship. Once the concept was decided, they became consumed with creating a one-day playlist for the fictitious station: 13 songs per hour for 13 hours.
"You know what's the worst thing about today?" joked Rob Timm, a regular afternoon DJ. "I think we've discovered a perfectly viable radio format."
Timm found himself relegated yesterday to producing a show for Gina Crash, a female jock who drove down for the 3-to-7 shift after finishing her morning duties at WMMR-FM in Philadelphia. A stack of CDs in the studio showed some of what the WRNR staff had come up with, including discs by the Indigo Girls, Hole, Janis Joplin, Sinead O'Connor and blues woman Koko Taylor.
It was Timm who launched the hoax just before 7 p.m. Thursday. After dispensing tickets to a Bruce Springsteen performance, he told listeners, "I can't think of a more fitting way to end things." Voice breaking, he went on: "This is probably the most difficult show I've done in my career."
With that, he played "When the Music's Over" by the Doors. Listeners would not hear another live voice until yesterday morning; the station went temporarily jock-less.
Then the phones started ringing.
The joke ended at 7 last night, when WRNR disc jockeys stormed the booth in an on-air coup. They celebrated with an old Nick Lowe song: "All Men Are Liars."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
