Chapter 4: Radio as Collage Art
Building, Navigating, and Activating Asynchronous Archives of Synchronous Sounds
WFHB Past and Present
The first fundraiser for what would eventually become WFHB was held on July 9, 1975. It was a show at the Bluebird Nightclub, a bar and performance venue, in downtown Bloomington. Taking the stage was a lineup of local musicians, mostly signed to 1970s local label Bar-B-Q (sometimes spelled BRBQ, B-R-B-Q, or Barb-B-Q, depending on the release) Records. The recently founded Bloomington Community Radio Corporation charged one dollar at the door. “We were nervous that nobody would come,” one of the founders explained to me.
Thanks to promotions, a local-star-studded lineup and a low ticket price, though, the event went well, as that same founder explained to me:
We did some promotion. The wackiest one, I think [the bank is] still there, there’s a People’s State Bank on the corner of 17th and College [Streets]. And at that point, they had one of those weird light-up signs, temperature, time, and some sort of announcement. So we… convinced them to advertise it. So nobody knew what it meant, but “Radio benefit at the Bluebird.” I’m sure that’s the only time they’ve ever advertised anything like that. It was a dollar at the door. We made seven-hundred-and-thirty-something dollars. So it was enormously attended. And so then we had money and overconfidence.
Subsequent pre-station benefits were less successful. The 1975 Bluebird benefit nevertheless remains a cherished memory of those who were there. Those who were not—the majority of WFHB personnel I know—had a chance to celebrate it on July 10, 2025, the day after the benefit’s 50th anniversary. That evening, WFHB staff hosted the fundraising event WFHB Past and Present, a concert and exhibit taking place at the very same Bluebird (mapped in Figure 4.5) where, half a century earlier, the station-to-be received its first community donations.
Figure 4.5: A map showing WFHB and the Bluebird Nightclub in downtown Bloomington. Map created in uMap. Interactive version at companion webpage.
The venue was steeped in multimodal nostalgia, audible and visible signs of times past spread throughout the Bluebird’s bar spaces. Just through the front door, CDs were strung together in garlands to hang from booths, their labels facing away from spectators so that they refracted light from outside and inside like oversized sequins. A portable CRT video monitor from Panasonic’s 1980s TR-930 series flickered, displaying the event’s custom-designed logo in fuzzy black-and-white (Figures 4.6-4.11). An assortment of shirts designed for WFHB fund drives from the 1990s onward hung throughout the bar (Figures 4.12-4.21).
Figures 4.6-4.11: Nostalgic images at WFHB Past and Present. Top row, left to right: 4.6: Cardboard and paper decorations meant to look like a boom box and microphones. 4.7: Discarded CDs strung together as garlands and hung on booths as decorations. 4.8: A CRT monitor displaying the event’s poster. Bottom row, left to right: 4.9: Paper sign posted above the doors between the bar area and the stage area. 4.10: Close up of small disco ball ornaments hanging from the doorframe. 4.11: Station mascot Spot the Dog, who is typically stored in the WFHB garage, parked outside the public entrance to the Bluebird; his spots are made up of old vinyl records.
Figures 4.12-4.21: Custom shirts given away as premiums for various fund drives or sold as merchandise at WFHB events, hanging at various places in the Bluebird for WFHB Past and Present.
A handmade banner marked three booths as “Listening Stations” (Figures 4.22-4.24). Each was set up with a computer monitor and small mixer interface connecting concealed laptops to two sets of headphones, allowing for one person on each side of the booth to listen to audio accompanying the videos and still images displayed on each monitor. Every station had a different conceit. They were, from the front entrance moving back toward the stage area:
Recent audio. Taped to the first monitor was a label: Watch and listen for clips by Youth Radio members, and WFHB’s award-winning news and public affairs stories from 2024. Still images—program logos, photos accompanying stories—cycled through in synchrony with the audio clips.
Recent video. Another label: Check out WFHB’s Youtube Channel featuring our Firehouse Sessions on video! Local media production company No Guru Media began filming and editing some of WFHB’s live in-studio music-and-interview sessions (called “Firehouse Sessions”) in 2025, prompting the creation of a YouTube channel. By the time of the 50th anniversary event, the channel featured recordings of sessions with seven acts: Grace Leckey and Jessie Bittner, both Indiana University graduates; Billy Fortune, based in Cincinnati, Ohio; Oldstar, based in Panama City, Florida; Alan Sparhawk (formerly of the band Low), based in Duluth, Minnesota; the Namby Pamby, based in Fort Wayne, Indiana; Sierra Hull, based in Nashville, Tennessee; and Olivia Wolf, also based in Nashville with roots in California. These local, regional, and national acts all visited WFHB to promote upcoming shows at various Bloomington venues.
Archival media. Watch and listen to archival WFHB photos and audio from the past! The final station offered a kaleidoscopic window into the station’s early years. WFHB operations manager Josh Brewer had thoughtfully paired audio from our cassette digitization project with scanned images and video footage primarily from the 1990s.[1] Josh’s entire 33-minute video included 19 separate audio segments with a range of content from station programming and events:
An early promotional spot (c. 1993) soliciting underwriting from local businesses by layering programmer Richard Fish’s voice over informational recordings about community radio made by Cleveland, Ohio-based community radio station WRUW.
A promotional spot for a 1997 concert by the Celtic Fiddle Festival arranged by the local Lotus Education and Arts Foundation as part of their Lotus Festival concert series.
A fund drive skit from WFHB’s March 1993 membership drive.
An excerpt from a 1994 on-air interview and live session with local musicians John P. Strohm and Kenny Childers promoting their new band Velo-Deluxe.
Part one of a 1997 live reading by locally-based author Chris Green of his six-part poem “323-1200 Fund Drive,” written about WFHB.
A montage (c. 1998) of local and extralocal figures who have featured on WFHB recording station identifications, including actors (David Spade, Bob Kershaw/“Captain Kangaroo”), locally based musicians (Carrie Newcomer, King Bobo, the band Vida), extralocally based musicians (Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Carole Noonan, Gabriel Yacoub, Ani DiFranco, Kerry Getz, John Hartford, Howard Levy, Jimmy Smith of the Gourds, Dar Williams, Lucy Kaplansky), non-WFHB radio personalities (Firesign Theatre’s David Ossman as character George Tirebiter, Jack Carney, Dr. Demento), regional community figures (Beth Lodge-Rigal of non-profit organization Women Writing for (a) Change Bloomington, aviator and executive Rex Hinkle, bait shop owner “Buddy” Bill Moser, sheriff’s deputy Chuck Wilson) sociopolitical agents with broader geographic domains (Indiana Lieutenant Governor Joe Kernen; Irish Minister for Arts, Culture, and the Gaeltacht Michael D. Higgins), and an apparent Jamaican English speaker whose identity is unclear from the archive (various cassette labels refer to him as “Little You” or “Lickle U” and ascribe to him the descriptor “Jamaican,” sometimes in quotation marks, with no other explanation or clarification).
A recorded Youth Radio program from 1996 for which the young host reviews two movies starring actor Keanu Reeves and solicits further requests for future features on specific actors.
Part two of Chris Green’s aforementioned poem.
An informational spot on an upcoming telephone survey to be undertaken by WFHB staff in advance of the station’s 1994 move downtown.
An excerpt from a 1998 performance by local artist Bob Lucas on Saturday’s Child, WFHB’s longest running live music program.
A full station identification by aviator Rex Hinkle, who positions himself as representing the Monroe County Airport, which served commercial airlines through the late 1990s.
Part three of Chris Green’s poem.
A mid-1990s fund drive testimonial/pitch by Bloomington Community Access Television show (and later web series) J&B on the ROX cast members and producers Joe Nickell, Bart Everson, and Christy Paxson.
A short promotional spot for “Chick of the 90s,” a Youth Radio host.
An excerpt from a 1997 episode of On the Line, a program focusing on the Bloomington economy, in which host and Bloomington City Council member Rod Young speaks with shoppers at stores in downtown Bloomington.
Part five of Chris Green’s poem.
A 1996 promotional spot for Youth Radio.
A 1994 fund drive skit based on television series Beavis and Butt-Head (1993-1997).
Part six of Chris Green’s poem.[2]
Throughout the evening, attendees sat down and listened, many of them reminiscing. I sat with some of my fellow programmers as they listened, each of whom were longtime volunteers; the photos, videos, and audio often triggered them to share their own memories. A few expressed dislike for the content or style of some of the audio segments, but still stayed to see and hear what would come next.
Figure 4.22-4.24: Still photos of the three listening stations. From left to right: 4.22: Recent audio of news, public affairs, and Youth Radio programming; a logo from a Youth Radio storytelling project is onscreen. 4.23: Recent video of live sessions; a clip of Alan Sparhawk in the WFHB studios recorded by local company No Guru Media is onscreen. 4.24: Archival media; a picture of WFHB volunteers at a Fourth of July parade c. 1998 is onscreen, while audio plays from an interview between host and then-music director Jim Manion.
The main event of the evening was a three-act concert featuring local acts LeRoy McQueen and Thee Vatos Supreme and Amy O opening for Indianapolis-based Wishy. Serving as master of ceremonies was Steve Volan, mentioned earlier in this chapter in his capacity as a guest on an Interchange episode edited into an archival segment of an episode of WFHB Rewind. The choice of Volan as host for the WFHB Past and Present event made sense as a relatively audibly and visibly recognizable figure in the local area. At the time of this writing, Volan (under the name “TallSteve”) hosts the 1-3 p.m. segment of Thursday’s afternoon music mix every other week and has been a WFHB host since 1993; his voluntary duties also include hosting the station’s annual New Year’s Eve countdown show of the year’s most played albums. Beyond the station, Volan has served as a member of the Bloomington City Council member, founded the first internet service provider based in Bloomington (BlueMarble, later bought by statewide company Smithville), owned the local video rental store Cinemat, earned a Master of Arts degree in geography at Indiana University, and now hosts the Bloomington-oriented podcast The 812.[3] Volan regularly volunteers as a master of ceremonies at the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival, introducing artists before their sets. In short, he is used to addressing publics in Bloomington about issues in Bloomington.
Volan spoke at the beginning and end of each of the three acts, introducing them, thanking them, and contextualizing them in the big picture of the event.[4] He opened the evening by guiding the audience back to the radio-saturated 1970s, commenting (to audience laughter and a few cheers) that this was “when impeaching a president really meant something.” After describing the mediascape of the time in broad strokes (vinyl records, 8-track tapes, the beginning of FM radio), he brought us to Bloomington:
Bloomington always wanted to be a music town. Back in 1974, a few guys in Bloomington who were into music looked around and said, you know, what this town needs is, and I quote, “a radio station that plays weird stuff.” Unquote. They weren’t interested in a commercial station, there were plenty of those, and they knew almost nothing about starting a radio station. But they were crazy for it. This bunch of hippies learned that there was such a thing as non-commercial FM radio stations, and that there were some around the country started and run by volunteers. And anyone could apply to the Federal Communications Commission to start one. But to apply, they needed money and friends. Was anyone interested in such an adventure? And so they decided to do what they knew best: use music to raise more music. They put on a benefit concert right here at this nightclub fifty years and one day ago today. [Audience cheers.] July 9, 1975. It was the first benefit for what became known as the Bloomington Community Radio Project.
With the event’s raison d’être established, Volan waxed slightly more poetic:
Welcome to the 50th anniversary of that project, 50 years ago last night, when the community began gestating what became Bloomington’s community radio station. When people said, we have this idea, and planted a seed in this room that germinated into WFHB.
These statements were, to me, particularly striking for their evocations of birth and growth, plant and animal. Volan offered us a narrative of WFHB that highlighted its affective and organic dimensions, not at the expense of facts but in tandem with them. He was not the first person I encountered in my research who described radio and especially WFHB with language beyond organizational and technological rationality.[5] During interviews, many of my colleagues referred to radio in terms of magic and miracles. One referred to community radio as operating “by organic good feelings and vibes” and went on to explain the importance of this:
Magic is very rare. Community radio is anarchistic enough and organic enough and based on individual, quirky people enough where quirkiness is not drilled out of them, it’s, in a sense, nurtured and welcomed, to a limit, that magic can happen. (Interview 20)
Volan’s monologue depicted WFHB in largely this same vein, a rhetorical strategy especially apt given the event’s goals of fundraising for the station and raising awareness of the impending challenge to its federal funding, though we did not know at the time how quickly this latter situation would progress.
After performances by LeRoy McQueen and Thee Vatos Supreme (whose self-titled debut album came out in 2024 and received significant airplay at WFHB) and Amy O (fronted by Amy Oelsner, founder of nonprofit organization Girls Rock Bloomington and an artist who has been releasing music commercially since 2016), Volan took to the stage for his longest speech, part celebration, part entreaty. He praised the station’s original programming, its community partnerships, and its impact on Bloomington’s event options (“touring bands are not being routed through Bloomington just to do a Firehouse Session”). He discussed the importance of the station’s physical location and the fact that the Firehouse was gifted to them rent-free (“...I visited KZUN in Lincoln, Nebraska, where they had just moved because they could not afford rent. It’s killed worthier stations than ours... there were several times in the past thirty years that having access to the Firehouse free and clear is what made the difference between a current and a former radio station”) and mentioned some of the station’s recent financial growth. Finally, he broached the topic of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting:
But as we speak, the station’s viability is under threat. In the U.S. Senate right now is that bill to rescind, to actually take back money issued to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. [Audience boos.] They don’t even have the decency to just zero out next year’s budget. They’re trying to take back the money that was already allocated. The threat to CPB is a huge threat to the viability of budgets like WFHB’s and every non-commercial radio station in the country. Some of these, our shows that I just described, some of the station’s initiatives may have to go if the Senate passes that bill, which could be as early as next week. If you can, please call every Senator you can and tell them to not let this bill pass. Please. [Audience cheers.]
We’re here for you and because of you. We’re volunteer-powered, listener-supported community radio. WFHB is a light in the darkness, a port we have to make safe from the brewing storm. These are difficult times. We ask you to do what you can. But I don’t want to bring the show down.
Volan returned to a more jubilant mode by pointing out the longevity of the Bluebird itself, eliciting audience cheers for the venue and its manager, Dave Kubiak. At last, he introduced Wishy with a brief history of their Indiana origins, connections to Bloomington, and successes outside the state (“How could we better celebrate fifty years than with an act from around here in the venue where community radio was born?”). After Wishy’s high-energy indie rock performance, Volan returned to the stage briefly to thank attendees, bands, and WFHB. His final words: “Good night, be safe, and thank you and tune in to your radio!”
WFHB Past and Present was a night transparently built on nostalgia, as is the wont of any anniversary event, and the goals of such strategies were especially clear in Volan’s discussion of the then-in-progress Corporation for Public Broadcasting defunding. Boym writes that nostalgia “is not always retrospective; it can be prospective as well. The fantasies of the past, determined by the needs of the present, have a direct impact on the realities of the future” (2011). Many creative constructions of memory shaped the WFHB Past and Present spaces and attendee experiences. Josh was obviously and necessarily particular in curating audiovisual materials for the archival listening station. Not all listeners enjoyed all of the segments, but this was not because any of the segments were overtly distasteful, offensive, or demonstrative of bad broadcasting practices. Certainly, it is possible to find cassettes that employ offensive stereotypes and overall sloppy work in the WFHB archive, especially from the station’s early days. These would not have served the purpose of the event, nor would it have been kind to foist them on an unsuspecting public present to support the station.
Was this use of archives manipulative? In the strictest sense, yes. It was strategic, meant to move audiences to specific affective reactions with material outcomes. It was not deceptive, but it was selective, not a comprehensive history, but collage art, made up of found materials from archives of cassettes, papers, photos, and shirts, many of them not initially meant as art but as quotidian records of life. Impacting the event’s potency were framing objects, discourses, and performances emphasizing complex connections between past, present, and future: nostalgic iconography adorning walls and seats, Volan advocating for political action through storytelling, contemporary artists playing on the Bluebird stage for WFHB’s future half a century after contemporary artists of the 1970s had done the same.
The differences between restorative and reflective nostalgia in Boym’s framework are sometimes initially subtle, but she makes clear their importance:
Restorative and reflective nostalgia might overlap in their frames of reference but do not coincide in their narratives and plots of identity. In other words, they can use the same triggers of memory and symbols, the same Proustian madeleine cookie, but tell different stories about it. Nostalgia of the first type gravitates toward collective pictorial symbols and oral culture. Nostalgia of the second type is more oriented towards an individual narrative that savors details and memorial signs, yet perpetually defers homecoming itself. If restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space. Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment, or critical reflection. (2011)
WFHB Past and Present has attributes of both types of nostalgia, per Boym, employing pictorial symbols, oral culture while also celebrating “shattered fragments of memory.” Both Volan and the archival listening station balanced humor and urgency, with Volan outwardly acknowledging a specific desire to dwell as much as possible in joy rather than seriousness.
[1] Video embedded in companion webpage.
[2] See Appendix B for full descriptions and transcripts of each of these segments.
[3] 812 is the area code used for Bloomington phone numbers and others in the southern third of Indiana.
[4] See Appendix C for fuller transcripts of some of Volan’s monologues, as made from videos I took at the event using my phone.
[5] Discourses of this nature have been part of broader cultural engagement with wireless technologies since at least the mid-19th century. William Boddy discusses quasi-mystical depictions of “the distant coded messages and disembodied voices of wireless” as “both Godlike and terrifying” in short stories and poems from that point forward as a means of expressing anxieties and fascinations with the medium of radio (2004, 23). Indeed, a 1922 article in periodical The American Magazine titled “This Magic Called Radio” refers to wireless communication as “this great modern miracle” (Barton 11). It opens with the author gazing at the night sky over Westinghouse Corporation’s Newark headquarters, noting stars “twinkling a bit too innocently” as “somehow, somewhere in the great expanse between the roofs of the city and the stars, mad spirits were at work” (ibid.). The discursive links between radio and the occult are perhaps less anxiety-inducing for the “mad spirits” of WFHB.