Free to play at WQNA

Tune to 88.3 FM, where colorful characters present original music

MEDIA | Tom Irwin

The phone chirps incessantly. Loud and fast heavy metal music blares from the speakers. Amid the cacophony a red light flashes on, and up to the DJ microphone steps Chris Hupp, transforming into Metal Chris as he takes a slug of Mountain Dew.

“Good evening and welcome to another edition of Monday Night Metal on WQNA with two hours of blasphemous metal coming your way. Call in your request or hit us on the old Facebook.”

Co-host Dr. Metal, aka Tim Simmons, answers the phone, takes a request, then searches for the asked-for song on the Internet. As Chris and Tim scurry around the compact DJ booth, Mike Goza, the knowledgeable and affable radio host of Blues Power, who just moments before started a death metal song after his last BB King selection to insure a smooth transition between shows, gathers his stacks of CDs and heads out the door.

Within minutes, into the studio comes Lana Wildman of the Fly-Over Zone, WQNA’s Saturday morning variety talk show featuring hosts Lana, Hugh Moore and Sam B. Davis. “We’re entering an interview we had with Dawn Wells, the Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island, in a radio program contest,” she says. “I have to edit the hour-long talk down to about five minutes.”

And so goes another evening on WQNA 88.3 FM, the Edge, Springfield’s combination student and community radio station.

Community radio explained Involved volunteers like Chris, Tim, Mike and Lana are only a few of the many, many community members who produce, promote, arrange, announce and do whatever else needs to be done for WQNA to air about 50 different weekly shows, along with student creations from the station’s host school.

The programming schedule contains a vast assortment of music genres, some popular and others obscure, each with the personal touch of the host or hosts defining the music choice to give the listeners a distinct and diverse view of individual options affecting the masses (or at least the ones tuned in). Compared to local commercial stations, where the idea of a DJ having a personal say in the music aired appears abhorrent and absolutely against all rules available, this seems an unusual and refreshing way to run a radio station.

Once a common, accepted and initially necessary part of radio, the idea of the DJ as music giver-discoverer-presenter is nonexistent on most major commercial radio stations. The music is piped in from other places and the song list is chosen far away from the DJ booth, usually to the benefit of publishing companies and recording conglomerates, resulting in the same songs played over and over. (Metal Chris jokingly extends congratulations to a local classic rock station for playing “Jukebox Hero” by Foreigner once a day for 24 years.)

Most commercial stations use between 400 and 600 songs, depending on the music genre they represent, as parent companies send the tested and proven cuts to the proper stations supporting classic rock or oldies or easy listening or contemporary sounds or Top 40 or classic country or whatever moniker classifies and categorizes the music. That’s why you can drive across the country and hear the same formats in different cities using identical song lists over and over again.

Generally the opportunity we receive to hear music on the radio comes from this system. Combating this artistically limited but profitable style of presenting music to the public via the airwaves are community radio stations and, to a lesser degree, public radio stations. As far as true grassroots, community-involved, not-forprofit radio, designed to inform and invigorate, not to make a buck at the cost of artistic integrity, small but mighty stations like WQNA run mostly by volunteers on tight budgets, are  our salvation. In our listening area, 88.3 FM is the only place to hear dub reggae, diverse blues, swing, jazz, punk, pop, classic country, altcountry, techno, metal, indie-rock, umpteen varieties of folk and bluegrass, funk and other types of music rarely heard on common broadcasts all on the same station, with sensible commentary by knowledgeable presenters included in the mix.