Pages 1-4 of my hand-written, annotated playlist of songs played as part of The dB’s Orgy on Harvard radio station WHRB, spring 1989.
My archivist, completist tendencies are on full display here in this playlist I made of the dB’s and related songs played on-air during this multi-hour Orgy, and recorded by me onto a hodgepodge of cassette tapes. I feel like there there may be a couple more pages I’m missing (this program was loooong), but these were all I could find.
In high school I’d discovered WHRB—specifically its Record Hospital nighttime programming of indie, punk and other underground music—via the weekly playlists left by the doors of my record store haunts. On one such store visit, I grabbed a flyer advertising a “dB’s Orgy” to be broadcast on the station that month. I was already a fan of the dB’s, having bought their latest album, The Sound of Music, after hearing the song “Amplifier” on local alt-rock station WFNX. (And yes, that song isn’t on that album, but I couldn’t find a copy of Like This!)
So on the appointed date and time as per that flyer, I gathered a bunch of tapes that were either blank or partially-blank, tuned my dad’s good stereo in the living room to 95.3 FM, and hit “record” on the first of those tapes I’d popped in his cassette deck. Since it was a double-deck that automatically switched from one bay to the other at finish, I was able to record up to three whole hours at a time, which made the process a bit easier.
The entire program was a revelation: the length (at least 8 hours, IIRC), the breadth of music and artists part of the dB’s universe (Kimberly Rew of The Soft Boys!), and the depth of the DJ’s record collection. He had the obscure, 1972 LP by Rittenhouse Square, with Stamey, Holsapple and Mitch Easter playing kind of terrible rock music, but charmingly goofy at the same time. And I’m pretty sure this program was the first time I heard Pylon and Yo La Tengo, among others.
After many hours and cassettes of taping, I later took my scribbled notes and re-listened to the whole damn thing again—okay, with some fast-forwarding. I marked the songs that I wanted to include on my “compiled copy” of what I considered to be core material. I generally omitted songs that I either already had in some form or were from artists with a more tangential connection to the dB’s. (Sorry, Pylon.) The final product ended up on three, 90-minute Maxell XLII-S cassettes. So fancy.
The story would end there, were it not for a random thread in the online forum for former Record Hospital DJs of which, as a 1993-1996 DJ, I am a member. Someone posted that flyer, tagging the DJ responsible for that dB’s Orgy, and mentioning he wished he had a playlist. Well, hey, I can help! I posted the first page of my hand-written playlist as seen above, mentioning how big an influence it was on this college-radio-curious, teen indie music fan. A 30-year-overdue thank you, Henry Donahue.
