Hey y’all
Just wanted to say that I’m a KTRU-believer in New England. I lived in Houston for my first twenty years. I’m a DJ at WMUA, the college radio station at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. With no hyperbole, I wouldn’t have ever been inspired to do my own radio show (and my record collection wouldn’t exist) if KTRU hadn’t completely transformed my view of music when I was a weird misfit kid on the fringes of suburban Houston who stumbled across KTRU on the radio dial in 1995 or 1996.

I cherish the notebooks I still have with KTRU playlists from the mid-to-late ’90s meticulously archived in my awkward teenage handwriting, complete with commentary (like “BEDHEAD”, with lots of exclamation points). Seriously, when I was growing up in Houston, ALL I wanted to do was be a DJ at KTRU someday. In high school, the first thing I did when I inherited my hand-me-down car was to slap a KTRU bumper sticker on the back window. I didn’t have cool older siblings to give me a musical education & my only outlet for finding out about creative, unconventional music was fanatically buying independent music zines from strip-mall bookstores. When I discovered KTRU, I was finally able to actually HEAR all of this great music I had been reading about. That’s what saddens me the most about all of this – online radio is fine (we stream online at WMUA & I know a lot of people listen via that outlet), but you can’t replace that serendipity of flipping through the radio dial at random & stumbling across something that blows your mind.

When people find out that I’m from Houston, the very first thing I rave about is not the museums, not the Vietnamese food, but KTRU. Every time I come back to Houston to visit my family, my mom makes sure that she has KTRU on in the car when she picks me up from the airport. I’ve been spreading the word about this awful news to all of the DJs & listeners at WMUA, posting about it on my radio playlist blog & sending out links through the WMUA Facebook page – even though most of them have never been lucky enough to actually listen to KTRU, it’s obvious how much the station impacted me during my formative years & they recognize the need to voice their support for college radio EVERYWHERE. Western Mass college radio is in solidarity with y’all!

Erika Elizabeth
Expressway To Yr Skull – WMUA 91.1FM, Amherst, MA