Looking back at U of G’s radio station
When I returned to Guelph after 35 years of being away, I was pleased to hear CFRU, the campus radio station, was still going strong. It sounded as eccentric and alternative as when I’d had a radio show there in 1980, so of course I wanted to get involved again.
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With some guidance from the programming committee, my show ideas evolved into what is now The Zombie Jamboree, an international dance party with a world of upbeat music to help bring you back to life. The show is on air Sundays at 6:30 p.m. This whole process inspired me to talk to some other old-timers about how U of G’s radio station has evolved over its more than 40 year history. CFRU began as Radio Gryphon and was broadcast by closed circuit on campus only, operating out of a tiny room in the physical sciences building. It wasn’t long before the station outgrew this arrangement. Someone present during this transition stage was Bonnie Durtnall.
Bonnie Durtnall was a CFRU volunteer in the 1970s and worked as a music programmer and librarian.Recalling CFRU’s early days, Durtnall said: “Later, we moved under new management with Ian MacDiarmid, to the new student centre (now the UC). We got a legitimate FM licence in the 1980s — a heady experience. By then, I was music programmer/librarian. It was demanding, paid little, but I got to meet various musicians and groups, for example Bruce Cockburn, Lighthouse, FM, Billy Joel, [and] XTC. [I also got to] attend concerts and hear the latest music — when I could coerce record companies into sending it. It was my job and I enjoyed it, and cataloguing records. I also had my own late night show where talking was at an extreme minimum.”
“Musically, we had people who played anything and everything. The music range was, to put it mildly, wide, embracing, and eclectic,” she added. James Gordon, now a city councillor in Guelph, was another volunteer who was around for CFRU’s early growth spurts. He hosted his own show in the 1980s.“From 1986 to 1989 I had a show called The Hillside House. As a founding director of the Hillside Festival, it would showcase artists who played there, eventually becoming an acoustic music show,” said Gordon.
Gordon also remembered one of the challenges of that time being the switch from vinyl to digital formats.
“I feel I knew CFRU in its embryonic state and saw it become a true community radio station, exciting to see for both students and the whole city,” he added. Finally, Paul Ruta was a show host at CFRU in the early 1980s.Not too long ago, Ruta returned to campus with his university-aged daughter and dropped by CFRU.
“The place looked almost exactly the same as it did in the ’80s,” Ruta recalled. “The vinyl library had shrunk and was moved to a back room, but the control room looked almost identical. Yes, today the music source is different: computer files and CDs versus records and cassettes in our day, but I was surprised to see that the fundamentals of doing radio remained virtually unchanged [over the] decades.”
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Ruta shared an anecdote about his start at CFRU. “In those days, CFRU was both AM and FM, with different programming on each. Like today, the FM version was what people heard when they tuned into 93.3 FM. The transmission signal may have been weak — you wouldn’t be able to hear it much beyond the city of Guelph — but at least it was technically “broadcast.” The AM signal was “closed circuit,” meaning you could only hear it on campus — and possibly only in the University Centre, through the in-house speaker system throughout the building,” he said.
“Before the guys at CFRU let you do your own show, you had to train using the AM equipment, to learn what all the knobs and dials were for, during times of the day when it was “off the air” so to speak,” Ruta continued. “What I didn’t fully realize during my training was that there was a switch for turning that speaker system off and on. You were supposed to leave it off while you practiced. Somehow I managed to turn it on, and continued casually swearing into the microphone as I tried to figure out which fucking knob did what, and why the cocksucking turntable wasn’t working, and so on and so forth until Ian MacDiarmid stormed into the room, flipped the switch to the off position, and stormed out again without a word. Amazingly, they still let me do a radio show after that.” Reflecting on the CFRU crowd of his time, Ruta continued, “Unsurprisingly, the radio station attracted introverts, nerds, misfits, and sometimes relatively normal people who were just really into the music.”The technological advances may be a bit more extensive than Ruta noticed during his quick visit; after all, we did audio editing on magnetic tape by cutting it up with a razor blade and then sticking it back together. However, CFRU remains very much a community outlet. So if you’re a nerd, misfit, or just really into the music, you should stop by the station sometime.
Photo provided by Barbara Salsberg Mathews