PORTLAND, Maine — The phone rang in the middle of the night and Jim Rand answered it.
On the other end of the line, a man had a request. He wanted to hear a song by The 13th Floor Elevators.
Rand was alone, broadcasting his regular Saturday night rock ‘n’ roll radio show from WMPG’s Bedford Street studio on the University of Southern Maine campus. Rand told the man he couldn’t play that particular record because he didn’t have it.
“You don’t?” the man said. “Hang on, I’ll be right over.”
A few minutes later, the doorbell rang.
“And there he was, with a white label, DJ-only, promo copy of the record,” Rand said. “I played it and never saw him again.”
That was decades ago, but that kind of direct, human-to-human contact has always made the radio station stand out from the static on southern Maine’s crowded airwaves. Since WMPG first powered up its transmitter 50 years ago on Aug. 31, 1973, its DJs and listeners have chosen what gets played on the radio.
No station manager, corporate overlord or online artificial intelligence algorithm has ever had a say — and that’s the way it’s going to stay.
“You’re getting people that know the music — they’re the human algorithm,” Rand, station manager since the late 90s, said. “They curate shows. They bring their wealth of knowledge — they’ve gone out and and seen these bands. They’ve searched them out.”
Currently, about 90 DJs broadcast a mix of music, spoken word and public affairs programming on the 24-hour station every week. No show lasts more than a couple of hours, ensuring a wide range of diverse sonic offerings.
Latin, reggae, blues, metal, soul, funk, zydeco, rock, hip-hop, celtic, classic country, bluegrass and rockabilly all get time on the radio. Local movie reviews, talk shows and veterans’ affairs programming are offered airtime as well. WMPG also broadcasts the syndicated Democracy Now! news show every weekday at noon.
Overnights, between Tuesdays and Wednesdays, a sound collage show called Rssd Uul Maang plays overlapping crackles, blips, chirps and mysterious audio snippets unlike anything you’d hear on a commercial radio station. The program has been in rotation on WMPG for 26 years.
The Local Motives show has been broadcasting live bands, in the studio or on stage somewhere in Portland, for even longer.
In addition to live radio, WMPG now also produces dozens of podcast-only music and talk shows.
The origins of the station can be traced back to one man: Howard Allen.
He was an education major when he started his own tiny, not-quite-legal pirate radio station with a Mr. Microphone toy transmitter, a mixing board partially made from an old washing machine and an antennae slung out his dorm room window at Anderson Hall on the Gorham campus in 1970.
Allen used a record stacker to automatically play tunes while he went to class.
A year or so later, after a lot of shoe-leather organizing, he convinced student leaders to fund an experimental-but-official campus-only radio station called WGOR.
The station was a hit, and by the fall of 1973 WGOR had morphed into the fully licensed WMPG, named for USM’s former moniker, the University of Maine Portland-Gorham.
According to an article in the American Journal, published a week after the station officially went on the air in 1973, WMPG paid $1,000 to get its antenna installed atop Bailey Hall in Gorham.
“WCSH radio donated 600 record albums and two turntables,” the story reported, “and WJAB donated 10,000 records, including a comprehensive library of oldies.” WEEI donated two microphones as well.
Allen, who is now 71, was back on the WMPG airwaves on Thursday, the station’s birthday, talking about the old days. When asked if he thought his radio experiment would last 50 years, he was quick to answer with a smile.
“Hell yes,” he said. “Though I wasn’t thinking about 50 years in the future, I was thinking about right now.”
After graduation, he bid radio goodbye, working as an engineer and briefly owning a music store called Down Under Records on Main Street in Bangor.
WMPG was already the largest community radio station in southern Maine when it went live — and it still is.
Other Maine colleges and universities have radio operations, and the community radio station WERU broadcasts out of Blue Hill at 12,000 watts, but none reach Greater Portland.
In 1973, WMPG’s 10-watt transmitter reached a potential 200,000 listeners. In 1988, the station boosted its power to 1,000 watts. Now, after upgrading to 4,500 watts and moving the transmitter to Blackstrap Hill in Falmouth in 2008, the station can reach about 315,000 sets of ears at 90.9 FM.
That’s just over the air. The station also goes out over the internet.
“On the stream, it’s about 5,000 a week,” said Anella Linton, WMPG’s development director. “That’s not solely southern Maine. We’ve got listeners around the world in Canada, India, England, Ireland.”
The nonprofit station raises nearly half of its roughly $400,000 yearly budget by soliciting donations from listeners in twice-yearly Begathons. The rest of the funding comes from USM, grants and business underwriting. WMPG has three paid employees.
Even in the age of Spotify, there’s a steady number of USM students, faculty and community members who are dying to be WMPG DJs. Program Director Jessica Lockhart, who has been at the station since 1994, trains about 30 new ones every year. Most work as fill-ins, and some get their own shows, though slots are coveted and hard to come by.
“I don’t have my own show because there’s such a long waiting list,” Lockhart said.
On Tuesday, Lockhart’s latest DJ-school graduate, Jeannie Doherty, a Gen Z art student with black lipstick, was beaming, already planning her possible future show.
“I want to call it The Shroud,” Doherty said. “It will be dark, punk and post-punk kind of stuff — dark rock.”
Even though she’s a digital native who grew up amid online music, Doherty said radio still appeals to her because its an opportunity to share the sounds she loves with the world — not unlike the man who gave Rand the record in the middle of the night.
“I’m excited,” Doherty said. “I love preserving old media. I have a ton of CDs. I have a ton of records. A night slot would be cool but I’ll take anything.”
When Doherty gets her own show, she’ll join a long line of WMPG DJ’s who have breathed their musical affections into its microphones over the last half century.
Station Manager Rand would like to see all of them attend a reunion-and-birthday party at the university’s new McGoldrick Center for Career & Student Success as part of the USM homecoming week on October 14, from 6-9 p.m. The party will include food, a live broadcast and the premiere of a new short film about the station’s first 50 years.
In these days, when nearly every local station is controlled by national corporations, WMPG’s multi-voiced, ruled-from-within approach is more unique than ever.
“It’s a gem. It’s free speech. It’s community.” Lockhart said.
