Viewed from the street, the small building looks like all the other white, clapboard cottages that USM owns along Falmouth St. in Portland. Go in the main entrance and through the sticker-plastered door on the left, however, and you’ll find yourself in the thriving cultural nexus that is WMPG, the community radio station for southern Maine.
Directly inside the door, framed awards from the Casco Bay Weekly and the Maine Association of Broadcasting line the walls of the small office. Down the hall, broadcasting studios, editing rooms and a massive library of 83,589 CDs occupy every square foot of the building’s ground floor and basement.
Since WMPG broadcasts 24 hours a day seven days a week and only plays a small handful of nationally syndicated material, the station never sleeps. Even at three in the morning, at least one of the station’s 200 volunteer DJs is sitting in front of the large mixing board, sliding volume controls, playing songs or sharing their thoughts with anyone listening.
Every week, WMPG airs around 75 shows that range across the spectrum from DJ Blizzard Bob’s bluegrass show “Blue Country” on Wednesday mornings to DJ Justin Andre’s “Uncle Funk” groove show on Saturday nights. In addition to the music shows, WMPG hosts a number of news and talk shows, and thousands of bands have played live from the WMPG studio.
Although WMPG is technically a part of USM, it is open to anyone in the area interested in getting involved. “It’s very much of an open door place,” says Claire Holman, the coordinator of Blunt Youth Radio, a weekly show produced by local high school students. “It’s not just a college radio station,” she says, “WMPG is a community radio station.” Without a doubt, WMPG offers the widest variety of programming available on the Portland airwaves. The station currently has nine international shows featuring music from as far away as the Middle East, Cambodia and Vietnam, many of which are hosted by people who came to Portland from those places.
“Corporate radio is completely missing the boat,” says Roy Ghim, a veteran DJ who hosts a rock show on WMPG on Tuesday afternoons called “Liberation By Sound.” Most radio stations take very few risks with the music they choose to broadcast, and even bands that receive a large amount of critical attention often have a hard time getting played. People volunteer with WMPG for a range of reasons, but Ghim believes that the impetus for many of them comes from listening to other stations and feeling that something important is missing. WMPG, he says, “is an experiment to see if we can make radio relevant.”
The station began in 1973 when a handful of students launched it out of a dorm room in Gorham as a pirate station without even a permit to broadcast. All they had, says station manager Jim Rand, was a 10-watt Mr. Microphone transmitter, a record player and a wire going out the window. When asked how far the original signal carried, Rand laughed and said, “You could hear it outside the door.”
The station has grown dramatically since then and now broadcasts on two frequencies, 104.1 and 90.9, as well as over the Internet at www.wmpg.org. Last year, the Federal Communications Commission awarded the station a construction permit to relocate its primary transmitter and antenna to Blackstrap Hill in Westbrook and increase its power from 1.11kW to 4.5kW. WMPG is currently working hard to raise the $250, 000 that the project has been estimated to cost. If everything progresses as planned, construction will finish in Spring 2011. When it does, the number of potential listeners within the station’s broadcast range will skyrocket from 35,000 to 185,000.
There are lots of ways for students and community members to get involved with the station. People looking to become DJs should contact Program Director Dave Bunker at 780-4598 about attending the upcoming DJ training on September 10th. Anyone interested in volunteering at the upcoming weeklong Beg-a-thon fundraiser in October, the Halloween radio drama show or the record sale in November should contact Office Manager Kelsey Perchinski at 780-4916.