How I found my groove at a century-old church radio station

Kenny Purchase is a musician in St. John's. He makes his own music, he played with Rocket Rocketship and he often tours the world playing with Fog Lake. He's been volunteering at VOWR for about three years and has a unique relationship with the radio station. We asked him to write about it.

Letting a record play while heading to the bathroom at VOWR is a dangerous game.

I can't even count the number of times I've sprinted at full speed from one end of the station to the other, rushing back to the studio from the washroom as a song is coming to an end.

One night, I let a Beach Boys record play for a little too long while hosting a popular easy listening show. Smiley Smile is a weird one in the Beach Boys discography, and when Good Vibrations ended, a bizarre interlude began.

Stop playing that Jesus Halloween music, it's August!

I managed to get into the studio just as the phone started ringing.

"Stop playing that Jesus Halloween music, it's August!"

The work of the devil

VOWR first crackled onto the airwaves on July 24, 1924.

The station was started by Rev. Dr. J.G. Joyce, then the pastor of the Wesley Methodist Church — now the Wesley United Church — as a way to bring services to congregation members who, for whatever reason, couldn't make it in to the church on Patrick Street.

He was a real pioneer. According to the station's history books, he rigged up a way to broadcast his sermons straight from the pulpit to people's telephones. In solving that technical problem, he created a social one: lots of folks seemed to think the transmissions were the work of the devil.

But he managed to convince them otherwise.

Time stops at VOWR

VOWR now broadcasts across the province 24 hours a day. Sixty-odd volunteers breathe daily life into the station, most of them 30 or 40 years older than me, and you never know what you'll hear when you tune in.

The usual mix is old-school easy listening, from folk to classical music to church hymns. But there are some real oddballs in the library that give VOWR its undeniable charm.

Like classical pieces with the orchestra swapped out for a band of dinky synthesizers, or an out-of-place new-wave version of The Phantom of the Opera, which sounds closer to Depeche Mode than it does to an Andrew Lloyd Webber piece. 

Soul Bossa Nova by Quincy Jones, redefined by my generation as the theme music for the Austin Powers movies, is a frequent hit. So is the The Benny Hill Show theme song, where I can't help but picture a cartoonish chase sequence the moment that saxophone comes in.

I've found some real gems in that library, some which I can't find any record of online.

The darkness of April's Angel Food Cake, an album by New Brunswick country singer Norma Gale, made me stop the tape mid-song and rewind it.

The Sanderlings were a Newfoundland band of siblings in the 1960s, way ahead of their time. While many other bands here were recording traditional music, these guys were playing catchy pop songs.

Digitizing a vast, unknown library

I got word of a summer position opening up at VOWR from a family friend in June 2015. Having little idea what to expect, I went for it.

I started doing odds and ends like editing public service announcements for Chase the Ace contests.

But my biggest job was digitizing a lifetime's worth of CDs collecting dust in the underbelly of the station.

Since the station's first day on air in 1924, the VOWR music library continues to grow.

Made up of donated record collections, CBC archive additions and mystery albums that have somehow made their way onto the shelves over the years, our collection allows us to dive deep into the history of music and uncover ancient tracks that have slid through the cracks unnoticed and unheard.

And that inspired me to go deeper into experimenting with my own music. During that summer, I found a dusty box in the basement of the station labelled "bad tapes." I asked permission, and station manager Doreen Whalen said, "Yes, take 'em."

VOWR goes to Prague

With a broken tape recorder I found upstairs, I went through the tapes, half of them unspooled and totally useless, messing with the pitch and recording bits and pieces of songs, dialogue, and sinister-sounding ministry broadcasts.

This was when I realized I had something cool going with VOWR that no one else had.

If you look back on a YouTube video of Fog Lake shot last year performing in Prague, you can see me, blurred and in the background, cueing up this sound on my sampler to introduce the set.

Sounding like a record infinitely skipping in a house abandoned for decades, this static-eroded tape loop introduces the set as we go into our first song, Novocain.

I'm using a little snippet of some forgotten song I found during my first summer at VOWR.

Finding confidence through hosting

That first summer ended and my biweekly pay came to an abrupt halt, but I continued to be part of the station by volunteering as a host.

As a touring musician, I've been on stages from Quebec to Berlin, and it was hosting radio shows at VOWR that gave me the confidence to do that.

Prior to hosting, the idea of projecting my voice to a radio audience honestly terrified me. But after a few sips of coffee in the cockpit of the studio, the shyness dissipates and I'm ready to be the old-as-time voice of VOWR.

VOWR helped me come out of my shell and sparked my passion for sharing music.

Dead air

I find humour in so many little things around the station.

Like the funny, sometimes bizarre conversations with listeners on the phone while I'm on air, or the cassette tapes running at half speed turning a once-beautiful love song into a nightmarish transmission from the Cookie Monster or, just as likely, into a double-speed number by Alvin and the Chipmunks.

But there's nothing funny about going off air completely. It happens a lot and we have a dead air alarm that sounds when the signal cuts.

It's loud enough to break glass.

At VOWR, the silence is actually deafening.

Modernizing a 94-year-old radio station

Fortunately, bad tapes and dead air are becoming are less of a worry. In the last few years, we faced the reality that we must adapt to change and make better use of more recent technologies

VOWR is even on Twitter now.

But there's an undying loyalty to the old days of radio that sets VOWR apart from any other station in the country.

It's 2018 and we're using a computer running Windows 98 and the same turntables and tape decks that miraculously still work after being repaired dozens of times over the last 25 years.

And most of us broadcasters would rather spend an hour carrying records from the library to the studio than taking seconds to load up a USB stick.

To my knowledge, VOWR is the only radio station in Atlantic Canada that stays true to the old days of broadcasting.

AM static, crackling dust on the needle, and tape warble are all part of the lovable VOWR sound — a sound that ought to stay as it is.

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