Heavy Machinery Radio Show Debut

Heavy Machinery was my radio show on WRUV 90.1 FM Burlington, the student run radio station at the University of Vermont. It ran from March of 1993 to August of 1996.

In the grand tradition of many college activities, all new DJs were required to pass a “trial by fire” as a form of weeding out the undedicated. This took the form of a mandatory semester of graveyard shifts.

I started on Friday mornings at 2am. Within 3 months I got very lucky and fell into the prime time slot of 8-11pm on Saturday nights, and I stayed there for the remainder of my tenure (despite not being a student.)

Documentation of the actual playlists is pretty spotty in the early days, as they were all on paper forms that were compiled by hand and submitted to the College Music Journal, which ensured a continuous stream of new records and CDs flowing into the station. After a while, I started to steal my playlists overnight so I could post them to rec.music.industrial (a Usenet group of industrial music fans from around the world) then sneak them back into the station the next morning before the playlist police started handing out demerits.

Most of the playlists I now have from that time were grabbed from old Usenet archives, though those only go as far back as 1994. I’ve posted the ones that I have on the datapoint timeline.