And it’s coming up in just a few days!

The concert, sponsored by the Georgetown Entertainment and Media Alliance, is not only a great representation of musical ability and a rocking good time, but is a great networking opportunity for any WGTB DJs (or fans!) interested in a career in media or entertainment.

The show will feature a variety of songs written by alums and students as well as covers, including a really fantastic cover of Bon Iver’s “Holocene”. WGTB’s own Tate Tucker will be performing as well.

Check out the list of performers and this year’s trailer below, and get your tickets before they sell out!

Buy tickets here (only $10 for students)

RSVP on Facebook

Join GEMA (a good idea if you haven’t yet – membership is free!)

GEMA Rocks 2012 will feature performances by:

Mike Zakarin (C ’05, MBA ’13) of the band The Bravery; Michael Pearsall (B ’06) and Evan Field (I ’98) of the band Honor by August; Marcel Arsenault (C ’07); Rochelle Ballard (B ’05); Rich Battista (B ’86); Emilie Bogrand (C ’07); Aaron Broadus (faculty); Greg Capone (B ’06); Bill Danoff (I ’68); Yean Do (student); Anatole Doak (student);Walter Egan (C ’70); Greta Gaines (C ’89); Kiran Gandhi (C ’11); David Hendrickson (B ’07); Gary Kearns (F ’79); Kimon Kirk (C ’00); Lance Langston (F ’82); Chris Murphy (F ’07); Eric Rigaud (C ’90); Brittany Sonnichsen (C ’08); Patrick Sullivan (B ’07); Teddy Svoronos (F ’08); Kirsten Thien (B ’93); Richard Trent (F ’10); Tate Tucker (student); John Zambetti (C ’70); Johnny Zambetti (B ’09); Teddy Zambetti (C ’80)

SPECIAL VIDEO APPEARANCES BY:

Stand-up comedian Mike Birbiglia (C ’00)

Actor and comedian Nick Kroll (C ’01) of FX’s The League

SNL writer and stand-up comedian John Mulaney (C ’04)

Make sure to get your tickets today! We’ll see you there.

You go to Spencer’s Gifts and look but never buy and wonder if you’re allowed to be there, among the grotesque and fantastic. You buy a ticket for the PG movie, Ice Age, and sneak into the theater for The Panic Room since you’re still twelve and wholesome and even-keeled at heart, but starting to nurse a healthy budding discontent. You take your sweater off in the murky fluorescent light of the empty food court because NO RULES and NO PARENTS and spaghetti strap tank tops are in. You slink into F.Y.E, the record store that no longer exists and which stood for For Your Entertainment, and flip through the CD racks, the muted smack of plastic on plastic, while someone tries to buy The Eminem Show but is thwarted by a Parental Adivsory sticker and a bored, dreadlocked cashier looking to enforce the law.

It was in the distraction of the Eminem album altercation that I saw it, lime-green siding, white front, half of a bespectacled policeman or bus driver type. The Promise Ring: Very Emergency. I had heard the band mentioned by my older cousin, clung to the name for no reason at all, and in a desperate preteen glimpse of recognition and potential street cred had to have it; grabbed the CD, stalked up to the register, forked over my hard-earned pet-sitting cash and just like that it was mine. Mine to keep. The first CD I ever bought with my own money.

I can’t know for sure what a 1999 album was doing in a 2002 store, and the possibilities for time travel seem bleak, so I choose to chalk it up to fate; like NPR’s Lars Gotrich believes, “Music tends to align as it should, connecting the a-ha! moments of your sound world through personal discovery and research.”

And so I spun that album, forgive the phrase, like it was 1999. Were The Promise Ring emo pioneers “before a certain three-letter word became a four-letter word” ?  Yes; they had albums full of studio-perfect pop constructions a la Weezer, infused with true-to-heart emotionalism and just enough attitude, or maybe irony, to keep a sharp edge. The band displayed an amazing sense of timing throughout four full-length records, often drawing a song to a close before unleashing the chorus raucously where you least expect it. Frontman Davey von Bohlen (his name is Davey!) owned that precocious lisp before Girls’ Christopher Owens was a gleam in the blogosphere’s eye, and Scott Schoenbeck ladled out bass lines that could bring you to tears. And lyrically, yes, Very Emergency could be “emo” :

So wouldn’t it be nice if we / could live twice for just one night
Then we’d know what to do  / when I’m shaking in my shoes
My heart skips a beat over you

 They had a vice grip on the preciousness of boy-boy friendship, timid and saccharine:

Davey, oh Davey, don’t tell me that you’re crazy
And Jason, oh Jason, look now what you’ve been chasin’
Dan Didier, and Didier, you can’t spend the whole day in your PJ’s
Scott Schoenbeck , yeah, Scott Schoenbeck, his head feels like a train wreck tonight

But “emo” never meant fluffy. Let me not understate this. The Promise Ring – actually, Very Emergency– is the reason I know and do music, the articulate force behind my own lyric-driven songwriting, completing the Triptych of Influence alongside Bob Dylan and The Clash, the first group whose catalogue and story I ever committed to memory. And yet, it was a love committed to a time and a place, specifically age twelve through fifteen. I’d revisit the album in high school and college sporadically, but always by accident. It never came up organically. No one ever mentioned it. It’s not like saying you loved Bright Eyes, or Dashboard Confessional, in middle school – that came up, at radio meetings and over backyard beers, remember Fevers and Mirrors? Man, I loved it. No, I never met anyone else, perhaps as a function of my age, who loved The Promise Ring like I did – so I assumed I was alone. Here was this little weird band that ceased making music right when I discovered them, which I accepted as a tragic but inevitable fact. I let it go.

Until now. On Monday, I saw on Twitter  that the band had just played their first reunion show in over seven years. They played Milwaukee, their hometown, for two hours – 26 songs – to a sold-out crowd, to my complete and utter delight. It’s like Christmas morning if you didn’t even know Christmas was coming. My twelve-year-old heartbeat which still flutters, maybe too often, from the depths of my twenty-two-year-old heart, pumped hard, feeling the immensity of true love for a silly little piece of music, glad to be part of the mystery of strange attachments, grateful for the sad little happiness of a world that turns round and ends up where it began, and for a past that dwells, just present enough to remind you of where you are and where you’ve been.

Having seriously revisited Very Emergency now, every time I hear the album’s lengthy closer, “All of My Everythings,” I melt a little more into the pool of familiar melody, those memorized bass line pauses and nuanced breaths between words; and it means so much. It means Everything. Dance record from before I was born / on the stereo / Playing last rites / for my late nights. Last rites, indeed. Why did ever we part?

– Caroline Klibanoff, host, “Mystery Train” Sundays 4-5 pm on WGTB 

Many thanks to all of those who took the stage to speak, and those who donated archival material. Royal Stokes sent a box of archives in advance, which were present in the exhibit, and the alums presented two vintage WGTB bumper stickers to the station. Geri Pizzi also gifted the station the newest CD by GTB alum Greg Barrett, who could not attend, and former G.M. Ken Sleeman donated 100+ hours of recorded, digitized shows (no more reel-to-reel!)

We hope this is only the beginning of our relationship with our alumni base and that it will continue to flourish as more current DJs connect with their unique and compelling history. There is a student-made documentary in the works on the subject, and we will keep you updated on that when it is completed. Thanks, finally, to you readers, who are as much a part of WGTB as anyone who’s been on the air or behind the scenes. If you would like to join our email listserv and are not a DJ, you can join our Alumni listserv here (even if you never DJ’d, we’ll use it to keep you updated): JOIN HERE

Check out the video below to get a full sense of what it was like, and the slideshow as well!

Photo Credits: Catherine DeGennaro
Video: Caroline Klibanoff

Dear loyal fans and friends of WGTB,
If you haven’t been following us on Twitter or Facebook, you may not know that tomorrow, Tuesday, is national College Radio Day, where over 330 colleges are registered to raise awareness about the value of college radio and the wonderful things it brings to campus. We at WGTB are very lucky to have such a supportive university, a healthy budget, a welcoming community, and an active alumni network, all of which contribute to our high listenership and ability to bring more music to campus. However, not all schools are in this situation, and every week more and more college and community radio stations are being shut down, often sold to corporations or cut from the schools’ budgets. Stations have come under fire at Vanderbilt, Maryland, University of San Francisco, Texas Tech — and that’s all just in 2011. Tomorrow brings together all these stations and their listeners to show solidarity and support for local radio. If you’re reading this blog right now, you are one of the reasons we thrive as a station– we depend on the efforts of our DJs and the support of our listeners and administrative liasons, and we are grateful for lending your ears and your energy over the years!

Our Tuesday shows will be broadcasting with a nod to this occasion, possibly airing specific spots that the CRD organizers have released. You can do your part by tweeting, Facebooking, and just generally helping spread the word. There is also a petition at SignOn.org to tell the FCC how important these small stations are in giving students a voice and in bringing together a community. Think about it – we have 120 shows and 200 DJs, so even if each show only had a few listeners that would still hit a very wide swath of the GU campus, providing a very central and diverse voice.

Of course, this plays all too key a role in our upcoming AlumLive Reunion event, bringing back WGTB DJs from the 1960s through the present-day to tell their stories, especially those that were here when GU sold the FM signal in 1979. It’s shaping up to be quite an event, with lots of expected media coverage and some really awesome archival material as part of the exhibit. It all goes down Saturday, Oct. 22 from 5:30 – 7:30 pm, in Bulldog Alley. Make sure to RSVP to that here: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=121413521298213 Refreshments will be served and it’s free, open to the public. Hope you can all make it.

Thanks for all your involvement and your support, and have a great week – and a great College Radio Day!

Caroline Klibanoff

General Manager, WGTB