You Get One Phone Call. Jailhouse Rock

It is legendary in the world of the Harvard radio station. Only the luckiest DJs at “Record Hospital,” the rock department of whrb 95.3 fm, have ever gotten “the most satisfactory kind of call you can get,” as Zach I. Baron puts it. “It is a big part of the mythology of the department,” says Jason S. Tajima, who was twice blessed. “It’s a big deal when it happens to you.”

Every so often, prisoners from local jails call in to the station using an original method: they call collect, and make their request in the few seconds of time normally allotted for the caller’s name, hanging up before the DJ has the chance to accept.

DJ Harry G. Kimball has a well-developed theory to explain the phenomenon. “We are similarly alienated from mainstream music, but in different ways,” he says. “What we play is underground, obscure: Punk, Hard Core, Indie Rock, ... The prisoners tend to think older, more traditional Heavy Metal. There is a difference between what they want and what we play, but we’re the only music station that accepts requests and is easy to call.”

Kimball admits he has never had such a call, but can explain that, too. “They tend to focus more on female DJs,” he expounds, “it’s related to hearing a sexy voice on the radio.”

One such sexy-voiced female DJ, Thalia S. Field ‘03, who is also a Crimson executive, has her own explanation. “Many of the people who make requests are very strange,” she says. “It’s a great radio station, but what we play appeals to a certain type of person. Like noise music.” Noise music? “Recordings of ordinary sounds, like jackhammers. The movement started in the 1930s with Pierre Henri, who composed musique concrète,” she explains. Though “a lot of times, prisoners request things that don’t fit with the format.” Field asserts that if she is called from jail, she will “definitely look hard to get what was asked for.”

Record Hospital knows it caters to a particular listenership. “Most of our listeners are cab drivers and prisoners,” says Baron. “People working late at night, and prizoners—I guess they are bored, they don’t have much to do. You can’t ignore it when they call in. For them, it’s like, ‘Thanks, you’re making my life a lot better.’”

Record Hospital’s motto may be “We cure nothing, we heal nothing,” but that doesn’t mean they aren’t providing a valuable service to the community.