Iboga? Frog Calls? It's Community Radio   

David J. Snyder, ordinarily program director for WERU-FM in Blue Hill, Maine, is on the air. He's filling in for David Piszcz, who hasn't arrived yet. Piszcz was to fill in for Rich Hilsinger, who couldn't make it. It's the worst nightmare of community radio: volunteers who don't show up.

But in fact, Snyder says, it seldom happens. Eventually, Piszcz hobbles in on crutches from a recent accident, sporting bushy red sideburns and a Tam-o-Shanter.

Blue Hill is in the heart of Maine's alternative lifestyle/counterculture belt, an area where you're likely to find more Birkenstocks than Air Jordans, more massage therapists than surgeons. It's also an area where the local community radio station makes house calls.

Eighteen or so hours a day, WERU broadcasts intentionally an eclectic combination of sounds and talk you won't hear any place else on the dial: Scandinavian Iboga beat, Original Baptist chants, New Age, folk, acoustic, jazz, blues, soca, salsa, rock, reggae, and recipes, interspersed with programs on health, the environment, and music by women, as well as a gay and lesbian radio forum and news from left-of-center Pacifica Radio.

Community radio was first organized at the National Alternative Radio Conference in Wisconsin in 1975 when the group decided that "the noncommercial spectrum was getting gobbled up by religious stations and institutions," says WERU Manager Jeff Kobrock. The National Federation of Community Broadcasters was established and sent to Washington to fight for the cause, he says. NFCB now counts about 65 stations nationwide.

After a six-year struggle to get licensing, WERU went on the air in 1988, broadcasting out of a converted chicken barn owned by Noel Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary fame. Stookey provided seed money from a foundation he created with proceeds from his "Wedding Song."

But the station soon ran into trouble. Its frequency, 89.9, occasionally overlaps with TV Channels 5 and 7 – area viewers hear WERU on their television sets – and complaints began at once. But as part of what Snyder calls its "good neighbor" policy, WERU stopped broadcasting so people could watch the final episode of "Magnum, P.I." Engineers made adjustments in the antenna to avoid the problem. Later, when residents complained that the station was interfering with Maine Public Broadcasting Network radio, WERU volunteers went into local homes to adjust the dials; it turned out people weren't receiving MPBN radio clearly because they weren't tuned in right.

Program Director Snyder is one of only five paid employees at WERU. One-hundred other non-paid staffers – 70 of them on-air – include boat builders, artists, musicians, shop owners and school teachers. Before going on the air they take WERU's "audio-literacy" courses, six hours in a classroom and at least six hours in the studio. As many as 50 have taken the course at one time. Still, volunteers burn out. WERU tried producing a drama series and found it a volunteer-killer in terms of time and effort.

Money is always a problem, but the WERU approach is characteristically offbeat. WERU holds three 10-day "fun-a-thons" a year. The station's biggest "fun-raiser," the annual Full Circle Summer Fair, this July featured not only the expected arts and crafts, live music and hot dogs but also open-air massage, temporary tattoos and "sea-chips" made from seaweed. An hour of open drumming – drummers joined in a percussion jam session in a kind of communal mind trip – drew some 75 participants.

Which befits a station where one program host, John Pilson, says he's as likely to air "frog-calls from the Amazon" as he is music. "Community radio," says Kobrock, "is where the medium really lives. Everything else is just canned."