I'll buy a dictionary
And look up what you said to me
[NOTE: Today’s 2 or 3 lines features part two of our three-part interview with Steven Lorber – the man behind the radio program that was the inspiration for 2 or 3 lines.]
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Q: After graduating from high school in New Jersey, you came to Washington, DC, in 1971 to attend Georgetown University.
A: I was a student in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, but that didn’t work out. Toward the end of my sixth year of college – which should have been the fourth year – I realized that I was never going to pass the foreign language requirement. I wrote letters to Georgetown every year for the next 10 or 15 years, begging and cajoling them to give me my degree. I got a call out of the blue in 2001 – which was more than 25 years after I should have graduated – from a Jesuit priest in the administration at Georgetown. He said “I just happened to come across your file, which is very thick, and I can't believe no one has responded to you.” He gave me the name of a neurologist to consult, and after this doctor tested me for about eight hours, he told me that I was functionally almost retarded in terms of my ability to understand and learn foreign languages. He gave me a 50-page report that I sent to the guy at Georgetown, who called me after he had read it and told me it confirmed what he suspected.
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| An aerial view of the Georgetown University campus |
A: Yes, but he said I’d probably have to take one more course in another area to get my degree. Three weeks later he called me, and said, “Guess what? I called a meeting of the committee that handles cases like yours, but everyone was on vacation. I was the only one who showed up, so I voted to grant your degree immediately.” So that’s how I got my degree.
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Q: When I came to Washington in 1977 as a brand-new government attorney, my officemate and I used to listen to WGTB – the Georgetown radio station – where you were a DJ.
A: I was at GTB a long time – from 1974 to 1979, which is when the university’s administration decided to give the station’s license to the University of the District of Columbia for a dollar.
Q: My understanding is that the staff of the radio station got very political, and ran ads and public-service announcements that were very controversial.
A: If the people that were in charge of the station had just played records and broadcast the Georgetown basketball games and done what they were told, a lot of the problems would have been avoided. But the station had really been taken over by people that were not students, and they thought the station was theirs and they could do whatever they wanted, and they mishandled it. I didn’t care about all the political stuff – I just wanted to get high and meet girls and play good music. I wasn’t politically minded at all.
Q: I don’t remember specific songs that I heard on GTB, but I remember thinking, “Where did this stuff come from?” I had never heard any of the music that was played on GTB anywhere else.
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| Headline from a Georgetown student newspaper article about the battle over control of WGTB |
A: GTB attracted people with niche interests. There was a strong progressive-music group that played Genesis and European progressive bands like PFM – a DJ who called himself Dr. Progresso used to play a lot of weird progressive stuff. There was a guy who loved metal before metal became popular. I liked garage. Everyone was in a different camp – GTB was very eclectic.
Q: How did you get your show on WGTB? Was there some sort of audition for on-air personnel?
A: It’s funny how I got the job at GTB. When I went to the guy that ran the station and said that I wanted to do a show, he said to me, “Can you get me some acid?” This was 1974 – I knew what acid was, but I never did it. I told him I’d need a few days, and then I went to everyone I knew, and somehow I got two tabs of acid and he gave me a show. I called it “Mystic Eyes” after the record by Van Morrison and Them.
Q: Did you choose that name because the song had some special meaning?
A: Not really. I just liked the song and thought it would work well for me to start to play it, and then break in and say, “I’m Steven Lorber, and you’re listening to the ‘Mystic Eyes’ show.” Also, my first time slot was from midnight to 3:00 am on Sunday mornings, and the first line of the song is “One Sunday morning.” So that’s another reason I picked it.
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Q: A little earlier you talked about being a big fan of garage music. What exactly do you mean when you use that term?
A: I define “garage” as being white kids interpreting blues records. I think the first really good garage record was the George Harrison song, “Don't Bother Me,” which was released on the Meet the Beatles album. That to me was the first garage record, although you can make a case for “Satisfaction” by the Stones or others – like “Louie Louie” and “Gloria.”
Q: Which were simple three-chord songs that almost anyone could play.
A: Exactly. So I started with garage records, and later got into psychedelic music, and then pub rock, with Dr. Feelgood and Ducks Deluxe and the Count Bishops. Then the punk thing came along, with bands like the Sex Pistols and the Buzzcocks.
Q: This was long before the internet existed, of course. How did you discover those groups?
A: I was reading Goldmine and Trouser Press and Melody Maker and other record magazines in those days. I’d get the names of other record collectors from the classified ads and start exchanging letters and trading records. I started trading with this one guy in England, and I remember him telling me that I was really going to like a record that had just come out over there, which he said he would mail to me the next day. So a couple of weeks later I got a copy of “Anarchy in the U.K.,” which was the first Sex Pistols single. This is going to make me sound like a boastful schmuck, but I can’t believe that anyone played it in the U.S. before I played it on WGTB.
Q: I know you were a friend of the late Skip Groff, who owned the legendary DC record store, Yesterday and Today.
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| The late Skip Groff, flanked by DC punk legends Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins |
[NOTE: Soon after Skip Groff’s death in February 2019, Steven hosted a two-hour tribute show to him on the Takoma Park, MD community radio station, WOWD-FM (94.3). Click here to listen to that show.]
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That does it for part two of our three-part interview with Steven Lorber. In the next 2 or 3 lines, we’ll cover Steven’s years at WHFS, the legendary Washington, DC, progressive station.
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Gruppo Sportivo was a Dutch band with an Italian name (which translates as “sports team”) that sang in French and English. They are another one of the great bands whose music I might never have become acquainted with were it not for Steven Lorber and his “Mystic Eyes” radio show.
“Mission à Paris” is the first track on Gruppo Sportivo’s first American album, Mistakes, which I went out and bought after hearing that song and several others from that album on “Mystic Eyes”:
Steven is still playing Gruppo Sportivo songs on his “Rock Continuum” radio show, which airs Monday afternoons on WOWD-FM (94.3). Click here to listen to his past shows.
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The band’s official website describes the song as “a dime-store spy novel of stolen NATO plans and secret rendezvouses at the Eiffel Tower.” (In case you’re wondering, rendezvouses is the correct spelling of the French plural form of rendezvous.)
Click here to listen to “Mission à Paris. Everything about it is wonderful, including the kazoo part at the beginning.
Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:
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