Josh Burke '92
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- Alenka FigaAlenka: Go ahead.
- Josh BurkeJosh: My name is Joshua J. Burke. I currently live in Golden Valley, Minnesota, and I’m a member of the Grinnell College class of 1992.
- Josh BurkeJosh: And the thing that was most meaningful to me during my Grinnell experience was my participation with KDIC, the radio station. Coming to Grinnell, as a prospective student, the guy that picked me up at the airport was- had just come from doing his heavy metal radio show on KDIC and he was originally from New Jersey, and I was coming from New Jersey and was also very much a fan of heavy metal, and so it just kind of seemed fate at that point, that this guy, a guy named Ed Zelley from the class of ’88, I think, picked me up.
- Josh BurkeJosh: And it was a great introduction to the College, so when I got here as a student I was very interested in being able to participate in KDIC. It seemed really cool to me that this was something that was open to any student. It wasn’t... you didn’t have to be a communications major or anything like that. Anybody could apply for a show, and if their idea for the show was good enough they might get it.
- Josh BurkeJosh: I was lucky enough to get a show that first semester. I signed up with a... an upperclassman as a partner. We thought that might give us a better chance of getting a show and we got a show, Monday nights from midnight to three, and the show was called Death with Josh and Dave, and it was a heavy metal show.
- Josh BurkeJosh: Dave, very shortly after the beginning of the show, pretty much bowed out, leaving it to me and my friends to run the show completely, and we did. It was fun having the resource of a college radio station that actually got records from record companies around the country and around the world, and being able to listen to new music that I might not otherwise have found or heard of and check that out.
- Josh BurkeJosh: During fir- I was lucky enough to have a radio show for seven of my eight semesters at Grinnell. And the one semester that I didn’t, a friend of mine had a show so I just came up to his show every single week and unofficially considered it my show. The first three shows that I had were all Monday nights from midnight to three, and I think that was kind of their recognition of just how popular a heavy metal show would be on KDIC, which was not popular at all. We- The first year that I did the show we had one faithful listener from town who would call in, and at the end of the semester we actually went into town and met him and took him out to dinner to thank him for being such a faithful listener to our show.
- Josh Burke & Alenka FigaJosh: My senior year I was lucky enough to actually be station manager of KDIC, and had a lot of fun working with my classmates who were on the staff, and kind of having the power of controlling what KDIC would mean, at least for one year of history. It was an interesting year. At one point we were shut down by the FCC because we didn’t have appropriate licensure.Alenka: Wow.Josh: So we got that resolved and got the station back up and running.
- Josh BurkeJosh: There was another point, the Rodney King trial happened during my senior year when we had to go up to shut a show down that felt rightfully outraged about the results of the trial, but was expressing it in ways that were inappropriate given our FCC license. To come up there very late at night and bump into the Dean of Students, at the time, who had similarly been summoned to shut down the radio station for the evening.
- Josh Burke & Alenka FigaJosh: It was a lot of fun times. The- I also remember when I was station manager, my fellow students, thinking that they might be able to somehow bribe me to get their show ideas. One student in particular who made an anagram… For your application you had to put a set list of music that you would play for your show.Alenka: They still do that.Josh: OK, and he... the first letter of each song that he picked spelled out a message to me. And it was like, “Josh is really cool,” or something like that. I thought that was very clever of him to do that. He still didn’t get a show.Alenka: Oh.Josh: Sorry about that, Ben.
- Josh Burke & Alenka FigaJosh: But... So it was a lot of fun, and even beyond Grinnell, y'know, when I was a law student looking for a job, it was something that I had on my resume. And I really think that my involvement with KDIC got me my first job as an attorney. The lawyer from a law firm in Minneapolis who had come down to Iowa City to interview students on campus had seen that on my resume, fancied himself something of a college music buff, and basically set up an interview with me just to talk about music, and we connected well enough that he brought me back to Minneapolis where I got my first job, and where I still live, so... All from Ed Zelley picking me up at the airport and inspiring me to do a heavy metal show on KDIC.Alenka: That’s really awesome.
- Alenka Figa & Josh BurkeAlenka: Could you go more into the... not having an FCC license story?Josh: Y’know, I don’t want to implicate anyone who might have been responsible twenty years ago and I don’t remember the details, which is more of the issue.Alenka: There’s probably a statute of limitations that’s run out or something now.Josh: That’s right! That's right. Y'know, every student DJ was supposed to apply for some kind of FCC license. I think they had a temporary license or something that wasn’t the full-scale license that you could get, specifically for college radio. And I think we had not complied with doing that, and there may have also been issues with our transmitter. I’m fuzzy about it at this point, but it wasn’t quite as famous or infamous as the guys who connected the transmitter to the train tracks in the 60s or 50s, whenever that was.Alenka: I think 60s.Josh: Yeah, yeah. So, not quite as- not quite as exciting as that. More of a technicality kind of thing, so..
- Alenka Figa & Josh BurkeAlenka: Yeah. Is there anything else you'd like to share?Josh: That's all I wanted to talk about, so...Alenka: Awesome. Well, thank you.Josh: Alright. Thank you.
Alumni oral history interview with Josh Burke '92. Recorded June 1, 2012.