First Transmission

Back in the early '90s, the internet wasn't used as a medium to promote music. There were no MP3s, no music sharing sites, and no iTunes. There wasn't even a good GUI web browser (Netscape Navigator) until the end of 1994. If you were in an "unsigned" band and wanted your music to be heard, you needed to go out and play live shows and/or try to get your music played on the radio. College radio was usually receptive to new music and would take chances on local or "unsigned" bands but getting any airplay on a commercial station was near impossible.

As luck would have it in August of 1993, a past co-worker of Scott's from Donnelley Directory was working at B-101 - a soft rock/adult contemporary radio station. He had a cassette of our latest release, Any Questions? - Prey For Death, and, knowing that our Industrial style music would never fit into the program format at B-101, he forwarded our cassette to his friends at 103.9 WDRE - Philadelphia's modern rock radio station.

They must have liked what they heard because I received a call from the station and they said that they planned to feature one of our songs during an upcoming Local Edge radio show - their weekly local music spotlight segment. I gave them some background info on the band and suggested that Limerick Lights (Radiation Mix) would be a good song to play.

I got a courtesy call about a week later from the station informing me that our song was scheduled to be played during the 08/15/93 Local Edge show. This would be our first mass exposure on the Philadelphia music scene and we were excited. We told everyone that we knew that we were going to be on the radio and that they should tune in. Not many people had e-mail at this point so we had to contact everyone by phone or word-of-mouth.

When the day of the broadcast arrived, we tried tuning in the radio station so we could listen to the show and record it. Normally, we never had a problem tuning in the station at either FFS I or FFS II but, on this day, the reception was full of static. We tried everything... We placed the antennas in every possible position, moved the radios all around the studios, etc. No matter what we tried, we couldn't get good reception.

Not to be deterred, we called our friend at Club Wojo and asked what his reception was like. He said that his reception was good and he invited us down. With time quickly running out, we jumped in the car and sped down to Club Wojo. With seconds to spare, we made it there and set up our recorder. This is what we heard...

P.S. I told them that Any Questions? were from Pottstown, not Doylestown as Mel Toxic says during the broadcast. "Not that there's anything wrong with Doylestown..."