Lunar Descent by Allen Steele

Author:Allen Steele
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781453274798
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy

The Mouth of the South (Pressclips.3)

Excerpted from “Hellraiser—Harry Drinkwater, The Last Angry DJ In America” by J.R. Presley; Rolling Stone, November 7, 2023:

The radio disc jockey who later became known to fans and enemies alike as the “Mouth of the South” first came to public attention in 2002, when he was a second-year law student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

By his own account, Harry Drinkwater led an unremarkable, even typical, college career: attending classes during the day, studying in his dorm room or in the library at night until about ten o’clock, after which he sometimes wandered down to Elliston Place to indulge in his favorite hobby, watching new session-musician bands try their licks at the legendary Nashville rock venue, the Exit/In. Drinkwater’s ambition was to be a public defender in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina; that was his goal until the day he happened upon a student demonstration on the Vandy campus.

“There were about twenty students in front of the president’s office,” Drinkwater recalls. “This was right after the Duck River nuke outside Manchester had its near-meltdown, and these guys were protesting Vandy’s investment in Southern Nuclear Utilities, the plant’s owner. They were actually being pretty peaceful about it—carrying placards, chanting slogans, that sort of thing—but there were about a hundred or so frat boys standing around them. Throwing beer cans at ’em, yelling obscenities, making rude gestures at the girls. I was just standing there—watching, not participating either way—when all of a sudden the frat animals charged the demonstrators and began to beat the holy crap out of them. And because I just happened to be there, a couple of them decided to jump me, too.”

Drinkwater laughs. “So there I am, with one of these neanderthals having me in a full nelson and the other tenderizing my stomach with his fists, and I look up to see [former Vanderbilt University President] Gilbert Gallagher standing in his office window, watching the whole thing and laughing his ass off. And right then I kind of decided it was time for a career change.”

The next day, Drinkwater went to Vandy’s student-operated campus radio station, WRVU-FM, and applied for an unpaid position as an announcer. As luck would have it, the station’s general manager at the time was Kate Humphrey, who would later become the program director of WJBR-FM in Boston (and one of Drinkwater’s many bosses in his career).

“Harry made no attempt to hide what he wanted to do on the air,” Humphrey says. “He wanted a soapbox for his views. But he knew his music, and I was angry about the breakup of the demonstration myself, so once we got him his license and he had been trained, we put him right on the air. The only ground rules I gave him were to say nothing which would break FCC rules or cause the university to shut us down.”

As he would many more time in the future, Drinkwater ignored those ground rules. At almost every stop-set, Harry Drinkwater

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.