Sometime last year, Rissa Rogus and Elizabeth Kim found a cardboard box in the WUOG music room. There wasn’t anything particularly odd about that. WUOG—the University of Georgia’s student-run radio station—collects boxes like old paper clips.
But something about this box stood out, so the two music directors opened it. They found treasure.
Rissa Rogus, WUOG’s local music director, leads the station’s outreach to the Classic City’s still-vibrant live music scene. She helps book bands for WUOG’s Live in the Lobby series and highlights Athens-based talent on her show, Sound of the City. (Photo by Peter Frey/UGA)
The neatly filed records and CDs inside included a first pressing of Substance, a classic two-record compilation from New Order. Additional rarities from Blondie, David Bowie, Fugazi, and others—all legends of alternative music—were mixed in. So was a handwritten note.
Written in cursive on a piece of notebook paper, Lars Gotrich introduced himself as a former WUOG staffer. In 2008, when WUOG was clearing out its studio atop Memorial Hall and preparing to move into its current location in the Tate Student Center, stacks of records and CDs were being thrown out. There was no room in the new archive.
Gotrich AB ’05, who now works for NPR Music, was horrified. He filled a box with rescued music from the trash bin and took it home. In 2023, he mailed it back.
Gotrich felt bad about taking everything without permission, and while none of the artists in the box would make today’s WUOG playlist—they’re too mainstream for college radio these days—he wanted the station to have its music back.
“One beautiful thing about radio is the focus on physical media,” says Laura Duncan, WUOG’s program director. “We have record players; we have CD players and old cassettes in the archives. We provide a nice space for this media to be used, and even if people listen to us online, they still get that feeling of physical media and connection.”
The music classified as “alternative” is ever-changing, but the spirit behind it is always vibrant. WUOG is now 52 years old but far from settling down.
Come as You Are
For as long as she can remember, Katie Sawyer has loved music. She was a drum major in her high school band, so when Sawyer got to UGA, she sought a place where she could share that love of music with others. So in the first semester of her first year on campus, Sawyer attended an interest meeting at WUOG. And she hasn’t left.
Katie Sawyer walked into the WUOG station as a freshman and never left. In 2024, she served as the station’s general manager, balancing inspired leadership with a love for all that WUOG represents. (Photo by Peter Frey/UGA)
“Something about this station is just special,” says Sawyer, a fourth-year entertainment and media studies major. “I needed this to be part of my life.”
As a freshman, Sawyer trained to be a DJ and adopted the on-air handle DJ Muppet Man. (All 132 WUOG DJs have handles.) Then she earned a promotion to internal affairs director and became general manager in 2024. She oversees the station’s 17-member executive committee as well as its 300-plus member staff.
“Just like me, everyone else here is just so passionate about radio and music and just Athens in general,” says Sawyer, who spends between 20 and 30 hours a week on station business. “I definitely expected some of the stresses that come with the job, but I really didn’t anticipate how eager everyone is to help.”
Shiny, Happy People
The most eager WUOGers (pronounced woo-AWG-ers) are Sawyer’s 17 lieutenants on the executive committee. They serve as leaders in programming, outreach, operations, digital media, and archives. And they also draw strength from those around them.
“I came here, and I found my people,” says William Sealy, a third-year double major in business and history. As WUOG’s community outreach director, Sealy leads efforts to reconnect with station alumni across the country.
Over the years, WUOG alumni outreach has been spotty, but since the station’s 50th anniversary celebration in 2022, the current staff’s efforts have met with a lot of success.
Current staff frequently interact with alumni through social media groups and in person. For example, former staff come back to campus to host hour-long shows where they get to “seize the airwaves” and play the classics, new and old. Alumni even take part in WUOG-sponsored events like concerts and panel discussions with ample room for telling stories.
A spiky sense of humor is a WUOG hallmark that dates back to the 1970s. These days, the station’s back room includes a collage that memorializes the least artistic, most embarrassing, and simply mind-boggling CD cover art DJs have collected over the years. (Photo by Peter Frey/UGA)
Love Shack
WUOG 90.5 FM first hit the airwaves on Oct. 16, 1972. Since then, it has remained one of the most influential college radio stations in the country. Members of R.E.M. were DJs. So was 2000s super-producer Brian Burton, better known as Danger Mouse.
Athens wasone of the epicenters of the alternative music boom, and WUOG both reflected and drove it. But the station has always been more than just a jukebox. It has covered news, sports, weather, and campus activities. It’s also given voice to thousands of students.
WUOG launched from the top floor of Memorial Hall on Oct. 16, 1972. The occasion was so grand that UGA President Fred Davison (seated) was on hand to congratulate the faculty and WUOG student staff involved. (Photo Special)
For 36 years, WUOG broadcast from Memorial Hall. For the students who worked there, the location was a shrine. As grubby as it was beloved, WUOG’s headquarters resembled the living room of a 1970s sitcom, and the staff embraced it.
Fashion and music styles changed through the years, but WUOG always kept its edge. And that edginess, that anti-establishment attitude, is something WUOG alumni still keep close to heart. But they also understand that times change.
“I’m excited by what they are doing,” says Jennifer Griffith ABJ ’86, MA ’92, PhD ’01, who was a WUOG staff member all four years of her undergraduate career and is now faculty in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Current staff members first reached out to her during the 50th anniversary celebration, and now Griffith checks in periodically.
“The students have so much enthusiasm,” she continues. “They don’t do anything the way we did, and you can’t hold their feet to the fire to get them to, but I’m letting go of that,” she laughs.
Broadcasts from building roofs and smoke-filled control rooms are a thing of the past. “Have fun,” Griffith says. “Do what you want to do. It’s your space now.”
New Adventures in Hi-Fi
WUOG is a program within the department of Engagement, Leadership, and Service in the Division of Student Affairs, and is now located in the Tate Student Center. While WUOG’s Memorial Hall studio wore its grime as a badge of honor, the station’s Tate Center space is bright, airy, welcoming, and well put together.
Student staffers come and go seemingly non-stop; they pause to eat lunch, study, or just hang out. The raised stage in the corner hosts bands every Tuesday night for the Live in the Lobby concert series. At other times, it serves as ample space to stretch out.
Tuesday nights at WUOG are for Live in the Lobby, the station’s showcase for local bands. The Howdies performed last fall and drew a standing-room-only crowd. (Photo by Peter Frey/UGA)
“I live here,” says Megan Dawson, a second-year public relations major and WUOG’s external affairs director. “In between classes, I’ll come into the lobby to talk to people or do my homework. It doesn’t feel like a job or a big time commitment because I love it so much. This is where I want to be all the time.
Anyone who claims that radio is dying has never visited the studio. And all those staff members bring their own perspectives with them. These days, diversity of taste keeps WUOG alternative.
“We have some people who nerd out to hyper-pop and others who like 1930s union strike music,” says Sealy, pulling two of WUOG’s more exotic genres out of the air.
While alternative music aficionados have historically delighted in breaking rules, WUOG does have a major one. DJs cannot play any artist who has made the Billboard 200 album chart or has more than three million listeners on Spotify. Sometimes underground artists will play their way off WUOG’s playlist. Chappell Roan is a recent example.
We all understand that we have a duty to uplift smaller voices.” — Katie Sawyer, WUOG general manager
This Must Be the Place
While the lobby is the station’s hub of activity and the booth is its flash, the archives are WUOG’s beating heart. Its shelves contain thousands of meticulously filed records and CDs. Many of them one of a kind.
“There are so many local bands who sent us CDs in the ’90s and then just faded away,” says local music director Rissa Rogus. “We are the only people who havea copy of their music, and that’s such a privilege.”
But that’s not all that the archives hold.
On a bottom shelf in the back is a box of journals, many of them dating back decades. Eventually, the journals will be sent to UGA’s Special Collections Libraries as part of the new WUOG Collection, which will include decades of playlists, program guides, promotional material, and correspondence.
For years, DJs have scribbled their thoughts or doodles in these journals, each of which covers a year. Much of it cannot be reprinted in a family magazine.
“We’re still making the same jokes,” says Elizabeth Kim. “It really makes you feel like you are a part of something very important and very special.”
WUOG doesn’t broadcast 24 hours a day anymore, but that doesn’t mean DJs don’t take the programming schedule seriously. And with DJ-produced art to advertise each show, the staff makes the calendar fun too. (Photo by Peter Frey/UGA)
Once in a Lifetime
With thousands of records and CDs filed in WUOG’s archive, what is the executive team’s favorite? The answer is unanimous. It’s a first-run copy of Talking Heads: 77, the band’s landmark debut. WUOG’s copy went missing, and through the years, the album achieved something approaching mythic status.
WUOG Music Director Elizabeth Kim. (Photo by Peter Frey/UGA)
“I remember my freshman year, people were talking about it like it was this legendary thing, and then I went and found it,” says Elizabeth Kim (right), a fourth year double major in English and journalism.“Where did you find it?!?!?” asked her incredulous co-workers.
“It was in the Talking Heads section.”
But perhaps the best part of the discovery was a chippy WUOG review from the time that was stored with the record. “Beats are funky. Vocals are a little weak.”
Later that fall, Kim leaned into her newfound celebrity at the station and dressed as Talking Heads’ leader (and vocalist) David Byrne, complete with the oversized suit from the concert film Stop Making Sense.
“I think we forget how important radio is,” she says. “It’s interesting to think something that goes through our hands now and onto the shelf will generate excitement 20 years from now.”
Spirits in the Material World
In 1979, a ragtag group of radio staff started their own band, calling themselves the Wuoggerz. Sometimes there’d be more than a dozen people on stage playing a wide range of instruments with various success. One of them, drummer Bill Berry, was pretty good. He would soon join R.E.M.
Needle drop. (Photo by Peter Frey/UGA)
Talent aside, the Wuoggerz earned a slot opening for The Police at the Georgia Theatre. The band was so impressed by the Wuoggerz performance and the crowd’s reaction—made up primarily of musician girlfriends and other pals—that The Police invited the group to open for them on the rest of their southeasterndates.
The Wuoggerz had to decline. They had class in the morning.
