New Jersey Jewish News Review
 Playing 'Music You Can't Hear on the Radio'
by Marilyn Silverstein
New Jersey Jewish News
December 10, 2002
A Sunday night in the darkened studios of Princeton University's WPRB-FM and John Weingart is where he loves to be - working the board, lining up songs, running the CD players and turntables and tape decks, and all the while tapping his foot to the irresistible beat of the bluegrass banjo playing in the background.
"This is Music You Can't Hear on the Radio - WPRB, broadcasting from Princeton University at stereo 103.3 on the FM dial and WPRB.com on the good old mysterious Internet," Weingart announces into the microphone in his soothing baritone as he punches the play button and the sound of a hot fiddle fills the air.
"This is my favorite moment in the show," he remarks to a guest, "just that second when one song ends and another begins. I have a lot of fun doing this."
Weekdays, Weingart dons a suit and tie and heads for his office at the Eagleton Institute for Politics on the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, where he serves as associate director, overseeing fellowship programs for graduate students and conducting research into applied politics.
But Sunday evenings from 7 to 10, he pulls on his WPRB T-shirt, kicks off his sneakers, and marches to a different drummer. His eclectic, idiosyncratic radio show, now in its 29th year, weaves together folk music, bluegrass, blues, old-time music, comedy routines, and concert announcements, plus generous sprinklings of songs from the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, Elvis Presley, and Paul Simon - all from the WPRB studios in the basement of Princeton's Holder Hall.
Each show ends with Emmylou Harris' upbeat "Love's Gonna Live Here Again," and a clip from a 1930s skit by a group called Gid Tanner and the Skillet Kickers: "That's sure good music. I never heard anything like that on the radio," comments one player. "Very seldom, very seldom," answers another.
"I bring in a broader array of music and comedy than other shows I'm aware of," Weingart said, "and there's this political consciousness as well as humor that I try to weave throughout the shows that I think is different. It's part of the appeal of the show to those who like it."
The 54-year-old Weingart has been spending his Sunday evenings on the radio ever since the days when he was pursuing a master's degree in public affairs at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. A dyed-in-the-wool Pete Seeger fan, he had grown up listening to independent bluegrass and folk music radio shows and had tried his own hand at one on WBRS while attending Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.
"I started off as a Pete Seeger fan and through trying to find Pete Seeger, I found FM radio when I was in high school," Weingart said during an interview, "... and through looking for Pete Seeger, I found lots of other music and the magic of radio."
While attending Princeton, Weingart began making some of his own magic on a Sunday evening folk show on WPRB, a gig that ended when he earned his degree in the spring of 1975. But when singer Paul Robeson died in February of 1976, he returned to WPRB to host a tribute, and he's been spending his Sunday evenings there ever since, playing the music you can't hear on the radio.
"I think any good radio show is somewhat idiosyncratic to the person putting it together," Weingart observed. "I think my taste is varied - although in a relatively narrow range. I love humor. I love songs that are funny. I love politics, so I love songs about politics. To some extent, I look for songs that are going to say something that's interesting to me."
As Weingart plans his play list, he can choose from the thousands of CDs, records, and tapes in his personal collection as well as from the extensive music library at WPRB. "I'm looking for multiple reasons to play any one song," he explained. "I have at my fingertips enough wonderful music to stay on the radio for years without taking a breath. It's an embarrassment of riches.
"My mission, to the extent that I have one, is not to proselytize for a particular kind of music," Weingart added, "but to air music I like and that I think is good and/or interesting. I really enjoy hearing how one song flows out of another. I like radio that's surprising. There is advance planning, but I like being spontaneous and just playing what I decide to play at a given moment.
"Part of the fun of it for me is that all the rules of what to play and when to play them are mine - to please my sense of what a radio show should be."
If he had thought about starting Music You Can't Hear on the Radio 10 years ago, Weingart said, he would have said he was too busy. "But because it got to be part of me early enough, I accommodate around it, and my wife and daughter accommodate around it," he said.
Weingart's wife, Deborah Spitalnik, PhD, is executive director and professor of pediatrics at the Elizabeth M. Boggs Center on Developmental Disabilities in New Brunswick, part of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. Residents of Sergeantsville, NJ, the couple and their teenage daughter, Molly, are members of the String of Pearls Congregation in Princeton.
The music and the radio program are part of his life, Weingart said. "I enjoy virtually everything about it, from actually doing it to thinking about it to playing it to meeting the people who listen to it," he said. "It's a very nice hobby. It's a joy to be doing it."
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