Radio Surfing With Cerphe

Four years after he fell in love with rock-and-roll while watching the Beatles on "The Ed Sullivan Show," Don Cerphe Colwell packed up his guitar and followed a girlfriend from suburban Boston down to American University.

"The girl lasted a semester," says Colwell, but within weeks, the freshman met another AU student who invited him to work part time at a radio station that was experimenting with a new kind of music programming.

By day, WHFS was a middle-of-the-road FM station, the kind that played Sinatra, Mantovani and Tom Jones. But at night, beginning in 1968, the station, then based in Bethesda, sold time to young rockers who desperately craved a place on the dial where they could play the album cuts and underground sounds that AM Top 40 radio would not spin.

Cerphe Colwell, who landed a part-time gig on WHFS and kept at it throughout college, joined the station full time in 1972. This month, he marks his 35th anniversary on the air in Washington, a rare feat of continuity in rock radio -- a career in which he became the first DJ in the region to play the music of Bruce Springsteen, watched as radio pulled away from its role in shaping listeners' tastes, and somehow survived a blizzard of ownership and format changes.

Cerphe, as he's known on the air (pronounced "surf"), looks the part of the aging but committed rocker. In black leather jacket, fashionably unshaven face and shaggy haircut, the 55-year-old DJ runs the afternoon shift at 94.7 the Globe (WTGB-FM), the formerly classic rock station that switched formats in February to try a blend of '60s and '70s rock standards and contemporary artists who fit in with the classic hits: Coldplay, Dave Matthews Band, KT Tunstall, Norah Jones.

The idea is to add younger listeners to the aging classic-rock audience while expanding the playlist to counter the widespread belief that broadcast radio is a place to hear established hits, but not necessarily the best way to discover new sounds.

Introducing listeners to the new was the heart of Cerphe's early years in the business. At WHFS in the '70s, "the idea of thinking about the ratings was foreign to us," he says. "It was extremely hippie radio. We did a ride board and lost cat reports: 'Bill has lost a Burmese in Bethesda.' It was self-indulgent -- if I bought a car, I would bore the hell out of people with four or five hours of car songs. But we turned people on to a tremendous amount of new music."

He would sign on in those years like this: "This is Cerphe -- we're sending out some tunes tonight for the truckers, the mad hatters, the ships at sea and especially, the ladies of the night." The music that followed was whatever the DJ wanted to play. In Cerphe's case, the tunes came from big wooden crates full of records that he hauled in from his enormous vinyl collection at home. (Only about 5,000 albums remain in Cerphe's Reston home from that legendary assemblage; he recently sold 40,000 records to a collector, and has now switched primarily to CDs and downloads.) ...Read more here...