by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Vin Scelsa: Free Form’s Joey Ramone

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       Vin Scelsa did his last radio show over the weekend.  (So he says.)   He began the last show (nearly) with the Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning,” and as is (was) so often the case for Vin, the song came with a story attached. 

Before he was a disc jockey for WNEW, and satellite radio, and WFUV, where for the past twenty years or so he has made Saturday night a time for “Idiots’ Delight” –before all this, Scelsa was a student disc jockey at Upsala College, a Lutheran school in East Orange, New Jersey.   As a rule the station signed off around midnight, but Scelsa and some friends of his on staff decided that it was time to liberate the station for round-the-clock programming.   The Saturday of Memorial Day weekend 1968, they played records all night long – free-form – and at five a.m. Vin played the Velvets’ “Sunday Morning”: now it was Sunday morning.  Because the school year had just ended, “nobody noticed our act of insurrection,” he recalled on his last broadcast.   “It was the sixties, man …”

I confess that I couldn’t stand Scelsa’s show when it aired Sundays before noon on WNEW.  It was too much like Sunday morning– too much like church; his free-form ruminations suggested a bad homily more than the glories of free-form radio.   Then the show was moved to Saturday nights and I signed on and fell for it hard.  For parts of ten years Saturday night in my apartment was a writing night – free-form, with no office work that day or the day after – and I wrote dozens of pages of each of two different books while listening to Vin Scelsa play records by Bruce Springsteen, the Ramones, the Clash, and dozens of other artists who could be heard to embody the spirit of free form.

That I am writing this at night – Sunday night – is evidence of the inspirational qualities of music after hours programmed in free form.  So is the image of an artist who decorated herself with the image from the Velvet Underground’s “banana” LP sleeve to mark Record Store Day.   The newyorker.com story that the image accompanied likened the Rough Trade record shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to a “a physical iTunes,” and the neologism suggests how dramatically “free form” has changed – has gone into new forms – since Vin Scelsa toted his Velvet Underground and Sopwith Camel LPs (the latter he still has) to the Upsala College studios.  

 I’ll never forget the night Black 47 played Symphony Space and Vin joined them onstage, singing – and dancing – free-form to “Like a Rolling Stone.”  

Stay free, Vin.