Free time is sparse for Dave Long. When he’s not running KURE, he’s working the night shift in the dorms fixing anything that breaks. But catching him during office hours at the station on a Friday was surprisingly easy.

Walking into Long’s cluttered office, it’s easy to become distracted. CDs are scattered across his desk. The only recognizable disc is a Ryan Adams CD single. A Quiet Riot promotional photo stares at visitors with the same intensity and androgyny the hair metalists possessed some 20 years ago. And standing on top of a computer, there’s The Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin’s action figure with an iron grip on a slippery serpent, by crikey! As I regain my focus, Long speaks of his path to becoming the station’s general manager, criticism of KURE’s playlist and what’s in his CD player.

Justin Kendall: What are your responsibilities as general manager?

Dave Long: I’m responsible for basically making sure everything gets done at the station. There’s a staff of people who I’m kind of in charge of making sure they get done with things that need to get done. I’m also responsible for filling out all the paperwork and forms and stuff and getting that into the FCC like our license and all that stuff. [Reading KURE’s description of his job] “I am wholly responsible for the correct and efficient management of something.” Making sure the station stays within the guidelines of the FCC and things like that as far as logging our transmitter power and not swearing on the air. That’s pretty much what I do.

JK: Is it time consuming?

DL: Pretty much. I’m kind of like the guy who people come to when they’re not sure about stuff. So I have to basically know just about everything about the station and I’m still kind of in the process of figuring it out.

JK: Was it a difficult transition taking over as general manager at semester?

DL: I started DJing at the station last summer. I had a show for a couple of hours every Wednesday and then I stayed on last semester and became the operations director.

At the end of last semester, Shar [Macatangay], the old general manager, was graduating and they needed to find somebody else. She asked me to apply for it and so I did and I got elected. I spent a lot of time talking with Shar since she’d been here since the dawn of time. So she knew a lot about what’s going on. I spent a lot of time talking with her and getting training and such to be the general manager.

JK: So you haven’t had to make a lot of sacrifices for the job?

DL: No. Just not sitting on my ass a whole bunch anymore.

JK: Obviously you saw Jason Hough’s letter in the Daily. How do you react to someone who says KURE isn’t serving its listeners?

DL: Well, the first time I read the letter, I was really pissed off. Then I went back and reread it and started marking it up because I was going to write a response. I figured I should have written a response because I am the general manager. But by the time I actually got down to talking to people, a bunch of DJs had written in, three or four members on the board had written in and it would have been overkill. So I decided not to, but the more and more I read it, I realized that he’s entitled to his opinion. That’s fine.

I’d rather let it die versus keep ranting about it because that’s not going to accomplish anything. He’s entitled to his opinion, we’re entitled to ours and they differ and that’s fine.

I’d rather not five months from now still being talked about how KURE is the home of no-name bands. Or it plays crap, crap, crap, crap, crap.

I’d say KURE is serving the student population and not just the student population, but Ames. With corporate radio, you’re bound to hear the same song within at least an hour. Where at KURE, we just have a wider variety of music that we play. There’s a reggae show on Sundays. I never hear any reggae on the radio around here. Yeah, we don’t play Top 40, TRL/MTV stuff. We play a little bit, but we also bring a lot of new music that hasn’t hit yet or gotten big.

[Looking at a copy of the letter] Jason Hough said that, “There are a lot of no-name bands” on KURE. Yeah, that’s true, but at the same time KURE had Gorillaz about six or seven months and was playing them before they even hit on MTV and started being put in heavy rotation on all the other corporate channels.

Yeah, it’s a lot of no-name bands, but no-name bands in the first place, I would say, are better than your prepackaged, preprocessed music that’s being put on MTV and corporate radio stations, [and] in the second place, could be on those [stations]. It’s basically music that hasn’t broken through yet to the mainstream.

JK: So listeners can sample newer stuff before it hits?

DL: Yeah, and it’s not like everybody we play here is going to make it big, but it’s music that’s not mainstream that could go mainstream at some point. Who’s to say? Or it could just end up in a corner in the dark somewhere collecting dust.

JK: Again, it’s an opportunity.

DL: Yeah, it’s an opportunity to play stuff you’re not going to hear anywhere else. In Iowa at least, which is another thing. From a personal standpoint, I think Iowa is really lacking a radio scene. All the stations are like, “Blah, blah. The new hottest song.” I’m like, “No. That was on MTV like five months ago.”

JK: What are your musical tastes?

DL: I basically like everything. On my show, I play a lot of techno and house music because traditionally college radio has been very indie rock and stuff.

But personal tastes, I like everything from older, classical rock like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and things like that to newer stuff.