Nathan Randall captured his love of music from the 1930's to the 50's at an early age while listening to his grandfather's jukebox.
The Boscobel native now shares his passion with listeners every week.
Randall, a 2005 Boscobel graduate, has a radio show called Out of the Attic that airs every Monday evening from 6 to 8 p.m. on 90.5 F.M. at the University of Platteville's radio studio.
The show features mainly music from the 30's through 50's with other modern art-ists such as Harry Connick Jr. and Michael Buble sprinkled in to the playlist.
Randall started at UW-Platteville in 2008 and eventually thought of giving the area an oldies station that brought the people back further than the 60's and 70's. The show started in October 2010.
"I thought why don't I start getting a little more involved with the radio station and maybe do some stuff I actually want to do," Randall said.
The show is centered around the music - not a tremendous amount of Randall's voice on the air.
"As far as air breaks on air and stuff they're real short and to the point," Randall said. "I figure the people tune into the radio on the music station to hear music, not necessarily listen to people talk."
When Randall does speak or get people to talk, he focuses on artists that per-formed some of the music that he plays.
Monday evening's fea-tured interview was Marshal Lytle, an original bass player for Bill Haley and his Comets. Before the Comets, the band was called Bill Haley's Saddlemen, a county music band.
Great Stories
"He had a lot of great stories, when they were just getting started," Randall said. "It was interesting to find out that their big hit ‘Rock Around the Clock', was actually their B-Side to ‘13 women and only one man in town,' which I guess only sold about 80,000 records, maybe not even that many. Rock Around the Clock has become a pretty popular tune."
Randall also recently in-terviewed Frank Maffei of Danny and the Juniors. The band is most known by the tune "At the Hop."
"I really got to know some interesting facts about their group," Randall said. "How they started in the Philadelphia area, and I learned a lot about their group."
Randall also will take music requests from listen-ers and has received positive feedback on the show.
"I've heard a lot from some of my professors on campus, a lot of my friends," Randall said. "I'm in a vocal jazz group here on campus, a lot of them tune in on Monday night. I'll hear random people on campus, ‘Are you the guy that has ‘Out of the Attic?', ‘Are you the guy on radio on Monday?' (I reply) ‘Yeah'. ‘Oh, I really like your show'. It's always good to hear."
Randall, who also used to do the public address announcing at Boscobel football games for several years, and also has done the same for basketball, has a deep passion for sports as well.
"When I got to UW-Platteville, I was on the sports staff at WSUP and was all about sports and wanted to get into sports," Randall said. "And through the powers that be changed my mind along the way, I've been on several staffs here at WSUP, maybe decided that sports wasn't ex-actly what I wanted to do anymore, that's a reason I started Out of the Attic, so I could get some of that on- air experience."
Tune in on-line
Randall also has created a Facebook and Twitter ac-count for this show and out-of-area listeners can tune in to his show at www.wsup.org.
"I've kind of taken off with it, especially this year," Randall said. "It's kind of a learning experi-ence building, kind of learning type of thing. This semester, I've got posters made and got the inter-views, got a whole bunch of stuff going on."
With just a bit of this semester left and the next semester, Randall, who said he would like to keep his fingers in radio in the future, hopes the show will go on with someone else after he graduates in the spring.
"I'm really, really looking forward to the rest of this semester and next semester as well," Randall said. "Hopefully somebody will take this show over, but if not, I had fun with it."