T Radio hits wrong note with riders

[Ian David]

Program shelved amid a crush of complaints

By Noah Bierman, Globe Staff | October 26, 2007

Some T riders complained about maudlin Phil Collins music and lame trivia. Others balked at hearing commercials in yet another public space. Then there were commuters who wondered why young guitarists who play live music on the platform were being drowned out by the "radio ga ga" of corporate disc jockeys.

But today, these disparate T riders are united in joy and a degree of quiet. T Radio, the two-week experiment in bringing disc jockeys and music to MBTA platforms, has been shelved.

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Augello is still irked about a trip to South Station in which he heard Phil Collins's "In the Air Tonight," one of those songs that gets stuck in the subconscious and refuses to leave. "Not just Phil Collins, but somebody really inanely explaining the back story for that song," he added acidly in a phone interview.

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It was insult to the intelligence of commuters, she said, when a disc jockey asked a multiple-choice trivia question about when Bill Clinton was first elected president and gave 1991, 1992 and 1993 as options.

"How difficult is that question to answer?" she sniffed. "Could anyone with a tenth of a brain not know that we have no election in odd-{numbered} years?"

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