It's about 10:30 p.m. on a Thursday night, and the phone is ringing inside 389 Harvard St.

Dan G. Appel '99 answers it. He's nodding, and a few seconds later puts the receiver back on its hook.

"It was a collect call--from an inmate at a local prison," Appel says, explaining that his caller rushed to request a song before the operator disconnected the call.

The anthropology concentrator-by-day, Record Hospital deejay-by-night contemplates whether to comply and play a tune by the punk group the Dead Kennedys. This has happened many times before.

After a second phone call from the same prisoner, Appel cues up the song.

"We get this all the time," he shrugs. "A lot of our calls are from convicts that seem to relate to the angst-ridden music."

It's just another night at 95.3 FM, WHRB.

The College in College Radio

The College's only student-run radio station aims to fill a gap in the airwaves.

The station courts a "different" kind of listener--the devotees of esoteric classical, jazz and underground rock music.

Cambridge's elite--and, yes, inmates at the state penitentiary--fall into this category.

Harvard undergraduates generally do not.

"Our audience base is not students," writes WHRB President Ashwin Vasan in an e-mail message. "The fact that we are in some sense `college radio' is only reflected by the fact that we are staffed and run by undergraduates."

Other than publicizing comp meetings and their famed Orgies--the station's lengthy celebrations of an individual artist during reading and exam periods--WHRB does not actively pursue a student audience, according to Vasan.

Sending program guides to every undergraduate's mailbox would probably be too expensive, he says, though the station has not explored the option.