The station manager for the Traverse City radio station has been inspired by a wide swath of artists since growing up in Philly. Listen to tracks from all of his selections at Local Spins.

Influential Classics: Bob Marley, The Clash, Rolling Stones, Charlie Christian.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: All musicians, radio execs and music industry personnel can trace their inspiration to artists and key recordings that influenced them. Today, Local Spins writer Ross Boissoneau reveals the music that changed the world for WNMC station manager Eric Hines of Traverse City.
Eric Hines, station manager at WNMC, the college radio station at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City, has been a music devotee basically all of his life.
“I grew up in Philadelphia in the ’70s in a working-class rowhouse neighborhood,” he says. He began collecting records in his teen years, mostly from thrift stores where his dollar could go farther.

Eric Hines (WNMC Courtesy Photo)
He was playing music by British reggae band Steel Pulse one day in his dorm room in college when a guy walking by his room stopped and asked him if he was into reggae. Hines replied that he had a couple dozen reggae recordings, and the man told him he was the new reggae director at the college radio station, and he should be at the station’s meeting the following Monday.
It wasn’t an immediate hit for him. “I had stage fright. It took me a year to work myself up to talk on the air live,” he recalls. He eventually got his nerve up, and stuck with it through graduate school.
After relocating to Traverse City in 2000, he applied at the college station, which had an opening for a general manager. When he didn’t hear back, he took a position at the local newspaper, the Traverse City Record-Eagle. Six months later, he was called for an interview at WNMC. He got the job and has been playing music there ever since.
“It has lots of alternative shows, so it’s like (Philadelphia station) WXPN was.”
Here Hines talks about some seminal recordings and why they were so inspirational for him.
1. The Clash, “London Calling” (1979) – This wasn’t my first Clash album (that was their eponymous album from a couple years prior). But this was the one I destroyed through repeated listenings. I grew up in a racially fraught Philadelphia in the 1970s, and the music on “London Calling” not only kicks ass, but through the sentiments expressed both directly and indirectly and in its use of reggae and jazz sounds, it also points the way to music being a vehicle for a militant racial solidarity. That was truly music to my ears. A lot of the music I came to love I got into through “London Calling.”
Listen: “London Calling”
2. Bob Marley and The Wailers, “African Herbsman” (1973) – I bought this at a record shop a few miles from my home in Philadelphia, The Record Cellar, which was frequented by at least one DJ from WXPN (back in the days when it was gloriously eclectic) who sold his vinyl there as he transitioned to CDs. I was fortunate enough to provide a new home for many of those LPs (primarily African and reggae albums). So the Record Cellar generally made a lot of major contributions to my musical development. At first, the primitive sound quality of this particular recording was a bit off-putting, but those three-part harmonies and the pure passion behind them easily cut through technical limitations. This got many, many spins during long twenty-something road trips.
Listen: “African Herbsman”
3. Charlie Christian, “The Genius of the Electric Guitar” (1987) – These are truly works of genius. Christian’s playing is lively, responsive to his (great) bandmates, but with a decided feel of its own. What affected me as much as the music was the discovery that these were actually Benny Goodman dates on which Christian was a valued sideman. Goodman was a byword for corny and passé in my circles. And yet, he’d made these great records and hired this great guitarist AND gave him plenty of room to play. If this was what jazz could sound like, I needed to hear more.
Listen: “Seven Comes Eleven”
Honorable Mention: The Rolling Stones, “Exile on Main Street” (1972) – I had other Rolling Stones records before this one, but this is the one where I really started appreciating the non-singles. It was one of my first thrift-store finds. Hearing how every song on the record told a story in a specific way, how each album side had a flavor of its own, how they all contributed to an overall statement. Or at least I thought at the time. But here I really learned that music wasn’t just about immediately loving something, and repeated listenings could really reveal depths to a recording that weren’t immediately apparent.
Listen: “Tumbling Dice”
Currently Loving: Jazz-Adjacent Music – Lately I’ve been listening a lot to labels that are pretty explicitly on the borderlands of jazz: Ropeadope, Jazz Is Dead, Far Out Recordings … the eclecticism of the London jazz scene, open to dance music influences and the influence of music from South Africa, Brazil, flamenco, Gnawa music, other African sounds, etc., has really helped establish a new template for moving improvisatory music in challenging, but groovy, ways. I’m liking what I hear. On the dance music side of things, you can check out what I think I’m talking about with “In Motion” from the South African DJ El Payo. On the jazzier side of things, the London-based Kansas Smitty’s. What these artists are doing, I’d say, is more or less an extension and transformation of the project behind Straight, No Chaser magazine, which was an extension/transformation of the project behind the punk/reggae alliance in late ’70s and early ’80s London.
Listen: El Payo, “All Blues”
ALBUMS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD: Eric Hines’ Playlist on Spotify
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