Off Duty: The Best of On Patrol With Peter Raffel (Week I)

On Patrol With Peter Raffel is celebrating its seventh anniversary with the release of Off Duty: The Best of On Patrol With Peter Raffel, a compilation of the show’s greatest moments from its four-year run. Each Wednesday for the next seven weeks featured clips will be shared that best emphasize the show’s unusual hilarity.

For the uninitiated: On Patrol With Peter Raffel was a two-hour college radio show that aired from 2011 to 2015, featuring music, comedy, and guests – some real, some fictitious – all streaming live from WLFM Studios at Lawrence University. For over one-hundred episodes, Raffel and his band of misfits unleashed chaos on the Appleton airwaves – at times against their will. The show featured Will Fraser as its intern (often referred to as Intern Will), and Morgan Ann Gray as a variety of outlandish characters. The show also hosted annual fundraisers, in partnership with GlobeMed and Health Development Initiative, called Radio for Rwanda: a twelve-hour marathon that raised over $8000 in its three years.

Included with each clip is a bit of commentary from Raffel’s perspective, featuring never-before-shared insight and backstory. Enjoy this bizarre, poignant, and sometimes embarrassing collection!

From On Patrol #70: It’s Not About The Umbrella
June 9th, 2014

One of my favorite things to do on the show was to have people play these twisted versions of themselves – sort of an extrapolation of my own exaggerated on-air persona. This really worked well with something as long-form as On Patrol: since people were coming on regularly it led to these characters, and eventually bits like this. I was always teasing Intern Will about his love of reverb – later to be spoofed on with the Infinite Reverb Pedal – and Morgan Ann Gray was really into period pieces; Mitch Greenberg and I were constantly talking about Star Wars, both on-air and off, and then I decided to have Anastasia Skliarova be obsessed with meat for some reason. We had all these personalities for people to shift in and out of – it was quite organic, which was always something I loved about the show. This bit was for the year’s finale and I’d been making a lot of SNL jokes throughout the term, so it made sense to do a cold open like this. The best part is when Mitch calls me a terrible writer, reading from a script that I wrote. This was just as we were going into the last year of the program, when the characters and situations became even more outlandish and interconnected – it was really a launching pad for the craziness of senior year.

Featuring: Morgan Ann Gray, Will Fraser, Mitchell Greenberg, and Anastasia Skilarova

From On Patrol #37: Moon Bees
January 7th, 2013

After Will’s first term as the show’s intern, I asked him to spend winter break creating a theme song that could be played before each episode. What he came back with was unsurprisingly brilliant, and also a quite catchy tune. The lyrics are pretty simple, which I can only imagine was because Will didn’t really understand what we were doing in that basement. He was right not to.

Written and Performed by Will Fraser

From On Patrol #2: Alcohol
September 26th, 2011

Listening back to the early episodes is difficult, because it’s pretty clear I had no idea what I was doing and had very little planned. Originally I intended to have listener calls be a way bigger part of the show, but the station didn’t have the phone hooked up – so I was using my cell to take calls holding it up to the microphone. This call always stood out to me as one of the first truly great moments, when Joe Fey called in unannounced and we just began to improvise. I had no idea where he was going so I was simultaneously trying to figure out what was happening and how to add on constructively. I love the part where I tell him I’m right-handed and he says, “I know, I know.” I think that was when I realized that Joe and I could really play off each other, and that some of these unexpected moments would end up being the funniest stuff.

Featuring: Peter Raffel and Joe Fey

From On Patrol #92: Done With The Seeds
April 6th, 2015

Towards the end of our run, the show fell into a standard format: songs at the beginning, followed by a monologue and some banter with Intern Will; then we’d perform the bit, and end with a guest – I certainly tried other methods, but after four years I’d figured out how best to structure the program. But that made for about twenty minutes off the top where I just talked – for better or worse – and after improvising alone for so long I’d really found my niche. I’m sure it was the audience’s least favorite part of the show, but for me it was important to cement the program’s narrative voice and ramp up to the absurdity later on. There was discussion about making the show only an hour, but I knew the thing had to be long-form and able to breathe around the edges: that monologue was so important to the overall arrangement. I could really go on for as long as necessary – and you can really hear my comfort, making myself laugh more than anything else. Most of these monologues were unscripted: occasionally I’d have an outline or a couple of points I wanted to hit, but primarily I was just free-associating and letting it go. I find this one particularly funny, even if no one else does: even before Bill Cosby’s was accused of sexual assault, I remember thinking it was super off-putting how he wore a sweat suit on stage.

Featuring: Peter Raffel

From On Patrol #87: The Connector
February 23rd, 2015

Harland Allison Williams will always have a special place in my heart, and is a character I wish we’d done more with. I really dislike these folk-hipster bands that seem so ubiquitous – the original idea came about when Morgan Ann and I were discussing how all their songs have that “Hey!” chant. That summer I’d seen a band called Fleeting Sons, who said their name was a combination of Fleet Foxes and Mumford and Sons – and that’s when I realized the movement had definitely gone too far. I was also going through a phase where I loved having Morgan Ann list a bunch of absurd things – writing all those band names was the best part. There’s also the obligatory nod to The Simpsons with the Mandolin District (a reference to the Hammock District in “You Only Die Twice”); and the dental advice is actual stuff I’d gotten from my hygienist and promptly never did. The top moments are when I call Harland out for potentially being drunk, and then Mumford and Sons member Eco Kyle.

Featuring: Peter Raffel and Morgan Ann Gray

From On Patrol #44: Exploring
March 4th, 2013

I made a lot of decisions involving the show – some good, some bad – but by far the best one was “hiring” Will Fraser. After that first year I wanted someone else involved: someone down there to make fun of, basically. All I knew was that the thing had to grow, and my gut feeling was to place someone in the role of “intern.”

Will lived on the same floor as me, and one day I passed by his room while he was playing Arcade Fire’s Funeral on vinyl, which was the first album that really turned me on to the contemporary music scene. So I knocked on his door, and we talked about it a bit, and the next time I saw him I offered him the intern position. I said if he didn’t like it he didn’t have to come back. He ended up staying three years.

Will would never admit this, but I’m almost positive he hated me for the first few months. I was absolutely ruthless to him, which is certainly a regret I have – it was all in the interest of a comedic style I was still honing in on. It became clear, though, that he was the perfect foil for me and that I’d hit some sort of jackpot by stumbling across him. Will is, far and away, the greatest musician and songwriter I’ve ever known personally – and in those early performances on the show you can literally hear my respect and awe for his craft growing. This was all before he’d started up Wild Firth, played any shows, recorded any tapes other than a project he’d done the previous summer. It was like watching an artist come into his own in real time. This song, entitled “Dance Nance,” had a guitar riff that I simply couldn’t get out of my head – I edited out the track from the show and put it on my iPod I loved it so much. It probably sounds like I’m fawning over him, but listening back to these early clips just shows his apparent genius from the beginning, both as a musician and as a sidekick. I’m probably more indebted to him than anyone else when it comes to On Patrol – if I hadn’t knocked on that door, the show would’ve ended long before it became what it eventually would.

Written by Will Fraser
Performed by Will Fraser and Nate Rosenfield

From On Patrol #5: All Along The Watchtower
October 17th, 2011

Things like this were always some of the best parts of the show for me: an idea would come up that was really absurd and we just ran with it, to the point where we were making radio plays based on one dumb joke. We put so much time into this thing: Joe Fey edited it like crazy, we did a rehearsal – the works. Everyone involved brought such an enthusiasm and sincerity to it – this was really the first time something bigger was done on air, and just had everyone laughing so hard afterwards. People like David Lewis and Morgan Ann were such big voices immediately, and were so comfortable even in their first appearance. Listening to it now I’m surprised at how well it holds up for something that might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever written.

Featuring: Peter Raffel, Joe Fey, David Lewis, Nico Glennon, and Morgan Ann Gray

Will Fraser and Nate Rosenfield performing “Dance Nance” (2012)