Radio Free New York
WBAI, the only New York FM station supported entirely by its listeners, operates from a squat, pinkish nonbrownstone on East Thirty-ninth Street. Outside there is a bronze plaque saying Vera Institute of Justice, but nothing about a radio station. Inside, in the narrow vestibule, sits a bored policeman day and night. WBAI’s transmitter was expertly sabotaged one Sunday last September, and a few days later a mysterious fire very nearly burned the brownstone down. One of the station’s own engineers was arrested on suspicion of setting the fire. WBAI attracts special people.
Theoretically, the station begins to serve its listeners at 7 A.M. each weekday. But generally East Thirtyninth Street is dead at that hour. The policeman is asleep in the vestibule; fluorescent lights burn in the station’s secondand third-floor offices, but the transmitter is shut off and loyal listeners are tuned to whatever electronic music the 99.5 megacycle band chooses to offer them.
About 7:20 on good mornings, a taxi disgorges a bearded, bearlike man, who shambles slowly toward the nonbrownstone. He looks very unhappy. You can see patches of scalp where his black hair has been crushed into disks against the pillow. He is tieless, and he fumbles deliberately through a hedgehog of keys that is another manifestation of tightened security at the station. The policeman wakes up, grunts, and dozes again. Larry Josephson, the bear, climbs to the third floor and enters what was once a maid’s room when the house was inhabited by real people. The room measures about seven by eleven feet, and the floor is gritty with mashed cigarette butts, superfluous correspondence, crushed coffee cartons, worms of white recording tape leaders, and honest gray dirt. One corner of the room is fitted with three worn turntables, a huge electric clock, and a cantilevered microphone that hangs over a console of switches and buttons and dials. A green swivel chair sits in front of the console. It squeaks — as 50,000 listeners can tell you. Another wall is a confection of tape recorders, more buttons, and more dials. There are two chairs for guests and a disused typewriter table, also frequently used as a chair.
Larry fiddles with the electronic wall and turns the station on. Then he plucks LPs from the record library — a claustrophobic corridor that leads away from the “studio.” A light blinks under the console. Larry picks up the phone and articulates his first words of the day: “Yes, it will be in a few minutes.” At 7:35 he tells the microphone that the policeman was asleep downstairs. “Wonderful to see someone get some rest for a change.” He puts on the William Tell Overture, his current favorite in an ambitious series of the great musical clichés, and — those with long memories will note — the theme song to The Lone Ranger. Larry recites “the official FCC litany so we’re legal” — the station’s name, address, wattage, facilities. This suggests another dialogue with the microphone: “Who is the Communications Commission? Can a Communications Commission over thirty-five find happiness with a transmitter fifty times its power?” He says that Bonnie and Clyde are in charge of security at the station’s transmitter in the Empire State Building, and that Bosley Crowther is WBAI’s man in charge of good taste.
After a while Larry the bagelman arrives with a large box full of breakfast — coffee, orange juice, a triple order of bacon, two fried eggs, and bagels, split and buttered. Larry the B. lingers until Larry the J. puts him on the air, as he does every morning; Tonto and the Lone Ranger. Larry the B. and the William Tell are about the only leitmotivs to the program. An interview is playing and the record scratch is terrible. Larry the J. turns down the volume, but the surface noise goes on. It’s one of the unique features of the station, Larry tells the microphone, that the scratch remains when the record fades. “In fact,” he says, “if WBAI’s equipment didn’t gurgle, pop, snap, and whine, lots of people wouldn’t know we were on the air. This is WBAI, bringing you boredom in the public interest.” A station break is required by the FCC every half hour, and Larry never plays it straight. The phone blinks; Larry picks it up, listens, grunts, and hangs up. “Kid telling me a shaggy dog story,” he announces humorlessly. Lisa calls, a fifteen-year-old art student with a strep throat. One of Larry’s regulars just checking in. Larry has about ten regulars, including one who invariably says, “There’s something very funny I think you ought to see in the Times on page . . .” and an incoherent fellow who after five minutes of prattling still has not reached the point of the story. Larry rarely puts the calls on the air immediately “because it’s so hard to screen out the clucks.” There is also an FCC rule against obscenity. Once, during a talk tha Larry had with his microphone about whether obscenities are obscene if they are in a foreign language, he put on the air a caller who discussed the French word “con” What? said Larry, whose French is shaky. “Con?, con, you know, c-u —” Happily, Larry reached the switch just before the FCC had cause for complaint, but he’s not averse to flirting with possible disaster.
A call comes in which makes him laugh and laugh, and he sums it up over the air: “And he called me a mother-blanking Jew bastard and said I could insult blacks over the air because he had just insulted me.”
It’s nearing nine o’clock and the program’s end, and Larry is still scraping coagulated egg from the foil pie plate in which his breakfast arrived more than half an hour before. He has on one of his favorite records, a hypnotic litany urging flat-chested women to develop their breasts. The phone rings and a girl says, “Would you please take that off, I’m up to Forty D already,” which Larry promptly relays to his listeners.
“You have been listening to Atilla the Hun, sometimes known as Larry Josephson. This is WBAI, and another day has gone by that I haven’t resigned on the air.” It is nine o’clock, but the announcer who is to change the records on the morning music program has not arrived. Larry says to his listeners, “I wish the announcer would get here on time . . . Whoever the announcer is, you’re fired.”
The announcer is, of course, not fired for being late, nor is Larry Josephson, who rarely arrives at 7 A.M. Sometimes he never arrives at all, and once he telephoned at 8:58, just in time to catch the arrival of the music program announcer, who, with WBAI’s habitual unpredictability, was early. Larry said over the phone, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and that message went out over the air, followed by the deadpan announcement, “You have just heard In the
Beginning, with Larry Josephson.” No one seems to mind, for in less than the year that he has conducted his eclectic, erratic morning programs, Larry Josephson has attracted a faithful following of extremists of every persuasion and a satisfying number of intelligent people who prefer him to the New York Times.
The station management is satisfied too, in fact rather surprised that he had the program in him. Like a number of the twenty-odd underpaid employees at WBAI, Larry Josephson joined as a volunteer on the technical side because he felt he needed a hobby. Even today, he earns the major part of his living by programming computers that program other computers, although he considers this simply a trade. Larry has a theatrical agent, and there is every likelihood that he will not remain forever with WBAI. He freely admits that he is often bored with the program; sometimes up so tight that he snarls into the microphone between long moments of dead air, or tells his callers to “go to hell” or angrily “all right, so have a nervous breakdown. Leave me alone.” At other times, his rambling wit will have his listeners doubled up over their coffee cups.
He shares a resistance to the platitudes of commercial broadcasting with his colleagues at the station and with the Pacifica Foundation, of which WBAI is a part. Pacifica (so called not because it came into being on the West Coast, but by analogy with the word pacific) was founded in 1946 by Lewis Hill, an ex-White House man for a Washington, D.C., station. Hill came to California determined to set up a listener-supported radio station which bowed neither to sponsors nor to the tastes of a mass audience. He wanted not to compete with commercial stations but to complement their programming by offering a free forum for opinions of every persuasion, and the flexibility to continue commentaries and panel discussions until the ideas, not the stopwatch, dictated a logical ending. In 1949, KPFA went on the air from an office building in Berkeley. In 1959, KPFK began to operate from Los Angeles, and in 1960, a millionaire paper manufacturer named Louis Schweitzer gave Pacifica his commercial FM station in New York, WBAI.
Pacifica’s evolution has not been peaceful. In 1963 the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee investigated the foundation following “reports of possible Communist infiltration or penetration.” For thirteen months the FCC refused to renew the station’s licenses, and although it finally exonerated Pacifica from any skulduggery and renewed the licenses, Pacifica continues to be somewhat left of center in its views. One WBAI man, freely admitting this, did, however, suggest that free speech for the past few decades has largely been a left-wing hang-up. Except for the name he chose for the foundation, Lewis Hill never limited the ideological content of his ideal station. He did envision “some conscious flow of influences, some creative tension between broadcaster and audience that constantly reaffirms their mutual relevance. Listener sponsorship will require this mutual stimulus if it is to exist at all.”
Almost axiomatically, WBAI does not live up to this lofty principle every day. There are hours of nonstimulus; hours of belligerent or boring commentaries by Ethical Culturists, civil rights lawyers, associate professors of international relations. And there are hours of amateurishness: “We are now twenty-two minutes behind schedule.” “Certain parts of the tapes were damaged in processing. We apologize . . .” “We thought we had enough in the can" for the summer folk-music programs, “but we didn’t, and the producer was away so our hands were tied, our tongue was tied, and everything else was tied.”
The refreshing thing is the candor with which the management admits the station’s failings. “We can sometimes be as incompetent on tapes as on live broadcasts,” says Dale Minor, WBAI’s gaunt, harried program director. His sense of professionalism rebels at the thought of broadcasts always lagging beyond their appointed time. He is not happy with the cramped chaos at the studio which causes tapes to be damaged or lost, or with the economic bind that forces the station to erase some programs so that there is tape available to record others. He also admits that the freewheeling attitude ot Pacifica toward the expression of the most divergent points of view, from Bircher to Communist, does tend to “attract unstable people who kind of come here and make a home of the place. And at the same time it’s probably worse for them than any other place because of the pressures.” He remembers one assistant producer who, when evicted from his apartment several years ago, brought a cot down to East Thirtyninth Street and began sleeping in his office. And although the New York Times played up the sabotaged transmitter and the abortive fire on East Thirty-ninth Street, suspecting that the perpetrator might be an irritated extremist of the far right or the far left, “one of our own nuts,” as Dale Minor calls him, is being held on suspicion of arson.
On the other hand, WBAI’s ideological flexibility allows for the kind of original programs that commercial networks would reject because they might offend sponsors or bore all but a tiny audience. The drama department can risk a four-and-ahalf-hour adaptation of The Trojan Horse, Christopher Morley’s novel, recorded by the station and presented on two successive evenings. The music department can present the Baroque Players of New York in a three-part series of rarities taped especially for WBAI, and the public affairs department can budget an hour and fifty minutes for an eyewitness report of the Battle of Danang in South Vietnam, perhaps last year’s best program. It was recorded on the spot by Dale Minor, who spent more than half of 1966 in South Vietnam for all three Pacifica stations. The fact that the program was not put on the air until about a year after the event did nothing to lessen its impact. It is an unemotional descriptive commentary, minute by minute, death by death, setting straight a record that Dale Minor feels other reporters falsified. In the script an asterisk indicates gunfire, a double asterisk prolonged gunfire. The asterisks appear like coarsely ground pepper across the pages of the script. None of the firing was dubbed.
Programming at WBAI has always been offbeat, but not always so daring. When it first became a Pacifica station its program director, Eugene Bruck, devoted 50 to 60 percent of the air time to music, his special interest, for he felt that “music can be as informational as anything else.” He played outstanding 78s that had never been transcribed to LPs. He had stereophonic broadcasts by arrangement with WRVR, a noncommercial (though not listener-supported) New York FM station. He carried live broadcasts from the Metropolitan Museum’s concert series. He inaugurated a continuing tradition of broadcasting the entire Ring of the Nibelungs on Washington’s Birthday. Brendan Behan spoke off the record “on such subjects as nationalism, homosexuality, the H-bomb, his Broadway play, The Hostage, Sean O’Casey, diet in the U.S., Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Communism, and Brendan Behan.” Allen Ginsberg appeared on the station, so did Ralph Ginzburg, Orson Bean, Celeste Holm, James Mason, Saul Bellow, Marianne Moore. You name them and they have probably aired their views over WBAI, without compensation, then as now. But Eugene Bruck worried about punctuality, the pronunciation of foreign names, and “the regular, conservative republican listeners” who were his special pride.
Today, no one at the station can give you a profile of the listeners, except to say that there are about 13,000 who have paid $I 5 ($10 for students) to receive a monthly program listing called “The Folio.” Paradoxically, the station management knows that it can reach its listeners by simply saying the word over the microphone. On a recent morning, Larry Josephson called for $98 to complete matching a large donation. He raised over $200 in fifteen minutes. On the previous evening, Frank Millspaugh, the station manager, received pledges for $250 in ten minutes. Neither found anything remarkable in such a swift response. When WBA! stages a party in a West Side hotel, as it does four or five times a year, 500 people show up to dance and meet each other. A party usually nets the station at least $1500.
This kind of instant listener response makes the station’s staff believe it is worth putting in sixty hours a week for minuscule salaries, and it justifies Frank Millspaugh’s vision of someday moving WBAI into a real brownstone in which there would be a theater and a coffee shop, wired for sound so that listeners could come to the station and participate in the programs. His ideal audience is not made up of people who say “Let’s turn on the radio since we’ve nothing else to do.” “We want the people who say,’Let’s listen to the radio because I want to do something interesting tonight.’ ”
Perhaps the chief reason there is such a lively relationship between audience and station is what one WBAI man calls “our stable of kooks”: Larry Josephson, the morning man, and Steve Post and Bob Fass, who close the station at night. Each is surrounded by a cult of personality that would have doomed them to instant and everlasting Siberia in Khrushchev’s Russia. But this is New York, and each has a fanatic following.
Steve Post, says one of his colleagues, “is the kind of little boy that when he is ill, listeners send chicken soup.” He came to the station as its unwilling bookkeeper, and the accountants have apparently never quite recovered. Now he is chief announcer, but his cult gather in force at their radios on weekends to listen to his open-ended Saturday and Sunday programs that begin at midnight. During the rest of the week, while Larry Josephson’s listeners sleep peacefully, insomniacs listen to Bob Fass. For a thoroughly revealing demonstration of WBAI’s eclecticism there is no better way than to sit in on one of Bob Fass’s shows —if you can find an empty chair. It’s a kind of “creative tension” that Lewis Hill probably never even dreamed of.
At 11:59 P.M. Bob Fass belts up the stairs and sweeps into the same tiny studio where Larry Josephson began the day. He is well over six feet tall, a bit pudgy, balding in the front, but with lots of lank blond hair falling over the collar of his tawny turtleneck at the back. He wears thick horn-rims, a wedding ring, a necklace of what looks like wizened cherry pits, and off-white workman’s pants — the kind with a loop for a hammer. When he shuffles LPs, ceaselessly looking for something he cannot find, the records look like greasy playing cards. A stout girl in a beret enters and says, “There are some people in the back room.” Bob replies: “I’ll talk to them. Send one of their number in.”
At 12:40 A.M. there is a mess of thirty records on the console. A young man with a mustache and Levi’s is pawing through an untidy bookcase full of tape reels, and Bob is whistling, puffing, and frantically shuffling through the records. He finds what he wants, cues up the three turntables and a tape machine, and mixes a cacophony that includes the recorded roar of a lion. He beckons through the glass partition to someone in the next room, and a swarthy, crew-cut man in new Levi’s and a string tie made of tiny beads comes in and takes the last free chair. Bob is on the phone. To the caller he counts out eleven people on both sides of the glass partition, and says, “And that’s too many, but if you really want to come up . . . I’m really sorry . . .” Then he tells the man with the mustache that he is in charge of the people in the back room: “You can tell them to go or shut up or whatever you want to.” But Bob thinks better of it and lunges out of the studio to do the job himself.
When he returns, he begins to interview the man in the string tie, who turns out to be a member of the Rosebud tribe of the Sioux Nation, and who talks fluently and musically about the abysmal state of Indian civil rights. “I don’t know if we’d want the country back today,” he concludes. Then the Indian speaks of peyote and of yuwipi, the spirits whom the Rosebuds turn to with their problems. His tone wavers; his confidence is gone. He says that he’s never taken peyote, but that the yuwipi are uncanny. Through the medicine men, he says, the spirits correctly predicted the number of votes he received each of the four times he was successfully elected president of the tribe.
The Indian takes his delegation away about 2 A.M. because “we’re pretty tired now.” Not so a milling group of others in the studio and in the anteroom. A tiny young woman with solid legs and a grape-colored wool hat comes in and kisses Bob warmly. Linda, for that is the girl’s name, sits down in the chair not yet cool from the Indian and begins twisting paper clips into pieces. She continues to do this throughout the interview when she is not smoking Kools or fiddling with rings on both her fourth fingers. She and Bob tell of their first contact — when Linda called him to say that the Visiting Mothers had no milk for the babies on Tenth Street. Linda organized the Visiting Mothers to care for homeless or indigent mothers and their children. She says that in August, when the call for milk went out over Bob’s program, the Mothers almost floated away in the stuff. She repeats “you know” like a verbal tic, but her face lights up when she talks of the Mothers, and she finds a winning flow of words somewhere. The Mothers work a fiftyto sixty-hour week for $40, she says. “Speaking of working for forty dollars a week, this is WBAI in New York.” The station break is on the dot. Linda talks of “the happy chaos of Visiting Mothers,” and Bob remarks that it is “a very tribal situation.” The Mothers are supported by Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist. Linda says, “He’s nice, he’s good,” but it turns out he is also asleep on the floor of the anteroom and can’t be roused to come to the microphone. Bob tries to bring in “the big boom” in the anteroom so that other Mothers can tell their story, but there is only dead air. “Typically, the microphone is not connected,” says Bob to his listeners, and dashes out to fix it.
It is 3:20 A.M. and the air conditioning is no longer able to compete with the crowd in the studio. It is close and very steamy. A handsome boy of about eleven, with long black hair and “Kill Christ” and “Ban the Bomb” buttons, wanders in and pledges $1 to WBAI saying, “I’m all too happy to get this off my chest.”
Paul Krassner has woken up, and he settles down at the microphone to sing in falsetto “Less Work for Mother,” which he says he and his brother performed long ago on the Horn & Hardart Children’s Hour. He has brought with him a red-haired girl in a thick, woolly lamb coat. There are six people in the studio now. Krassner and Bob Fass shoot the breeze for a long time to an audience that must be shrinking by the minute, so incredibly in are the topics.
There is a talk of a recent David Susskind Show about hippies (“You and I, Bob, were not on the show because we are considered Establishment hippies,” comments Krassner); of the Associated Press man who called Krassner after his death notice appeared as a joke in Cheetah and asked, “Is this God’s honest truth?” when Krassner assured him that he was really alive; of a typo in the next morning’s Times that had “fass media” for “mass media”; of the suggestive implications of “penal colony,” “naval stores,” and “windbreaker.” Krassner suggests that the word hippie is just a label because “Einstein had long hair, and I have an uncle who’s a judge who smokes pot.”
As records play over and under each other, Linda tells of her arrival this evening. “I’m here to blow up the building,” said she to the cop on duty at the entrance. “Good,” he replied flatly, “then I won’t have to sit here any longer.” It’s getting very, very late. I look longingly at a large electric coffee pot on a shelf in the corner. On it is a sign: “This pot may give a slight electric shock, so watch out.” The word “this” has been crossed out, but there is nothing going on inside the pot. I wish I had some coffee.
Krassner says, “Even though I have a daughter by my former marriage, my parents think I’m a virgin.” Bob tries to sign off: “At this time WBAI concludes another day of scaring people.” But there’s a lot to be said before this actually happens. Krassner sings “bye, bye” in falsetto every time Bob draws breath during the FCC litany that Larry Josephson recited so many hours ago, and which he will recite again so soon. Krassner is replaced by a record of the same song that sounds so like his rendition that one suspects he recorded it on the Horn & Hardart Children’s Hour. At 5:35 A.M. Bob Fass throws a switch and WBAI is off the air. The day is just beginning. There are nine survivors; the most lively is the little boy with long black hair.