John Leonard's Nightsounds

Many radio shows lay claim to be the first free-form radio program. By my measure, the first, truly free-form show was "Nightsounds" on KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California.  It's host was John Leonard. His official title at Pacifica was Drama and Literature Director. He gave 15 minute book reviews on air and gave cultural commentary and organized readings to be recorded and aired. It was 10 years after Henry Jacobs had aired his tape loop experiments. (Audio here) 

While at KPFA his Nightsounds program was syndicated on WBAI via tapes sent by fourth-class mail. At WBAI these were aired by a then very young Bob Fass who later hosted Radio Unnamable.The program ran at 11:30 PM. It's hard to say when it started. The WFMU bio says he started just after KPFA signed on in 1949, but Lenard would have been 10 years old then. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Checklist puts his run at 1963-1964, which is later than some first-hand accounts. It is more likely that he started around 1961, while he was a student, and stayed on through 1964 before leaving to teach English in Massachusetts.

The reason I credit Leonard rather than Jacobs as the father of Free-Form FM is a bit petty. Jacobs cast himself as more of a composer. Leonard was still a DJ. Sure he cut between songs and sampled, but he played songs, recognizable songs. At his worst it was still just audio collage and those works were recorded in advance. Jacobs programs were more eccentric and original but they also were frequently just live un-listenable layers of analog noise. Free-form FM later became genuinely popular. It was not popular because they played records backwards, or over-top one another while reel-to-reel decks cranked out bird calls. Free-form FM played deep cuts, whole albums, new artists, and full length versions of popular radio edits and engaged in zany audio effects and audio collage. If there is a root to that tree it's Leonard, more than Jacobs.

Leonard went on to become the New York Times Book Review 's most distinguished editor.  He had previously worked for the National Review after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the New York Times in 1967, first becoming an editor in 1969. He hosted WGBH's First Edition, and reviewed books, TV and movies on CBS Sunday Morning for 16 years. He also taught creative writing at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. His contributions are many and manifest. He died in 2008 after election day.

Radio Unnamable

Free Form radio didn't happen in just one place, on one station or in one city. It had no single progenitor, or single origin. Despite that, Bob Fass deserves a lot of credit as an early DJ in the earliest days of the format. Giving a DJ total control was madness and it often sounded that way. There were other prototypical DJs who were on air at the same time such as John Leonard at KPFA and Clyde Clifford on KAAY-AM. The prototype for it all was probably Henry Jacobs but he was pursuing another idea entirely. I could write for a week on the origins of free form FM. But tonight let's focus on Fass. More here.

Fass, a native New Yorker was working in theater in the 1950s so it isn't surprising that a friend from high school, the novelist and poet Richard Elman got him in the door. Elman was producing drama programs for WBAI at the time. Fass started as an announcer, with a midnight to 6:00 AM shift, and he brought a sense of drama with him. He opened each show with the line “Good morning, cabal.”  He had live guest performances, you should know a lot of the names: Townes Van Zandt, Jose Feliciano, Joni Mitchell, Arlo Guthrie, The Fugs, Patti Smith... the list is endless. He also did interviews with people we now consider iconic: Paul Krassner, Kinky Friedman, Bob Dylan, Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, even beats like Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso. —I'll just stop there abruptly.

He sometimes played records of course. He played them forwards, backwards, and on top of each other.  Inspired by John Cage he would sometimes layer multiple records and tapes into a cacophonous medly. Did I mention the drugs?  I'll say no more.  He named his program after a work by Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable.  It's no Malone Dies but it was pretty good. His show grew in influence, he covered the police riots at the DNC in 1968. Abbie Hoffman called him daily with updates from court. Anti-draft protesters would call his program from the court house to try to raise bail from his audience. Fass had become an icon himself. More here.

But in the 1970s a change in management routed him out. After management tried to parse out chunks of his program to various advocacy groups Fass joined a group of DJs trying to unionize. Management forbid him to speak on the air about the dispute. Fass did it anyway. The event ended with some staff barricaded in the studios live on the air, until the phone lines were cut and the police dragged them out. Fass was banned from the station for 5 years. Fass defiantly spent the duration at WFMU. He was reinstated at WBAI in 1982, but with a show just once a week, Midnight to 3:00 AM Thursdays. He is still alive and show is still on the air; the music is a bit dated, but his politics certainly are not.  

**********UPDATE**********

Bob Fass is to be the subject of a documentary film out later this year. See trailer below: