INTERVIEW: MARK SPEER

CPVR was not the first cable radio station in existence, but it was one of the most important. There is no book yet written that canonizes the role of cable radio. But there will be and CPVR will have it's own chapter.  It was founded in Palos Verdes, CA by engineer Tom Hewitt and two industrious organizers: Mark Speer and Brad Gardner. They organized and staffed the station.The historical free-form CPVR began cable casting in March of 1972.  The rest is history.  More here, here and here.

Harv Lazer on CPVR

© Harv Laser

1. How old were you when you started organizing CPVR?
I was 16 years old.

2. Did you have any radio experience before that?
No, but we had a great love for it. Radio was very electric at that time. Out in California we had KPPC, stations like KYMS, KNAC, KMET and KLOS. There was a lot of energy going on then... We started in 72. We were in pre-production in 71' and we saw Brad Sobel's radio station, KPOT. It was on the front page of the L.A. Times and he was on for all of three months. Somewhere in those 90 days we were there. He was an inspiration.

© Harv Laser

3. Were you the driving force behind the station?  How did that start?
It was interesting. First of all a little background. This was in a place called Palos Verdes, a peninsula out by San Pedro California.  What's interesting is that one side of a hill which is dark as far as LA radio and TV stations. You don't get any LA radio or TV stations. So I had this idea, and Brad had this idea and Tom had this idea all separately and then merged. We found each other and put it all together.

4. How did you meet Tom Hewitt and Brad Gardner?
Another friend of mine, a great guy by the name of Jim Sideris had just moved out to  Palos Verdes from Boston, Mass.  He picked up Brad Gardner hitchhiking (back in those days hitchhiking was a lot safer) And they got to talking about radio. After that, all I remember is that one day he came to my house expecting someone much older. When we had our first phone call he said "it was nice talking to you sir." because he was expecting to meet someone much older.  Brad already knew Tom Hewitt from high school.

5. Was Tom older? I read that he was your engineer.
No, Tom was actually a couple years younger. The guy was a genius. He built the whole thing for like $200. Today if you wanted to wanted to start something like that [CPVR] you can buy turntables, mixing boards  and stuff like that. They didn't have that back then, you either bought broadcast equipment or you built from scratch. Tom got two AR [Acoustic Research] turntables and hot-rodded them. [more here] Those became our turntables, so in order to play a record you gave it a little push to get it up to speed.  It worked quite well and they were very inexpensive. He got a Radio-shack mixer and hot-rodded it too. Tom built everything, put it all together.

© Harv Laser

6. How did CPVR end up in the Golden Cove shopping center in Rancho Palos Verdes?
There was a community organization, that was formed called the Palos Verdes Youth Commission (PVYC). They were trying to do things... like community hotlines, a free taxi service to the beach, because there was no bus service.  The guy at the Youth Commission, Mark Poer, he was a great guy. We ended up going before the board and they said "why not?"  They gave us money to get started, ...and office space for a studio. The local cable company, Times-Mirror cable they went out and got the FM modulator and the telco lines for our studios from the phone company.

7. Was the start relatively smooth or were there technical problems?
There were a few bumps. There were a lot of problems with the phone lines. The phone company has flavors of broadcast lines. They have equalized and un-equalized lines. We were on the cheap one, un-equalized lines. It took a lot of tinkering but we were able to get it to sound pretty clean.

8. In that era you were competing with AM stations, broadcasting in mono.
Oh yeah.  Back then that was the era of KHJ and KRLA and the other AM flame throwers. But we were on the FM dial, broadcasting in stereo. ..We were on 95.9 right next to KLOS and KMET. We had a blast.

© Harv Laser

9. When did things wind down at CPVR?
I think it ran until sometime in the Summer of 1974. I was there the whole time. basically we got to the point where we graduated high school and were finding out way in the world. It was getting harder and harder to get people to support the station... The world was changing.

10. That wasn't the end of your time in Radio though.
My first job was at what is now KOZZ in Reno Nevada, it was KGLR then. It was one of the last free-form stations, and that's what I really loved to do. Six months after I landed there it went to a Top-40 format. I was suddenly out of a job, which was OK because I didn't fit in. So I came back to LA and got back in touch with my radio friends. One of them, John Clark worked at KNAC. I did freelance production and air shifts for them. There was a chain of record stores called Music Plus, John ended up as the voice of Music Plus and I wound up doing the spots. It was quite exciting, as I had won the account away from Brother Studios, the Beach Boys recording studios, and they gave me great compliments (Imagine the Beach Boys telling you you cut better spots then they did!). It worked out because I was better suited to commercial production, and they after all, were a major studio at the time heavily involved in producing albums

11. I know you spent time at KWST. When was that?
The program director there, Paul Sullivan went to John Clark and asked if he knew anybody like Mark Speer that he could get. And he said... "how about Mark Speer?"  But it was brutal, god awful hours. I didn't know enough then to say I needed help. I was overloaded with work. When I got fired at KWST I just asked for my paycheck and went home and took a nap. They actually fired me twice.

12. You did production at KCHO as well.
Lorraine Dechter another former CPVR person, is the News Director at KCHO. She helped find me some work up there.

13. Whatever happened to boy genius Tom Hewitt?
Sadly, Tom Hewitt was gay in an era when it wasn't OK to be gay and he died of AIDS. It was really sad to lose such a talented engineer.

14. What are you doing these days?
I freelance, but these days I mostly spend my time teaching live television music video production at Butte College in California. These days, I also produce and direct the fireworks show for the city of Redding, CA, amongst other things That's great fun.

*All images and audio courtesy of Mark Speer

CABL to CPVR

Cable radio was invented before cable TV. The earliest claimant dates to at least December of 1922. [source] There were even more exotic experiments that preceded that by a few decades but it's over-charitable to call them radio. So the title goes to J. A. Gustafson the GM of the Fredonia Telephone Company in Kansas who wrote the below quote in an issue of Telephony Magazine:

“We have added a radio receiving set to our central office equipment and furnish radio service to our subscribers. This service is furnished over cable pairs that would otherwise be idle...To furnish this service we use a standard radio receiving set and three stages of amplification. A circuit is furnished to the subscriber at a monthly rental for the circuit only, and the subscriber buys his own loud-speaker or receivers."

Another very early cable radio experiment was in Dundee, Michigan. It was first offered as a luxury service at a whopping $1.50 per month. It was run by the Farmer's Telephone Company, who still exists. A similar system was built in Lorain, Ohio, but it only served about 700 homes. Cable radio took off overseas before it came to America.  Unlike a true radio, a cable radio doesn't need much in the way of components or even an antenna. Using amplifiers, and relays across twisted pair a "radio" would only need an on/off switch and a volume dial. since there was only one station there was no need even for a tuner. It was just a speaker with a variable resistor. So in a small urban foot print it can be cost effective for consumers. In south Korea they were building out large municipal systems as early as the 1940s. Similar systems popped up in Europe and the pacific.

In the U.S. the expansion was mostly with rural systems that operated like amplified speaker wire. Homes didn't need to have power in order to have radio. In the large rural southern regions that still hadn't been electrified that had commercial appeal.  One of the earliest urban systems in the U.S. was built by Muzak.  Muzak built it's own system in the 1940s in New York but took one in the chops when they carried a WOR-AM broadcast of the world series in 1941. The subsequent lawsuit was actually the start of retransmission fees. Patrick R. Parsons book Blue Skies: A History of Cable Television covers this ear in great detail. More here too.

In the U.S. the first cable radio stations started cropping up in the 1970s. Cable TV was increasingly popular and the notion of piping in some audio channels seemed like a natural progression. The first commercial cable radio station in the United States was probably CABL-FM 108. It was carried on the Theta Cablevision system, serving homes in the West Los Angeles area. They first went live on January 1st 1972. The station was run by Brad Sobel, a former pirate radio man. According to him in a Billboard article potential audience was between 4,700 and approximately 25,000 (based on information provided by Brad Sobel in an article in Billboard. He was also still involved with KIIS-AM at the same time. He was later an engineer at KIQQ-AM, KWTH-FM, KZPN-FM, KCRY-FM and a slew of others. Brad was an all around radio man.

Another early station was 95.9 CPVR in Palos Verdes, CA. Tom Hewitt built the station from scratch and two locals, Mark Speer and Brad Gardner started the non-profit youth organization that staffed it. CPVR began cable casting in March of 1972. It was carried on the Times-Mirror cable system. Numerous universities hosted cable radio stations. There is some difficulty identifying which is a true cable radio station and which is carrier current. Some used both systems at different times. Records are scant and these stations were dying off in droves by the 1980s. Even the somewhat successful WLHE in Woburn, MA signed off in 1987. (The station had been founded by Larry Haber.) There are some broadcasters still simulcasting on cable TV. But I know of none that are on cable exclusively. The closest is probably WHAV,  who is still carried on the PEG government channel in Andover, Haverhill and Methuen Massachusetts. They also broadcast under part 15 at 1640 AM in Haverhill. More here.