The John Fahey Half Hour

c) 1983 Sally Cruikshank used by permission

Elliott Swanson  is a madman, perhaps the best kind of madman. A mad scientist, a mad musician and a teller of mad tales. He's the kind of madman that Kerouac wrote about admiringly "...the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles..." We met by chance, introduced by Chuck Reinsch at the KRAB archives. I was researching tribute radio programs. These are ongoing radio shows dedicated to the recorded works of a single band or musician. There are very few in the whole history of radio, so perhaps Swanson was the progenitor of it all. Back in 1971 he created a radio program dedicated to the works of the brilliant, iconoclast guitarist John Fahey. After several months Swanson abandoned the program, like an impatient genius moving on to his next invention in the laboratory.

There are parts of his career that for reasons of national security we cannot discuss. There are parts of his career that we cannot discuss because he cannot remember. Let's not read into that. Mr. Swanson was kind enough to give me some of his time for an interview and numerous follow up questions by email. The questions were obvious: How did this come to be? Why KRAB? Why at that time and why at that place.  Above all, perhaps 'Why John Fahey?' is the biggest question of all. In the pursuit of those answers our conversation wandered across time, space, endless digressions and the near infinite permutations of possibility. It was the most fun I had with an interview in a long time. So for the sake of brevity I've taken some liberties with the text. I've also added material where he's answered follow up questions via email. A compete interview transcript will go to the KRAB archive.

JF: Can you tell me how you first discovered the music of John Fahey?

ES:  I heard things on the radio. I know I bought some records. I was in the army 1962 through '65 and so when I got out I was then in school for 6 years. I did hang around radio stations some. I did a little bit of work then, but I just was not on the air.  I listened to a lot of FM. We had kind of a little Fahey cult going in early in the game, not back in the black and white label days but just after that. So that's probably where I first heard about him.

The first time I met him was kind of interesting. He had to have already been out of U.C. Berkeley, so he must have come back for some reason, and this had to have been sixty something...  I was living around the Haight Ashbury in 1968 and I used to go over to Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue. I would also go over to the U.C. Berkeley campus. I was walking along and I heard this guitar music and, wow that sounds really familiar.  So there's this guy sitting on a bench with a guitar out playing --nobody listening to him at all, just people walking around. So I sat down, sure this is John Fahey. I got a half an hour concert live sometime in the mid sixties at U.C. Berkeley.

Then I kind of moved around, ended up in the Seattle area which of course is where KRAB is. Let's see I moved up to Seattle probably in '69 and there was some guy that wanted me to get some records down in Venice, California. We must have known each other socially from somewhere or other. But like I said I don't have super clear memories of all that time for various reasons. I think it was George [Bigley] and I think the company might have been Orwaka [Distributing] that was in the Northwest area in Seattle or Tacoma or somewhere like that. Anyway I had access to a car. So I borrowed the car and said well sure I'll go down to Venice and pick up a couple cases of records for you. You know I like the guy's music. That'll be interesting.

So I steamed down to L.A., to Venice California and I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't what I found. Fahey was living in this little cheesy place in Venice. I think it was stucco and it was a little tiny house.  You always have this vision of your heroes, artists and icons living palatially well. That wasn't the case here. He was living on the low end of Venice in kind of a tough area.  I found it kind of fascinating. Anyway I went up and knocked on the door and Fahey opened it and we sat down and talked.

The pathway through his living room  was an interesting trip because there were turtles everywhere, walking all over the floor, shitting everywhere. You had to be very careful not to step on the turtles or in turtle shit because it was like free range turtles and tortoises, just a bunch of them.

Anyway he got me the records and we continued talking for a while. Again I have no idea what we talked about. We found a few things in common as I recall. I loaded up the records and headed back on a high speed run to Seattle and dropped off a couple cases of Takoma records up there. Chuck can verify the operation, but like I said they went to a guy named George. I think he owned a record shop or was a distributor or whatever.That's the second time I met John Fahey.

JF: And not the last?

ES: Not the last. I got in at University of Washington in Library and Information Science, a masters degree program. On the campus was the KCTS studio-- the PBS affiliate in Seattle. I started working for them, about 1970 would be by guess. It was perfect because I just had to walk across Red Square between the Library classes and the studio because they were on campus at the time. They aren't now. So that's where I had access to all this hardware and recording gear. At KCTS I was running camera, the audio board --whatever they needed--  lighting sets, floor directing, yadda yadda.

JF: So that was KCTS-TV?

ES:  KCTS-TV, yeah.  I had a whole bunch of these Fonotone Records that were individually cut and I recognized the technique. When I was a little kid, I grew up about the same time period as John Fahey did. He was born in '39 and I was born in '44. So we kinda went through the fifties in much the same way. At home we had this radio record player thing that if you lift up the secret lid on the top there was a record cutter. You could buy these blanks set it to cut mode, and it would create this big pile of curly black thread as it transcribed whatever you wanted on to the disc. Fonotone must have had a very similar system because their were identical...I'm kind of guessing, maybe 7-inch roughly?

JF: Wasn't' Fonotone owned by Joe Brussard in Maryland?

ES: Yeah, and you know I associate Ed Denson as the person I bought them from, but again I am mis-remembering because I know the name Joe Brussard. It must have been him that I got them from, because I bought them all.  And that will digress the digression because when I found out that they existed I said I have got to have 'em, they're too nuts. There were a lot of Blind Thomas recordings. Blind Thomas was John Fahey. I can even give you a little bit of dialog. He'd do things in the songs like this "Here come Blind Thomas, he got the blues again."  Then after that he'd go "Here come Big Fydor Dostoevsky, he got the blues too." Shit like that all the way through. What Fahey told me at one point, when we talked the last time, was that Denson or Broussard or whoever was faking old Blues recordings. That's what these things were. At our final meeting we discussed the Fonotone sessions a little bit and he called them two things. One of them was his "wages of sin" and the other one was "that Fonotone shit." Those are direct quotes.

JF: They don't talk about that in Joe Broussard's documentary.

ES: I bet not!  Anyway I got all these Fahey things and nobody has heard a lot of it, so I called up people at KRAB. I said I know you do a lot of weird stuff on this station and I like it; I could add to it and they said well sure. So I fired up the 10-inch deck at KCTS, the editing turntable there, and I started doing a little bit of jabbering and playing records. Between the liner notes and the music you've probably got a years worth of material that you can play with. I rolled off half an hour of reel-to-reel tape. I don't have any of the recorded shows anymore. I gave Chuck all the rest of the Fahey LPs my son hasn't taken. I think there were timing notes on one of the sleeves. That's in Chuck's archive, he's got that stuff. That is as close as we're going to come to a reel-to-reel recording because I don't have any of those 10-inch tape recordings and they evidently don't at KRAB either.  None of that stuff was saved.

JF: What format did you deliver your show in since you were pre-recording it?

ES: Specifically, metal 10" reel-to-reel tapes. I think it was a quarter-inch Maxell tape. I did it all in mono. If I remember correctly, KCTS at that time was pretty primitive. I don't think they had the ability to record in stereo. It didn't make any difference you know, for what I was doing and actually the quality of the Fonotone records was dreadful. It wasn't essential to have this show in super high fidelity, although I did clean recording. I mean I used studio mics and I tried to sound reasonable on the air. Anyway that's what they were on and I can't remember the recording speed. It was whatever I could fit the half hour show on. They had compatible gear at KRAB. I'd just get on my bicycle and go over there, or take the bus sometimes and drop off the tapes. They'd give them back and I think I'd record over the top of them when I was doing the next show-- with a low-paying job and GI Bill to live on, money for things like blank tapes was very scarce.

JF: Do you know how long you did the show? When did it start?

ES: [Chuck Reinsch] sent me the program guide with what he thinks is the first show. He thinks it's Friday June the 11th, at 5:00 PM, 1971. It aired right before "Krumhorns and Kings, with Dick Palm, with early Western music." He means really early, because a krumhorn is a renaissance instrument.

JF: We know it to the hour?

ES: We know when it started, I don't know how long I did it. I can't remember when the last went out. It probably didn't go exceptionally long because after I got out of library school it would have been '71.[Note: Charles Reinsch puts the final airdate as January 9th, 1972.]  I had a job so I left the area to go work. It had to be less than 6 months on the air.  I remember being really saddened when I heard what happened to KRAB and the sale of the license and all the rest of it. It was a radical station, and people did freeform things.

JF: There were other stations founded by Lorenzo Miliam... but KRAB was unique.

ES: Anyway, I met John Fahey one more time.

JF: How'd that happen?

ES:  I can't remember precise details, but it was in Oregon somewhere.  I heard through the grapevine he was around and looked him up. We hung out in his hotel room for a while and talked. That's when he told me the Fonotone stories I mentioned earlier. He’d changed hugely. He had a big scraggly beard. It looked like... kind of a low end hotel that he was in. I was just thinking you know this is not right...  you deserve more than this.

JF: When you mentioned the army, 1962-1965, you said that you were involved in radio? Was that AFRTS?

ES: No, I have to be careful about this. I was working for the Army Security Agency in Germany. It involved huge antenna fields and Warsaw Pact countries, and I really can't talk about it. I'll get in trouble. They get very tense about ELINT communications and SIGINT stuff.  Anyway I don't know that anybody cares, or that it makes a difference anymore but that it probably something I should not go over in huge detail. I didn't have access to a radio station until I got out of the army.

In 1967 when I was going to Santa Rosa Junior College I worked as a clerk at a mall record and musical instrument store, and may be misremembering studio info. The events took place but the station data is hazy. [Highly likely this was 1350 KSRO-AM.] I used to hang out at a Santa Rosa, CA AM transmitter every now and then.  The transmitter was also where the disc jockey was located, in the middle of nowhere. That was early radio exposure, then came radio KRAB. Then, when I was Library Director down in Astoria at Clatsop Community College, I did children's bedtime stories.

JF: What radio station was that?

ES: KMUN.

JF: When you were recording your show did you play only recordings of Fahey or was there other material?

ES: Only Fahey. Fahey, and me talking —and that was it. I wanted to be true to the concept. I didn't play anything else by anybody else. I didn't play [Robbie Basho], I didn't play [Leo] Kottke, none of that —just John Fahey.  I think once in a while I would get erudite and talk about how something sounded like something else, where the root of it came from, but I never played the root recordings. I just played Fahey.

JF: Do you have a favorite song and/or a favorite album?

ES: Favorite song is easy to pick, "In Christ there is no East or West" and I'm not a religious person. The version I most like came from the Blind Joe Death LP that has the old woodcut. That song sounds best to me rough and without polish.

JF: What about that song does it for you?

ES: It's so emotionally powerful. I don't know that Fahey was hugely religious, I definitely wasn't. But there is a spirituality factor. It's just stunning. Literally stunning. It knocks me out every time I hear it. It catches something I don't know how to describe. I don't have the words for it.

KPNI, KSMU, KCHU, KNON and KCBI

It's an urban legend told at Class D,  carrier current, and other micro-stations at Colleges and Universities across America. I've heard many versions of it... and even some that had some basis in truth. The story always starts with the college radio station having a big signal, and it ends with them having little or none. IN the middle of the story they always do something a bit naughty, and the school president, or board of regents punishes the station by selling off  or downgrading their license.

I'd heard this story about KPNI at SMU. The story was that they had a license and that after ill-mannered DJs ran amock, the license was sold to KNON. It's totally untrue. The other rumor that the call letters are a dick joke are also untrue. The PNI part of the call letters refer to the school mascot: a pony.

I recovered and posted their defunct website history here. According to that history on their old website, KPNI was founded as the carrier current station KSMU in 1947. (Other sources put the start in 1949) University of Wisconsin described them in a 1949 paper as a "carrier current station." That's the earliest date I can attest to. There is no agreement as to whether the station was operating on 760 or 640 AM initially. That history and another at dfwretroplex.com both concede that the station went dark for years at a time on multiple occasions 1958, 1989, and again recently.

But in the 1960s they even reported to the "What's Happening" column oat Billboard Magazine. They broadcast illegally in the early 1960s, and returned to carrier current status in 1964 with the assistance of Prof. H.Charles Baker. More here. They only began using the KNPI calls after 1987, over 10 years after 91.1 KSMU signed on in Springfield, MO.  There never was a license for KPNI or KSMU, no AM, no FM, no Class D license, no LPFM, not even a CP.

89.3 KNON however, does have a license. Their completely unrelated story actually begins at 90.9 KCBI, the Criswell Bible Institute station. KCBI first went on air in May of 1976 on 89.3 operating at 1000 watts. Our friends at KCHU started work in 1971, but didn't sign on until August 28, 1975. Sadly the free format 90.9 KCHU only operated until September 1977 when it went off air due to insolvency. It was one of the legendary stations connected to Lorenzo Milam and Dennis Gross.

In 1978 KCHU was approached by Criswell Bible College about a license swap. KCHU was not enthused about reducing power form 100k watts to 1,000 watts.  KCHU remained silent through 1980, while they organized a local like-minded group to assume their license as KNON.  KCBI applied to the FCC take over the 90.9 spot.  A legal struggle ensued. The FCC issued an order that if KNON was not on the air by July 31, 1983, the license would be forfeited. They made the deadline. Despite that, in 1986 a judge ruled against KNON and gave their license to KCBI.  KNON lost on appeal but the FCC advised the parties to complete the frequency swap offered 10 years earlier. For their trouble, KNON got a $75k payment which helped stabilize the station's finances. More here. You will notice that KSMU and KPNI do not appear in that story anywhere...

Sex and Broadcasting

I've been reading the book Sex And Broadcasting by Lorenzo W. Milam. It's dated, published in 1975 before many changes in law, and many other changes in technology. But the concepts are all there and a lot of history. On page 229 he lists off "Sympathetic Broadcasters."  It's a list of community stations that he felt were of a free-form, highly local in nature. I noticed immediately that many of these stations were no more. Todays post is an update to that 36 year old list, and it makes for a sad story. You can buy one here.

The list is broken into categories, the first of these is On-the-Air. These are Community radio stations already in service as of 1975. Many of these still exist in more-or-less the condition they were in at the time of that writing: KAOS, KBOO, KOPN, KPFT, WPFW, WAIF KPFK, WDNA, KUNM, KPOO, WREK, WORT, WBAI, WRFG, WYEP, KDIC, KKUP, WAMH. Others have become what Alan Bernard at Poormojo News Wire calls an "NPR Zombie." Those stations include: KPBX, WYBC, KTOO, and WYSO. 1340 WYBC-AM became a simulcast of NPR zombie WSHU only a couple days ago serving as a reminder that this process continues. But, WYSO is a better example of how a station normally makes the change. They began broadcasting All Things Considered in 1972. It picked up Morning Edition in the late 1980s. By 2002 there was almost nothing left. The community that built the station had lost the station. More here.

For the record, I listen to NPR. I like a lot of the programs. But it's important to note that it's not local programming. There is a difference. Most of the below is bad news. Remembering those caveats, here's what really changed:

KERS 88.9 Sacramento, CA. It began in 1970 as advertised above. In 1979, KERS became KXPR and fully embraces NPR-zombiehood.Today it's a full fledged Public Radio network including KXJZ, KUOP, KXJS and KXSR. More here.

KDKB-AM 93.3 /KDKB-FM 1510 Phoenix, AZ - This legendary free form rock station ended the simulcast in 1978 with the AM side flipping to Oldies. By 1980 they were a rigid classic rock station. Today 93.3 is still a rock station today but not free form in any sense of the word. Today they even have 80's themed weekends. More here.

KBBF 89.1 Santa Rosa, CA- In 2009 they swapped their city of license with 98.7 KSXY for a cash payment thus "relocating" to Calistoga. They are still owned by Bilingual Broadcasting Foundation. An audit by the CPB found “egregious” violations back in February.  Station Manager  Jesus Lozano, a convicted drug offender has been  accused of embezzling.  He resigned when the news went public and they elected a new board in March. They filed for a a silent STA only a few days ago following a lightning strike. More here, here, and here.

KBDY 89.9 St. Louis, MO - It was a 20 watt station on the North side first licensed in 1972. It was cited repeatedly for exceeding power restrictions. This allowed 89.9 WLCA at Lewis & Clark Community College to challenge their license. They had a STA to return at 6 watts but that seems to have fizzled before 1980. 

KRAB 107.7 Seattle, WA - Founded by the author of Sex and Broadcasting, Lorenzo Wilson Milam. He helped found KRAB and more than a dozen other radio stations around the country. KRAB was virtually insolvent from the get go. They attempted to share-time with KNHC and didn't work it out. The owners, the Jack Straw Foundation sold the license to a commercial broadcaster and started 90.7 KSER which signed on in 1991 and is still alive today. More here.

WAFR 90.3 Durham, NC - In 1973 they were written up in Ebony magazine with a 5-page photo spread. Today 90.3 is vacant, allowing the presence of WNAA on 90.1 and WDCC on 90.5. WAFR signed on in 1971 with 3,00 watts and went off air in 1975 when CPB yanked it's funding.

KSAN 94.9 San Francisco, CA - This legendary free form rock station operated from 1968 until 1980. Station founder and visionary died from a heart attack in 1975. KSAN flipped to country music. KSAN is still a big classic rocker. A frequency swap moved the KSAN calls to 107.7. More here including a documentary film and here.

WBCN 104.1 Boston , MA - The station went off the FM airwaves on August 12, 2009 and became an automated HD-2 stream on 98.5 WBZ. Originally a classical station, they became a free-form rocker in 1968. The original airstaff included Steven Segal, one of Tom Donahue's minions. slowly it degraded into an AOR format. In 1979, the station was purchased by Hemisphire Broadcasting who ousted the old hippies. this begat a general strike and most were re-hired but the playlist continued to get more regimented. In 1994 they flipped to alternative rock. Today it's a Hot AC station WMBX.

WGTB 90.1 Georgetown, DC. - In 1979, Georgetown donated the WGTB license to the University of Washington DC. In 1997 UDC sold it to C-SPAN for $25 million dollars. After the sale, the station relaunched as WROX, via campus AM carrier current. It later changes calls to WGTB since it didn't matter anyway. It has faltered several times and gone dark. it had a notable resurrection in 1996 and finally relaunched as a webcast in 2001. More here.

WTBS 88.1 Boston, MA - They became WMBR on May 24, 1979, selling it's old callsign to Ted Turner for 50 grand.They spent the money getting a more powerful transmitter. Programming is still loose and local.  More here.

KCHU 90.9 Dallas, TX -  This station was also founded in part by Lorenzo Milam. The station signed on in August of 1975. After just a year-and-a-half their cobbled hardware began to fail and without a steady source of income they were doomed. The station was silent by 1980. Criswell Bible Institute mounted a legal challenge, and eventually they swapped frequencies with Criswell winning the more powerful 90.9 stick. After continued internal disputes Lorenzo turned the station license over to a group called ACORN, who founded 89.3 KNON, a station that in some ways continues the mission. More here.

WFAC 91.5 Columbus, OH - They were a 10 watt station in 1975. Today it's WHKC owned by Christian Broadcasting Services, 15,00 watts of Air 1. The transition from point A to point B involved NAB,the UAW, the FCC and new legal precedents.  I'll dedicate a whole post to them later.