Blues for M.F.

The LP "Soul Battle" was released on Prestige records in 1961, matrix (7223). It lands on Track 2, Side A. It featured three tenor sax players King Curtis, Oliver Nelson, and Jimmy Forest, Roy Haynes pick up drum duties, Gene Casey and George Duvivier sound out the session on piano and bass respectively. The John Handy Quartet covered it in 1962 for Roulette records with a burning bebop infused solo, which is what first brought it to my attention. For years I had assumed that MF stood for motherfucker, but the original Soul Battle LP spells out in parentheses that the M.F. stands for Mort Fega. The back of the LP spends a mere 26 lines describing the song, So I'll quote a bit of that as it's relevant to our story here.

"Blues for M.F. is a tone poem with a fine set of altered blues changes which lend themselves to distinguished soloing by all three of the reed men. The tune certainly captures the intensity, the sincerity, and the quiet humor which have made Mort Fega one of the nations most popular jazz announcers..."

The song is an exploration of a blues scale replete with flatted thirds, but woth a very steady meter to provide a platform to hold all nine minutes and thirty seconds of soulful sax solos. Each is worldessly singing the praises of Mort Fega who was at the peak of his career at the time. Unusually this wasn't even the first Jazz tune dedicated to Mr. Fega. In 1959 The Red Garland Trio Plus Ray Baretto recorded Manteca for Prestige (7139). Donald Fagen testified in a 2006 obituary for the man that the song was played on Fega's show regularly

"I looked forward to Mort’s between-track commentary as much as to the music itself. With Red Garland’s “Mort’s Report” playing softly in the background, Mort, with the grace and enthusiasm that reveals itself only in the most bona-fide jazz lover, would carefully list every soloist and sideman."

It was the New York jazz scene that brought all these people together. Red Garland moved to New York from Dallas in 1946. Oliver Nelson went to College in St. Louis, but moved to New York in 1958 after graduating. King Curtis was from Ft. Worth and moved to New York to become a session musician in 1952, and both George Duvivier and Ray Barretto were a native New Yorkers. These jazzmen all undoubtedly listened to Faga and knew his as a mover in the jazz biz. You couldn't be a jazz head in in New York and not know 1330 WEVD-AM in the 1960s.

Mort Fega, was from New Rochelle, NY which is where he had his first show at 1460 WNRC-AM on Saturday afternoons. New Rochelle was New York City suburb, so it's signal reached parts of New York City. The popularity of that show grew such that in 1962 he was able to jump to WEVD and launch a  "Jazz Unlimited" which aired six nights a week simulcast on 97.9 WEVD-FM. His show aired opposite Symphony Sid Torin, but by the 1960s Sid was old hat. While he was a His hep cat jazz delivery was decades old.  Fega was all about modern jazz he pushed artists like Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk alongside jazz classics.

Fega left WEVD in 1966, and continued broadcasting jazz from WBAI, WRFM, and WTFM in New York City. His departure from WEVD is a bit mysterious but he debuted on WRFM in June of 1965 while he was still on WEVD and Cue Magazine lists him in January of 1966 already hosting Jazz in Stereo on WTFM. In August of 1965 Billboard specifically spells out that on his new station that Fega beat out Sid for the top spot.  Then he showed up on WBAI in June of 1966 with a Friday night program.

The quick shuffling around the dial came to an end three years later when in 1969 Fega and his wife Muriel relocated to Phoenix where he quickly got a radio show on 1400 KXIV-AM named simply "Night." That program continued midnight to 4:00 AM six nights a week until at least 1974. He moved to Connecticut in 1976 and started a program that aired twice a week, one on Saturday afternoons and one Tuesday evenings on college radio station 91.3 WWUH. He then added on a program at 1230 WINF-AM in Manchester and in 1979 a Sunday morning program on 1550 WMLB-AM in West Hartford.

Then finally the workaholic jazz man retired to Delray Beach, FL in 1986.  But the itch came back and he picked up a weekly show on 90.7 WXEL-FM. It was only once a week but it was five hours long! He also taught a History of Jazz course at Palm Beach Community College and wrote a weekly column for the Palm Beach Post newspaper. Mort Fega died on Jan. 21st 2005 due to complications from a recent back surgery. He was 83.

The History of LGBT Radio (Part 2)

Out-FM on WBAI in New York city is one of the longest running LGBT radio programs in America. But like everything else long-running in community radio it has some even deeper roots. 99.5 WBAI has a long history in identity politics and cutting edge social issues, in particular LGBT programming.

According to R. Paul Martin in July 1962, WBAI aired an interview with homosexual activist Randy Wicker. This 90-minute show is widely believed to have been the first such program in the United States.  It was well received by most news outlets, but the Journal-American was condemned the segment and others called for WBAI's FCC license to be revoked. A complaint was filed, but rejected by the FCC. WBAI was particularly typically contrarian about it and withing months Mr. Randy Wicker began to produce gay programming on WBAI. In some regard, he was succeeded by Charles Pitts who was a tad more controversial. In a 1972 programming folio his show was described "Free form stuff with a homosexual cast to it; from the sintered brain of Charles Pitts."

In 1968 Pitts was airing discussions on S&M, bondage, cruisy locations, and more. More here. Pitts did not play well with others and was fired somewhat contentiously and then later re-hired. Pitts developed  a two-hour, Saturday afternoon program called Out Of The Slough starting in 1970. He moved the program to the Saturday Midnight time slot in 1972 and after 3 months lost the slot. After an outcry in local press, notably the Village Voice, Pitts was back. But in May 1973 he was fired again. It was a theme that continued for years. There is a 1978 WBAI tape of Pitts recounting a beating he took on a Greenwich Village street in the NY Public Library [SOURCE] For more on the very colorful Mr. Pitts I do recommend reading the book Playing in the FM Band by Steve Post.

Rudy Grillo and R. Paul Martin were two of the several producers of Gay Rap, which aired on WBAI from the mid 1970s  until in 1985. The successor that program was Gay New York which was produced by Mr. Martin. In that same era, WBAI began holding full day "Gay Day" Specials and held a WBAI AIDS Special in 1985. AIDs is just another part of the background noise of daily news today. But in the early 1980s this was very progressive. More here.

Gay New York aired weekly from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM on Thursday afternoons. Later  it moved to 7:30 Thursday nights and eventually alternating Sunday nights. Concurrently another program The Gay Show began airing on Wednesday nights. In the mid 1990s. In 1991 This Way Out was on air alternating weeks at 1:30 PM it was a more international news format for and about the lesbian and gay community. An Afternoon Outing, started at 2:00 on Thursdays a news magazine for and about the gay and lesbian community hosted by Gonzalo Aburto. Another LGBT program, Outlooks began airing shortly thereafter. Contributors included Nicholas Cimorelli, Larry Gutenberg, Marie Becker, Lidell Jackson, Allen Ross, Bob Storm, Rick X, Tony Glover, Nancy Kirton and others. WBAI management decided to merge Outlooks and The Gay Show which created a new program OutFM in 1992. At different times it aired on Mondays from 11:00 AM to Noon, which was about 2009 thru 2012. [SOURCE] and in 2015 it moved to Tuesday nights 9:00 PM to 10:00 PM [SOURCE]

From the very beginning OutFM was a pastiche of a program. Marle Becker said the following about it's dynamic "OutFM is a collective of about seven to eight people and obviously when you get that many different people with different agendas in a collective, there's always a problem."  The differences between the two programs were sharp. The Gay Show was very news oriented. Outlooks was more focused on grassroots political organizing. The union of the two grew into a more well-rounded but progressive LGBTQ public affairs and culture talk radio show that remains on  air today.

But it's also important to mention that many of the radio hosts, and producers named above are now deceased, many of AIDS. Bob Storm died in November of 1997, Larry Gutenberg died in June of 1995. Marle Becker died in 2015 of cancer.

Radio Free Alcatraz

Radio Free Alcatraz is one of my favorite things that happened in all of radio history So lets start at the beginning. Almost everyone is at least passingly familiar with the iconic Alcatraz prison.  The actual Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary was a maximum security federal prison on Alcatraz Island. The 22 acre island is 1.25 miles off shore from San Francisco. Spanish naval officer Juan Manuel de Ayala charted the island in 1775 by as one of the three islands he identified as "La Isla de los Alcatraces." The name was an error. Alcatrace is Spanish for Gannets, a North Atlantic bird. Ayala had more likely seen Pelicans. More here.

You might be wondering about it's Native American history. Well, there doesn't seem to be much. The island was mostly bare rock, possibly with coastal grass and scrub. In 2001 The Alcatraz Island Historic Preservation and Safety Construction Program wrote "There is no record or remaining evidence  of prehistoric usage of Alcatraz Island by Indian Tribes." Lets discuss. It's possible that Native Americans determined that the bald rock in the bay wasn't very useful. The first Indians to "live" on the island would have been the 19 members of the Hopi tribe imprisoned there for seven months in 1895 for refusing to allow their children to be taken to government-run boarding schools.

Things got way more interesting in 1964 when five Sioux Indians: Richard McKenzie, Allen Cottier, Martin Martinez, Garfield Spotted Elk, and Walter Means landed on Alcatraz in March 1964 and tried to seize it. They invoked the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie as a legal precedent establishing their right to reclaim surplus federal land and filed a claim. This may have technically been Native Peoples first to attempt to settle on the island. Regardless of the legal merits of the claim Federal Marshals kicked them out.  Five years later they returned in much greater numbers. More here.

In 1969 a fire destroyed San Francisco’s American Indian Center. After the fire, Native American activists proposed re-establishing one on the now vacant Alcatraz. Their proposal was denied.
In multiple phases in November of 1969 Native American activists "colonized" the island anyway. The primary landing was on November 20th with 89 men, women and children. On Thanksgiving, 1969, an estimated 400 Native Americans gathered to celebrate Thanksgiving. The occupation would last another 18 months.

Prominent members of the movement included: Richard Oakes, Katherine (Jody) Beaulieu, Adam Fortunate Eagle, chairman of the BANAC (Bay Area Council of American Indian Affairs), Verna Clinton Tullie, Dean Chavers, Stella Leach, LaDonna Harris, Jerry Hatch, Allen Miller, Ron Lickers, Mickey Gemmill, and Gerald Sam, Carol Miller, Daniel Bomberry, Larry Benegas, Elaine Dempsey (Wintun), Ross Barden, Grace Thorpe, and both LaNada Boyer Means and Leman Brightman of UNA (United Native Americans). LaNada, was actually the first Native American student at U.C. Berkeley.

On December 22, 1969, KPFA began its first live broadcast from Alcatraz, hosted by spokesperson John Trudell, a Santee Sioux from Omaha, NB. Trudell had studied radio and broadcasting at San Bernardino Valley College and was a natural for the role. He interviewed residents of the island and visitors.  Al Silbowitz, then manager of KPFA got a grant and with Trudell installed some borrowed and donated radio equipment, on the main cell block building on Alcatraz.  Their programs aired on the Pacifica Network which consisted, at the time, of KPFA in Berkeley; KPFK, Los Angeles; and WBAI, New York. The program was somewhat irregular in schedule but was 15 - 30 minutes long.

The vision for Alcatraz was an egalitarian society. But due to the press attention some people naturally rose to prominence such as Richard Oakes and John Trudell. Oakes left the island with his family in January 1970 after his step daughter fell from a stairwell and died. His departure created a leadership vacuum. Vagrants and hippies began to settle on the island. Eventually non-Indians were prohibited from staying overnight. The native population at this time was about 50 people, 40 of whom were women.

Each episode of Radio Free Alcatraz began with a recording of Buffy Sainte-Marie singing "Now that the Buffalo's Gone." Buffy Sainte-Marie visited the island in person in May of 1970. But by June of 1970 the program was being recorded in the Pacifica Studios. The final program aired in September of that year.  More here.

In May 1970 the federal government began to transfer Alcatraz to the Department of the Interior and the National Park System. That's when the government shut off the electricity and telephone service. The same week the government removed their water barge. This left the occupiers with a small generator for power, butane stoves cooking and a severe water short age. When the barge was removed, different sources cited that they had either 70,000 or as little as 4,000 gallons of water. Then on the night of June 1st, 1971, provocateurs set a fire which destroyed several buildings. On June 11, 1971, Federal marshals invaded the island to remove the remaining residents. At the time, the residential population was just six men, five women and four children. More here.

The results were good and bad. In the years that followed, members of AIM (the American Indian Movement) organized occupations and protests at Plymouth Rock, Mount Rushmore, Wounded Knee, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and dozens of other sites across the country. Richard Nixon ended the Federal policies of termination and assimilation and implemented the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act. But Richard Oakes was murdered by a white supremacist in 1972 and John Trudell's family were killed in a suspicious fire in 1979.

Today the Pacifica Radio Archive houses many recordings of Radio Free Alcatraz on 1/4” reel tape. Not all of these tapes are digitized yet. If you want to donate go here.

WBAI Print Ad

I keep posting these, pointing out how rare it is to see a radio station advertise in a print publication. I think in a decade I've found less than a dozen.

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:

DJ John Cage

John Cage was an avant-garde composer among other things. He "wrote" compositions of pure silence, he played piano with debris placed on top of the strings, and experimented with tape cut-ups. His music career started out in radio but never really came back to it. He found some fame in the 1960s but all-in-all was too damn weird for general consumption.. which suited him just fine.

The closest he came to being a DJ was as a boyscout as a child. Cage had a radio program on KNX when he was 12, for the Boy Scouts of America. It began as a 30 minute program entirely comprised of performances by himself and other Boy scouts. Solo violin, solo piano piano and vocal. Strangely it's popularity led it to expand fo a 2-hour program. It was the kind of thing that was only possible in 1924. At the time KNX operated on 360 meters, and had only been granted those calls in May of 1922.

In 1982 he wrote a radio play "Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Erik Satie: An Alphabet" which was commissioned and performed on Westdeutscher Rundfunk WDR Radio in West Germany. It had 16 performers and one narrator and contained no music.

In 1966 Cage and Morton Feldman recorded four conversations billed as "Radio Happenings" at WBAI in New York. The series of sit downs ran from July 1966 and January 1967. There was no music, he composed nothing, they just rambled for half an hour or so each time.

CBS once commissioned a play group he worked with in Chicago to do a work based upon Kenneth Patchen's The City Wears a Slouch Hat. I can find no recording of it, but he does mention it in an interview here which I quote from below:

"My idea was to take a play, and thinking of the script as having ambient sounds to use those sounds, not as sound effects, but as the sounds of a music which would accompany the play. CBS liked that."

But the most famous connection to radio is in performance. In 1955 he "wrote" a composition for 5 radios with two performers stationed at each radio. One is for tuning the radio-stations, the second is for adjusting the volume and tone. I put quotations around the word "wrote" because the content of the composition is inherently different at each performance even if the rhythm is the same. Below is the video form a 1982 performance of it.

Jean Shepherd lives!

No one that listened to Jean "Shep" Sheppard will ever forget him. His career spanned decades and included tours on WOR-AM, KYW-AM, WLW-AM. He died in October of 1999. But he lives on at a single Class-D radio station in Dudley, Massachusetts. they transmit from the campus of Nichols College.At a barely audible 14 watts, 95.1 WXRB run real rock n' roll 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Today these are considered oldies, but it's not your uptight Jones Network sat-fed oldies format. The WXRB playlist is possibly three-times as deep, and focused on the first 25 years of rock n' roll. I'll admit now that it's automated, but in a very conscious and deliberate way somewhat reminiscent of WRKO's "arko-matic" system. On their own website they say the following:

"WXRB-FM showcases Rock & Roll's FIRST 25 years, to preserve its' place in mainstream America and to bring these special songs to a new generation of listeners, to young and old alike. We're a totally NON-COMMERCIAL EDUCATIONAL FM station, dedicated to keeping this special music alive and available for everyone to enjoy."

But back to Jean Shepard. Every Sunday evening at 11:00 PM DJ Max Schmid hosts the program "Mass Backwards"featuring the voice of the deceased Jean Shepherd. What great shtick for a tribute station dedicated to the love of an era... including one of the DJs, nto just the music. Mass Backwards actually comes out of WBAI in New York.

The physical size of a radio wave

Radio waves are entirely real and physical things even though we cannot see them. It seems simple now that I write it but they are hard enough to imagine in the first place. An AM carrier wave varies in height because they are amplitude modulated. The height varies regardless of the frequency. But the wavelength is constant. For example 820 WNYC-AM has carrier wave with a wavelength of over 1,120 feet. 99.5 FM WBAI, also in New York, has a wavelength of about 10 feet. But because its Amplitude is not modulated, that too is constant. WBAI uses a microwave link between its studio and transmitter. This microwave link at 950 MHz has a wavelength of about 11 inches.

This physical size is behind the design for the "long wire antenna" Each type of long wire is suited to respond best to an even fraction of the full wave. A 1120 foot long wire antenna would be best to receive WNYC-AM. But also impractical inside a Manhattan apartment. At 560 feet it is tuned to the half-wave. At 280 feet the quarter wave. At 140 feet, an eighth and so-on. Great article on Long-wire antennas here.

This same concept applies to the broadcast of the signal. 880 WCBS broadcasts from a tower rigged to output almost a perfect half wave. More info here. There are no AM radio stations that I know of radiating a full half-wave. If you do, please fill me in.

The Bombing of KPFT

KPFT was founded by journalist Larry Lee, who convinced Pacifica Radio to establish an independent radio station in Houston, TX. His dream became a reality in March of 1970. In that same year, KPFT became the first, second and only radio station in the United States to have its transmitter bombed by terrorists. More here. 

The first sound to emanate from 90.1 FM in Houston was the song Here Comes The Sun from the then-brand-new Beatles album, Abbey Road. About two months later on May 12 members of the KKK blew up the KPFT transmitter, and the station was off the air for weeks.

Several months after completing repairs and returning to the air, the transmitter was bombed a second time! The October 6th bombing caused much more extensive damage. The cost of the damage was estimated to be about $35,000 —that's $222,000 in today's money adjusted for inflation. KPFT was off the air for more than three months. They resumed broadcasting on Wednesday, January 20th, 1971. A guard of armed police surrounded the station. They interviewed the mayor and the chief of police who both sided with the KKK, questioning their right to broadcast, and accusing them of airing obscene records.  Arlo Guthrie performed live in studio opining his set with Alice's Restaurant. This was the song that they had been playing when the October bombers struck.  Guthrie stepped up to the mic and said:

"So I was sitting in West Palm Beach yesterday, —this is in Florida— and I said "Wow, I'm gonna go over to Houston. What am I going to do there?" I mean maybe somebody will bomb me.. I didn't have any songs about bombs, or nothing like that, so I had to write one. I'd like you to sing it with me..."

A decade later, the KKK's Grand Wizard claimed that his greatest act "was engineering the bombing of a left-wing radio station," hinting none-too-subtly at KPFT. In 1977 bomber Jimmy Dale Hutto was ratted out by FBI informant Russell Rector. Russ has been in the witness protection program since the bombing because the KKK was pretty upset about his informing. Ultimately a whole quartet were indicted: Louis R. Beam Jr., a 24 year old salesman; Peter Lout Jr., a 26 year-old construction worker; Jimmy Dale Hutto a 24 year old chemical worker, and Paul William Moratto a 24 year old electrician. Hutto for his part was arrested in February by the FBI as he was driving toward California with Moratto. His intention was to dynamite more Pacifica radio stations.

Despite the actions of these right-wing terrorists, The Pacifica Network grew to five stations: KPFA in Berkeley, KPFK in Los Angeles, WBAI in New York, WPFW in Washington, and KPFT in Houston. Until 1983 it also included KRAB in Seattle. More here.