Woofah-Goofah and the Master Blaster

In Boston in the late 60s, Peter Wolf (J. Geils Band) was a DJ on the late, great WBCN-FM. He was known as Woofah-Goofa. You may better know him as the lead singer for the J. Geils Band from 1967 to 1983. They put out an awful album that year titled "Freeze Frame" after which he went solo to little aplomb. He did reunite with the J. Geils Band briefly in 1999, but that received even less aplomb and he went solo again. But let's get back to radio because that's far more interesting.

Wolf is no Bostonite. He was born in the Bronx, as Peter W. Blankfield. Wolf has more of a ring to it so lets stick with that when addressing him in the 3rd person.

After dropping out of  the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston Wolf was singing in a group called the Hallucinations. He became connected to the music scene and after parties often migrated to his place. One night a law student named Ray Riepen told Wolf of his plan to buy a radio station. peter was too broke to participate fiscally, but he was in. Wolf became the stations music director, program director, and a night shift DJ.

In 1967 the Hallucinations broke up and Peter was left minus his band. This is when he and a couple kids from Worcester Polytechnic Institute got together and formed the J. Geils Band. They were the house band at a club called the Boston Tea Party located on 53 Berkeley Street.  The WBCN studio was at 171 Newbury Street. Peter would run from the end of one gig to the start of the next. Under Riepen the station flipped from classical to AOR... Free Form FM. Teaparty house emcee Charlie Daniel became his informal co-host can called him Woofah-Goofah, Wolf called Charlie Master Blaster.  They played rock 'n' roll and rhythm 'n' blues and whatever else they wanted.

Alas it could not last. By 1969 the demands of the band were in conflict with his radio gig and Wolf left radio for good. He continues today as a solo artist. He has done some live performances on various stations... but then in 2011 he made an appearance on WZLX where he broke out some of his old jive talk for his old Boston audience.

The Media Revolution on FM Radio

This was actually really good. Thank you Steve Wolfson.

PART ONE


PART TWO

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.

Henry Jacobs' Last Tape

For those of you that don't read Beckett, the title of today's post is probably lost on you. [more here] So let us proceed directly to the worldly and unworldly works of Mr. Henry Jacob. It's hard to explain to a contemporary radio listener how much different FM radio was just a few decades ago. Not only could DJs pick their own music (to a degree) but in some cases they took it to the utmost extreme and broadcast whole psychedelic audio experiments... making their own musical works in the process. 

According to the liner notes on Smithsonian Folkways LP [FS 03861] he got his start in radio on a Mexican border station in 1950, which turns out to be XEW-AM. But that's not the whole story. He attended the University of Chicago (the home of WHPK) and attended grad school at the University of Illinois (the home of WILL). His program began on WILL in 1952 but KPFA aired them as well. I suspect it's 580 WILL-AM, but 90.9 WILL-FM signed on as WUIC in 1941 so it's conceivable he was on the FM stick and accounts are just off on the call sign change. They became WILL-FM in 1954.

Henry Jacobs was a legitimate early experimenter in sound collage in the John Cage sense of the word. Which makes for a nice comparison as they both started tape experiences in about 1952. Both of their tape loop experiments precede the work of Pierre Schaeffer. But as early as he was, Jacob's didn't exactly invent tape manipulation. Halim Abdul Messieh El-Dabh was manipulating wire recorders in Cairo as early as 1944. You can hear it here) What makes Jacobs' unique across the spectrum was that he was a radio DJ. His weekly program was called "Music And Folklore". These included woks by all manner of ethnic artists and experimental musicians other than himself. His own experiments with tape loops were mostly broadcast on KPFA in 1953 and 1954. These led to the release of a few LPs on Smithsonian Folkways the last of which was the the Vortex LP released in 1957.

Modern electronic music is often the work of stoned college students dicking around with samples and beats in user-friendly software. Some of it's great, but most of it is decidedly low brow. Jacob's and these early experimenters were engineers, and artists as you had to build, and repair your own equipment. They were an  artsy-fartsy, intellectual bunch of geeks. Jacobs in particular spent parts of his KPFA program interviewing ethnomusicologists. Some of that work went into a LP on a Fantasy records LP [FSY 7001]  Interviews Of Our Times It was a collaboration with Lenny Bruce and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Anyway he out grew radio quickly and was producing programs for KQED-TV by the early 1970s. The record label Locust Music has been re-releasing some of his back catalog.  Jacob is still alive and resides in California.

The First Free-form DJ

It's a hard point to argue. Before there were formats, technically everything was free form in a way. Really before about 1935 it was hard to tell who was taking radio seriously and who was not. In 1947 It was abundantly clear that Jim Hawthorne was not. NOTE: not to be confused with James Hawthorne of the BBC or the other Jim Hawthorne a well-known but unrelated sportscaster.

Many operate under the assumption that free-form radio as we know it today began on 94.1 KPFA Berkley, CA. The first NCE licensed station in America and crown Jewel of the Pacifica Network. But it was not so. Before they took to the air Jimbo was running amok. On his show at 1110 KXLA-AM, he played a blizzard array of Buddy Baker, Spike Jones, Red Ingle, Slim Coates, and all without regard to genre and format. That was way back in 1946! Some sources, like and AWA Journal cite the start as in 1948, but there is an announcement [SOURCE] in the May 13, 1946 issue of Broadcasting which confirms. Variety magazine announced it over a year later in August of 1947 which probably is the source of the confusion.   (Note: KXLA became KRLA in 1959.)

 

His popularity was such that in 1950 he managed to score a late night talk show on KLAC-TV it was kind of a predecessor to NBC's Saturday Night Live according to the Los Angeles Times. He landed some spots in some movies and even did some pre-3-stooges reels for film. Everything he did was counter to radio culture at the time.

His effect was barely noticed while he was active in broadcasting. It's only now that in looking back you can see the effects ripping outward. His zany all night weekend show on KOA radio was the stuff of legend. WFMU has a little tribute page here. and his fan club is here.

He's got a radio pedigree a mile long. This is far from complete...

• KMYR Denver 1941 - 1946
• KXEA - 1946 - 1946? 
• KXLA Los Angeles, 1946 -1948
• KECA Los Angeles, 1948 -1950
• KNX Los Angeles, 1950-1952
• KCBH Los Angeles, 1952 -1955
• KYA San Francisco 1957 -1959
• KDAY Los Angeles, 1959 -1960
• KFWB Los Angeles, 1960 - 1963
• KOA Denver, 1974-1981-1984
• KIEV Los Angeles, 1991

Today Jim Hawthorne is 88 years old, living in a retirement home in Santa Barbara, California. He's grown comicly cantankerous bemoaning the state of modern radio, it's voice-tracking and control by megacorporations. He still does a local TV show in Santa Barbara four times a year