Bob Fass
Encyclopedia
Bob Fass is an American radio personality and pioneer of free-form radio, who has broadcast in the New York region for 40 years.
Fass’s program, Radio Unnameable, first aired in 1963 on WBAI
, a listener-sponsored, non-commercial radio station operating out of New York City. From the beginning the show featured the work, and impromptu interviews, of counterculture figures such as Paul Krassner
, Bob Dylan
, and Abbie Hoffman
, and the first performances of Arlo Guthrie
's Alice's Restaurant
and Jerry Jeff Walker
's Mr. Bojangles
among others.
"... he started free-form radio, each night creating a program with no format, an improvised mélange of live music, speeches, and random phone calls. Radio Unnameable was a radio party line on which Fass piled one caller atop another and said, 'Speak among yourselves.' It was a forum for eyewitness reports from war zones and urban conflicts, recitations of poetry and prose, solicitations for political causes, testimonials for illegal drugs, and experiments with noise and silence." Notable guests include investigative reporter Mae Brussell
, Abbie Hoffman
commenting on the Chicago Seven
trial, a planning session for the Central Park Be-In
, and the first radio appearance of Phoebe Snow.
He also plays a major role in Marc Fisher
’s book, Something In The Air, which covers radio’s impact in the post TV years. The Washington Post columnist describes how the “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!” scene in the film, Network
, grew out of an actual incident when WOR
’s Jean Shepherd
exhorted his listeners to throw open their windows, stick out their heads, and shout, “Excelsior!", then he goes on to write:
“Shepherd took the unseen audience and let them see each other, but it’s Bob Fass who took that to the next level, giving it social and political meaning. Fass really opened the door and summoned the audience into the action. He used the mass media
to amass a very real movement.”
and was also a member of Stella Adler
’s workshop. He appeared on stage in Brendan Behan
’s The Hostage at Circle in the Square, The Execution of Private Slovik
with Dustin Hoffman
, and The Man with the Golden Arm
at the Cherry Lane
, among other New York productions. When he went into the army in 1956, he started a theater at Fort Bragg, North Carolina
. In 1960, he took over the role of the warden in the legendary off-Broadway
production of Threepenny Opera with Lotte Lenya
. Over the next two years, he played a variety of roles in the show, also acting as assistant stage manager.
In 1963, he began working at WBAI, one of the nation’s first listener-sponsored, non-commercial radio stations, operated by the Pacifica Foundation. Novelist and poet Richard Elman
, a friend of Fass’s from high school, who was producing programs for the station’s Drama & Literature Department, helped Foss get a job as an announcer. He then was given the midnight to dawn time block to use as he wished. Jay Sand, in The Radio Waves Unnameable, writes “He had the same supplies as any other broadcaster---two turntables, a microphone, a stack of records, perhaps a guest in the studio, a friend on the phone,... (but) the radio program he created however transcended those common wares.”
by Samuel Beckett
, which Fass was reading at the time, gave the show its title. His signature greeting, “Good morning, cabal,” came from a listener. “I wanted a sign-on line, like William B. Williams “Good morning, world,” says Fass. “Someone sent in a postcard suggesting, “Good morning, cabal.” I looked it up in the dictionary and discovered that the word, cabal, comes from “horse.” Originally, people met on horseback at night with their identities concealed-even from each other—to plot or plan something subversive. And I thought, that’s it: “Good morning, cabal.”
Fass brought his acting training to the radio via his voice. Filmmaker Susan Lazarus recalls listening to Bob’s show as a teenager. She drifted off to sleep and woke some hours later to hear Tom Rush
singing a beautiful song live in BAI’s studio. It was called Urge For Going, by a new Canadian songwriter named Joni Mitchell
(who would also go on to sing and play the piano on Radio Unnameable). Lazarus remembers the sense of discovering something with Fass at the very instant of transmission. “It was like magic.”
Nowhere else, Jay Sand writes, could you hear a DJ “playing two records at the same time or backwards, or the same song over and over and over again, simply because he liked its message. Nowhere else in the early 60s could you hear callers and hosts alike criticize LBJ [President Lyndon B. Johnson
] for escalating the War in Vietnam, encourage men to burn their draft cards, or talk in glowing terms about their drug experiences. Radio Unnameable was a counterculture radio show before anyone ever applied the term to America’s drop-out youth. Bob Fass was a hippie before there were hippies.”
From the earliest days of Radio Unnameable, Fass experimented with sound, inspired by the audio art he’d heard by John Cage
and Bill Butler
. He collaborated with Gerd Stern and Michael Callahan
’s media collective, USCO
, which had produced sound fields for Timothy Leary
’s Fillmore East
shows, then dove in and began creating dense mixes on the air.
On the spur of the moment, Fass would layer four or five sources of sound; an instructional typing record… a Hopi
Indian ceremony…an anti-war song…cannons firing…an excerpt from a play. He would weave the sources in and out; make them louder, then softer, introducing new voices and noises that would comment on the state of the nation or just create a mood. When everything came together in a moment of perfect timing, the effect was mesmerizing.
Watching the production of these mixes behind the scenes was sometimes just as entertaining as listening to them on the air. Fass would get a brainstorm only seconds before a cut would run out and fly into the record library in search of the perfect segue. “He existed on a slightly different plain than the rest of us,” Steve Post
recalled in his memoir of life at WBAI, Playing in the FM Band. “He was more spontaneous. We all copied him, but he was the best.”
Fass always pressed to expand the boundaries of radio communication. In the mid 70s, he asked the station’s Chief Engineer and resident technical guru, Mike Edl, if there was any way to rig up a contraption that would allow him to put as many as ten phone calls on the air at the same time. The system Edl built became a centerpiece of Fass’s show, allowing more of his listeners to connect with him, and with each other. Fass rarely rushes callers off the phone. Community organizers know they can always count on Fass for airtime to spread word of current crises or upcoming events. He is an ongoing outlet for the unsung, unspun, ignored and unknown. At least one suicidal listener called in to receive on air counseling.
, David Peel, Richie Havens
, Jose Feliciano
, Joni Mitchell
, The Fugs
, Patti Smith
and Phil Ochs
(parodying "Positively 4th Street
"; half pretending a comic competition with Bob Dylan
, but later telling disapproving callers that it was Dylan’s right to play with an electric guitar and a band behind him). Jerry Jeff Walker
and David Bromberg
introduced the song Mr. Bojangles
on the show, The Incredible String Band came over from England with their manager, Joe Boyd
, Happy
and Artie Traum
often stopped by before heading back to Woodstock.
After Arlo Guthrie
debuted "Alice’s Restaurant" in 1966, hundreds of people called asking where they could buy the record. Arlo didn’t even have a recording contract yet. Bob knew Dave Van Ronk
, from the Village folk scene, from Conrad’s shop. (They shared a birthday and Fass remembers they once celebrated by sneaking into the Carmine Street Pool after dark.) Garland Jeffreys
, Buzzy Linhardt and Moogy Klingman
are hometown guys who still make repeat visits.
Other performers include Taj Mahal
, Paul Siebel
, Muddy Waters
, Otis Spann
, Skip James
, Rosalie Sorrels
, Tiny Tim
with his ukulele
, Jake & the Family Jewels
, Cat Mother & the All Night Newsboys
, Melanie
, Penny Arcade
, Rambling Jack Elliot, Tom Rapp
and Pearls before Swine
, Frank Zappa
, flute virtuoso Jeremy Steig
, The Holy Modal Rounders, Sis Cunningham
and Sammy Walker
.
Bob Dylan
was a significant guest on the show. Fass met Dylan before he began his radio career, double dating with Carla Rotolo
, one-time stage manager of The Hostage, and her sister, Suze, who was Dylan’s girlfriend. “We went out to dinner in the Village and played poker at Dylan’s apartment over The Music Inn on W. 4th Street,” Fass remembers. “When I started the show, he listened and occasionally I could squeeze a suggestion out of him. He turned me on to Lightnin' Hopkins
.”
Dylan first appeared on Bob’s show doing comic improvs with Suze Rotolo
and John Herald
in 1963. Listeners also got a preview of his forthcoming album, Freewheelin'
. In 1966, in the midst of recording Blonde on Blonde
, he returned to Radio Unnameable, taking phone calls from listeners. When Dylan’s crusading anthem, Hurricane
, came out in the mid 70s, Fass played it all night for five nights in a row and in 1986, when Dylan turned 45; he organized a 45-hour marathon of his music for WBAI.
Fass explained the connection to NPR reporter (and former WBAI news reporter) Jon Kalish, this way: “Bob Dylan
is the leading bard of our age. I feel grateful to have been alive while he's been writing. In a way, it’s like having known Shakespeare
.”
, editor of The Realist
, soon followed by Zen poet D.A. Levy, who spoke about legalizing marijuana. Krassner became a regular, along with Timothy Leary
, Wavy Gravy
, (aka comedian Hugh Romney), filmmaker Robert Downey
, (years later, Robert Downey Jr., the actor, sang on Radio Unnameable) musician David Amram
, comic actor and writer, Marshall Efron
, the club performer, Brother Theodore
, and Kinky Friedman
(years before he began writing mystery stories and took up politics).
Allen Ginsberg
, Peter Orlovsky
, and Gregory Corso
, turned up multiple times on Radio Unnameable. Over the course of many years, activist attorney Flo Kennedy kept listeners abreast of the latest injustices in America’s court system. Steve Ben Israel and Judith Malina
of the Living Theater, actor Rip Torn
(and more recently his son, director Tony Torn), Ed Sanders
, Tuli Kupferberg
, and the rest of The Fugs
, all made themselves comfortable on Fass’s show. Abbie Hoffman
, the former civil rights organizer turned political provocateur appeared regularly during the tumultuous years from 1968-1973. “We’d have a phone near the bed and call in,” Anita Hoffman
, told Jay Sand. “It was an incredible feeling of a small intimate community.”
Listening to Bob Fass’s programs from the 1960s and 70s is like time traveling through the jubilant birth and rocky growth of that community of idealistic and irreverent Americans, which dared to challenge the status quo.
Some believe it began one night on-air in 1966, when Fass invited “the Cabal” to join him for the Fly-In, a get together at JFK airport where he and his friends could meet and party with Radio Unnameable listeners and their friends, while aircraft took off and landed in the background. (“My vision was like the Hawaiians who greet you when you get off the plane with leis, a kiss, and song,” Fass says.)
About a month later, on Saturday, February 11, 1967, 3000 people showed up at midnight “on the coldest day of the year”, to play guitar and hang out at the International Arrivals Terminal underneath Alexander Calder
’s monumental mobile. Fass told author Jay Sand, “that was the first inkling I had that there were so many people and that they wanted so much to get together.” “Something about this electronic thing - this radio station - makes it possible to listen to other people like themselves and they get the idea they aren’t alone.”
Excited by the response to the Fly In, Fass and his friends looked for another opportunity to gather the tribe. Emmett Grogan
(who worked with the anarchist collective, the Diggers
and at The Free Store -“the trip without a ticket”, providing food and services to runaways and other needy citizens on New York’s Lower East Side) suggested the next get together should put all that positive energy towards a good purpose, “like cleaning up the junk on the Lower East Side.” That was all the encouragement Fass and Paul Krassner needed.
They announced plans for a Sweep In which would be held on April 8, 1967 and invited the audience to join them in cleaning up Krassner’s garbage-strewn block; 7th Street between Avenue D and 3rd Avenue. Word of the upcoming spring-cleaning eventually reached New York’s Sanitation Department. Apparently embarrassed by the idea of dirty hippies doing their work for them, city trucks were dispatched in the wee hours to clean the block, from top to bottom, a hitherto unprecedented occurrence.
That didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of Fass’s listeners. When they arrived armed with brooms, mops, sponges and cleaning solutions and discovered the original mission had been accomplished; they simply moved down to 3rd Street and started scrubbing there. The New York Times reported a sizeable group of participants were kids who came in from Westchester County and Long Island.
It wasn’t long before the movement nurtured in NYC went national.
Abbie Hoffman
became a household name in August 1967, after he led an anti-capitalist demonstration at the New York Stock Exchange, showering the traders with dollar bills. Bob Fass’s Radio Unnameable became the communications hub of the Yippies!, the Youth International Party
, started by Hoffman, Jerry Rubin
, Fass, Krassner, and a few others, to bring flower children, acidheads and old lefties together into one group that could change the course of American society.
The Yippies! got worldwide attention that October when they applied for permission to levitate the Pentagon during a massive anti-Vietnam War demonstration that attracted 50, 000 to Washington D.C. Fass can be heard on tapes of the event (along with Ed Sanders
of the rock group The Fugs
, and Mountain Girl) chanting, “out demons, out!” as they attempt to exorcize the evil spirits at the War Department.
But not every one appreciated the Yippies’ sense of humor and it proved hard to keep things light in 1968. Fass and his friends spent months on the air plotting a march on Chicago to coincide with the Democratic National Convention that August. They dubbed it the “Festival of Life”, in contrast to the “Festival of Death,” they felt the political power brokers were advancing in Vietnam. As a kind of a practice run for the big event, the Yippies decided to hold a Yip In at Grand Central Terminal in New York in March 1968.
It began as a happy go lucky party; a reunion of people who’d met at the Fly In and the Easter Be-In in Central Park the previous year. WBAI had reporters on the scene and Bob Fass was broadcasting phone calls from Paul Krassner
and others at Grand Central, describing the good vibes and great turn out. Then suddenly, things turned violent. Several hippies from the commune, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, decided it would be a great symbolic gesture to rip the hands off the clock at the train station in “a rape of time.” A couple others set off firecrackers and the NYPD began cracking heads and smashing cameras. As the panicked crowd streamed for the exits, over 200 cops cornered them, throwing individuals like Village Voice reporter, Don McNeil, through glass doors, and dragging others out and arresting them.
Decades before CNN or the World Wide Web existed to transmit news in “real time”, Radio Unnameable was there providing a link between people inside the terminal and the audience listening at home. (Fass even called the police precinct to let the cops know that the station was monitoring the attack live on the air). He broadcast eyewitness accounts from the scene and spoke to Abbie Hoffman
, who was getting his wounds patched up at Bellevue Hospital. Washington Post reporter, Nicholas Von Hoffman
, came directly from Grand Central to join Fass on the air. As a member of the establishment press, he opined, “I'd have to say the police used excessive force".
It was a brutal initiation for the Yippies but it was also the moment that solidified Bob Fass’s place in the city’s information network. He was providing up to the second, unfiltered news that citizens wary of mainstream press coverage could trust. As Jay Sand points out in the Radio Waves Unnameable— “Bob Fass did not just report the news, he helped mold the events of the time.“
The next month, when Columbia students occupied school buildings to protest the University’s stance on the war and a plan to evict Harlem residents in order to build a gymnasium, WBAI, with Fass’s show in the lead, “acted as a nerve center for the demonstrators.” After the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy (both in 1968), Fass provided in depth, ongoing alternative coverage, giving listeners and independent investigators a chance to grieve, discuss theories, express opinions and trade information considered too controversial for the major media to touch.
In the weeks leading up to the 1968 Democratic National Convention
, callers and guests on Radio Unnameable debated the wisdom of marching directly into the path of Mayor Richard J. Daley
’s troops. Fass cautioned listeners “to know what they were getting into should they choose to go. They don’t mess around in Chicago.” Vin Scelsa
, later a major NYC radio broadcaster in his own right, then a WBAI listener, told Jay Sand, “We all should have been indicted as co-conspirators, not just the Chicago Seven. We were all in on it. That whole thing was planned on Bob’s show.”
Fass rarely left his command center in WBAI’s Master Control but at the very last minute, he flew to Chicago and recorded everything he saw and heard…and not just from The Yippies’ point of view. After reporting a noise that sounded like “ an M1 cracking against someone’s head,” Fass noticed that some of the national guardsmen “look very frightened. They are putting on their gas masks. They aren’t very experienced with them.”
The ensuing attack, roughing up hippies and network news reporters alike, was broadcast live on television. When the dust settled, several of Fass’s comrades were arrested for conspiracy and inciting to riot. Fass escaped indictment and returned to WBAI
where over the next decade, his show became a kind of an alternative Town Hall; Abbie Hoffman
called virtually every night with an update from the show trial of the Chicago Seven, which lasted for months. Anti-draft protestors would phone from the courthouse after being arrested to ask Bob’s audience for help in raising bail. A woman called to say her landlord had set fire to her building and she had no other place to go—were there any carpenters listening who might help her rebuild? Over the long years of Rubin Carter
’s incarceration for a murder he did not commit, attorney Flo Kennedy called Radio Unnameable regularly “to keep the case in the consciousness of at least listeners to late night radio,” says Fass. He remembers visiting Woodstock
during the early 1970s and telling Bob Dylan
“Carter was being railroaded for being “an uppity nigger.” Several years later, Dylan produced his epic song telling the story of the unjust conviction (Hurricane
) and formed his Rolling Thunder Review specifically to raise funds for Carter’s defense. Fass calls the subsequent retrial and vindication of Carter “one of the great cooperative efforts where hippies and blacks united to achieve change before Jessie Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition
.”
Even in the years after Abbie Hoffman’s 1973 arrest for intent to sell cocaine (Fass believes he was set up), when he changed his name and appearance and went underground, he still surfaced occasionally on Radio Unnameable.
The stand off ended with some staff members seizing control of WBAI’s transmitter at the Empire State Building, while others (including Fass) remained barricaded in the studios, broadcasting until the phone lines were cut and the police arrived to haul them away.
New York City’s free speech station padlocked the front door and suspended broadcasting altogether for 35 days. Fass was banned for five long years, during which he returned to stage acting, did a guest residency at WFMU in New Jersey, and campaigned to return to his rightful throne at WBAI.
Since his reinstatement in 1982, Fass has continued in the same vein. Singers like Jeffrey Lewis
, Roy Zimmerman
, Debby Dalton, Kathy Zimmer and Rav Shmuel, blues guitarists Toby Walker and Guy Davis
, radical environmentalist Keith Lampke (AKA Ponderosa Pine) and visual artists like Keith Haring
, Art Spiegelman
and McArthur Fellow Ben Katchor
, are just a few who have joined the roster of Radio Unnameable guests.
Fass reassembled the members of The Lovin' Spoonful
on the air, emceed the Phil Ochs Memorial, (a tribute to the life and music of the folksinger broadcast live from the Lower East Side in December 2005) and flew to Houston to celebrate Jerry Jeff Walker
’s birthday, which he taped and played on the radio.
Fass was a fierce and consistent critic of, as he calls it, “Bush
’s war for oil” and continues to speak out against capital punishment, often putting prisoners who call from jail on the air. He has returned to the issue of homelessness in New York numerous times, raising awareness about the dangerous city shelters, reporting on the gentrification of many of the city’s neighborhoods which traditionally had offered affordable housing, and slamming the city’s “ assault on rent control.” In the mid 1980s, Fass made remote recordings at the tent city the homeless had erected in Tompkins Square Park
on the Lower East Side. He went on to work with the Living Theater and members of that community to produce a piece of theater based on their experiences (which included both professional actors and homeless people), called The Hands of God. By 2006, Fass’s time on WBAI had been reduced to just one night a week.
describes Bob Fass as: “a gigantic man with receding blond hair and thick black-rimmed glasses, with hands so huge they appeared to dominate his enormous frame. His voice, soft & gentle, which I heard coming from the office monitors seemed somehow detached from his body.” Post, who began as WBAI’s bookkeeper before hosting a program of his own, The Outside, describes how Fass took him under “his ample wing” and allowed him to watch him at work, teaching him what he knew, demystifying the whole process.
Julius Lester
, a former SNCC photographer, recalls being so in awe of Fass that for the first year he did his own program at WBAI people constantly mistook him for Bob.
Larry Josephson
who would became WBAI’S morning man and eventually station manager, remembers, the first time Bob motioned him into Master Control, “it was like Dorothy entering Oz.”
Indeed, Fass creates such a magical atmosphere and makes it all seem so easy, he has encouraged dozens of wanna-be DJs. His continuing impact is clear, according to Marc Fisher
, author of Something in the Air (Random House, 2007), who says Fass has inspired countless other personalities like Sirius shock jock Howard Stern
(who listened to Bob a lot as a kid) Tom Leykis
in L.A, and Vin Scelsa
, to ride the radio waves.
“I like the idea of sharing, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” says Fass. “I want to connect people in one city with people in another. I think information can cure almost anything.”
As previously noted, Fass has always been ready to lend an ear and share the air with absolutely anyone who felt they had something to say. This largesse often leads to endless, boring mouthing off that only a mother could love, but equally often leads to dynamic, intimate flurries of insight, energy, humor and understanding.
Unlike almost any other radio or television personality one can think of, silence never scares Bob Fass. Seconds pass as he seemingly ponders the thoughts of his guests, leaving them or you, the listener, a large space to fill in the blanks. In addition, to being a congenial master of ceremonies, Bob Fass is a good listener.
Fass has never been a brilliant monologist like Jean Shepherd
who preceded him on WOR in the late 50s, nor a star interviewer. His style is to make a few gentle stabs at drawing his guest out, and then he’s content to go with the flow. His singular talent, as Jay Sand notes in The Radio Waves Unnameable, is for orchestrating the great mix; “For Fass, beauty exists in the way events intertwine… the art came in the complete presentation.. and for better or worse, the divergent strands of life which Fass presented would have fused to form a lucid whole by the time he said, 'BYE BYE'.”
Looking back at the great “audio bazaar” he’s presided over for more than forty years, Fass says it’s the little moments that stand out for him. “Once at 3 am, a guy called from the Lower East Side
and was talking about something, then said, "Whoa! do you hear that thunder?" A woman in the Bronx who was also on the line, paused and then said, "Wow! Look at the lightening!" You could hear the thunder claps moving up town and you got the feeling of a network of the whole city."
Remembering the appearance of the Brooklyn Black Panthers on Radio Unnameable back in the day, Fass says, “I kind of like it when people come up a little hostile and suspicious and I and the audience warm them up and win them over by the end of the show.”
In 1971, a man called in about 2:45 in the morning and announced that he had taken pills and was going to commit suicide. He asked Fass to promise not to call authorities, but Fass refused. "I didn’t want to lie to him," Fass explained to a reporter the next day. “If the last thing someone says to you is a lie, that kind of cheapens life.” Fass spent the next two hours talking to the caller live on the air, as other WBAI workers contacted the police and the phone company attempted to trace the call.
Later that morning, the police finally found the caller lying unconscious on his bedroom floor. His telephone was off the hook, the radio tuned to WBAI. He was taken to the hospital in critical condition but survived. Fass says the man contacted him later and thanked him for being there. The press tried to turn Fass into a hero but he demurred. When a Daily News reporter arrived at his home, wanting to take his picture, Fass passed him a photo of his colleague, Larry Josephson
, through a crack in the door. Josephson made the front page, identified incorrectly as "Bob Fass, WBAI’s heroic DJ." Fass later commented that he thought, “Larry would enjoy having his picture in the paper.”
Columnist Jimmy Breslin
observed Fass on the job in 1985: “a large man in a tie dyed T-shirt, Fass had two or three callers on the air at once. They spoke about battered wife syndrome and low income mortgages. One caller arguing with another said, “Pathetic left wing drivel!” Someone threw the door open and said, we have food!” As Breslin left, he passed Melanie
on her way in, just arriving to sing on Radio Unnameable.
In the mid-1980s Fass was nearly homeless. AJ Weberman rented a truck for Fass and a large storage unit to hold his archives, paid in advance for many years.
Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher
remembers spending a night at WBAI in 2005. “A caller phoned in to say that kids were being roughed up by cops in Brooklyn. Bob effortlessly went to the phones and the show became an open forum where listeners offered almost play-by-play accounts of the encounter from their different perspectives. It was an amazing mix of old counter culture stalwarts and a new BAI audience of west Indians and African Americans. Bob Fass was the circuit that linked them.”
Fass was last paid for his radio time in 1977. Musicians like Dave Bromberg turn up at tributes to thank Bob “for giving us our careers.” Many of his protégées have turned colleagues, like Steve Post
, Larry Josephson
, and Vin Scelsa
, and have spoken of his generosity with his time. Listeners have made donations to his retirement fund. “It’s better than BAI paying me that people remember me, I guess,” Fass says.
In 2005, attorney Neil Fabricant, President Emeritus of the School of Social Policy at GWU, organized a rent party
for Fass. “The right wing has spent billions of dollars to revise the history of an era and to distort the collective memory,” Fabricant says. He suggests that restoring and properly archiving the 45 years of Bob Fass’s program “would be a giant first step in reclaiming that history.”
80 hours of Radio Unnameable have been acquired and are currently available at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York. There is a documentary film
currently in production about Fass and Radio Unnameable,.
“Like many others, Bob wanted to change the world. Unlike many others, he had access to the airwaves and therefore a very real opportunity to do so.” says Jay Sand.
Good Evening Cabal, a weekly show on a Florida-based community FM station, is named as a tribute to Bob Fass by its host, Curt Werner, who as a Brooklyn teenager listened to Fass in the 1960s on WBAI. The program, which features music from the 1960s and 1970s and live interviews with artists and writers from that era, has been on the air for four years on WSLR 96.5 LPFM in Sarasota, Fla. Fass himself appeared as a guest on the show in 2007.
, Abbie Hoffman
, and Phil Ochs
":Bob Fass in Chicago - August 27, 1968
An audio file (mp3 format) of a Radio Unnameable, a 90-minute segment with Bob Dylan
as guest from 1966: Bob Dylan on WBAI
Fass’s program, Radio Unnameable, first aired in 1963 on WBAI
WBAI
WBAI, a part of the Pacifica Radio Network, is a non-commercial, listener-supported radio station, broadcasting at 99.5 FM in New York City.Its programming is leftist/progressive, and a mixture of political news and opinion from a leftist perspective, tinged with aspects of its complex and varied...
, a listener-sponsored, non-commercial radio station operating out of New York City. From the beginning the show featured the work, and impromptu interviews, of counterculture figures such as Paul Krassner
Paul Krassner
Paul Krassner is an author, journalist, stand-up comedian, and the founder, editor and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958...
, Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
, and Abbie Hoffman
Abbie Hoffman
Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ....
, and the first performances of Arlo Guthrie
Arlo Guthrie
Arlo Davy Guthrie is an American folk singer. Like his father, Woody Guthrie, Arlo often sings songs of protest against social injustice...
's Alice's Restaurant
Alice's Restaurant
"Alice's Restaurant Massacree" is a musical monologue by singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie released on his 1967 album Alice's Restaurant. The song is one of Guthrie's most prominent works, based on a true incident in his life that began on Thanksgiving Day 1965, and which inspired a 1969 movie of the...
and Jerry Jeff Walker
Jerry Jeff Walker
Jerry Jeff Walker is an American country music singer and songwriter. He is probably most famous for writing the song "Mr. Bojangles.-Biography:...
's Mr. Bojangles
Mr. Bojangles
Mr. Bojangles may refer to:* Bill Robinson, African-American tap dance performer, also known as Mr. Bojangles* Mr. Bojangles , a song written by Jerry Jeff Walker, covered by several artists**Mr...
among others.
Show content
As an early pioneer of free form radio, Fass would air a variety of different features each night. As Marc Fisher describes it:"... he started free-form radio, each night creating a program with no format, an improvised mélange of live music, speeches, and random phone calls. Radio Unnameable was a radio party line on which Fass piled one caller atop another and said, 'Speak among yourselves.' It was a forum for eyewitness reports from war zones and urban conflicts, recitations of poetry and prose, solicitations for political causes, testimonials for illegal drugs, and experiments with noise and silence." Notable guests include investigative reporter Mae Brussell
Mae Brussell
Mae Brussell was a conspiracy theorist and radio personality.Born in Beverly Hills, California, Mae was the daughter of the prominent Wilshire Boulevard Temple Rabbi Edgar Magnin and great-granddaughter of Isaac Magnin, founder of the I...
, Abbie Hoffman
Abbie Hoffman
Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ....
commenting on the Chicago Seven
Chicago Seven
The Chicago Seven were seven defendants—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner—charged with conspiracy, inciting to riot, and other charges related to protests that took place in Chicago, Illinois on the occasion of the 1968...
trial, a planning session for the Central Park Be-In
Central Park Be-In
Between 1967 and 1968 several "be-ins" were held in Central Park to protest against various issues such as US involvement in the Vietnam War and racism. This park was a place where all of the different types of people that New York contained could mingle....
, and the first radio appearance of Phoebe Snow.
Response to the show
Neil Fabricant, Legislative Director of New York’s ACLU during the 1960s, has said that Fass was “a midwife at the birth of the counter culture.” Ralph Engleman, in his book, Public Radio & TV in America: A Political History, cites Fass as "the father of freeform radio."He also plays a major role in Marc Fisher
Marc Fisher
Marc Fisher was a columnist for the Washington Post between 2000 and 2009. He is now the Enterprise Editor for the Post. He attended the Horace Mann School and Princeton University. He worked at the Miami Herald from 1981 to 1986. Since then, he has worked at the Washington Post as a reporter,...
’s book, Something In The Air, which covers radio’s impact in the post TV years. The Washington Post columnist describes how the “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!” scene in the film, Network
Network (film)
Network is a 1976 American satirical film released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer about a fictional television network, Union Broadcasting System , and its struggle with poor ratings. The film was written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet...
, grew out of an actual incident when WOR
WOR (AM)
WOR is a class A , AM radio station located in New York, New York, U.S., operating on 710 kHz. The station has a talk format and has been owned by Buckley Broadcasting since 1987, after the station was sold by RKO. The station has conservative, or right-of-center hosts.Its call letters have no...
’s Jean Shepherd
Jean Shepherd
Jean Parker Shepherd was an American raconteur, radio and TV personality, writer and actor who was often referred to by the nickname Shep....
exhorted his listeners to throw open their windows, stick out their heads, and shout, “Excelsior!", then he goes on to write:
“Shepherd took the unseen audience and let them see each other, but it’s Bob Fass who took that to the next level, giving it social and political meaning. Fass really opened the door and summoned the audience into the action. He used the mass media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
to amass a very real movement.”
Early years
Bob Fass was born June 29, 1933 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Fass received a scholarship to study acting with Sandy Meisner and Sidney Pollack at the Neighborhood PlayhouseNeighborhood Playhouse
The Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre is an actor training school at 340 East 54th Street in New York City, generally associated with the Meisner technique of Sanford Meisner.-History:...
and was also a member of Stella Adler
Stella Adler
Stella Adler was an American actress and an acclaimed acting teacher, who founded the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City and the The Stella Adler Academy of Acting in Los Angeles with long-time protege Joanne Linville, who continues to teach and furthers Adler's legacy...
’s workshop. He appeared on stage in Brendan Behan
Brendan Behan
Brendan Francis Behan was an Irish poet, short story writer, novelist, and playwright who wrote in both Irish and English. He was also an Irish republican and a volunteer in the Irish Republican Army.-Early life:...
’s The Hostage at Circle in the Square, The Execution of Private Slovik
The Execution of Private Slovik
The Execution of Private Slovik is a nonfiction book by William Bradford Huie, published in 1954, and an American made-for-television movie that aired on NBC on March 13, 1974. The film was written for the screen by...
with Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Lee Hoffman is an American actor with a career in film, television, and theatre since 1960. He has been known for his versatile portrayals of antiheroes and vulnerable characters....
, and The Man with the Golden Arm
The Man with the Golden Arm
The Man with the Golden Arm is a 1955 American drama film, based on the novel of the same name by Nelson Algren, which tells the story of a heroin addict who gets clean while in prison, but struggles to stay that way in the outside world. It stars Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, Kim Novak, Arnold...
at the Cherry Lane
Cherry Lane Theatre
The Cherry Lane Theatre , located at 38 Commerce Street in the borough of Manhattan, was New York City's oldest, continuously running off-Broadway theater...
, among other New York productions. When he went into the army in 1956, he started a theater at Fort Bragg, North Carolina
Fort Bragg, North Carolina
Fort Bragg is a major United States Army installation, in Cumberland and Hoke counties, North Carolina, U.S., mostly in Fayetteville but also partly in the town of Spring Lake. It was also a census-designated place in the 2010 census and had a population of 39,457. The fort is named for Confederate...
. In 1960, he took over the role of the warden in the legendary off-Broadway
Off-Broadway
Off-Broadway theater is a term for a professional venue in New York City with a seating capacity between 100 and 499, and for a specific production of a play, musical or revue that appears in such a venue, and which adheres to related trade union and other contracts...
production of Threepenny Opera with Lotte Lenya
Lotte Lenya
Lotte Lenya was an Austrian singer, diseuse, and actress. In the German-speaking and classical music world she is best remembered for her performances of the songs of her husband, Kurt Weill. In English-language film she is remembered for her Academy Award-nominated role in The Roman Spring of Mrs...
. Over the next two years, he played a variety of roles in the show, also acting as assistant stage manager.
In 1963, he began working at WBAI, one of the nation’s first listener-sponsored, non-commercial radio stations, operated by the Pacifica Foundation. Novelist and poet Richard Elman
Richard Elman
Richard Elman was a novelist, poet, journalist, and teacher. He was born in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Yiddish-speaking and came to this country at the turn of the 20th century from Russo-Poland. His boyhood is captured in his comic novel Fredi & Shirl & The Kids: An Autobiography In...
, a friend of Fass’s from high school, who was producing programs for the station’s Drama & Literature Department, helped Foss get a job as an announcer. He then was given the midnight to dawn time block to use as he wished. Jay Sand, in The Radio Waves Unnameable, writes “He had the same supplies as any other broadcaster---two turntables, a microphone, a stack of records, perhaps a guest in the studio, a friend on the phone,... (but) the radio program he created however transcended those common wares.”
Radio Unnameable
The UnnamableThe Unnamable (novel)
The Unnamable is a 1953 novel by Samuel Beckett. It is the third and final entry in Beckett's "Trilogy" of novels, which begins with Molloy followed by Malone Dies. It was originally published in French as L'Innommable and later adapted by the author into English...
by Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, which Fass was reading at the time, gave the show its title. His signature greeting, “Good morning, cabal,” came from a listener. “I wanted a sign-on line, like William B. Williams “Good morning, world,” says Fass. “Someone sent in a postcard suggesting, “Good morning, cabal.” I looked it up in the dictionary and discovered that the word, cabal, comes from “horse.” Originally, people met on horseback at night with their identities concealed-even from each other—to plot or plan something subversive. And I thought, that’s it: “Good morning, cabal.”
Fass brought his acting training to the radio via his voice. Filmmaker Susan Lazarus recalls listening to Bob’s show as a teenager. She drifted off to sleep and woke some hours later to hear Tom Rush
Tom Rush
Tom Rush is an American folk and blues singer, songwriter, musician and recording artist.- Life and career :Rush was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His father was a teacher at St. Paul's School, in Concord, New Hampshire. Tom began performing in 1961 while studying at Harvard University after...
singing a beautiful song live in BAI’s studio. It was called Urge For Going, by a new Canadian songwriter named Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell, CC is a Canadian musician, singer songwriter, and painter. Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in her native Saskatchewan and Western Canada and then busking in the streets and dives of Toronto...
(who would also go on to sing and play the piano on Radio Unnameable). Lazarus remembers the sense of discovering something with Fass at the very instant of transmission. “It was like magic.”
Nowhere else, Jay Sand writes, could you hear a DJ “playing two records at the same time or backwards, or the same song over and over and over again, simply because he liked its message. Nowhere else in the early 60s could you hear callers and hosts alike criticize LBJ [President Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon Baines Johnson , often referred to as LBJ, was the 36th President of the United States after his service as the 37th Vice President of the United States...
] for escalating the War in Vietnam, encourage men to burn their draft cards, or talk in glowing terms about their drug experiences. Radio Unnameable was a counterculture radio show before anyone ever applied the term to America’s drop-out youth. Bob Fass was a hippie before there were hippies.”
From the earliest days of Radio Unnameable, Fass experimented with sound, inspired by the audio art he’d heard by John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
and Bill Butler
Bill Butler
Bill Butler is a Scottish Labour Co-operative politician and former MSP. He represented Glasgow Anniesland in the Scottish Parliament until losing his seat in the 2011 election. He had been elected in the by-election following the death of First Minister Donald Dewar...
. He collaborated with Gerd Stern and Michael Callahan
Michael Callahan
Michael Callahan is an American soccer player who currently plays for Richmond Kickers in the USL Professional Division.-Youth and Amateur:...
’s media collective, USCO
USCO
USCO was a media art collective in the 60s and 70s, founded by Michael Callahan and Gerd Stern, who also founded Intermedia Systems Corporation which produced multimedia art internationally. Influenced by media theorist Marshall McLuhan, they were using stroboscopes, projectors and audiotapes in...
, which had produced sound fields for Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary
Timothy Francis Leary was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. During a time when drugs like LSD and psilocybin were legal, Leary conducted experiments at Harvard University under the Harvard Psilocybin Project, resulting in the Concord Prison...
’s Fillmore East
Fillmore East
The Fillmore East was rock promoter Bill Graham's rock venue on Second Avenue near East 6th Street in the East Village neighborhood of the Manhattan borough of New York City. It was open from 1968 to 1971, and featured some of the biggest acts in rock music at the time...
shows, then dove in and began creating dense mixes on the air.
On the spur of the moment, Fass would layer four or five sources of sound; an instructional typing record… a Hopi
Hopi
The Hopi are a federally recognized tribe of indigenous Native American people, who primarily live on the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona. The Hopi area according to the 2000 census has a population of 6,946 people. Their Hopi language is one of the 30 of the Uto-Aztecan language...
Indian ceremony…an anti-war song…cannons firing…an excerpt from a play. He would weave the sources in and out; make them louder, then softer, introducing new voices and noises that would comment on the state of the nation or just create a mood. When everything came together in a moment of perfect timing, the effect was mesmerizing.
Watching the production of these mixes behind the scenes was sometimes just as entertaining as listening to them on the air. Fass would get a brainstorm only seconds before a cut would run out and fly into the record library in search of the perfect segue. “He existed on a slightly different plain than the rest of us,” Steve Post
Steve Post
Steve Post is an American freeform radio artist, author of Playing in the FM Band .In 2006 he celebrated his 25th anniversary as program host on WNYC, New York City's principal NPR affiliate station. For 20 years he was host of WNYC 93.9's Morning Music program...
recalled in his memoir of life at WBAI, Playing in the FM Band. “He was more spontaneous. We all copied him, but he was the best.”
Fass always pressed to expand the boundaries of radio communication. In the mid 70s, he asked the station’s Chief Engineer and resident technical guru, Mike Edl, if there was any way to rig up a contraption that would allow him to put as many as ten phone calls on the air at the same time. The system Edl built became a centerpiece of Fass’s show, allowing more of his listeners to connect with him, and with each other. Fass rarely rushes callers off the phone. Community organizers know they can always count on Fass for airtime to spread word of current crises or upcoming events. He is an ongoing outlet for the unsung, unspun, ignored and unknown. At least one suicidal listener called in to receive on air counseling.
Musicians
A long list of musicians have appeared on Radio Unnameable, including Townes Van ZandtTownes Van Zandt
John Townes Van Zandt , best known as Townes Van Zandt, was an American Texas Country-folk music singer-songwriter, performer, and poet...
, David Peel, Richie Havens
Richie Havens
Richard P. "Richie" Havens is an African American folk singer and guitarist. He is best known for his intense, rhythmic guitar style , soulful covers of pop and folk songs, and his opening performance at the 1969 Woodstock Festival.-Career:Born in Brooklyn, Havens was the eldest of nine children...
, Jose Feliciano
José Feliciano
José Feliciano is a Puerto Rican singer, virtuoso guitarist and composer known for many international hits including the 1970 holiday single "Feliz Navidad".-Childhood:...
, Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell, CC is a Canadian musician, singer songwriter, and painter. Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in her native Saskatchewan and Western Canada and then busking in the streets and dives of Toronto...
, The Fugs
The Fugs
The Fugs are a band formed in New York in late 1964 by poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, with Ken Weaver on drums. Soon afterward, they were joined by Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber of the Holy Modal Rounders...
, Patti Smith
Patti Smith
Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses....
and Phil Ochs
Phil Ochs
Philip David Ochs was an American protest singer and songwriter who was known for his sharp wit, sardonic humor, earnest humanism, political activism, insightful and alliterative lyrics, and haunting voice...
(parodying "Positively 4th Street
Positively 4th Street
"Positively 4th Street" is a song written and performed by Bob Dylan, first recorded by Dylan in New York City on July 29, 1965. It was released as a single by Columbia Records on September 7, 1965, reaching #1 on Canada's RPM chart, #7 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, and #8 on the UK Singles Chart...
"; half pretending a comic competition with Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
, but later telling disapproving callers that it was Dylan’s right to play with an electric guitar and a band behind him). Jerry Jeff Walker
Jerry Jeff Walker
Jerry Jeff Walker is an American country music singer and songwriter. He is probably most famous for writing the song "Mr. Bojangles.-Biography:...
and David Bromberg
David Bromberg
David Bromberg is an American multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter. Bromberg has an eclectic style, playing bluegrass, blues, folk, jazz, country and western, and rock and roll equally well. He is known for his quirky, humorous lyrics, and the ability to play rhythm and lead guitar at the...
introduced the song Mr. Bojangles
Mr. Bojangles
Mr. Bojangles may refer to:* Bill Robinson, African-American tap dance performer, also known as Mr. Bojangles* Mr. Bojangles , a song written by Jerry Jeff Walker, covered by several artists**Mr...
on the show, The Incredible String Band came over from England with their manager, Joe Boyd
Joe Boyd
Joe Boyd is an American record producer and former owner of the Witchseason production company. Boyd was instrumental in launching the careers of Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, and The Incredible String Band.-Career:...
, Happy
Happy Traum
Happy Traum is an American folk musician who started playing music in the Fifties. Happy is most famously known as one half of Happy and Artie Traum, a duo he began with his brother...
and Artie Traum
Artie Traum
Artie Traum was a New Age Voice Award-winning guitarist, producer and songwriter. Traum's work appeared on more than 35 albums...
often stopped by before heading back to Woodstock.
After Arlo Guthrie
Arlo Guthrie
Arlo Davy Guthrie is an American folk singer. Like his father, Woody Guthrie, Arlo often sings songs of protest against social injustice...
debuted "Alice’s Restaurant" in 1966, hundreds of people called asking where they could buy the record. Arlo didn’t even have a recording contract yet. Bob knew Dave Van Ronk
Dave Van Ronk
Dave Van Ronk was an American folk singer, born in Brooklyn, New York, who settled in Greenwich Village, New York, and was eventually nicknamed the "Mayor of MacDougal Street" ....
, from the Village folk scene, from Conrad’s shop. (They shared a birthday and Fass remembers they once celebrated by sneaking into the Carmine Street Pool after dark.) Garland Jeffreys
Garland Jeffreys
Garland Jeffreys is a part African-American, and Puerto Rican American, singer and songwriter, transversing the musical genres of rock and roll, reggae, blues and soul.-Career:...
, Buzzy Linhardt and Moogy Klingman
Moogy Klingman
Mark "Moogy" Klingman was an American musician and songwriter. He was a founding member of Todd Rundgren's musical team Utopia, and later became a solo recording artist, bandleader and songwriter...
are hometown guys who still make repeat visits.
Other performers include Taj Mahal
Taj Mahal (musician)
Henry Saint Clair Fredericks , who uses the stage name Taj Mahal, is an American Grammy Award winning blues musician. He incorporates elements of world music into his music...
, Paul Siebel
Paul Siebel
Paul Siebel is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist, born on September 19, 1937 in Buffalo, NY. He is best known for other artist's cover versions of his songs, most notably "Louise"...
, Muddy Waters
Muddy Waters
McKinley Morganfield , known as Muddy Waters, was an American blues musician, generally considered the "father of modern Chicago blues"...
, Otis Spann
Otis Spann
Otis Spann was an American blues musician, who many consider the leading postwar Chicago blues pianist.-Career:Born in Jackson, Mississippi, United States, Spann became known for his distinct piano style....
, Skip James
Skip James
Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James was an American Delta blues singer, guitarist, pianist and songwriter, born in Bentonia, Mississippi, died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania....
, Rosalie Sorrels
Rosalie Sorrels
Rosalie Sorrels is an American folk singer-songwriter who resides in the mountains near Boise, Idaho. She began her public career as a singer and collector of traditional folksongs in the late 1950s. During the early 1960s she left her husband and began traveling and performing at music festivals...
, Tiny Tim
Tiny Tim (musician)
Tiny Tim , , born in Manhattan, was an American singer and ukulele player. He was most famous for his rendition of "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" sung in a distinctive high falsetto/vibrato voice.-Rise to fame:Born to Lebanese parents in 1932, Khaury displayed musical talent at a very young age...
with his ukulele
Ukulele
The ukulele, ; from ; it is a subset of the guitar family of instruments, generally with four nylon or gut strings or four courses of strings....
, Jake & the Family Jewels
Bunky and Jake
Bunky and Jake were an American folk-rock duo, who were a part of the New York folk music scene in the 1960s and 1970s.Andrea "Bunky" Skinner and Allan "Jake" Jacobs, who later formed Jake and The Family Jewels, met in 1962 at the School of Visual Arts in New York and performed in the Greenwich...
, Cat Mother & the All Night Newsboys
Cat Mother & the All Night Newsboys
Cat Mother and The All Night Newsboys was an American musical group, originally formed in New York and later based in Mendocino, California, most active in the late 1960s and early 1970s.- History :...
, Melanie
Melanie Safka
Melanie Anne Safka-Schekeryk is an American singer-songwriter. Known professionally as simply Melanie, she is best known for her hits "Brand New Key", "Ruby Tuesday" and "Lay Down ".-Early career:...
, Penny Arcade
Penny Arcade (performer)
Susana Ventura , better known by her stage name Penny Arcade, is an American performance artist, actress, and playwright based in New York City.-Career:...
, Rambling Jack Elliot, Tom Rapp
Tom Rapp
Thomas Dale Rapp is an American singer and songwriter, best known as the leader of Pearls Before Swine, the psychedelic folk rock group of the 1960s and 1970s. More recently he has practiced as a lawyer.-Life:...
and Pearls before Swine
Pearls Before Swine
"Pearls before swine" refers to a quotation from Matthew 7:6 in Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, implying that things should not be put in front of people who do not appreciate their value....
, Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa
Frank Vincent Zappa was an American composer, singer-songwriter, electric guitarist, record producer and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, orchestral and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed...
, flute virtuoso Jeremy Steig
Jeremy Steig
-Biography:Steig is the son of New Yorker cartoonist William Steig,At age 19 Steig was involved in a motorcycle accident which left him paralyzed on one side...
, The Holy Modal Rounders, Sis Cunningham
Sis Cunningham
Agnes Cunningham was an American musician, best known for her involvement as a performer and publicist of folk music and protest songs...
and Sammy Walker
Sammy Walker
Sammy Walker is an American singer-songwriter. Influenced by the folk and country sounds of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams, Walker emerged in the mid 1970s with two albums for the Folkways label and two albums for Warner Brothers...
.
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
was a significant guest on the show. Fass met Dylan before he began his radio career, double dating with Carla Rotolo
Carla Rotolo
Carla Rotolo is the older sister of Suze Rotolo, one of Bob Dylan's early girlfriends in New York City.Carla was the first child of Joachim Rotolo and Mary Pezzati Rotolo who were union activists...
, one-time stage manager of The Hostage, and her sister, Suze, who was Dylan’s girlfriend. “We went out to dinner in the Village and played poker at Dylan’s apartment over The Music Inn on W. 4th Street,” Fass remembers. “When I started the show, he listened and occasionally I could squeeze a suggestion out of him. He turned me on to Lightnin' Hopkins
Lightnin' Hopkins
Sam John Hopkins better known as Lightnin’ Hopkins, was an American country blues singer, songwriter, guitarist and occasional pianist, from Houston, Texas...
.”
Dylan first appeared on Bob’s show doing comic improvs with Suze Rotolo
Suze Rotolo
Susan Elizabeth Rotolo , known as Suze Rotolo , was an American artist, but is perhaps best known as Bob Dylan's girlfriend between 1961 and 1964 and a strong influence on his music...
and John Herald
John Herald
John Herald was an American folk and bluegrass songwriter, solo and studio musician, and one-time member of The Greenbriar Boys trio.-Biography:...
in 1963. Listeners also got a preview of his forthcoming album, Freewheelin'
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is the second studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in May 1963 by Columbia Records. Whereas his debut album Bob Dylan had contained only two original songs, Freewheelin initiated the process of writing contemporary words to traditional melodies....
. In 1966, in the midst of recording Blonde on Blonde
Blonde on Blonde
Blonde on Blonde is American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's seventh studio album, released in May or June 1966 on Columbia Records and produced by Bob Johnston. Recording sessions commenced in New York in October 1965, with a plethora of backing musicians, including members of Dylan's live backing...
, he returned to Radio Unnameable, taking phone calls from listeners. When Dylan’s crusading anthem, Hurricane
Hurricane (song)
"Hurricane" is a protest song by Bob Dylan co-written with Jacques Levy, about the imprisonment of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. It compiles alleged acts of racism and profiling against Carter, which Dylan describes as leading to a false trial and conviction....
, came out in the mid 70s, Fass played it all night for five nights in a row and in 1986, when Dylan turned 45; he organized a 45-hour marathon of his music for WBAI.
Fass explained the connection to NPR reporter (and former WBAI news reporter) Jon Kalish, this way: “Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
is the leading bard of our age. I feel grateful to have been alive while he's been writing. In a way, it’s like having known Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
.”
“Midwife to a Movement”
Fass remembers his very first guest on the air was Paul KrassnerPaul Krassner
Paul Krassner is an author, journalist, stand-up comedian, and the founder, editor and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958...
, editor of The Realist
The Realist
The Realist was a pioneering magazine of "social-political-religious criticism and satire," intended as a hybrid of a grown-ups version of Mad and Lyle Stuart's anti-censorship monthly The Independent. Edited and published by Paul Krassner, and often regarded as a milestone in the American...
, soon followed by Zen poet D.A. Levy, who spoke about legalizing marijuana. Krassner became a regular, along with Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary
Timothy Francis Leary was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. During a time when drugs like LSD and psilocybin were legal, Leary conducted experiments at Harvard University under the Harvard Psilocybin Project, resulting in the Concord Prison...
, Wavy Gravy
Wavy Gravy
Wavy Gravy is an American entertainer and activist for peace, best known for his hippie appearance, personality and beliefs. His moniker...
, (aka comedian Hugh Romney), filmmaker Robert Downey
Robert Downey
Robert Downey may refer to:* Robert Downey, Sr. , director* Robert Downey, Jr. , actor, son of the above...
, (years later, Robert Downey Jr., the actor, sang on Radio Unnameable) musician David Amram
David Amram
David Amram is an American composer, musician, conductor, and writer. As a classical composer and performer, his integration of jazz , ethnic and folk music has led him to work with the likes of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Willie Nelson, Langston...
, comic actor and writer, Marshall Efron
Marshall Efron
Marshall Efron is an American humorist originally known for his work on the listener-sponsored Pacifica radio stations WBAI New York and KPFK Los Angeles, and later for the PBS television show The Great American Dream Machine...
, the club performer, Brother Theodore
Brother Theodore
Brother Theodore , born Theodore Gottlieb, was a German-American monologuist and comedian known for rambling, stream-of-consciousness dialogues which he called "stand-up tragedy".-Early years:...
, and Kinky Friedman
Kinky Friedman
Richard S. "Kinky" Friedman is an American Texas Country singer, songwriter, novelist, humorist, politician and former columnist for Texas Monthly who styles himself in the mold of popular American satirists Will Rogers and Mark Twain. He was one of two independent candidates in the 2006 election...
(years before he began writing mystery stories and took up politics).
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
, Peter Orlovsky
Peter Orlovsky
Peter Anton Orlovsky was an American poet.-Life and work:Orlovsky was born in the Lower East Side of New York City, the son of Katherine and Oleg Orlovsky, a Russian immigrant. He was raised in poverty and was forced to drop out of Newtown High School in his senior year so he could support his...
, and Gregory Corso
Gregory Corso
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...
, turned up multiple times on Radio Unnameable. Over the course of many years, activist attorney Flo Kennedy kept listeners abreast of the latest injustices in America’s court system. Steve Ben Israel and Judith Malina
Judith Malina
Judith Malina is an American theater and film actress, writer, and director, who was one of the founders of The Living Theatre.-Early life:...
of the Living Theater, actor Rip Torn
Rip Torn
Elmore Rual "Rip" Torn, Jr. , is an American actor of stage, screen and television.Torn received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his role in the 1983 film Cross Creek. His work includes the role of Artie, the producer, on The Larry Sanders Show, for which he was nominated...
(and more recently his son, director Tony Torn), Ed Sanders
Ed Sanders
Ed Sanders is an American poet, singer, social activist, environmentalist, author and publisher and has been a longtime member of the band The Fugs. He has been called a bridge between the Beat and Hippie generations.-Biography:...
, Tuli Kupferberg
Tuli Kupferberg
Naphtali "Tuli" Kupferberg was an American counterculture poet, author, cartoonist, pacifist anarchist, publisher and co-founder of the band The Fugs.-Biography:...
, and the rest of The Fugs
The Fugs
The Fugs are a band formed in New York in late 1964 by poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, with Ken Weaver on drums. Soon afterward, they were joined by Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber of the Holy Modal Rounders...
, all made themselves comfortable on Fass’s show. Abbie Hoffman
Abbie Hoffman
Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ....
, the former civil rights organizer turned political provocateur appeared regularly during the tumultuous years from 1968-1973. “We’d have a phone near the bed and call in,” Anita Hoffman
Anita Hoffman
Anita Hoffman , born Anita Kushner, and was a Yippie activist, writer, prankster, and the wife of Abbie Hoffman.Hoffman helped her husband plan some of the most memorable pranks of the Yippie movement...
, told Jay Sand. “It was an incredible feeling of a small intimate community.”
Listening to Bob Fass’s programs from the 1960s and 70s is like time traveling through the jubilant birth and rocky growth of that community of idealistic and irreverent Americans, which dared to challenge the status quo.
Some believe it began one night on-air in 1966, when Fass invited “the Cabal” to join him for the Fly-In, a get together at JFK airport where he and his friends could meet and party with Radio Unnameable listeners and their friends, while aircraft took off and landed in the background. (“My vision was like the Hawaiians who greet you when you get off the plane with leis, a kiss, and song,” Fass says.)
About a month later, on Saturday, February 11, 1967, 3000 people showed up at midnight “on the coldest day of the year”, to play guitar and hang out at the International Arrivals Terminal underneath Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder was an American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing mobile sculptures. In addition to mobile and stable sculpture, Alexander Calder also created paintings, lithographs, toys, tapestry, jewelry and household objects.-Childhood:Alexander "Sandy" Calder was born in Lawnton,...
’s monumental mobile. Fass told author Jay Sand, “that was the first inkling I had that there were so many people and that they wanted so much to get together.” “Something about this electronic thing - this radio station - makes it possible to listen to other people like themselves and they get the idea they aren’t alone.”
Excited by the response to the Fly In, Fass and his friends looked for another opportunity to gather the tribe. Emmett Grogan
Emmett Grogan
Emmett Grogan was a founder of the Diggers, a radical community-action group of Improv actors in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, California...
(who worked with the anarchist collective, the Diggers
Diggers (theater)
The Diggers were a radical community-action group of activists and Improv actors operating from 1966–68, based in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Their politics were such that they have sometimes been categorized as "left-wing." More accurately, they were "community anarchists"...
and at The Free Store -“the trip without a ticket”, providing food and services to runaways and other needy citizens on New York’s Lower East Side) suggested the next get together should put all that positive energy towards a good purpose, “like cleaning up the junk on the Lower East Side.” That was all the encouragement Fass and Paul Krassner needed.
They announced plans for a Sweep In which would be held on April 8, 1967 and invited the audience to join them in cleaning up Krassner’s garbage-strewn block; 7th Street between Avenue D and 3rd Avenue. Word of the upcoming spring-cleaning eventually reached New York’s Sanitation Department. Apparently embarrassed by the idea of dirty hippies doing their work for them, city trucks were dispatched in the wee hours to clean the block, from top to bottom, a hitherto unprecedented occurrence.
That didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of Fass’s listeners. When they arrived armed with brooms, mops, sponges and cleaning solutions and discovered the original mission had been accomplished; they simply moved down to 3rd Street and started scrubbing there. The New York Times reported a sizeable group of participants were kids who came in from Westchester County and Long Island.
It wasn’t long before the movement nurtured in NYC went national.
Abbie Hoffman
Abbie Hoffman
Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ....
became a household name in August 1967, after he led an anti-capitalist demonstration at the New York Stock Exchange, showering the traders with dollar bills. Bob Fass’s Radio Unnameable became the communications hub of the Yippies!, the Youth International Party
Youth International Party
The Youth International Party, whose members were commonly called Yippies, was a radically youth-oriented and countercultural revolutionary offshoot of the free speech and anti-war movements of the 1960s. It was founded on Dec. 31, 1967...
, started by Hoffman, Jerry Rubin
Jerry Rubin
Jerry Rubin was an American social activist during the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s, he became a successful businessman.-Early life:...
, Fass, Krassner, and a few others, to bring flower children, acidheads and old lefties together into one group that could change the course of American society.
The Yippies! got worldwide attention that October when they applied for permission to levitate the Pentagon during a massive anti-Vietnam War demonstration that attracted 50, 000 to Washington D.C. Fass can be heard on tapes of the event (along with Ed Sanders
Ed Sanders
Ed Sanders is an American poet, singer, social activist, environmentalist, author and publisher and has been a longtime member of the band The Fugs. He has been called a bridge between the Beat and Hippie generations.-Biography:...
of the rock group The Fugs
The Fugs
The Fugs are a band formed in New York in late 1964 by poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, with Ken Weaver on drums. Soon afterward, they were joined by Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber of the Holy Modal Rounders...
, and Mountain Girl) chanting, “out demons, out!” as they attempt to exorcize the evil spirits at the War Department.
But not every one appreciated the Yippies’ sense of humor and it proved hard to keep things light in 1968. Fass and his friends spent months on the air plotting a march on Chicago to coincide with the Democratic National Convention that August. They dubbed it the “Festival of Life”, in contrast to the “Festival of Death,” they felt the political power brokers were advancing in Vietnam. As a kind of a practice run for the big event, the Yippies decided to hold a Yip In at Grand Central Terminal in New York in March 1968.
It began as a happy go lucky party; a reunion of people who’d met at the Fly In and the Easter Be-In in Central Park the previous year. WBAI had reporters on the scene and Bob Fass was broadcasting phone calls from Paul Krassner
Paul Krassner
Paul Krassner is an author, journalist, stand-up comedian, and the founder, editor and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958...
and others at Grand Central, describing the good vibes and great turn out. Then suddenly, things turned violent. Several hippies from the commune, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, decided it would be a great symbolic gesture to rip the hands off the clock at the train station in “a rape of time.” A couple others set off firecrackers and the NYPD began cracking heads and smashing cameras. As the panicked crowd streamed for the exits, over 200 cops cornered them, throwing individuals like Village Voice reporter, Don McNeil, through glass doors, and dragging others out and arresting them.
Decades before CNN or the World Wide Web existed to transmit news in “real time”, Radio Unnameable was there providing a link between people inside the terminal and the audience listening at home. (Fass even called the police precinct to let the cops know that the station was monitoring the attack live on the air). He broadcast eyewitness accounts from the scene and spoke to Abbie Hoffman
Abbie Hoffman
Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ....
, who was getting his wounds patched up at Bellevue Hospital. Washington Post reporter, Nicholas Von Hoffman
Nicholas von Hoffman
Nicholas von Hoffman is an American journalist and author. He wrote for the Washington Post. Later, TV audiences knew him as a "Point-Counterpoint" commentator for CBS's 60 Minutes, from which Don Hewitt fired him in 1974.-Biography:He is of German-Russian extraction, descendant of Melchior...
, came directly from Grand Central to join Fass on the air. As a member of the establishment press, he opined, “I'd have to say the police used excessive force".
It was a brutal initiation for the Yippies but it was also the moment that solidified Bob Fass’s place in the city’s information network. He was providing up to the second, unfiltered news that citizens wary of mainstream press coverage could trust. As Jay Sand points out in the Radio Waves Unnameable— “Bob Fass did not just report the news, he helped mold the events of the time.“
The next month, when Columbia students occupied school buildings to protest the University’s stance on the war and a plan to evict Harlem residents in order to build a gymnasium, WBAI, with Fass’s show in the lead, “acted as a nerve center for the demonstrators.” After the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy (both in 1968), Fass provided in depth, ongoing alternative coverage, giving listeners and independent investigators a chance to grieve, discuss theories, express opinions and trade information considered too controversial for the major media to touch.
In the weeks leading up to the 1968 Democratic National Convention
1968 Democratic National Convention
The 1968 Democratic National Convention of the U.S. Democratic Party was held at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, Illinois, from August 26 to August 29, 1968. Because Democratic President Lyndon Johnson had announced he would not seek a second term, the purpose of the convention was to...
, callers and guests on Radio Unnameable debated the wisdom of marching directly into the path of Mayor Richard J. Daley
Richard J. Daley
Richard Joseph Daley served for 21 years as the mayor and undisputed Democratic boss of Chicago and is considered by historians to be the "last of the big city bosses." He played a major role in the history of the Democratic Party, especially with his support of John F...
’s troops. Fass cautioned listeners “to know what they were getting into should they choose to go. They don’t mess around in Chicago.” Vin Scelsa
Vin Scelsa
Vincent Anthony Scelsa, better known as "Vin," was born on December 12, 1947 in Bayonne, New Jersey. He is the host of a freeform radio show known as Idiot's Delight....
, later a major NYC radio broadcaster in his own right, then a WBAI listener, told Jay Sand, “We all should have been indicted as co-conspirators, not just the Chicago Seven. We were all in on it. That whole thing was planned on Bob’s show.”
Fass rarely left his command center in WBAI’s Master Control but at the very last minute, he flew to Chicago and recorded everything he saw and heard…and not just from The Yippies’ point of view. After reporting a noise that sounded like “ an M1 cracking against someone’s head,” Fass noticed that some of the national guardsmen “look very frightened. They are putting on their gas masks. They aren’t very experienced with them.”
The ensuing attack, roughing up hippies and network news reporters alike, was broadcast live on television. When the dust settled, several of Fass’s comrades were arrested for conspiracy and inciting to riot. Fass escaped indictment and returned to WBAI
WBAI
WBAI, a part of the Pacifica Radio Network, is a non-commercial, listener-supported radio station, broadcasting at 99.5 FM in New York City.Its programming is leftist/progressive, and a mixture of political news and opinion from a leftist perspective, tinged with aspects of its complex and varied...
where over the next decade, his show became a kind of an alternative Town Hall; Abbie Hoffman
Abbie Hoffman
Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ....
called virtually every night with an update from the show trial of the Chicago Seven, which lasted for months. Anti-draft protestors would phone from the courthouse after being arrested to ask Bob’s audience for help in raising bail. A woman called to say her landlord had set fire to her building and she had no other place to go—were there any carpenters listening who might help her rebuild? Over the long years of Rubin Carter
Rubin Carter
Rubin "Hurricane" Carter fought professionally as a middleweight boxer from 1961 to 1966. In 1966, he was arrested for a triple homicide in the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey...
’s incarceration for a murder he did not commit, attorney Flo Kennedy called Radio Unnameable regularly “to keep the case in the consciousness of at least listeners to late night radio,” says Fass. He remembers visiting Woodstock
Woodstock, New York
Woodstock is a town in Ulster County, New York, United States. The population was 5,884 at the 2010 census, down from 6,241 at the 2000 census.The Town of Woodstock is in the northern part of the county...
during the early 1970s and telling Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
“Carter was being railroaded for being “an uppity nigger.” Several years later, Dylan produced his epic song telling the story of the unjust conviction (Hurricane
Hurricane (song)
"Hurricane" is a protest song by Bob Dylan co-written with Jacques Levy, about the imprisonment of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. It compiles alleged acts of racism and profiling against Carter, which Dylan describes as leading to a false trial and conviction....
) and formed his Rolling Thunder Review specifically to raise funds for Carter’s defense. Fass calls the subsequent retrial and vindication of Carter “one of the great cooperative efforts where hippies and blacks united to achieve change before Jessie Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition
Rainbow Coalition
Rainbow Coalition may refer to any of the following groups:* National Rainbow Coalition, a former Kenyan political party* The 24th Government of Ireland, formed after the previous coalition fell apart...
.”
Even in the years after Abbie Hoffman’s 1973 arrest for intent to sell cocaine (Fass believes he was set up), when he changed his name and appearance and went underground, he still surfaced occasionally on Radio Unnameable.
The 1970s
Bob Fass continued to do his show as New York City and WBAI went through radical changes. In the 1970s, the Movement split into factions and new program directors and station managers brought into revision the station attempted to portion out blocks of airtime to feminists, gay rights activists, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and other interest groups. Fass and many others felt this approach was the very antithesis of the personal character of WBAI. In 1977, Fass found himself at the forefront of a power struggle for the future of the station. He participated in a staff attempt to form a union. Management accused him of “living in the past” and ordered him not to discuss the station’s internal business on the air. That was a request he found impossible to adhere to because he felt strongly that listeners paying to support non-commercial radio deserved to know and have a voice in what was being planned.The stand off ended with some staff members seizing control of WBAI’s transmitter at the Empire State Building, while others (including Fass) remained barricaded in the studios, broadcasting until the phone lines were cut and the police arrived to haul them away.
New York City’s free speech station padlocked the front door and suspended broadcasting altogether for 35 days. Fass was banned for five long years, during which he returned to stage acting, did a guest residency at WFMU in New Jersey, and campaigned to return to his rightful throne at WBAI.
Since his reinstatement in 1982, Fass has continued in the same vein. Singers like Jeffrey Lewis
Jeffrey Lewis
Jeffrey Lewis is an American singer/songwriter and comic book artist.-Early life:Lewis attended State University of New York at Purchase and graduated in 1997 with a degree in Literature...
, Roy Zimmerman
Roy Zimmerman
Roy Zimmerman is an American satirical singer-songwriter and guitarist whose self-proclaimed leftist-slanted commentary is primarily focused on social issues and politics....
, Debby Dalton, Kathy Zimmer and Rav Shmuel, blues guitarists Toby Walker and Guy Davis
Guy Davis (musician)
Guy Davis is an American blues guitarist and banjo player, actor, and musician. He is the son of actors Ruby Dee and the late Ossie Davis.-Davis' roots:Davis says his blues music is inspired by the southern speech of his grandmother...
, radical environmentalist Keith Lampke (AKA Ponderosa Pine) and visual artists like Keith Haring
Keith Haring
Keith Haring was an artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s.-Early life:...
, Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book memoir, Maus. His works are published with his name in lowercase: art spiegelman.-Biography:Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to Polish Jews...
and McArthur Fellow Ben Katchor
Ben Katchor
Ben Katchor is an American cartoonist best known for his comic strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. He has contributed comics and drawings to The New Yorker and The New York Times...
, are just a few who have joined the roster of Radio Unnameable guests.
Fass reassembled the members of The Lovin' Spoonful
The Lovin' Spoonful
The Lovin' Spoonful is an American pop rock band of the 1960s, named to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. When asked about his band, leader John Sebastian said it sounded like a combination of "Mississippi John Hurt and Chuck Berry," prompting his friend, Fritz Richmond, to suggest the name...
on the air, emceed the Phil Ochs Memorial, (a tribute to the life and music of the folksinger broadcast live from the Lower East Side in December 2005) and flew to Houston to celebrate Jerry Jeff Walker
Jerry Jeff Walker
Jerry Jeff Walker is an American country music singer and songwriter. He is probably most famous for writing the song "Mr. Bojangles.-Biography:...
’s birthday, which he taped and played on the radio.
Fass was a fierce and consistent critic of, as he calls it, “Bush
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
’s war for oil” and continues to speak out against capital punishment, often putting prisoners who call from jail on the air. He has returned to the issue of homelessness in New York numerous times, raising awareness about the dangerous city shelters, reporting on the gentrification of many of the city’s neighborhoods which traditionally had offered affordable housing, and slamming the city’s “ assault on rent control.” In the mid 1980s, Fass made remote recordings at the tent city the homeless had erected in Tompkins Square Park
Tompkins Square Park
Tompkins Square Park is a 10.5 acre public park in the Alphabet City section of the East Village neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It is square in shape, and is bounded on the north by East 10th Street, on the east by Avenue B, on the south by East 7th Street, and on the...
on the Lower East Side. He went on to work with the Living Theater and members of that community to produce a piece of theater based on their experiences (which included both professional actors and homeless people), called The Hands of God. By 2006, Fass’s time on WBAI had been reduced to just one night a week.
Lasting influence
In his book about life at WBAI, Playing in the FM Band, Steve PostSteve Post
Steve Post is an American freeform radio artist, author of Playing in the FM Band .In 2006 he celebrated his 25th anniversary as program host on WNYC, New York City's principal NPR affiliate station. For 20 years he was host of WNYC 93.9's Morning Music program...
describes Bob Fass as: “a gigantic man with receding blond hair and thick black-rimmed glasses, with hands so huge they appeared to dominate his enormous frame. His voice, soft & gentle, which I heard coming from the office monitors seemed somehow detached from his body.” Post, who began as WBAI’s bookkeeper before hosting a program of his own, The Outside, describes how Fass took him under “his ample wing” and allowed him to watch him at work, teaching him what he knew, demystifying the whole process.
Julius Lester
Julius Lester
Julius Lester is an American author of books for children and adults, and taught for 32 years at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is also a photographer, as well as a musician who recorded two albums of folk music and original songs.-Early life and family:Born on January 27, 1939, in...
, a former SNCC photographer, recalls being so in awe of Fass that for the first year he did his own program at WBAI people constantly mistook him for Bob.
Larry Josephson
Larry Josephson
Larry Josephson is an award winning public radio producer. Since 1965 he has worked in the field of public broadcasting as a producer, host, station manager, engineer, teacher, writer and consultant...
who would became WBAI’S morning man and eventually station manager, remembers, the first time Bob motioned him into Master Control, “it was like Dorothy entering Oz.”
Indeed, Fass creates such a magical atmosphere and makes it all seem so easy, he has encouraged dozens of wanna-be DJs. His continuing impact is clear, according to Marc Fisher
Marc Fisher
Marc Fisher was a columnist for the Washington Post between 2000 and 2009. He is now the Enterprise Editor for the Post. He attended the Horace Mann School and Princeton University. He worked at the Miami Herald from 1981 to 1986. Since then, he has worked at the Washington Post as a reporter,...
, author of Something in the Air (Random House, 2007), who says Fass has inspired countless other personalities like Sirius shock jock Howard Stern
Howard Stern
Howard Allan Stern is an American radio personality, television host, author, and actor best known for his radio show, which was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2005. He gained wide recognition in the 1990s where he was labeled a "shock jock" for his outspoken and sometimes controversial style...
(who listened to Bob a lot as a kid) Tom Leykis
Tom Leykis
Thomas Joseph Leykis is an American radio personality. He currently hosts The Tasting Room with Tom Leykis, a weekly lifestyle program dealing with fine food and drink, airing weekends mainly in West Coast markets...
in L.A, and Vin Scelsa
Vin Scelsa
Vincent Anthony Scelsa, better known as "Vin," was born on December 12, 1947 in Bayonne, New Jersey. He is the host of a freeform radio show known as Idiot's Delight....
, to ride the radio waves.
“I like the idea of sharing, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” says Fass. “I want to connect people in one city with people in another. I think information can cure almost anything.”
As previously noted, Fass has always been ready to lend an ear and share the air with absolutely anyone who felt they had something to say. This largesse often leads to endless, boring mouthing off that only a mother could love, but equally often leads to dynamic, intimate flurries of insight, energy, humor and understanding.
Unlike almost any other radio or television personality one can think of, silence never scares Bob Fass. Seconds pass as he seemingly ponders the thoughts of his guests, leaving them or you, the listener, a large space to fill in the blanks. In addition, to being a congenial master of ceremonies, Bob Fass is a good listener.
Fass has never been a brilliant monologist like Jean Shepherd
Jean Shepherd
Jean Parker Shepherd was an American raconteur, radio and TV personality, writer and actor who was often referred to by the nickname Shep....
who preceded him on WOR in the late 50s, nor a star interviewer. His style is to make a few gentle stabs at drawing his guest out, and then he’s content to go with the flow. His singular talent, as Jay Sand notes in The Radio Waves Unnameable, is for orchestrating the great mix; “For Fass, beauty exists in the way events intertwine… the art came in the complete presentation.. and for better or worse, the divergent strands of life which Fass presented would have fused to form a lucid whole by the time he said, 'BYE BYE'.”
Looking back at the great “audio bazaar” he’s presided over for more than forty years, Fass says it’s the little moments that stand out for him. “Once at 3 am, a guy called from the Lower East Side
Lower East Side
The Lower East Side, LES, is a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by Allen Street, East Houston Street, Essex Street, Canal Street, Eldridge Street, East Broadway, and Grand Street....
and was talking about something, then said, "Whoa! do you hear that thunder?" A woman in the Bronx who was also on the line, paused and then said, "Wow! Look at the lightening!" You could hear the thunder claps moving up town and you got the feeling of a network of the whole city."
Remembering the appearance of the Brooklyn Black Panthers on Radio Unnameable back in the day, Fass says, “I kind of like it when people come up a little hostile and suspicious and I and the audience warm them up and win them over by the end of the show.”
In 1971, a man called in about 2:45 in the morning and announced that he had taken pills and was going to commit suicide. He asked Fass to promise not to call authorities, but Fass refused. "I didn’t want to lie to him," Fass explained to a reporter the next day. “If the last thing someone says to you is a lie, that kind of cheapens life.” Fass spent the next two hours talking to the caller live on the air, as other WBAI workers contacted the police and the phone company attempted to trace the call.
Later that morning, the police finally found the caller lying unconscious on his bedroom floor. His telephone was off the hook, the radio tuned to WBAI. He was taken to the hospital in critical condition but survived. Fass says the man contacted him later and thanked him for being there. The press tried to turn Fass into a hero but he demurred. When a Daily News reporter arrived at his home, wanting to take his picture, Fass passed him a photo of his colleague, Larry Josephson
Larry Josephson
Larry Josephson is an award winning public radio producer. Since 1965 he has worked in the field of public broadcasting as a producer, host, station manager, engineer, teacher, writer and consultant...
, through a crack in the door. Josephson made the front page, identified incorrectly as "Bob Fass, WBAI’s heroic DJ." Fass later commented that he thought, “Larry would enjoy having his picture in the paper.”
Columnist Jimmy Breslin
Jimmy Breslin
Jimmy Breslin is an American journalist and author. He currently writes a column for the New York Daily News' Sunday edition. He has written numerous novels, and columns of his have appeared regularly in various newspapers in his hometown of New York City...
observed Fass on the job in 1985: “a large man in a tie dyed T-shirt, Fass had two or three callers on the air at once. They spoke about battered wife syndrome and low income mortgages. One caller arguing with another said, “Pathetic left wing drivel!” Someone threw the door open and said, we have food!” As Breslin left, he passed Melanie
Melanie Safka
Melanie Anne Safka-Schekeryk is an American singer-songwriter. Known professionally as simply Melanie, she is best known for her hits "Brand New Key", "Ruby Tuesday" and "Lay Down ".-Early career:...
on her way in, just arriving to sing on Radio Unnameable.
In the mid-1980s Fass was nearly homeless. AJ Weberman rented a truck for Fass and a large storage unit to hold his archives, paid in advance for many years.
Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher
Marc Fisher
Marc Fisher was a columnist for the Washington Post between 2000 and 2009. He is now the Enterprise Editor for the Post. He attended the Horace Mann School and Princeton University. He worked at the Miami Herald from 1981 to 1986. Since then, he has worked at the Washington Post as a reporter,...
remembers spending a night at WBAI in 2005. “A caller phoned in to say that kids were being roughed up by cops in Brooklyn. Bob effortlessly went to the phones and the show became an open forum where listeners offered almost play-by-play accounts of the encounter from their different perspectives. It was an amazing mix of old counter culture stalwarts and a new BAI audience of west Indians and African Americans. Bob Fass was the circuit that linked them.”
Fass was last paid for his radio time in 1977. Musicians like Dave Bromberg turn up at tributes to thank Bob “for giving us our careers.” Many of his protégées have turned colleagues, like Steve Post
Steve Post
Steve Post is an American freeform radio artist, author of Playing in the FM Band .In 2006 he celebrated his 25th anniversary as program host on WNYC, New York City's principal NPR affiliate station. For 20 years he was host of WNYC 93.9's Morning Music program...
, Larry Josephson
Larry Josephson
Larry Josephson is an award winning public radio producer. Since 1965 he has worked in the field of public broadcasting as a producer, host, station manager, engineer, teacher, writer and consultant...
, and Vin Scelsa
Vin Scelsa
Vincent Anthony Scelsa, better known as "Vin," was born on December 12, 1947 in Bayonne, New Jersey. He is the host of a freeform radio show known as Idiot's Delight....
, and have spoken of his generosity with his time. Listeners have made donations to his retirement fund. “It’s better than BAI paying me that people remember me, I guess,” Fass says.
In 2005, attorney Neil Fabricant, President Emeritus of the School of Social Policy at GWU, organized a rent party
Rent party
A rent party is a social occasion where tenants hire a musician or band to play and pass the hat to raise money to pay their rent, originating in Harlem during the 1920s. The rent party played a major role in the development of jazz and blues music...
for Fass. “The right wing has spent billions of dollars to revise the history of an era and to distort the collective memory,” Fabricant says. He suggests that restoring and properly archiving the 45 years of Bob Fass’s program “would be a giant first step in reclaiming that history.”
80 hours of Radio Unnameable have been acquired and are currently available at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York. There is a documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
currently in production about Fass and Radio Unnameable,.
“Like many others, Bob wanted to change the world. Unlike many others, he had access to the airwaves and therefore a very real opportunity to do so.” says Jay Sand.
Good Evening Cabal, a weekly show on a Florida-based community FM station, is named as a tribute to Bob Fass by its host, Curt Werner, who as a Brooklyn teenager listened to Fass in the 1960s on WBAI. The program, which features music from the 1960s and 1970s and live interviews with artists and writers from that era, has been on the air for four years on WSLR 96.5 LPFM in Sarasota, Fla. Fass himself appeared as a guest on the show in 2007.
Quotes about Fass
"When speaking today to those who listened to Bob Fass regularly throughout the '60s, one can sense an almost spiritual reverence that they still hold for Radio Unnameable. Before the cultural explosion of the mid-1960s- before listening to Radio Unnameable became a ritual shared by the city's counterculture community – those who discovered Fass felt as if they had untapped a passageway into a magical world, and many instantaneously became religious Radio Unnameable devotees." http://www.altmanphoto.com/Page8.Sixties.Players.htmlBroadcast samples
The internet archive has available a sound recording (in various formats) of a program "featuring live interviews with Jerry RubinJerry Rubin
Jerry Rubin was an American social activist during the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s, he became a successful businessman.-Early life:...
, Abbie Hoffman
Abbie Hoffman
Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ....
, and Phil Ochs
Phil Ochs
Philip David Ochs was an American protest singer and songwriter who was known for his sharp wit, sardonic humor, earnest humanism, political activism, insightful and alliterative lyrics, and haunting voice...
":Bob Fass in Chicago - August 27, 1968
An audio file (mp3 format) of a Radio Unnameable, a 90-minute segment with Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
as guest from 1966: Bob Dylan on WBAI
Sources
- Playing in the FM Band: A personal account of free radio – Steve PostSteve PostSteve Post is an American freeform radio artist, author of Playing in the FM Band .In 2006 he celebrated his 25th anniversary as program host on WNYC, New York City's principal NPR affiliate station. For 20 years he was host of WNYC 93.9's Morning Music program...
– Viking PressViking PressViking Press is an American publishing company owned by the Penguin Group, which has owned the company since 1975. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim...
, 1974, ISBN 0-670-55927-X - "A Radio Station with Real Hair, Sweat, and Body Odor" – The New York Times, Susan Braudy; Sep 17, 1972; Sunday Magazine
- "Insurgent Staff Members Take Over WBAI In Coup" – The New York Times, Robert D. McFaddenRobert D. McFaddenRobert Dennis McFadden is an American journalist who has worked for The New York Times since 1961.-Biography:McFadden attended the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and graduated from the journalism school of the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1960.In 1996, he won the Pulitzer Prize for spot...
; Feb 12, 1977 - Sand, Jay. "THE RADIO WAVES UNNAMEABLE:." 24 Jan. 1996. 28 Aug. 2006
- Breslin, Jimmy. "BETWEEN EVANGELIST & a ROCK SHOW, JUSTICE." NY Daily News 29 Oct. 1985.
- Engleman, Ralph. Public Radio & TV in America: a Political History. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996.
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