WFMU FM - Elena Razlogova

WFMU - FM

BY ELENA RAZLOGOVA

Although histories of freeform radio—also known as “underground” and “progressive rock radio”—usually focus on commercial stations such as KSAN in San Francisco, noncommercial WFMU and Pacifica station WBAI were among the pioneers of the format in the late 1960s. In November 1968, trade weekly Billboard announced a fundraising marathon for WFMU, then operated by Upsala College in East Orange, New Jersey. According to Radio-TV editor Claude Hall, the station played “progressive rock” and had “some of the best programming available in this format anywhere in the nation.” Today listener-supported independent WFMU holds the status of the oldest freeform station in the United States.

Founded in 1958, WFMU made its first foray into underground radio on November 4, 1967 when

an Upsala student and volunteer DJ Vin Scelsa launched his overnight program The Closet. Scelsa discovered freeform in June of that year when he heard Bob Fass play the entire Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album over WBAI without interruption around 4 am. At the time, a triumvirate of WBAI personalities—Bob Fass, Steve Post, and Larry Josephson—pushed the boundaries of no-format radio in New York, blending music, humor, and phone chats with listeners. The name of Scelsa’s program, The Closet, paid homage to Post’s show The Outside and also called up a Fibber McGee and Molly radio comedy gag where Fibber opens his closet and all of his stuff falls out. Scelsa played sundry records—folk, art rock, blues, jazz, psychedelia—as if they randomly fell out of his “closet”

and conversed with listeners on the air much like Fass did on his overnight show.

The core group of DJs at the station created an intimate supportive community that hung out at the station all the time and kept it in working order. The group photo in front of the “Old Yellow” studio building brought together what Scelsa called the “inner circle” of the station. According to DJ Jeff Heilbrun, it was inspired by the cover of The Band’s 1968 album Music from Big Pink that depicted all band members in front of the “Big Pink” house. The photo included Scelsa, his future wife Freddie Bauman, who hosted a children’s show, station manager Ron Bullard, folk-leaning freeformer George Black, “Beatlemaniac” Roger Dangerfield, and Lou D’Antonio with his wife and kids. D’Antonio, a high school teacher and volunteer DJ since 1962, became part of the freeform inner circle, and would remain at the station after Scelsa and his crew shut down their freeform experiment. He played a mix centered around jazz and classical music, accompanied by droll storytelling in the tradition of his favorite New York DJ Jean Shepherd.

Soon listeners in New York area and nationally began to notice the station. In the spring of 1968, freeformers Larry Yurdin and Toni Stevens found their way from San Francisco. Yurdin came directly from KMPX, the station where Tom Donahue pioneered commercial freeform. Stevens took a DJ slot, while Yurdin convinced Scelsa to turn WFMU entirely freeform by July, a move made possible by a fundraising marathon that raised $3,000. At Yurdin’s invitation, several New York personalities joined to spin records, including Larry “The Bagelman” Siegel, Josephson’s sidekick on WBAI; Danny Fields, publicist at Elektra Records; and Bob Rudnick and Dennis Frawley, who penned music column “Kokaine Karma” for underground paper East Village Other. Kokaine Karma’s theme song, “Frisby,” was composed by Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypertext, in the earliest case of synergy between WFMU and digital culture. Except for Scelsa and Black, who took care of daily operations, everyone at the station was a volunteer, including all other students and all the newcomers.

The newcomers connected WFMU to New York labels and scenes, especially the Greenwich Village and the East Village, with access to performers, unreleased tapes, and soon-to-be-released records. Scelsa got an advance copy of the Beatles’ White Album and played it in its entirety on the air before it came out in stores. Musician and composer Buzzy Linhart recorded tapes at the station and played them as a guest on Scelsa’s show. Live guests also included Nico, Steve Katz, Ten Years After, and Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. Members of Velvet Underground called to offer their support, and Lou Reed gave a phone interview on the air in September 1968.

Also in September, a self-appointed Dylanologist Alan Weberman visited the Kokaine Karma show to play his bootleg Bob Dylan tapes, and donated one of them to the station. Dylan recorded this tape of folk tunes and Woody Guthrie’s songs in 1961 a few blocks from Upsala College, in a home of Guthrie’s friends, electrician Bob Gleason and his wife Sid. At the Gleasons, Dylan first met Guthrie, who came to the house on weekends while convalescing at a nearby hospital. The “East Orange” tape got a lot of play on FMU.

In addition to New York and San Francisco ties, WFMU had a strong connection to Detroit. Rudnick and Frawley befriended a proto-punk group the MC5 and their manager John Sinclair, and became founding members of Sinclair’s radical White Panther Party. They embraced Sinclair’s respect for avant-garde Black music, featuring free jazz alongside “high-energy” rock of the MC5 and another Detroit band, the Stooges. After hearing the MC5 on the Kokaine Karma show, Danny Fields visited the band in the Detroit, and signed them and the Stooges to Elektra in September 1968. John Sinclair and the MC5 appeared on WFMU in late December, a few days after the band clashed with the Motherfuckers collective at the Fillmore East. In the online excerpt from their broadcast, the band fields questions about their Fillmore show, along with playing Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech, and tapes of their own concerts. In the summer of 1969 Iggy Pop appeared on the air as the guest of Danny Fields.

WFMU also raised the bar on free and benefit concerts, an important practice accompanying freeform radio in San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere. Bob Fass put on celebrated free shows, including several Central Park Be-Ins, and MCed Woodstock Sound-Outs, an informal free series launched on the Labor Day weekend in 1967 and continued in the summers of 1968 and 1969 until the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. WFMU followed suit, setting up several free shows at Central Park and elsewhere. In the spring 1968, soon after joining the station, Larry the Bagelman organized a free concert with a pioneering electronic group Silver Apples in the Tompkins Square Park that he claimed drew 6,000 people. The apex of these efforts was the 72-hour nonstop benefit marathon broadcast live from Cafe Au Go Go on November 3-5, 1968. DJs adopted the three-day concert format of the initial Woodstock Sound-Out but reconceived it as a live-broadcasted benefit show. Variety noted a “lengthy” benefit lineup and concluded that WFMU “has been roping in much underground attention of late.”

Participating acts reflected the musical diversity embraced on WFMU and on freeform radio in general in the late 1960s. Admittedly, the lineup was mostly male; the few women included Black folk singer Andrea “Bunky” Skinner of Bunky & Jake, vocalist and instrumentalist Ellen McIlwaine of Fear Itself, and Hamilton Face Band’s drummer Ruth Komanoff, who around this time began her long collaboration with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. The psychedelic roster included San Francisco’s Quicksilver Messenger Service (its co-founder Dino Valente also performed solo and donated his scheduled spot at Cafe Au Go Go for the benefit); Boston’s Bo Grumpus; and the McCoys, a bubblegum-turned-psych band from Indiana. Folk and folk rock were represented by Dave Van Ronk, part-Creek singer-songwriter Patrick Sky, Billy Mitchell, Bunky & Jake, and musician and producer Felix Pappalardi. Jazzmen included guitarist Larry Coryell, flutist Jeremy Steig, and Black saxophonists Frank Wright and Charles Tyler. Jazz rock was represented by Pacific Gas & Electric and members of Blood, Sweat & Tears Steve Katz and David Clayton Thomas. The New York Rock ‘n’ Roll Ensemble added rock-classical fusion. Blues and blues rock acts included Black harmonica player James Cotton, Atlanta’s Fear Itself, and Tommy Flanders, formerly a member of the Blues Project with Katz. The Woodstock Sound-Outs scene joined in with country-rockers Cat Mother & the All Night Newsboys and a psychedelic soul group the Children of God, headed by Black singer, guitarist, and civil rights activist Jerry Moore. Proto-punk acts included David Peel & The Lower East Side and the Fugs. In the extant Fugs set from the show, between songs, Ed Sanders introduces the station as “WFMU, the sound of communist ape-smut!”

The station was indeed embroiled in the political struggles of the late 1960s. DJs joined the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war marches. In late August 1968, the Kokaine Karma duo and Freddie Bauman separately traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Bauman went to support one of the candidates, while Rudnick and Frawley accompanied the MC5, the only band brave enough to perform at the Festival of Life, organized by the Youth International Party, aka Yippies, on the eve of the mass demonstrations. Kokaine Karma’s report preserved the setlist from that iconic performance, including MC5’s own “Kick Out the Jams” and “Black to Comm” as well as rock ‘n’ roll classics like Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti.” As police descended on protesters in Chicago, Bauman called WFMU to report. The recording of her on-air conversation with Scelsa conveys the fear and outrage most young participants felt at the time.

Then in April-May 1969, Upsala students rebelled demanding the end of military recruitment on campus and better cooperation with the local Black community. Their 95 demands included more funding for WFMU and total student control of the station. George Black interviewed protesters on the air and installed an WFMU loudspeaker at one of the buildings occupied by the students. An irate professor tore out the loudspeaker wire to silence FMU–the only violent incident during the rebellion and proof of freeform radio’s importance for student activism.

Despite WFMU’s popularity and successful fundraising marathons, the “Free Form Radio experiment” at Upsala College lasted only a little over a year. Conservative listeners and the American Legion complained to Upsala and the FCC about the station’s hippie programming: radical politics, talk of drugs, and obscene lyrics on the air. The college fired Yurdin, Rudnick, and Frawley in the late spring of 1969. As Frawley left the station, he put the intro to track two of the uncensored pressing of the MC5’s first LP, “Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker!” on loop; it played for hours. The student DJ crew and Danny Fields quit on August 31, 1969, unwilling to deal with pressure from administrators and sensing the end of counterculture. Scelsa moved on to an illustrious career on commercial stations WPLJ, WNEW, and K-Rock, among others. But these few glorious experimental months on WFMU ensured the place of noncommercial college radio in the history of freeform in the 1960s. By the late 1970s, thanks to DJ Irwin Chusid’s tireless advocacy, WFMU returned to freeform and remains so to this day.

Elena Razlogova is a media historian based in Montreal. She is currently working on a book-length history of WFMU. Check out her other writing on WFMU here: http://elenarazlogova.org/?cat=8

Credits:

WFMU photo: WFMU archives

Silver Apples at Tompkins Square park photo: by Syeus Mottel, courtesy of Matt Mottel

1968 WFMU marathon poster: Martin Weinberg’s personal archive