WBAI: Listener Sponsored Radio New York City

WBAI, a part of the Pacifica Radio Network, is a non-commercial, listener-supported radio staation, broadcasting at 99.5 FM in New York City. It played a major role in the evolution and development of the counterculture in the 1960s.

Right: Bob Fass with Abbie Hoffman in the background on the left.

WBAI was a radio station which was not known for its great continuous music, even though there were no commercials. This was a station that expressed freedom of speech continuously way before the days of Howard Stern came. In my opinion, radio stations like WBAI defined what free speech means on the radio. My favorite shows were the midnight shows with Steve Post and Bob Fass. Sometimes artists like Bob Dylan would pop over and joke with listeners. In 1966, Arlo Gutherie came over to debut his new song at the time, Alice’s Restaurant. Hundreds of people called asking where they could buy the record. Arlo didn’t even have a recording contract yet.

Bob Fass had his own show called, Radio Unnameable. A steady stream of incredible musicians has made Radio Unnameable a home away from home–Townes Van Zandt, David Peel, Richie Havens, Jose Feliciano, Patti Smith, Dave Van Ronk, 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 immortal tune, 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.

Its programming is leftist/progressive, an admixture of leftist political advocacy tinged with aspects of its complex and varied history, such as Freedorm radio, which WBAI played a role in developing, as well as various music.

The station’s origins began with WABF, which first went on the air in 1941 as W75NY and moved to the 99.5 frequency in 1948. In 1955, after two years off the air, the station was reborn as WBAI (whose calls were named after then-owners Broadcast Associates, Inc.). It was purchased by eccentric philanthropist Louis Schweitzer and donated to the Pacifica Foundation in 1960. The station, which was commercial up to that point, switched to non-commercial status from then on.

In 1973, the station broadcast comedian George Carlin’s infamous Seven Dirty Words routine.

The history of WBAI is long and contentious. Referred to in a New York Times Magazine piece as ‘an anarchist’s circus,’ one station manager was jailed in protest, and the staff, in protest at sweeping proposed changes of another station manager, seized the studio facilities, then located in a deconsecrated church, as well as the transmitter, located at the Empire State Building.

WBAI’s coverage of the turbulence of the 1960s and early 1970s in New York was a self-defining series of events, a deep resonance. The station covered the 1968 seizure of the Columbia University campus live and uninterrupted, as well as innumerable anti-war protests. With its signal reaching for nearly 100 kilometers beyond New York City, its reach, and its influence, both direct and indirect, were far greater. The station presented an annual 24-hour nonstop presentation of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, a marathon reading of War and Peace with celebrities reading various sections, held live performances of emerging artists in its studios, and produced and presented interviews with prominent figures in literature and the arts, as well as original highly-produced radio dramas.

With the decline of that particular arc of history represented by the 1960s and 1970s the station found itself turning against itself, a new board of directors determined a new agenda, and, against the staff resistance represented by what was known internally as The Crisis, and manifest in the seizure and occupation of the facilities, a different station emerged, one which attempted to offer an alternative perspective within the aesthetic sensibilties represented by mainstream commercial media rather than offer an aesthetic, a sensibility, fundamentally other than and a challenge to mainstream media.