Poetry Wednesday 12/10/08: Alison Steele, The Night Bird

POST IS UPDATED WITH HER VOICE – very mind-blowing !

Alison Steele (January 26, 1937 – September 27, 1995) was a pioneering American disc jockey in New York City during the sixties.

Born in Brooklyn, Alison Steele achieved her greatest notoriety as a DJ on WNEW-FM, where she spun records on the night shift, after a major change in station programming from a dull music format to progressive rock. Alison didn’t know much about progressive rock when she started at this, and neither, apparently did the management of WNEW-FM. She was basically left to her own devices and in this process, developed her persona, The Nightbird.

She would start her show reciting poetry over Andean flute music, then introduce her show in her well-known sultry, smoky voice:

“The flutter of wings, the shadow across the moon, the sounds of the night, as the Nightbird spreads her wings and soars, above the earth, into another level of comprehension, where we exist only to feel. Come, fly with me, Alison Steele, the Nightbird, at WNEW-FM, until dawn.”

Alison Steele:

“The original format was Sinatra, Steve & Eydie – that sort of music,” she explained. And it didn’t last long. By September of 1966, WNEW switched its format to progressive rock. All the jocks were fired except me. They found that 90% of the people knew my name and liked me (so) they asked me to do overnight, and I said, ‘Sure. What do I do?’ They said ‘Do your thing’.

“I was thinking about my thing. I am a night person. I hate to get up in the morning. There are the larks and the owls and I have been an owl all my life, so I decided to be the Nightbird, because of the duality of a nocturnal bird, and being a girl.

“I knew nothing about rock and roll. They had a library of about 500 albums, so I’d take them home, listen, study them.”

The first night she was on, Steele opened with some poetry she had written, some Incan temple music, and THE MOODY BLUES’ “Nights in White Satin.” “The switchboard lit up,” she recalled. “I knew how to do a program that was more conceptual than anyone else. I always started with poetry – something inspirational (to demonstrate) we all have tremendous potential. Things will always get better. I used Shakespeare, the Bible, Longfellow, Camus, and the music related to that.”

Steele kept careful track of the quotes and poems she used, marking each with the date it was read, and going back to favorite pieces over the years. The format she created proved to be a popular and durable one. Her audience was large and loyal. Steele became the first woman to win Billboard’s “FM Personality of the Year” award in 1978.

The Night Bird Introduction (untitled)

by Alison Steele

We’re deep into the night,
and from this point on,
all sense of time ceases to exist,
only space and the sensory,
that which we feel and experience,
becomes the manifestation,
of all the cosmic waves
of the universe.
the sound pours into the brain,
and pushes all barriers,
to the outer limits of perception.
And here we are in space.
we are above and beyond.
Come…fly with me…
Alison Steele, the night bird, until dawn…

Alison’s interview with Kiss

She would transition to recordings of some of the more exceptional and experimental music acts of the time. Some of the groups she would feature at that time would be Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, Hawkwind, Lothar and the Hand People,Tangerin Dream, Edgar Froese, Moody Blues, Ramases, Renaissance, Curved Air, and many other groups of that genre. If it was raining on a Monday night, she would always play The Doors’ classic “Riders on the Storm”as her first song setting the mood for that night’s show. She would always end her shows with The Beatles song “Flying” over which she would say a goodbye message.

Her show became a hit, and did much to push WNEW-FM into the forefront of progressive radio. She also served as Music Director there for a while.

She left WNEW-FM in 1979 and worked as a writer, producer, and correspondent for “Limelight” on CNN until 1985, in addition to serving as announcer for the daytime soap opera“Search for Tomorrow”from 1982-1984. She later worked as a disc jockey on New York’s WNEW-AM from 1980–1981 and on WXRK from 1989–1995, along with some work for VH1 and running a boutique on the Upper East Side of New York City called Just Cats. Alison Steele died of stomach cancer in 1995. She is remembered as one of the great women of radio—a true on-air pioneer. Calling herself the “Nightbird,” Alison Steele was one of the first female disc jockeys on the radio.

The Doors at The Fillmore East Theater in New York City

WNEW-FM would do live simulcast shows that were held at the famous theater in the lower east side of New York City, The Fillmore East, which Alison co-hosted with Scott Muni and some of the other WNEW-FM gang.

Due to changes in the music and exponential growth in the concert industry, Bill Graham closed down the Fillmore East, with its final concert taking place June 27, 1971, with the billed acts Allman Brothers, J. Geils Band, Albert King and special guests Edgar Winter’s White Trash, Mountain, The Beach Boys and Country Joe McDonald in a performance which was by invitation only. The concert was broadcast live by WNEW-FM with between-set banter by many of their then trend-setting DJs, Alison Steele, The Nightbird, Dave Herman and Scott Muni among them. The Allman Brothers set was released as the second disk of the Deluxe Edition/Remastered version of their Eat a Peach album.

I want to thank my Multiply friend, Seth, for assisting me in locating some of Alison’s poetry on the web. He found an audio clip of her voice, and converted it to mp3 format, and then sent it to me. I uploaded it to imeem, got the code to embed it on the blog. This helped me piece together the heart of this post. You can also hear her sultry voice on the video as she interviewed Gene Simmons.

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Laurita .

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