This note by Uncle Happy (aka WBAI host/, Sydney Smith) blew in with tangled tumbleweed from the dying blue ghost forum...
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An unvarnished blog that dips into the past and comments on the present of WBAI-FM, a once significant, intelligent New York radio station that for years has suffered chronic abuse from within and now nears extinction. Your comments are welcomed and will not be censored.
Tomorrow is Bob Fass’s 81 birthday. I, for one, will be celebrating it. I’ve been a listener for almost 50 years and a friend of Bob’s for about 20. I’d proud of being both.
ReplyDeleteRadio Unnameable came into my life in 1967. I had a summer job working in a cardboard mill, Budmar Mill, in Bloomfield, NJ. My two friends Alan and Stefan and I worked from 11 p.m. until 7:00 a.m.. Weeknights, Bob Fass was our constant companion.
It amazes me now to think that in those days he filled about 40 hours a week with a very good radio program. 1967 was the summer of “Alice’s Restaurant”, but there was other great music as well. Many wonderful musicians would drop by and spend the night with Bob in the studio--Jerry Jeff Walker and David Bromberg to mention just two examples. Radio Unnameable was the first place I heard Monte Python and George Carlton, not to mention Lenny Bruce.
The phone calls were occasionally too long and tedious. However when I called, which I did frequently, people probably said the same about my calls. Bob gave everyone a chance to talk, although he often challenged them to back up what they said. Many of the calls were compelling. Some were desperate. Some amusing. Many were informative--especially when Abbie Hoffman or Paul Krassner called.
I like SDL and Indigo, and agree with most of what they write. Chris, ironically with thanks to Bob, has also become someone I proudly call a friend. I’m not entirely convinced that Bob couldn’t still produce a good radio show if he had a minimal level of support from the station. He’s been treated shamefully by WBAI as was Ibrahim Gonzalez. For this alone, I’ll never forgive the current management of Pacifica and WBAI.
Allow me to conclude by shouting out, loud and clear, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BOB. And thanks for everything.”
The Pacifica Maven
I'll join in on that shout out, TPM, and I hope I can do so without seeming hypocritical.
DeleteSmith should add the option of someone selling cure all your ills superfood powder. Anyway, that is a funny list and he did a fun show this morning.
ReplyDeleteOn to Bob Fass. My thing about him, as a radio host, is his temper. He really can't take people disagreeing with him at all, and, at the least, will cut them off or, at the most, become rude or even vicious with them. That's what I don't like. I expect that from right wing jerks on corporate radio.
Anyway, I'll wish a HAPPY BIRTHDAY to both Bob Fass and Sydney Smith, from one crabby Cancer to two fellow crabby Cancers.
Finally, I like TPM, too. Thanks.
SDL
This discussion is pointless. It is the same thing over and over. "I love Bob!" "Bob is awful!" "Sidney is such a scamp!" "I don't care for Sidney" etc.
ReplyDeleteNone of this matters. This doesn't have anything to do with the individual preferences or the quirks and character traits of any on-air host. It has to do with the absence of any organized process by which WBAI determines who should be on the air, when they should be on the air, and what they should be doing on the air. There are no metrics, no focus groups, no professional surveys of the potential listening audience. The whole thing just plods along, guided by cronyism or the personal choices of whatever privileged individual happens to be the GM or PD at a given time.
And it isn't just who is allowed on the air. Once a show goes on the schedule, there is no system in place to review the content and to determine whether it is working or needs to be improved. How are the shows named? How are the theme songs selected? Who decides whether a show needs a co-host? This is all left to the privileged "owner" of the air time. R Paul Martin wants to bring his girlfriend on to be a co-host even though she may add nothing to the show and has no experience in radio and even though there might be 20 people better suited for that role? No problem, the girlfriend is a co-host for 25 years. Al Lewis wants to bring his wife on? Done! Oh, and she can inherit the show for a few years after he dies. The air time was his property after all.
And consider the missive from Sidney Smith. When was the last time anyone actively assessed Sidney's show, his audience, and whether the air time could be better utilized? Is there a radio station anywhere in the US where the on-air host can remain on the air for years w/ no audience, even while routinely boasting about doing no preparation, having no plan to entertain the audience, about how he no longer wishes to do the show, about how he wants to leave? Then again, is there any radio station anywhere in the world where most of the on-air "talent" has been there for 20-50 years?
It is a chummy little clubhouse which exists to feed the egos of about 2 dozen people, as Sidney admits. Which is fine. They can have a clubhouse. But let them pay for it.
I still think Sidney is an asset wasted—give him a real incentive, starting with a sensible time slot and I'm sure he will deliver. He is being honest when he attributes his own stick-to-it-ness to a "habit and a needy ego"—what separates him from majority of WBAI's fossils is that he has untapped talent. New York is full of untapped talent, but he's right there, being spent frivolously.
DeleteAs for the rest of your post, it's right on the money and it has taken WBAI beyond salvage.
I generally agree with the sentiments of the 2nd paragraph of Anonymous' post. However, there IS a way to gauge the audience, and that's by looking at the pledge tally results. They show where people put their money. That means that those are the shows and types of programming they like. Cure all ailments products and snake oil are number one.
DeleteRegarding paragraph #3. On a free form station, it IS up to the producer/host to decide the matters you describe. That's why it's free form radio and not corporate crap that is strictly structured and micromanaged. Now, back to my above comments. If the show makes no money to speak of, it should be removed, otherwise, we see a waste of electric bills.
Paragraph #4. I don't think it matters how long someone has been on the air, but whether they have a listenership. If we look at Schmid, Irsay, Whent and Null, they have been on for decades but have larger listenerships. However, Fass, Sargeant and Salassi can't pull in anything. Longevity isn't really a factor.
I agree about letting themselves pay for the clubhouse. My question is who will be Mickey Mouse and who will be Donald Duck and Goofy...
SDL
Sydney is a resource to us old radical queers, especially the ones of us who have had a hard time understanding why we were put off on a side track by the straight/stroller pushing queers. Sydney must stay on the air for a long long time. And, yes his program on the 28th was a smash hit. Happy 64th Birthday Sidney.
DeleteLukas
I agree, SDL, that the money comes in when WBAI offers such products as snake oil and conspiracy "documentaries" (that mostly document the producer's need for attention), but I suspect that the paying audience for such things is more apt to comprise ill-informed and/or ailing shoppers than people who seek intelligent enlightenment. Thus, we can't with any accuracy determine the true listenership from looking at fundraising tallies, which themselves reflect the time aired.
DeleteSimply put, someone left the well-stocked refrigerator's door open, and walked away.
Lukas, your praise for Sidney hits the mark.
- Pledges are not a gauge of what the potential audience wants and it isn't a substitute for a system to survey audience needs, to develop programming to meet those needs, and to evaluate current programming. Pledges may to some extent reflect the relative preferences of WBAI's current miniscule audience, which isn't really the issue. But even when a show brings in virtually no money, it still stays on the air.
ReplyDelete- WBAI is not a "free form" radio station. Certain shows may be, but the station is not. And "free form" is nothing more than an excuse for bad radio which draws no audience. People going on air with no preparation to talk about random things which are of interest to them, but which are of no interest to the audience. There's a reason no one else does this and it isn't because there is a corporate conspiracy against on-air rambling. You can call it a feature, but everyone else views it as a bug.
- Radical queer, consider why you might have been put off on a side track. Maybe it is because you refer to gay people as "queer". They aren't. Not any more. Or maybe it is because your radical vision involved little more than lots of loveless, commercialized sex with strangers. That wasn't liberating. It was exploitative and had catastrophic consequences for LGBs. Human beings need kindness and love and social connection. The absence of it destroys human health and well being. Take a hint: Uncle Happy, your radical queer icon, is not actually happy.
Thank God for the Millennials, who are rejecting your disastrous path and are creating a future grounded in love and commitment. In those strollers to which you derisively refer are beautiful children. Children that gay parents will raise and love and who in turn will give love back to their parents and to others in their lives. These folks will have something bigger than themselves to live for. And they will have too much self-respect ever to call themselves "queer."
WBAI is a no-form radio station, a rudderless ship manned by users who perceive greatness solely as that which they see in a mirror. Equating sloppiness and ineptitude with free form is what they do to justify their inability to produce good radio.
DeleteI don't know where you are going with your misread of the term, "queer"—like the so-called "n-word" (i.e. Nigger), it was the bigot's expression of hatred, but both terms have become "acceptable" when used by the people they once were meant to demean. It's a clever way to disarm racists and homophobes.
The first time I saw this term used in the U.S., in other than a negative way, was at an '80s MacWorld expo in Boston. A booth manned by gay programmers wore and distributed tee-shirts emblazoned with: "We're here, we're queer, and we got e-mail!"
The words themselves are perfectly harmless, the difference lies in the way people use them—but that;s rather elementary, isn't it?
Non-Queer Anonymous,
DeleteI am a gay guy who "talks the talk" as far as radical LGBTQ politics, but secretly tends to agree with you that "radical queers" tend to end up quite unhappy in their personal lives. I hate to call people out, and I take no pleasure from their pain, but look at someone like Matilda Bernstein Sycamore, an award-winning rad queer author who seems, quite frankly, lonely and miserable. I would never want to model my life on his choices, because his blog is all about his whinging about his various problems and how the community has failed him. Or take all the "Against Equality" people, (like Yasmin Nair, who is, like Sycamore, constantly complaining online about her life). Even, or maybe especially, during Pride season, they just constantly harp about how awful gay pride and gay marriage are -- they're such eeyores. Matilda even started an event called Gay Shame, and I get with him how he's motivated by this huge disappointment he feels by not being accepted by this imaginary community of sexy young punk rock queers that only exists in his imagination. But whatever the etiology, with their relentless negativity, they seem more anti-gay than most avowed homophobes. I can't remember the last time I read Nair or Sycamore say one nice thing about a gay man. That's fine to have that opinion, but it reeks of self-loathing, and it seems to lead to anywhere but happiness. It sounds like the same might be true of Uncle Happy.
I am sure there are happy older rad queers, but I have personally never met them -- it's all fun and games when you're young and cute, but once you pass 40 or 50, or get kind of fat or bald or lose mobility or whatever, it seems like you're discarded by the other hedonistic rad queers who no longer find you attractive. Because really, that's what binds rad queers -- hedonistic sex and the freedom to pursue it (and, to a lesser extent, weird gender expression, but that is kind of its own thing). Hedonism is super fun when you're young, but after awhile it is no kind of life.
I am pretty privately content with my domesticated 'heteronormative' lifestyle, but in the circles I run in I am almost embarrassed by the fact that I have a happy, functioning, long-term monogamous relationship (with kids probably on the horizon). I don't want to throw anybody under the bus, since I do think those negative nancy radqueers were needed to jump start the movement at Stonewall and the following decade (who else was going to do it???), but in my heart I feel that that constantly negative, dissatisfied overall stance on life does not serve one well in the long term. Nothing is ever good enough for them, and all they really seem to want to do is party til they drop.
As Joan Didion wrote in "Goodbye to All That" (about her decision to leave the hedonistic Manhattan of her youth):
" And even that late in the game I still liked going to parties, all parties, bad parties, Saturday-afternoon parties given by recently married couples who lived in Stuyvesant Town, West Side parties given by unpublished or failed writers who served cheap red wine and talked about going to Guatalajara, Village parties where all the guests worked for advertising agencies and voted for Reform Democrats, press parties at Sardi’s, the worst kind of parties. You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair."
Using pledge tallies is the best way to gauge the CURRENT audience. What you choose to read into those tallies is another thing. However, they tell you what programming keeps the station afloat at this point in time.
ReplyDeleteThe POTENTIAL audience can't be read because the billions of people who could receive WBAI on a radio or via internet aren't listening. If you want to know what the potential audience wants, go out on the street and ask them. Truth be told, they want pop music of some sort, probably. Look at what happened to WWRL.
Anyway, this is all going down the same old path of people all arguing over what WBAI should be. I've heard it all since 1978 (remembering the polka music idea). The one thing we can seem to all agree on is that many people are on WBAI because of favoritism of some form. Some may be there due to some form of seniority.
I'm staying out of the queer debate, since it is tipping into the judgemental realm now. As a member of a non-mainstream sexual community, I'm jaded by this sort of chatter. Just do your thing with conscious and consenting adults and I don't give a crap who you are or what you call yourself.
SDL (aka SirDarklust. You figure it out...)
Maybe I SHOULD mention one thing about the word "Queer." If you go to a BDSM/kink oriented website, like fetlife.com, you'll see it used by many people (especially younger women) to define their sexuality. The definition is basically bisexual or homoflexible people who prefer the homosexual culture to heterosexual culture.
DeleteSDL
[points at SDL's comment]
ReplyDeleteWhat he said :)
~ 'indigo'
It must really suck in a bad omen sorta way when your show is to debut and gets interrupted by tech problems.
ReplyDeleteSDL
But you would surprise many people if that occurrence surprised you—know what I mean? :)
DeleteCurrent WBAI management and staff have no regard for the listener, unless there is a possibility of having access to their wallet or purse. This morning, we heard a clear indication of that disregard and the arrogance that has lost the station most of its listeners. “If you don’t like what we give you, go f**k off!”
After a one-hour muffled replay of an old interview with recently deceased Bobby Womack, the morning’s “engineer,” Tony Ryan, appears to have picked up his sledgehammer and left the premises. At least that was the impression one had when empty air ate up minute after minute of WBAI’s airtime. Ryan’s rerun “tribute” was over just before 6 AM, followed by fifty minutes of a barely perceptible hiss. At 6:49, the silence was interrupted by a series of station promos into which Mr. Sledge (has he a sister?) sandwiched a long piece of innocuous music—no station break, no explanation, no apology, but Ryan came back on shortly after 7AM and introduced another Womack recording. Then he too some calls, asking for opinions on the Central Park Five case, which took us to 7:39AM. That’s when he finally gave a station break, but still no mention of the lost 50 minutes.
Did you see how much the Sunday lineup is about to be shuffled (assuming, of course, the station is still on the air)?
ReplyDeleteIvan Hametz' and Chris Whent's programs are being moved to later time slots, apparently, so that no one will have to wake up at five am to listen to "High Praize".
I think we need to send a rescue mission for Ivan and Chris--and Rebecca Myles, Michio Kaku, David Rothenberg, "Emmanuel Goldstein", Max Schmid and a few others.
Don't you think that shuffle will be good fir Ivan and Chris?
DeleteAny WBAI host who has talent and isn't wearing a mental Mae West is asking for it. Most of them don't have to worry, I was told by a homeless angelic being that artificial halos make excellent flotation devices (good for potties, too).
BTW, the other morning, I tuned in and heard a so-so singer sounding most peculiar. They were re-running one of Daulton's 5 AM shows in a 10AM music slot and I was struck by the lyrics and rendering: "Goh-goh-goh-is-is-is-goo-goo-goo,,,," the program had been Verizonized!
Semi-Radical Semi-Queer: I am a transsexual woman. You have described the very reasons why I could be only so involved with LGBT activism, especially among the "radical queers". One of the reasons I transitioned was so that I wouldn't have to live with the kind of anger you described. Some of the biggest trans-haters I've encountered are the RQ's and radical second-wave feminists such as Kathy Brennan, Janice Raymond . The thing is, most of them can't enjoy their own company, which is why they're resentful of trans people who are happy in their own skins and why, among some of the gay men you've described, there's such an obsession with looking young and partying.
ReplyDeleteMany decades ago, long before Stonewall, Richard Lamparski and I spent an evening at Christine Jørgensen's house in Massapequa. He was there to interview her for his "Whatever Became of...?" series, I was his driver/ Christine was living with her mother (who was Danish) and a cocker spaniel in a wonderful house with a front garden and picket fence. Massapequa being a small community, Christine having received an inordinate amount of publicity when she had the operation, and the climate of intolerance being what it was in the U.S., I asked her if she experienced much harassment in her hometown. Not at all, she assured me—in fact, she belonged to a woman's club and was active (as well as welcomed) in many community activities.
DeleteI often wondered if her celebrity might have been a mitigating factor.
Gee I just say a few little things, and I get yelled at. As for Queer...I am. About the faceless anonymous loveless, and inhumane sex culture by both straight, and gays of the 1970's. That is up to the advent of the AIDS Pandemic. Well if one listened to what I said. I was, and am horrified at it. I was very specific about that. It's what drove me from activism at the time. So no that not where I was or am at. As I said I was as were so many of us in the Stonewall era a romantic revolutionary. We didn't want to join society as today's assimilationists do, and have done. We wanted to change the whole show top to bottom. Young romantics are like that. The Occupy youngsters case in point as I also said. We were pushed aside by the more practical minded politically savvy types that had contempt for us. Also as I said this is the way of all revolutions. We were young full of love, and hope. We couldn't tell political theory from a ham sandwich. So of course we were doomed. About not having listeners, and being on the air longer than I should have been. Sure yeah. Right now I'm on 55 minutes a month. Well twice a month if I'm not ill or pre-empted. This as punishment for not going along with the snake oil premiums, and saying so publicly. As Chris said if I had a proper slot, and back up which any producer is "supposed" to get it would be very different. I recall raising $1200. before I even started pitching back in the day, and then going on to raise a bundle. However not being favored this was not acknowledged. Hey that's show business. Btw over my years at the station I voluntarily left the air three times to make way for newer hosts. I'm not the only one to do that, but still. So yeah I do care, and am aware that things need to turn over. Btw I was 'invited' back each time. Yeah I'm full of it, but sometimes one needs to blow one's own horn. Ain't I cute? Chris thanks for re-printing my missive about my audience. I was serious ya know. I have thought about doing a show on the street. It all depends on how extroverted my meds make me.
ReplyDeleteAlways good to have you aboard, Sydney. Perhaps, if you lowered your show's level of intelligence, Berthold Reimers might give you a decent time slot.
DeleteI'll simply second Chris's statement – nice to hear from you, as always – your wit, intelligence, humor, and perspective are much appreciated.
Delete~ 'indigo'
Well I've tried that a few times, but it still comes out too smart'n cute. I even went on, and read the dictionary once. Damn if that didn't turn into something weird, and interesting. Okay I'll take your advice, and try to be really stupid. Umm I might succeed at it, but it may come out funny so we're right back where we started. Look I'll speak to my writers. I'll get back to you.
ReplyDelete