April 1, 2002 7:06PM
Counterculture and counterweights

I returned to Pittsburgh in 1972, fresh from Denmark and New Experimental College, prior to that Berkeley CA from the Summer of Love onward. I had a daughter one and a half years old, a failed marriage and not much part of a dime in my pocket. My parents bailed me out and I lived with them. I was deep into alternative education and counter to culture and looking for something. One day I found it.

First:
I have been a devotee of the radio since the early days of my life. I remember having the essence scared out of me one night while my parents were out partying and my father's best friend Bettino Fragale, Bets, was babysitting. I was maybe six or seven and my brother was probably three or four. The program was Inner Sanctum, for some reason we were listening to it on the upstairs radio scary in itself because it was where my severe grandmother lived, and the story, as far as my inchoate impressionable brain could tell was about a guy that had fire in his head. I know, it sounds nuts and is probably wrong, but so strong is that image, that I can imagine ,now, a man with his head, lid open a stoked furnace blazing like the hearths of the steel mills a short distance away skirting the Mon River Valley. It still scares the bejeebers out of me. O! That image!

Eventually we got a TV and I was sunk watching Howdy Doody each day, Flub-a-dub and spaghetti and meatballs and the Gillette Friday night fights which really kind of bored me, except for the commercials and alas radio declined in the living room, as surely supplanted by the eye as the horror of a guy with fire in place of his brain turned to image fed with a visual spoon.

Came a revolution. All of this really great rockabilly, jump and jive music that throbbed, just made you feel alive with rhythm, connected. Even better pissed off, if not your parents then, every other adult you met. We had raging arguments, the tables pulled down like Murphy beds, from the walls of William Penn School Grade School, transforming the gymnasium into our lunch room, about the merits of Elvis. I contended that I had never heard a more poignant song than Heartbreak Hotel to my third grade confreres and the joy I felt at Hound Dog could hardly be spoken. And then, Chuck Berry, I was a goner. I couldn't get enough of the radio, early on, KQV and Al Noble became the station and DJ to listen to. On Saturday morning Al would play the top one hundred or so in order. It was, well it was boss or tough or whatever the hell we said. It was even cool for a while. Lee Andrews and the Hearts, Teardrops, is something that I can sing to this day. It's in my head now.

Science Fiction and Rock 'n Roll two guilty pleasures I have carried into my later years.

Sitting with my blue plastic Arvin transistor radio, AM only, there was no Frequency to Modulate on the front steps door stoop you would find me most temperate days reading Astounding Science Fiction, listening next to the rhododendron bushes and the pink flamingos that we had brought back from our I Love Lucy trip to Florida. Believe that trip has taken on mythic dimensions in my family.

Years turned I listened to soppy jazz and montavani strings, matured listened with ineffable joy to KPFA in Berkeley California, thank you Phil Elwood for my education in jazz on Sat and Sun morning, learned Scott Joplin and Django to Ornette Coleman.

I remember one frightful January snowy evening when I was alone in the farmhouse at Fosdalsgaard Danmark, ’67, with only the large vacuum tube international table top radio to DX the world. The red kitchen wooden table. I couldn't sleep well, the darkness outside, the wind blowing wickedly attacking at the thatched roof, the empty dark rooms, Jan was gone, Susan was gone, Sheldon and Betsy, Jake, Aage and Sara. I was stranded, alone in the world except the sound of Radio America and the BBC and whatever I could, distant station Brought to the red table and warm. Trying to keep as sane as possible in the dense dark cold Danish night the nearest neighbor miles away. Cold. Elvis, British Rock, Glenn Miller, snatches of foreign conversation. Alive.

So I returned to America to Pittsburgh and found this radio station. It was borrowing time from WDUQ the local NPR station in the afternoons, while struggling to get the funds to go on the air. WYEP-FM . They were asking for volunteers to help with mailing, licking envelopes etc. I called.

Eventually I became program director.

I remember the first unofficial night best. Larry called from the top of the cathedral, Klystron Tube hot and ready to broadcast. Man, I thought, the Klystron tube! There were only a few of us in the empty basement at four cable place and a small Shure mixer that we used eventually for remote radio broadcasts. Someone hooked it up. John got a twinkle in his eye. “Let’s go on the air!” he said. Just like that. I could feel the excitement that started in my stomach and buoyed me up. I was floating. We plugged in a microphone to the mixer. We were “on the air” John said some extemporaneous things, he handed the mic to me and I said something very inane. John picked up a book off a table. Alan Ginsburg’s Howl and started to read. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,…. It was a perfect start. We even got a phone call from some student in the Pitt dorms who was wondering what the hell he was hearing. Our first talk show.

Two days later the station officially launched, but the programming never matched that first peerless night.