Underground Radio

 

Cecile Lusby                                                                                                          1922 words

                           Underground Radio: A Splice of My Life

     My favorite station does not show up on the Arbitron Radio Ratings, but though it no longer exists, KSAN changed my life. KSAN was a small classical music station before Metro Media bought it. From its initial broadcast of ‘community radio” in 1968, San Francisco’s KSAN was the nation’s first major underground radio station. Its music, news, and public service announcements were slanted to young progressives in the Bay Area.

     FM Radio stations had been around for a while. Berkeley’s KPFA had started in 1949, with my father, Vince Lusby as its first Sunday morning jazz host. KPFA combined music and political programs, in those days presenting perspectives both left and right.  KJAZ began its all-jazz format in1959, the summer Billie Holiday died and ‘I Love You, Porgy’ was Nina Simone’s first hit. FM programming was offering an escape from ‘bubblegum rock’ formats on AM radio alternating three minute ‘hits’ with loud ads.  KSAN broadcast free form uninterrupted sets of music chosen by its staff, instead of a preset play list sent down from management or the hits on popular music charts. The success of albums and artists with longer songs and their experimental arrangements convinced the owners, Metro Media,  there was money to be made in this new market, a genre called album oriented rock.

       Led by Tom Donahue, striking KMPX workers moved over to KSAN, whose general manager, Willis Duff was looking for a chance to combine topicality and commercial success by blending music and satire. While most high school kids were happy with their AM top 40 stations, more sophisticated teens and listeners in their twenties were hoping for longer musical selections, sometimes six or eight minutes long, like the full length songs on albums by Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and The Beatles after 1966. FM (frequency modulation) gave a truer tone when compared to AM’s more static-y sound and was the more likely alternative for serious music lovers.

     Music segments on KSAN were at least twenty minutes and often thirty minutes long before any ad interrupted the flow. The culture or personality of KSAN was expressed in the interplay between music, lyrics, news, and the news reporters in an often irreverent exchange. The process involved the newsman beginning his report and the DJ quietly lining up music that would touch on that subject matter. For example, one news item reported that after Richard Nixon was accused of being “out of it,” he responded, “I am hep.”  Nixon’s incorrect use of the ‘e’ instead of ‘i’ in ‘hip’ made it clear that there really was an issue. The DJ on duty would prepare a musical response without saying a word and after the news ended, would begin playing a song like Dylan’s “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones.”  They let the music do the talking, giving listeners the challenge of making their own connections.

      For a new station breaking ground in the election year of 1968,  news was everything. That year was arguably the most violent in our history. TV’s evening news covered the war in Vietnam, the assassinations of RFK and MLK, and the riots across the country in the wake of the killings. President Johnson’s withdrawal from the election campaign unsettled the Democratic race and that summer’s violent demonstrations outside the Chicago convention hall were televised, upsetting much of mainstream culture. Nixon’s victory and inauguration in 1969 brought an end to the New Frontier and the Great Society, leaving many of the younger generation furious or skeptical.

    In the Bay Area 1968 was a year of strikes, one at San Francisco State supported by many of the labor unions, and a newspaper strike leaving readers of both the SF Examiner and the SF Chronicle without their papers for 52 days.  We use the term “multimedia” to acknowledge that print, radio, and television all covered the news, but    when mainstream readers lost access to the big newspapers,  KQED, the local public broadcasting station began airing Newsroom every night presenting local journalists and radio people giving the TV audience a freer, local slant on the news and a substitute for print media. The alternative press flourished at this time when the Bay Area was home to at least eight underground papers: The Oracle, Berkeley Barb, S.F. Bay Guardian, Good Times, Bay Area Express Times and a feminist paper, It Ain’t Me, Babe. The Black press had the Sun Reporter and the Black Panther paper. On radio KSAN was the number one source of new music and news for the young, hip listeners of the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the center of this trend was Scoop Nisker making tapes blending snippets of news, pertinent song lyrics, and sound effects, spliced audio creations he called ‘collages.’

      KSAN found a loyal audience, tapping into its youthful energy through news, commentary, and community bulletins.  In the January 1971 Bolinas Oil Spill, KSAN broadcast the need for quick response, announced the rescue center’s phone number, and recruited volunteers to save sea birds and help cleanup the beach. I was there the next day, learning the technique then in use to wipe away the crude gunk off the grebes and gulls and ducks. This example was one way the station kept its listeners connected to the news stories.

      DJs also participated in interviews with musicians and contemporary authors. My listening to folk singer and writer Jeanie Darlington describe her book, Grow Your Own brought me to my local bookstore and then to a lifetime of organic gardening. I made record purchases and bought my concert tickets based on information I heard on my radio. In those years KSAN’s music and commentary was everything from breakfast to bedtime on my days off, with occasional TV breaks.  I listened every day.

     As Scoop Nisker writes, “In 1970 after guilty verdicts of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial were announced, the San Francisco Examiner had an article saying rioters in Berkeley were listening to KSAN news to find out where to go. And they were, of course, because we were giving directions.”

      The shadow side of this intimate connection between DJ’s, news reporters, and audience can be heard in the 1970 tapes of the reconfigured KMPX’s strike included on the website for KSAN Jive 95 news clips.  KSAN carried their underground competitors’  revolutionary and often scatological demands and threats, followed by KMPX’s management cutting off the broadcast and their jobs. If KSAN showed the positive side of the youth culture, KMPX’s final days showed the uglier aspects of alternative life.                    Increasing violence and profanity in anti-war and student demonstrations brought the critical attention of then Governor Ronald Reagan, whose power over the UC Regents caused Berkeley’s Clark Kerr to step down and tuition to increase dramatically after 1970-71. The Reagan and Nixon administrations marked a change of mood in the state and nation.

     In 1970 I graduated from college as a divorced mother of two, remarrying at the end of the year. In June of 1971 we bought a small house on 2 acres outside Santa Rosa, sixty miles north of Berkeley and San Francisco. We were ‘back to the land-ers’ trying to live simple lives away from the problems in the cities, but we still listened to KSAN. We grew our own food and livestock. My husband needed to earn money for the mortgage, and build his own business, but soon grew restless with responsibility and slow returns.  I worked at the local hospital as an Emergency Room secretary. We had a baby in 1973 and in 1975, a divorce.  In my bleak transition, KSAN began playing punk rock of the mid-1970s, and all of a sudden there was David Bowie and Elvis Costello—different, certainly, but easier on the ears than The Clash, the Sex Pistols, and the Ramones. The change in musical aesthetic was sudden and stark. It was all irreverence then..  KSAN avoided Disco, but more and more I lost that glow from recognizing my youth, my music, and my community. I read Rolling Stone for its coverage of music, appreciating the writing. Then in 1981, KSAN changed to a country music format without the same news. I was adrift.

     Most of the DJs moved away from the Bay Area. Bonnie Simmons programmed shows for KVRE and works even now on KPFA Thursday nights. Many of the newsmen can still be heard, with Scoop Nisker on KFOG and showing up here and there (e.g., Spirit Rock Meditation Center) to talk about Buddhism, Dave McQueen just retired from CBS news in 2009, and Peter Laufer continues to write while on the faculty of the University of Oregon in Eugene.  Terry McGovern has been a character actor on TV and in movies for decades.

       The market appeal that attracted Metromedia and Willis Duff to KSAN eventually faded, so KSAN changed to country music.  After leaving KSAN he continued doing market research. It was his job to track public tastes by auditioning would-be disc jockeys and potential news anchors in front of test audiences. He did not stop with pencil and paper scorecards; Duff used the old psychological tool of electrodes on fingers to gauge emotional response to the person trying out for the job. It was an audition by galvanic skin response or electronic market analysis.  As tastes change, markets change and Willis Duff wanted to measure the possibilities for success.  What he did for Progressive music and the marketing of controversy in news in 1968 he did by guessing that there was a demand and would be profit.  He consulted with network radio and television to oversee the selection of news anchors.  Think of the film, ‘Broadcast News,” or the new BBC series, ‘The Hour’ featuring handsome men with no experience in journalism who move up to anchor major network news, you know that truth really is stranger than fiction.

   Strange things happen when we look the other way and just let markets sort things out. Radio has become balkanized with the rise of talk radio, mostly right wing and usually AM.  KPFA is an exception on the left, and NPR’s news and interview format tries to remain neutral.  Arbitron will tell you the demographic group that any station aims for in its broadcasting strategy. Americana or roots music music is my favorite, but such a specific musical programming is called niche radio, very characteristic of this time in our country. Music stations are common on the FM dial with fixed playlists of Top Forty sprinkled with a few examples of free form alternative music. Today’s radio is an archipelago of musical genres, each station its own separate island of age, race, and ethnicity.

     What did we know then, with all our bright hopes for peace and freedom? How could we guess that by the turn of the 21^st century nearly all radio, television, and newspapers would be owned by five media giants? Which of us had any idea that radio would be controlled by corporate consultants like Arbitron, or by media analysts who no longer cared for our words and music. Community Radio, in the words of Joni Mitchell, was just a dream some of us had.

For more on this topic, there is the online article by Marcy Rein from 1970, The More Times Change: Bay Area Alternative Press, 1968 – 1998.  David Armstrong’s book, A Trumpet To Arms deals with both alternative press and KSAN.

Below, Bonnie Simmons formerly of KSAN, still heard on KPFA.

Domestic Flight

                                                                       

Domestic Flight

     Good housekeeping? What, the magazine? Housekeeping, the novel by Marilyn Robinson?  Or do you mean cleaning house, Martha Stewart’s favorite topic? Sorry, but I never enjoyed it. By my twenties I understood the saying, “Housework is never noticed until it isn’t done.” My daughters clean regularly to feel better about their surroundings and themselves, which is a mystery to me. I prefer detachment, mind over matter.

       For forty years now I have lived in an old hatchery, a real redwood tribute to family and fertility, a conversion my second husband had almost completed on the day he walked out.  I finished the exterior with my own DIY shingling job and found it more satisfying than other chores, certainly more fun than housework.  Under the topic ‘More Fun’ I would also include traveling, knitting, gardening, reading, writing, you name it.

    Perhaps my aversion to domestic maintenance is connected to my Anglo ancestors and their bookish disregard for household routine. Consider this quote from Quentin Crisp, by his own account “one of the stately homos of England” and author of The Naked Civil Servant as he described maintaining his flat, “There was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years, the dirt didn’t get any worse.”  Closer to home, the American comedian Phyllis Diller said, “Housework can’t kill you, but why take a chance.” and “I’m eighteen years behind on my ironing.”   My guru Phyllis also said, “Cleaning the house before your children are grown is like shoveling snow in the middle of a blizzard.”

      Much of the comedy at the beginning of the Women’s Movement was based on a resistance to the notion that women should be happy with housework. Women in the 1960s were not expected or really welcome in the marketplace.  I view those comediennes who first mocked housekeeping and the traditional views of women (Diller, Totie Fields, Joan Rivers, and later Roseanne Barr) as pioneers. Back then, unfortunately, many of their jokes mocked women themselves, their bodies, or their status as housewives.  What their humor offered then was another point of view, resisting the life of the household drudge. The dutiful housewife sends her children outside rather than risk their “tramping dirt in the house.” She does not listen to them or cuddle them; she is cleaning.

      On weekends I like Book TV and recently watched a speech by Cambridge scholar Ha-Joon Chang, who said, “The washing machine has changed the world more than the Internet.”  He was referring to how appliances and other technical advances have improved the daily lives for half the planet: women.  I suspect that many men have benefited from these home advances as well. Consider that great American soul, Henry David Thoreau, who lived simply in a state of nature, but still found doing his laundry so distasteful that he left Walden Pond every week to take a bundle of soiled clothes to his mother for her to wash. Was this transcendence?

      For another example of a man’s view of the laundry, I recently read a review by Rachel Aviv of Peter Trachtenberg’s The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and its Meaning, where the author disclosed that once “he attempted suicide because at the moment it seemed more appealing than folding laundry.” Modern life has wrested hours out of every day once taken up with scrubbing and sweeping, duties that now require only minutes.

      I would add the obvious corollary that clothes dryers have changed the world as well. I refer here not just to finishing the laundry, but also to the use of the dryer as a substitute for ironing. Very few women iron anymore. Now they use hand held steamers or the dryer to fluff their clothes to rid them of major wrinkles. I iron perhaps two or three times a year now, but then that’s just me. Millions of women count every minute away from the ironing board as blessed.

      As a child I watched my working mother rush through her tidying, tossing any stray items into a hamper or onto a clothes hook in the closet, saying “Out of sight, out of mind,” and that became my maxim.  I can count all the homes of my childhood and the apartments of my twenties by the secret hiding places I made, laundry being my first ‘dirty little secret,’ with ironing a close second.  At my worst I used a screened porch for this task, a space reserved for an old washer and a dirty clothesbasket. I didn’t want my children wearing dirty clothes, so I did laundry frequently.

      My husband believed he could speed things up by creating a drain where the landlord had not. Instead of hiring a plumber, my spouse drilled a hole in the floor, bent over, and inserted the washer’s drain hose into the new aperture. This project was probably the masculine equivalent of ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ However, when bamboo began to sprout through the gap and the heater vents, he decided it was time to move to the country. This is the same ex who left while building my place, but that’s another story.

      Early motherhood extended my inattention to domestic duties.  Hiding my freshly laundered clothes was my greatest flaw as a housewife.  This practice frustrated my daughters, but they eventually learned to retrieve and to iron, then to hate ironing, and finally to go to the cleaners or use a dryer to ‘fluff their stuff.’ More than once over the years I dedicated an entire room to contain my family’s clean, but un-ironed garments. When it was clear that certain items had not been worn in six months or more, I bagged them up and took them to the Goodwill. I saw this as a good thing. I felt clean, organized, and charitable.

      When my children were in elementary school I set up the ironing board in front of the TV and we all watched PBS for our edification, or Soul Train for their footwork, and the distraction kept me from noticing how awful ironing was. The children were safe with me as I held court there beside the clean clothesbasket. If I began the same duties in solitude, I would daydream, get weepy, or mutter to myself as I suspect generations of women did before me. So I began listening to my radio’s mix of news and music as I worked.  Now I have changed my loyalty to NPR—such loyalty that I cannot bear to be distracted by ironing and all the disciplined dedication that it requires.

      Ah well, let us change the subject and move on to closets. Let me peek inside …perhaps not.  Very few readers are old enough to remember Fibber McGee opening his radio closet, but I can still hear the clickety-clatter and clashing cymbals as all the contents came crashing down in those old broadcasts. My closets are not that bad or that congested.

    Perhaps it is better to discuss the kitchen, which is an area where I can truly say that I have shown improvement over time. This was not always the case. Since my culinary skills have not increased over all my years of cooking, I burn a pot every now and again. I always soak it. Why linger over the dishes if you have to toss dinner in the garbage? I say scrape and toss the scorched contents, soak the pot, and make a quick salad. My first husband had a problem with this rule, and, come to think of it, so did the second. Hmmm, I think I’m discovering something here.

     Men of my generation did not help with the dishes, and did not cook, either. So why should I have revealed where I put the soaking pot?   How long it had been there? Please.  I chose the oven for the first day or so.  When I suddenly encountered it after an unplanned delay, the odor was always a surprise. Then I would take it outdoors to toss the stuff not already welded to the sides of the pan into the garden and return to scour it. This process left just the burned residue, which in turn called for another soaking, another hiding place. One needs to be resourceful when choosing a different spot… the back porch, maybe.

      When I went to deliver my son in 1964, the hospital stay was five days, and my mother-in-law came over to help by cleaning my house. She discovered a sequestered soaking pot after it emitted a low belching sound from the bottom of the storage shelves on the back porch, and saw its bubbling and frothing away as the sign of growing bacteria and all around negligence.  There was no end to the story. The pot was still waiting for me when I got back home with the new baby.

     I am a responsible, daily dishwasher, and also have a novel way of washing the floor. I recently scanned through a November 2010 issue of Good Housekeeping, and found an article on Jamie Lee Curtis and her super-organized home. She is systematic, but still manages one bit of kitchen cleanup the same way I do: she scrubs her floor by using damp white cleaning cloths under her dancing feet. I did this forty years ago, telling my children what fun it was and then suddenly we were all together in the kitchen skating around on ragged old towel scraps with the radio up, laughing at each other’s moves.  With the children grown, cleanup is once again a solitary venture, which may be a clue as to why any social being would hate being confined to the domestic front. Females are not homebound anymore.

       When I was a kid, I only had to help my mother out—to play a small part in a larger team. When I married at twenty, a whole mountain of household maintenance tasks fell on my shoulders, in addition to my job and then childcare. I developed a rash after a few months of washing dishes, a dermatitis that erupted under my wedding ring and spread upwards.  After one dermatologist described it as dishpan hands, the allergy grew worse and worse. The light began to dawn on me that something could be wrong with my life when the rash approached my armpits.  Years later I got a prescription for hydrocortisone ointment, but in the mid 1960s I was amazed that right after separating from my husband, and tossing that wedding ring down the toilet, the rash disappeared. Possibly it was a better ointment, possibly it was removing the ring that I suspect caused the outbreak, but my cure worked for me.

     As my children went out into the world, I worked toward completing my first goal of becoming a teacher, then switched to school counseling before I retired. I was able to develop a life of reading, traveling, gardening, and having some fun along the way. So in the end, I was not a household drudge. My children turned out to be good people even though I lived my life with a nod to domestic maintenance, not as a slave of it.

for a Dancer

For A Dancer

In November, 1950, all Woolworth’s novelty fabrics went on sale. Mama found a piece of orange tulle left over from Halloween and sent me to find thread to match. She haggled with the sales clerk as soon as I was out of earshot, buying a yard of ivory satin from a larger remnant. My mother counted the change from her two dollars, but it was not enough to buy a pattern.
“What did you buy, Mama?”
“Never mind. It’s a secret. After dinner tonight, I want you to pack up your clothes for the good will. That old swimsuit, for instance.”
“But it still fits. “
“Just put it all in the bag. I’ll figure it out later.”
Fridays Mama usually stayed up late reading, sleeping in late Saturday mornings. I took my bath and was heading off to bed when I noticed her studying my bathing suit and tracing the outline on the new material. Once in my bedroom I heard the sound of her scissors knocking against the kitchen table. Next morning the floor was slippery with satin scraps, and my swimsuit was back on top of my dresser.
That night I woke to find her working on the project again. Seeing me, she spoke sharply: “It’s time you were in bed, little girl.”
When I stirred in my sleep, I heard the whirring of her old sewing machine. She began again right after Sunday dinner, with another early bedtime for me. I woke up after midnight to find her bent over the table, her head on her arms, asleep by the machine next to rows and rows of orange ruffles. Her cigarette had left a long grey cylinder in the ashtray.
My ninth birthday arrived a week later and I opened the box to see my mother’s handiwork wrapped in white tissue. I was proud, but speechless.
“It’s a tutu, honey. It’s what ballerinas wear,” she said.
I wanted to ask if there were shoes as well, but I knew better. I put on the tutu after pressing the satin against my cheek, and Mama, who loved to dance, led me through the five positions as I followed in my bare feet. We whirled and swayed to her Nutcracker record on the phonograph. Crashing on the couch, we went through the ballet book my father gave me, looking together at photos of Maria Tallchief and Alicia Markova.
That Christmas Mama had sat us down to show us her budget—her bills and her income. We learned there that children learned the Santa Claus story, but that it was parents who bought gifts. Mama reminded us that our father was absent, and so our presents would be what she could afford on her salary. Stevie cried.
For Christmas 1950 I got ballet slippers, but there was no money for lessons. Four years later when I was thirteen, my Aunt Nellie paid for a beginners’ class that lasted six weeks. I was lacking whatever passion Mama had for classical dance, so I didn’t press for more instruction in such an ordeal of discipline. Six weeks was quite enough for me in 1955, when dancing changed with Elvis’ gyrations and James Brown’s bold moves.

The Achievement of a Lifetime: Planned Parent

Planned Parenthood: The Achievement of a Lifetime

In reviewing my life, I have witnessed many changes in the world that surprised me, none more so that the transformation of women’s lives between 1960 and 2010. The sexual revolution was not so much a revolution as a reconfiguring of America from one set of anti-obscenity and anti-birth control laws to a different principle establishing sexual privacy as a basic personal right. Many years elapsed between the development of efficient contraceptives and the ordinary woman’s legal access to them. The old laws Anthony Comstock and his Wall Street funders pressed congress to pass in 1873 remained a repressive force until the U S Supreme Court set them aside in 1966. It was at that time that the Court helped my generation, then in their early twenties, decide the number of children we wanted with reliable forms of birth control. For younger women, the changes since the 1970s are simply revolutionary.
Those of us in college in 1960 were born in the late 1930s or early 1940s. In my sophomore year when my friends and I were eighteen and nineteen, a classmate got married, becoming the first in our group to get a prescription for ‘the pill,’ after showing the doctor the announcement of her engagement in the paper. She took Enovid for six weeks prior to her wedding night, the night for which she had saved her virginity. That year also one of our friends died after a botched back alley abortion. I was quietly working my way through school, keeping silent about my stay in an unwed mother’s home in my last year of high school. I put the baby up for adoption, and at my post-partum checkup at the U.C clinic, the doctor refused to give me contraceptives because I was unmarried and only seventeen. These disparate circumstances were very much part of that era: the golden ideal of being a virgin on your wedding night counterposed by the risks of sex out of wedlock and unplanned pregnancy.
By 1964 America’s birth rate had dropped dramatically. Something had changed in the lives of married couples in the USA. 1966 was the first year Planned Parenthood opened clinics in the SF Bay Area, after Title X of the Civil Rights Act 1965 allowed women to get birth control, regardless of income. The idea of sexual privacy had arrived, reaching the highest court in the land, terminating the Comstock Laws that forbade birth control for married couples in 1966. The court spoke again in 1972 when it extended the same right to singles. In the forty years since that time our expectations of personal freedom have changed, altering society’s views of women at home and in the workplace.

Today we are once again threatened with a loss of freedom and privacy in the current attempts by social conservatives to stop federal funding for Planned Parenthood. It is a tragic turn of events, since the use of contraceptives prevents pregnancy, thereby avoiding abortion. If the conservative goal is to reduce or eliminate abortions, the logical position would be the advocacy of personal responsibility to avoid unplanned pregnancy. To eliminate or reduce access to birth control would return us to the Comstock Laws. This goal of social conservatives has everything to do with women, with limiting the free agency of women, with curtailing the sexual expression of women, and restoring traditional matrimony with its attendant risks without much said about self-restraint for men.
If the conservative agenda were truly pro-life, it would foster spending on social programs, like childcare and food stamps, but it does not. For the young and the poor. “Abstinence only” is what conservatives promote, with the consequence being the predictable failure of large numbers of people to restrain their youthful sexual appetites. Spontaneous unprotected sex leads to pregnancy and poverty, to poor families, poor women, and poor children, just as it did in 1729 when Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal.
As a survivor of the bad old days, the last days of the reign of the Comstock Laws, I say, “Give us family planning through Planned Parenthood, please. Give us our privacy and our personal choices as established in Title X.”

Planned Parenthood the achievement of a lifetime