Chapter 7. WBAI 99.5 FM

Back in Hell’s Kitchen after three months on the road in Tennessee I heard about a meeting Downtown at the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers discussing film distribution. A tall, middle aged man across the room stood addressing the audience. 

“I’m on the board of WBAI, the community radio station programmed essentially by volunteers  here in New York City”. He spoke with authority, the air of a New Englander flavored his voice, “Now we, WBAI, have a fifty-thousand watt transmitter and an FM signal and we  broadcast from the top of the Empire State Building, that’s where the transmitter is and it goes out sixty miles,” and he looked around the audience pointing a finger to the ceiling, “that’s millions of people. If you have something to say why not think about WBAI, it’s another way of spreading your message,” and I felt he was speaking to me. A light went off in my head.  Radio! 

Filmmaking is fear, paranoia and anxiety. And it takes so long. And it costs so much. I was self-financing the project and so far had nothing. In a way it was like cocaine. It was intoxicating at the start but in the end it was a slog and it went on for years. The many applications I’d sent to non profit foundations yielded nothing. Looking back I see a vanity project or perhaps, put more kindly, an education, a way to travel, explore and focus on the world. My university. Like Zorba said: “Life is a risk.”

The tall, gangly, owlish man across the room, with long, lank, gray hair and large spectacles balanced precariously off-kilter on his nose, introduced himself in his Bostonian voice: “Ted Conant, call me Ted. My father was President at Princeton during the Second War - Oh yes - he was chairman of the National Defense Research Committee ramping up the Manhattan Project building  the bomb.” 

A shiver ran down my spine. It was like discovering a dusty diary in the shed; a source, a witness, a tendril touching the past, tactile and real, reaching into  the shadow of The Bomb. Ted invited me to join him for coffee that night and we spent the rest of the evening talking film, radio, Rupert Murdoch, newspapers and the atom bomb. 

He’d recently returned from Australia consulting with Murdoch and didn’t have a very high opinion of him. But he loved Australia and admired Australian Broadcasting. And he knew a lot of the backstory to the Bomb and introduced me to Robert Junk, the Swiss science writer who escaped the Nazis to write Brighter Than a Thousand Suns. Ted urged me to visit WBAI. Looking back, he was a Harry Potter character, a fairy tale magician who seemed delivered to me that night, an escapee  from the Upper East Side Brahmin class taking me under his rumpled wing.

_____ 

The next day I phoned WBAI. It took me a dozen tries before somebody answered: “…so why are you bothering me, just come down to the station! We’re on Thirty-Fifth and Eighth. Click!”. I grabbed a bag of audio tapes and  walked downtown ten blocks. This was old New York before the Giuliani clean-up sucked the life out of it, blunted the edge, the dangerous, exciting, unpredictable wondrous city where I’d landed two years earlier. This was the late seventies which was really the tail of the sixties.

You weave your way through the garment district, racks of clothes on wheels, past New York’s Penn station, Madison Square Garden and the glorious main New York Post Office spanning two blocks with a grand stone staircase.The streets always crowded, the sidewalks always scattered with papers, porno, coffee cups. Times Square, exploding with lights and fantasies, vagrants, travelers, cops, drugs and dim lit street-side bars and shiny electronic equipment stores selling knock-offs,  and the ribbons of commuters, the people flowing streams of faces and stories  winding past as far as the eye can see.

The building was shabby retro-art deco with a noisy tiled foyer. I took the elevator to the Nineteenth floor and found a shaggy haired fellow driving the telephone switchboard, pulling and stabbing the phone jacks: “WBAI hold on please.  WBAI hold on please”, he turned for a moment and motioned me: “take a seat!”

I watched a cavalcade pass through the vestibule and caught snatches of profanity laced conversations. I felt I’d merged with a Robert Crumb movie: “WBAI, hold on please. WBAi, hold on please”. After about half an hour I was invited to meet the news director.

I entered a narrow corridor packed with audio tapes and reels stacked on shelves, streamers of quarter-inch audio tape spilling from boxes and spools and rumpled program notes scribbled like graffiti; air-checks of Dylan and Bob Fass and Alice’s Restaurant, Steve Post and Larry Josephson, Abie Hoffman and the Ring Cycle and the corridor disappeared into infinity.  I stepped over the body of a middle-aged man propped against the wall nodding his head and he gave me a dazed look. I later learned he was the station’s film critic. 

I continued up the hallway passing offices crammed with more boxes of tapes, and books and files and papers, spools piled on desks, people pushing past some running and finally I reached the end. I was deep in the bowel of it. I heard the muted clatter of a teletype machine in a closet and saw the red on-air light flashing. This was the beating heart. 

A woman with large glasses, looked up and beckoned me into the news room. She closed the door and invited me to sit. I remember there was no chair so I leaned against the wall. A couple of producers were bent over tape recorders, swishing tape, cutting news. There were reels of tapes, wound stories and intros stacked and ready for air on her desk. 

She was a young blond woman with Nordic blue eyes and a serious air. She was the assured and professional voice I’d heard on WBAI news, Celeste Wesson. I pointed to my hefty bag of tapes but she seemed disinterested and asked if I could volunteer. I gulped and said I could and she invited me to join the crew. Immediately. Asked if  I rode a bike. I did but that was long ago in Australia at gentle sea side Portsea. 

But soon I was weaving between the traffic watching the bike messengers, how they rode and trying to ride the same but slower, on the sidewalk, against the traffic on the wrong side, through red lights to get the news. With a tape recorder over my shoulder and a note pad in my bag and a press pass I did assignments for WBAI evening news and found myself at press conferences and news events. We had access to a phone and experts, could interview them and put them on the news in minutes from just about anywhere in the world. I was transfixed. These folks were serious. Radio was exciting and vital and immediately gratifying compared with the long slog of independent filmmaking. Whenever I had spare time I made for the station and soon became part of the menagerie. 

And now I was a devoted listener and it was radio like I’d never. heard. As a child, radio was my companion. I remember a Bakelite Astor Mikey beside my bed and listening with my ear close to the speaker and the world of radio was inside my head; the flights of Superman and  the air adventures of Biggles, Ginger and Algie and The Lone Ranger and Tonto and the visceral thrill of radio was something new and different to me then as it was at WBAI. 

There was something tangible about radio and now I felt it between my fingers, sliding the cool magnetic tape and pressing sound in the slot in the metal edit block for the cut. In a headphone world one hears the depth and reach of sound and the yellow grease pencil marking the consonants and building a story cut by cut, building the reel and writing the script on a manual and pasting an AP or UPI tearsheet scrap you cut from the ticker. And rushing to the audio booth to lay the tracks and mixing the piece and handing off and watching, winding and threading the tape and minutes later sitting in the news room silent but for the monitor speaker and Celeste’s assured voice presenting the news behind the flashing red light. 

Soon I was invited to help produce and read the WBAI Weekend News and I found myself opposite a Caribbean woman as co-producer. My Australian accent and her Caribbean brogue became a feature of those weekend newscasts.

It was quieter on weekends but there was always somebody  interesting around. Producers and on-air guests filtered in an out, always the monitor speakers playing the on-air sound and producers hunched over Scully tape recorders cutting tape. It was an open secret that some were homeless and slept on couches and under desks. There was a room tucked away somewhere in the maze of corridors and audio tapes, behind a rack of ancient tape recorders that might have belonged or Dr. Frankenstein or Nicola Tesla. These phantom spirits including the nodding film critic, sometimes crept in and out of that room. It was rumored to contain racks of exotic pornography and drugs and only a select few were invited.

One may ask how it was that such a thing could happen. Where was the management? Who was in charge? Truth was that WBAI had always been an anarchic state of affairs, an asylum run by the inmates. Since few received any salary it was difficult to enforce rules. The station needed personnel on hand twenty-four-seven to run the place and it was they who were in charge when the management, such as it was, retired for the night.

Each weekend we poured through the incoming reports from Associated Press and Reuters rolling in on the teletype machines. We ripped and we wrote and used red pencils to highlight and stapled addendums and updates and we worked the phones and recorded incoming stories contributed by other volunteer producers and assembled our newscast. It was intoxicating. Deadlines are great teachers. One learns how to write and edit quickly and the adrenalin flows. And suddenly its 6:30 and now its time for the WBAI evening news. 

My Caribbean news partner was soon leaving town headed for Granada where she planned to set up a scuba diving business. She was an Afro-Caribbean woman, her hair cut close to her scalp, her demeanor polite and she invited me to her upper west-side apartment for dinner one Sunday evening.  Soon afterward she left and I never saw her again.