Black Leather Pants

There was a point in my life when I took to wearing black leather pants. In a way I was “coming out”, acknowledging my proclivities  as I explored deviance, specifically BDSM. 

Bondage. Domination. Submission. Sado-masochism. Phone sex. On and off-line sex. Extended chats and too many strangers to remember.

I liked my black leather pants because they were not blue jeans. They were rugged, and edgy; warm in winter, cool in summer, formal and informal and the seams worn smooth and I wore them everywhere for years. They were part of my search for the Philosopher’s Stone.  

The “Philosopher’s Stone”. I’d heard Chris Kristofferson was in search of the same;
that great state of inner transformation, from base state to enlightenment and maybe even  perfect being. I was pretty much still in the base stage with many a mile to travel but at least I was on the path and in the race.

I was buried in snow with early stage Cabin Fever in Hancock and my roof was starting to leak and the white paint was peeling off my country cottage by the railway tracks. After seventeen years absence from radio I found myself saying yes and I signed a six-month contract to become Interim General Manager at Pacifica Radio’s crown jewel, KPFA in Berkeley,  California. It was late winter,  2011 and I needed money.

“Can you be out here in two weeks?” 

I said yes and an electric charge went through me. I was plugged into radio again. 

Fifty years ago, in Papua New Guinea on the island of Bougainville, I’d first felt that feeling. The adventure and the possibilities. Radio became a kind of magic to me and I became a magician; alone in a studio one speaks to thousands and conjures a soundscape that is all imagination,  syncopating spirals of sound vibrating and transducing into visions and dreams, radio waves bouncing off the ionosphere and through our lives.

And in America radio was my avenue to freelance journalism. My association with Australian Broadcasting gave me legitimacy. And then came WBAI, my first experience with Pacifica. In those early days I was only interested in getting my stories to air and learning about radio’s deeper possibilities. I never imagined managing a station. I was a producer and dug deep into the oeuvre; I studied and taught radio workshops at WBAI and at New York Universities and eked out a living as a journalist, a documentary radio producer and sound recordist and I loved it. 

WBAI provided a playground and a palette for my explorations in radio. But how was it that such a place could even exist? 

Pacifica was a network of five volunteer community radio stations; in L.A, Washington DC, Houston, New York City and Berkeley California. Pacifica rode the wave of the Sixties,  right through the pipeline to its very end and that was a  marvelous thing. It was a free speech bastion and cauldron of experimentation and exploration. It was the home of radical radio and it was still about making love not war. 

KPFA invented the concept of  listener sponsored non-commercial radio. It was the late 1940’s and the reverberations of World War Two, the atomic bomb and the shocking pictures  of the Holocaust and sixty million killed in that war, shook the foundations of history. The straight backed, white haired British philosopher, Bertram Russell spoke truth about war and peace and the threat of atomic annihilation and Mahatma Gandhi sat down with a spinning wheel  in front of oppression and brought the British Empire to its knees. 

Into this foment KPFA was born; poets, left-wing political activists, musicians, Quakers, queers and communists and  Louis Hill started it all. He had a vision. At 3pm, April 15, 1949, Lew Hill sat behind the microphone and announced: 

"This is KPFA FM, listener sponsored radio in Berkeley, the first such radio station in the world”. 

Frequency modulation or FM radio had arrived but nobody had a way to listen. Hill figured if he gave people FM radios tuned to KPFA’s frequency and created news, music, poetry, drama and ideas and a place for artists to express themselves,  programming with no commercials but sponsored by listeners, he had a captive audience in the Bay Area of San Francisco. And so it was.

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels , upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop”. 

Mario Savio, Free Speech Movement, Berkeley 1964. 

The Berkeley Free Speech Movement successfully brought civil rights like mass sit-ins to colleges all over the world and excited the righteous imaginings of young people. It was why I came to America and I wanted to taste the fruit and I was in the heart of it at KPFA in Berkley.

I remember the first LSB meeting I attended, the Local Station Board. I’d just arrived. I’d visited California often for brief assignments and meetings and I’d never really tasted it. But it was familiar; the dry air and the white dust, the sun, the blue sky and smell of Eucalyptus. But the people are a different breed and soon peace and love were left in tatters on the studio floor at Pacifica.

That first day I was an interloper in leather pants, the new interim general manger from New York, no, from Australia for God’s sake. An outsider brought in to shake things up, hold the line against entrenched paid staff who drew a line between  them and volunteers.

Local Station Boards are contentious affairs, factionalized and out spoken, sometimes vicious. Two dozen members sit monthly representing paid subscribers, staff and union and the station manager is required to present a monthly report. There is usually an audience, supporters of various factions, in the bleachers. 

Berkeley and Oakland and San Francisco across the Bay Bridge, home of the Black Panthers, Dan Ellsberg and Angela Davis, The American Indian Movement and Chicanos and Farm Workers and firebrands of the sixties still written on the walls and its after taste lingers at Pacifica.