Post by Brian DeShazor, Pacifica Radio Archives

The Pacifica Foundation, founded in 1946 by Lewis Hill – a Quaker, conscientious objector, poet, and pacifist – began broadcasting at KPFA, 94.1 FM in Berkeley, California, on April 15, 1949. It was the first of its kind. The mission was to create a new kind of radio, supported by listeners, owing nothing to sponsors, providing an outlet for poetry, independent journalism, free speech, creative expression, and a safe haven for artistic experiments with the radio medium. Predating National Public Radio, over the next 28 years, the network added four stations: KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles, CA (1959), WBAI 99.5 FM NYC, NY (1959), KPFT 90.1 FM Houston, TX (1970), and WPFW 89.3 FM Washington D.C. (1978). Perhaps best known as a chronicler of social justice movements and cultural change, Pacifica stations contributed to their communities by broadcasting unique coverage of HUAC hearings, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the women’s movement, the gay liberation movement, the student free speech movement, the Black power movement, the Native American Indian movement, and many others. Pacifica stations consistently embraced the performing and literary arts, offering sometimes the only forum for cutting edge and classical arts, as well as providing a stage to experiment with music, radio drama, spoken word, sound sculpture, and the art of radio documentary. This may be my favorite description of the programming ideals from a 1960 KPFK member folio program guide (all of which are freely available online at Archive.org):

“As a listener-sponsored station KPFK is free from the restrictions and inhibitions of commercial radio. We may attempt to discharge our special responsibility to the community with vigor, intelligence and imagination.

Our approach to broadcasting is permissive, bold and somewhat naive, because we feel that these attributes hold the secrets of growth and true wisdom. We choose to focus on the positive aspects of our freedom; what we are freed for; rather than what we are freed from.

We are free to serve: By tapping the creative resources of our nation and community we give hearing to deserving and unknown literary and musical talent, we provide a forum for the full discussion of public affairs, and we serve the community by an active participation in its cultural and intellectual life.

We are free to explore: In public affairs we are free to probe beyond the superficial level. Our programs are designed to stimulate, not to mirror complacency.

We are free to innovate: By broadcasting original works, special interviews, and live concerts, we can give free radio its rightful position as a provocative and intimate communicative medium. We are free to create new formats and recombine old ones. We can afford to risk without fear of the consequences on a popularity rating scale.

We are free to challenge: Our view of current happenings and long-term trends in this community and the world can be fresh and insistently honest, equally free to challenge the dogmas of the avante garde or the traditionalist, the intellectual or the anti-intellectual, the happy few or the complacent many, as the occasion requires. We frankly admit our prejudice, against the pretentious in any form or walk of life. Sacred cows find no sanctuary in our studios.

We have no commitments other than to these ideals.”

The Pacifica Radio Archives has over 60,000 program units, and has digitized approximately 10% since the advent of the digital age thanks to several grant funded projects and by public request. We are currently in the final months of a two-year project to preserve and make accessible 2,000 programs covering the women’s movement, in a project titled “American Women Making History and Culture: 1963-1982”, funded in part by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission at the National Archives and Records Administration.

From the Vault is the Pacifica Radio Archives radio series produced weekly to rebroadcast and contextualize the history captured on reel-to-reel tape from 1949 to about 1999 by the Pacifica radio stations. The series is heard on the Pacifica Radio stations and its 200 affiliates. The series was created in 2006 in an effort to disseminate the history preserved to new audiences, promote the grant funded projects that helped digitize selections of the collection, and raise funds to continue preservation and access projects.

With thousands of tapes to choose from, it’s no easy task to curate. We begin each week mindful of current events and obituaries. We work from a calendar of historic events, commemorations and anniversaries to motivate our research. Programs of note include: The first march on Washington for Gay Rights, 1979; a previously unknown 1964 speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and my personal favorite, Flora Molton, a blind blues street singer from Washington D.C.

Gospel and country blues musician Flora Molton.

We are always seeking ways to make the materials contemporary and reach new audiences. In the works is a program on the 50th anniversary of the Watts Uprising in Los Angeles. We will be using the KPFK 1965 radio documentary, The Fire This Time, but not in the traditional way. On July 10, 2015, the archival sound will be used in a live concert event produced by Grand Performances as source material in a new hip-hop/ rap music mixtape performance curated by Lyricist Lounge co-founder Anthony Marshall, featuring dead prez, Jimetta Rose, ill CamiLLe, Bambu, food4Thot, and members of the Watts Prophets. From the Vault has produced 486 one-hour episodes to date.

Now that the Pacifica Radio Archives is partnered with the RPTF we look forward to expanding our Campus Campaign and our efforts to make the radio history part of educational curriculum.

Post by Lisa Hollenbach

In the Special Collections reading room at UC-San Diego, I tune in to Pacifica station WBAI in New York City, circa the spring of 1961. Or, to put it more accurately, I listen to a copy of a tape made by the poet Paul Blackburn, which includes several WBAI broadcasts recorded that spring. Blackburn also produced his own poetry show on the station from 1964-65, and I’m here researching a project about poetry broadcasting on Pacifica Radio. Listening through the layers of mediation that stand in for Blackburn’s own listening ear, I catch an interview with Allen Ginsberg, a broadcast of Blackburn reading translations of medieval Provençal poetry, a Mozart piano concerto, and a BBC production of King Lear. At one point Blackburn reads directly into the tape recorder from Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems before the next recorded broadcast cuts in. During the Mozart, I can hear a typewriter in the background, and suddenly I’m placed in a room with dimensions. I wonder, though there’s no way to know, if he’s working on a poem.

In a recent post for this series, John McMurria asks, “Why Care About Radio Broadcast History in the On-Demand Digital Age?” As a literary scholar interested in radio broadcasting of poetry from the 1950s through the 1970s, this is a question I think about a lot. I often feel as though I’m working on several neglected cultural fronts at once, examining forms long declared dead, including during the period I study—poetry, radio, spoken word recording, the Pacifica Radio network itself. Yet the on-demand digital age is also reviving public interest and an experimental ethos to both recorded poetry performance and to radio’s digital afterlife. Preserving and narrating the cultural history of sound media history has repercussions for how we listen to the past and for creative possibility in the present.

I hear echoes between our own digital moment and the 1960s, when the FM band became a site for experiments in underground and community radio, and when poets experimented with new poetic forms, new approaches to performance, and new media. The listener-sponsored Pacifica Radio network—first broadcasting from KPFA in Berkeley in 1949—was an influential innovator in the FM revolution. WBAI, acquired by Pacifica in 1960, quickly became a countercultural hub for freeform radio, minority perspectives, coverage of the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement, and innovative cultural programing. Poets’ voices and poetry were (and still are) heard constantly on Pacifica’s stations. In the sixties a WBAI listener might catch, for example, Ginsberg on Bob Fass’s Radio Unnameable, or a group reading and discussion by members of the Umbra Poets Workshop.

Paul Blackburn (a UW-Madison alumnus) was a fixture of Manhattan’s Lower East Side poetry scene until his early death from cancer in 1971. He co-curated two important reading series at the cafés Le Metro and Les Deux Mégots and helped to establish the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. He also appeared several times on WBAI for interviews or to give readings before producing his own weekly Contemporary Poetry program. On his program, Blackburn occasionally invited poets into the studio, but he more often broadcast from his extensive tape collection. Blackburn recorded everything. His enormous portable tape recorder followed him to readings; it was also a fixture in his home, where he recorded late-night conversations with friends as well as the radio and his own poetry. A collection of Blackburn’s tapes, including recordings of his radio show, are now held with his papers at UCSD’s Archive for New Poetry.

Blackburn’s radio program often brought listeners to the cafés where poets like Ted Berrigan, Diane Wakoski, John Wieners, and Ed Sanders performed in front of lively, familiar audiences. In doing so, he introduced listeners both to a literary scene and to the importance of that scene to the poetry itself, as poets read works that named the very friends, cafés, and streets caught on the tapes. With casual introductions and a laissez-faire approach to sound editing, Blackburn projected a style and experimental aesthetic that fit well within WBAI’s overall freeform aesthetic at the time.

Blackburn’s stint as a radio producer was short-lived—an appearance by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) pushed the station’s limits on obscenity too far—but his tapes also leave a fascinating record of radio listening. These include broadcasts from WBAI as well as other NY stations, documenting his daily life and poetic interests as well as nationally historic events, like John F. Kennedy’s state funeral. Blackburn probably recorded the radio for the same reasons we all used to—to capture for future listening or to share. But his radio listening also played a role in his compositional practice. One tape, for example, records a series of news broadcasts from December 1965 related to the launch and space flight of Gemini 7. Blackburn would draw on these for his poem “Newsclips 2,” which comically picks up on reports of the crew removing their space suits (“what a great idea, a pair / of astronauts / orbiting earth for two full weeks / in their underwear!”). The poet Robert Kelly states that Blackburn “collaborated with the tape recorder” to tune the page to voice and ear, but the voices indexed by his poetry include not only his own poetic voice but the highly mediated voices of radio—like the one that signs off “Newsclips 2”: “Don’t miss it boys and girls, and that’s / all for tonight.”

A relatively unknown poet’s brief stint as radio producer for a local noncommercial station is unlikely to make it into any major survey of broadcasting history. Yet I’m interested in Blackburn’s tape collection in part because it documents sonically not only a particular time and place, but how that moment was subjectively heard and engaged by artists. The Radio Preservation Task Force, by attending to “local, regional, noncommercial, and under represented movements in broadcasting history,” has the potential to direct us to unexpected places where radio history can be found, and the unexpected voices and sounds heard on American airwaves.