Those Wireless Knobs

Those Wireless Knobs

For Sandy O’Keeffe

Switching it over to AM
Searching for a truer sound
Can’t recall the call letters
Steel guitar and settle down

Catching an all-night station somewhere in Louisiana
It sounds like 1963, but for now it sounds like heaven
May the wind take your troubles away
May the wind take your troubles away
Both feet on the floor, two hands on the wheel,
May the wind take your troubles away.

-Jay Farrar, Windfall

© Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., BMG Rights Management

My life has been shadowed and scored by the radio–from the late fifties until real radio died a few decades ago—shadowed like a summer’s night cruise in Jim Jay’s convertible ’67 Mustang, scored by the Beach Boys on the only station in our little desert town, as we spot the gangsters in the GTO paralleling us a block away. We feel menaced but so alive. 

Sandy asked me, “So how is it you know about all these fifties Jewish club comics? I never heard of Shelley Berman.”

After some thought, I said, “The radio.”

And then memory rushed in, like an opened window on a rainy summer night, all soothing negative ions, New York accents and blue jokes, Hammond B-3 and rock riffs.

After voicing one radio-related recollection after another, I realized the primacy of this medium in my personal cultural history, the influence of those wireless knobs. I would be a different guy without the radio. My generation’s culture would be unrecognizable to me without those wireless knobs. I’ve been a connoisseur of radio since the 1950’s. As a seven-year-old budding politico I listened to the Democratic Presidential convention in 1960 on the radio, thrilled to hear Kennedy speak and John Chancellor comment from the floor of the LA Memorial Sports Arena. I have followed electoral politics ever since.

I first heard The Lone Ranger on the radio on Saturday mornings in our kitchen, probably late fifties, though that didn’t make me a cowboy. I do have four pair of boots, three Stetsons and a couple bolos. No guns. No cattle. But grew up wondering about Tonto.

Up until 1960, we heard Amos ‘n’ Andy by radio. It wasn’t until 1963, three years later that, as a ten-year-old I would begin to understand the racist irony of that show while watching Bull Connor’s pigs fire-hosing children and putting dogs on young people in Birmingham.

Many of us of a certain age were influenced permanently by the radio. We were set on a revolutionary path because of radio.

I have lived in 45 places since high school. In each new town, object one was to find the good stations and punch them into the car radio. Right now, even a bit sleepy, I can tell you exactly what the presets are on both cars.

Let me try to explain.

My Dad was a Navy radio guy in the Pacific in WWII and he and I built a Heathkit short wave receiver together when I was a kid. I loved it and I listened intently for secret messages and intel from exotic places. Dad claimed that certain frequencies were “Russian jamming stations”, intended to block spies from hearing Elvis, I suppose. Or The Lone Ranger. Or Kennedy. It was the winter of the Cold War, after all. It sounded like static to me, droning white noise. At one point I panicked, thinking the Reds might know I was listening.

My brother Peter and I turned part of our family garage workshop into the control room of a space ship, and of course, we needed a radio. The neatest thing was we had a busted but real radio microphone I thought was like Edward R. Murrow’s or Walter Cronkite’s that we got from someone. A good thing, that, as it kept us in touch back on earth.

Later, Dad turned me on to KGO-AM radio from San Francisco where we listened to Ira Blue live from the Hungry i in North Beach at the corner of Kearny and Columbus, where Mort Saul and Lenny Bruce performed. I may have heard Tommy and Dick Smothers too, when they were still avant-garde, or pre-film Woody Allen.

This was the answer to Sandy’s question.

I got exposed to Joan Rivers, Dick Cavett, Phyllis Diller, Tom Lehrer, yes, Shelley Berman and more comics. Borscht Belt song and dance hoofers and dirty joke tellers. John Phillips, later of the Mamas and Papas fronted the house band there in the early sixties The Kingston trio and the Limeliters played. How we got that signal in southeastern Washington I’ll never know. I’m sure Father Sweeney would not have approved. It took a few years before I got to stand in front of the actual Hungry i or the Purple Onion down the street. These were like Mecca to me.

KGO started in Oakland in 1924 and by the early ‘60’s had became the prototype for today’s all-talk format, led by radio legend Jim Dunbar. In the late sixties I continued with KGO and heard live coverage of demonstrations and riots in San Francisco and Berkeley with reasonable people, old folks, professors, parents and citizens criticizing racism, the war, the University of California and the police department’s actions and sounding like good Americans, versus communist agitators, as we heard any protester called elsewhere. I can’t measure the impact this had on me. On May 15^th, 1969 I listened to Jim Dunbar narrate “Bloody Thursday” from Peoples Park in Berkeley as Contra Costa County cops bashed heads and killed a kid.

The birth of ‘60’s underground FM radio with Big Tom Donahue at KMPX in San Francisco in 1967 was important news, even to a geeky kid in a small town. Some guy I knew got the Berkeley Barb in the mail and we knew all about this new format, even though you had to go to Seattle or Portland to hear something like it. FM was a secret, the electronic audio vehicle for communicating news of the revolution. No one but us cared or noticed since FM had been confined to the dentist’s office previously. No cars had FM radios. It took a decade for the money guys to ruin it. 

Roger and I lived in Bellingham, Washington in 1972, 54 miles south of Gastown and we got CKLG radio from Vancouver, BC. Vancouver was the Berkeley of Western Canada then. The drinking age was 19 and we smoked dope right there in the bars. And, we suspected they thought the war was a bad idea. “LG-FM” was cool beyond imagination: Long sets, whole sides, smart programmers who sounded stoned but very coolly in control, commercials for radical left-wing goings-on and head shops and free clinics. “It’s two in the morning. That was Side 1 from Atom Heart Mother here on LG FM, Vancouver. Saturday the North Van Peoples’ Clinic is holding a rally in Stanley Park…” I first heard Ram Dass live on LG. It was my pipeline to my people since we could not pick up KOL from Seattle.

Perhaps here is a good place to credit this piece’s title. Van Morrison grew up on those wireless knobs at a time when the BBC had a monopoly on the British airwaves. So budding young musicians and hipsters reached across the Channel to pull in stations playing American jazz, blues, rockabilly and the roots of a genre that would change the world. He recalls this in his and Paul Durcan’s wonderful song In The Days Before Rock ‘n’ Roll:

Justin, gentler than a man
I am down on my knees
At the wireless knobs
I am down on my knees
At those wireless knobs
Telefunken, Telefunken
And I’m searching for
Luxembourg, Luxembourg,
Athlone, Budapest, AFN,
Hilversum, Helvetia
In the days before rock ‘n’ roll

In the days before rock ‘n’ roll
Fats did not come in
Without those wireless knobs
Fats did not come in
Without those wireless knobs
Elvis did not come in
Without those wireless knobs
Nor Fats, nor Elvis
Nor Sonny, nor Lightning
Nor Muddy, nor John Lee

In the days before rock ‘n’ roll
In the days before rock ‘n’ roll

Van Morrison and Paul Durcan

© 1990 BMG Rights Management

The English-language service of Radio Luxembourg began in 1933 as one of the earliest commercial radio stations broadcasting to the UK and Ireland. It was an important forerunner of pirate and border radio. In music history, of course our American forms of jazz and blues and what came later are our unique heritage and treasure. But it is also true that black musicians had to go to Europe to really find acceptance more broadly. Jimi Hendrix hailed from Seattle but wasn’t really discovered until English rock guys knew what he was doing and talked about it. It took skinny young English guitar slingers from London and Liverpool to play the blues back to cloistered and fluoridated white American kids. “Wow, I like that! What is it?” “Why, it’s your very own music, Beaver.” Stations based on the Continent had a lot to do with how that happened and how white American rockers got educated by John Mayall, Long John Baldry, Jimmy Page and Van Morrison.

Dave Alvin of The Blasters memorializes yet another essential trend in rock radio history in their song Border Radio:

She calls toll-free and requests an old song
Something they used to know
She prays to herself that wherever he is
He’s listening to the Border Radio

This song comes from nineteen sixty-two
Dedicated to a man who’s gone
Fifty thousand watts out of Mexico
This is the Border Radio
This is the Border Radio

-Dave Alvin

© BMG Rights Management

The border radio station everyone seems to know about was XERB 1090, broadcasting from Playas de Rosarita in Baja in the sixties with Wolfman Jack at the mike at 150,000 watts, suitable to reach all the tinny cheap “transistor radios” from Imperial Beach to Malibu and beyond. Late at night, we could pick up the Wolfman in the southeastern desert of Washington if the weather and the moon were right. XERB was a “border blaster” AM station, one of dozens along the US-Mexico border from San Diego to Brownsville.

I have to assume there is a significant portion of a generation conceived while the Wolfman played The Crickets, Martha and the Vandellas or the Everly Brothers.

A border blaster is a station based in one country used to target (or delight) another. The term “border blaster” is usually associated with Mexican AM stations covering large parts of the southwest. The concept is similar to European broadcasting in the middle 20^th century that included some pre-World War II broadcasting towards the United Kingdom that I mentioned earlier, “radio périphérique” around France and the U.S. government-funded propaganda station Radio Free Europe that targeted Eastern Europe. I imagine we can add Tokyo Rose and Hanoi Hannah to that list.

With broadcasting signals far more powerful than U.S. stations, the Mexican border blasters could be heard over large areas of the U.S. from the 1940s to the 1970s, often to the great irritation of American radio stations, whose signals could be overpowered by their Mexican counterparts. These are also sometimes referred to as “X stations” for their call letters, which Mexico assigns beginning with XE or XH.

ZZ Top’s Frank, Billy and Dusty penned I Heard It On The X thus:

Do you remember
Back in nineteen sixty-six?
Country Jesus, hillbilly blues,
That’s where I learned my licks.
Oh, from coast to coast and line to line
In every county there,
I’m talkin’ ’bout that outlaw X
Is cuttin’ through the air.

Anywhere, y’all,
Everywhere, y’all,
I heard it, I heard it,
I heard it on the X.

We can all thank Doctor B.
Who stepped across the line.
With lots of watts he took control,
The first one of its kind.
So listen to your radio
Most each and every night
’cause if you don’t I’m sure you won’t
Get to feeling right.

Anywhere, y’all,
Everywhere, y’all,
I heard it, I heard it,
I heard it on the X.

© BMG Rights Management

I spent three decades in Southern California. (I realize my experiences have been entirely left coast, so I apologize to friends who came of age in Philly, Chicago, Memphis, New York or Houston whose early radio experiences deserve mention, but from someone more qualified than me.) KMET in LA was my constant friend, starting in 1973. The Mighty Met was a source for new music and for the significant LA counter culture, beginning to broadcast in 1968 and continuing for almost twenty years. Jim Ladd was a giant at 94.7 and of hippie FM at large. His memoir / history Radio Waves is definitive. The sub-title says a lot: “Life And Revolution On The FM Dial”.

Don Henley contributed the Introduction and he tells it better than I have:

“Music changed my life. Radio, the vehicle for that music, was my connection to the world that lay outside my small hometown. During those difficult adolescent years it was a friend in the dark; a messenger to a lover; a magic carpet; a ticket out. Rock and roll was coming of age and hormones were rattling all over the globe.”

Pretty much perfectly said.

Good radio still exists but only as a shadow of its heyday, like a fading Stanley Mouse or Alton Kelley Grateful Dead poster for the Avalon Ballroom.

Pacifica does a great job with KPFA in Berkeley broadcasting for seventy years and KPFK in LA has been on the air since 1959. Intelligent, radical radio for the People. We have a Pacifica station here in Boulder at KGNU.

NPR is mostly solid if not meek.

There are hundreds of publicly funded local stations doing journalism and eclectic music.

My go-to’s these days are mostly jazz stations.

But the place where it began, the city FM stations of the sixties and early seventies have been largely taken over by greed, formatting and commercialism. Of course it all passes, but this is sad.

It’s 1970, we’re driving about aimlessly in the ’55 Belair, with only one or two AM stations to choose from, stoned senseless and somehow, magically, we divine the next tune to be played, and surprise, it comes on. We are seers, rock and roll shamans. And, to further confirm our vision, as we sing along to the lyrics to Who’ll Stop The Rain, it stops.

-Geoff O’Keeffe

February 18, 2019