Matthew has kindly offered me blog space to announce the opening of a new website: My KPFA: A Historical Footnote [1].
Throughout the 1960s I worked intermittently for Berkeley's non-commercial listener-supported FM station, including four years full time as its Production Director. Worked? It was more like being thrust into a round-the-clock play pen bursting with obstreperous child prodigies. But out of this chaos came many programs to rival the BBC’s — and for a single-digit percentage of the cost.
Whole volumes have been written about Pacifica Radio’s internecine warfare, but very little about what was actually going out over the air while the blood was flowing. This website does not aim to redraw the battle lines, but consists primarily of programs from the 60s of which I still have playable copies, together with long, informative, inspiring and frequently amusing conversations I recorded in 1994 with over two dozen of the network’s original founders, programmers and supporters. (At least five of them have since passed on to the Great Studio in the Sky). In all, it contains about 75 hours of .mp3 files, freely available for downloading. In the brief three weeks it’s been up, it has already climbed almost to the top in a number of Google searches; for instance a search for KPFA history [2] brings it up in 16th place out of about 107,000, with well over 500 hits.
If you're a seeker after soundbites, you had best not even go there. When KPFA’s staff went on the air in 1949, the first thing they did was to rip the clocks off the walls (literally!). It was Rabelais’ Abbey of Theleme come to life, and the station's formidably erudite founder Lew Hill would instantly have acknowledged this living metaphor. These are distant echoes from a "laid back" era — as John Cage said of Tibetan chant, if you find it boring perhaps you haven’t been listening long enough. You are hereby invited to turn off your Blackberry and pass through these Stygian portals into living history!
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