Appendix C

Introductory Speech

…91.3 FM in Monroe County. 98.1 in Bloomington. 100.7 in Ellettsville and 106.3 in Brown County. This is WFHB, Firehouse Broadcasting. Let’s hear it for WFHB! [Audience cheering.]

I want to take you back to a time before music streaming, before social media, before YouTube, before the iPod, before video and audio on the internet, before the internet itself, before the compact disc, before videos and MTV. Our setting is the 1970s. The ways to listen to music back then were the long-playing vinyl record, which we still have, and the 8-track tape, which we mercifully do not. And, of course, there was the radio. The 70s saw the emergence of the FM dial as a medium for music because it was high fidelity, a hi-fi signal to listen to music in stereo. Listenership in FM radio would surpass AM radio by 1978. FM was booming.

But we have to go even further back than that, to the Watergate era, when impeaching a president really meant something. [Audience laughter, one audible cheer.] Sorry. Bloomington always wanted to be a music town. Back in 1974, a few guys in Bloomington who were into music looked around and said, you know, what this town needs is, and I quote, “a radio station that plays weird stuff.” Unquote. They weren’t interested in a commercial station, there were plenty of those, and they knew almost nothing about starting a radio station. But they were crazy for it. This bunch of hippies learned that there was such a thing as non-commercial FM radio stations, and that there were some around the country started and run by volunteers. And anyone could apply to the Federal Communications Commission to start one. But to apply, they needed money and friends. Was anyone interested in such an adventure? And so they decided to do what they knew best: use music to raise more music. They put on a benefit concert right here at this nightclub fifty years and one day ago today. [Audience cheers.] July 9, 1975. It was the first benefit for what became known as the Bloomington Community Radio Project.

Well, vinyl LPs are still somehow a thing today, and we still have the radio. Welcome to the 50^th anniversary of that project, 50 years ago last night, when the community began gestating what became Bloomington’s community radio station. When people said, we have this idea, and planted a seed in this room that germinated into WFHB. And so many of you standing in this room today. There is a lot of history in store for you tonight, which we’re gonna get to. But for now, you should know that there are historical artifacts on display here in the club from the history of WFHB. At the station merch table up there, in addition to shirts and hoodies and totes, there are screenprints of the poster for tonight’s event made by Badknees Ts, which you can buy. There are also a very limited number of the original posters from that night, July 9, 1975, for sale.

But it’s time to start the celebration. We’re here to show you a little of what the musicians that night did, for raising money for radio that made a whole local music scene possible.