Chapter 1: Radio as Lightning Rod

I told him I had heard he didn’t intend to do any more writing. Why? I said.

“I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph,” he said.

—Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 1968

Polarities

Does anyone listen to radio anymore?

This is a question I hear regularly—from acquaintances, family members, and even other scholars (especially in the United States)—whenever I explain what I do. It’s a revealing line of inquiry, founded on the assumption that because radio is not new, it must be old, and because it is old, it must be outmoded. Even when asked with good intentions (as I assume most of my colleagues have), it arises from a limited presumption of what community radio is and does, who uses and benefits from it and why, and how it came to be in the first place.

The pithy answer to the hyperbolic question “does anyone listen to radio anymore” is, of course, “yes.” In this chapter, I expand on this initial reaction to offer a significantly longer response that engages with what I find is often at the root of this line of inquiry: the question of why radio exists in the United States in the 21^st century and what about its existence matters in the digital age. While a full history of the medium is far outside the scope of my dissertation, I assemble here a strategic lineage through archival and ethnographic research of some of the key phenomena that have shaped the United States-Indiana-Bloomington radioscapes over time. By exploring narratives of the ideological and material origins of the contours at hand in these dynamic formations, I situate WFHB within the social-sonic-spatial settings that have produced and continue to produce it and position it as a metaphorical (and, in one particularly dramatic case, literal) lightning rod.

This chapter’s epigraph comes from New Journalism writer Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an account of acclaimed author (most notably of 1960 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and countercultural figure Ken Kesey and his comrades, the “Merry Pranksters,” in social experimentation. The contrast between a lightning rod, which actively attracts natural energy, and a seismograph, which records it, feels apt for discussing the impassioned responses community radio consistently elicits—in support of or opposition to it—from participants and politicians alike. After noting this cryptic aphorism, Wolfe writes that Kesey “talked about… forms of expression in which there would be no separation between himself and the audience. It would be all one experience, with all the senses opened wide, words, music, lights, sounds, touch—lightning” (1968, 8). Kesey was specifically discussing experiments with psychedelic compounds, but in doing so he pointed toward a goal of intersubjectivity, of connectedness and mutual awareness on collective levels that defy social and sensory limitations. I invoke his philosophies here not to conflate community radio and psychedelic drug culture, but to emphasize how the community radio model is designed to not simply record and measure the world around it (although it can and often does), but to conduct energy to it in multiple modes, echoing the unbounded (or at least less bounded) forms of experience Kesey sought to explore. In the case of community radio, the lightning in question is not always desirable, often consisting of not only creative and constructive enthusiasm but also of reactionary ire. (Likewise, Wolfe portrays Kesey in Electric Kool-Aid as dealing with critics within counterculture movements on one hand and criminal investigations on the other; the book ends with his sentencing for drug possession convictions.) It is nonetheless typical of the model. Understanding the reasons behind this spectrum of responses is critical for radio researchers, practitioners, and listeners interested in supporting an accessible and varied media ecosystem.

Kesey himself made direct contact with the community radio world at least once when, in 1967, he allowed a reporter from San Francisco Bay Area-based station KPFA (discussed later in this chapter) to record a 12-hour psychedelic experiment: Kesey, his Merry Pranksters, and members of the band the Grateful Dead taking the hallucinogenic drug LSD and subsequently channeling its effects through philosophical musings and theatrical musical performance. KPFA producer Laurie Garrett would later condense it into a half-hour piece for airing; it now resides in the KPFA archives (KPFA 2024). It is a quintessential example of community radio’s framing (usually by its practitioners) as countercultural. Community radio makes space for broadcast practices that might be anathema to professional media producers for their lack of polish or standardization. Community radio’s raison d’être is to be different from other outlets, to do what commercial and public stations’ top-down management often does not allow them to do, to offer a true alternative for people who value creativity, improvisational play, and, of course, community. These are not values that must be revolutionary. Today, against a backdrop of increasing capitalism, fascism, and isolation packaged as “rugged individualism,” though, they often are. This is not to say that community radio operations are always successful at pursuing their ideals to the point that they effect tangible social change on a large scale. Such organizations are nonetheless based on the possibilities that media can be in some way countercultural.

It is tempting to keep extending the lightning rod metaphor. Like a lightning rod, perhaps a working community media operation must be grounded; perhaps it is part of a larger system of social and material protection; perhaps some see community radio as disrespectful and profane against the orderly capitalism of commercial stations or the professional polish of public radio, much as 18^th century clergy and authority figures reportedly “condemned [Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod] as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God” (Russell 1943, 6). As my historical recounting will show, however, the nature of community radio is such that it can rarely be said to always be or do or be perceived as any single thing. Instead of trying to build a singular image of a community radio lightning rod, then, I spend the following sections discussing the forces that have polarized the medium in the United States such that it lends itself to the metaphor.