Chapter 1: Radio as Lightning Rod

The KRAB Nebula: Artistry in the ‘Precious Aether’

As the KPFA project continued to grow and shift in Berkeley, its brand of progressive, experimental community programming began to spread across the country. The Pacifica Foundation expanded its network to include KPFK in the Los Angeles area in 1959 and WBAI in New York in 1960. It was around the same time that KPFA volunteer Lorenzo W. Milam began the process of setting up his first community station, Seattle’s KRAB, knowing full well the struggles ahead:

I had the luck to be in on the early days of (what was then) considered to be revolutionary, even dangerous, communication. In December of 1962, when KRAB went on the air, there were only three other ‘community’ stations in the country. All were considered to be radical and inimical to the peace and survival of The State. The Pacifica stations (New York City, Berkeley, and Los Angeles) were under fairly constant attack from the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee…. The Federal Communications Commission harassed the stations unmercifully—to the point of not even granting small permit requests such as changing a transmitter, or modifying an antenna. (1986, i-ii)

Milam went on to found and/or directly advise at least ten community radio stations and inspire many others through his on-the-ground work and electrifying rhetoric. For Milam, the thrill of community radio as depicted in his essays, books, and speeches was in its inclinations for the sonically unconventional, both textual and textural. Working at a time at which the radio commons was becoming increasingly crowded and available open frequencies few and far between, he invariably expressed disgust at what he wrote about as “the pimps and thieves who now run the media” (1975, 19). Radio, he held, should have soul, as it did in the less regulated early years “before the ogres took over our precious Aether… those wild experimental days of free and loving transmission” (20). Following in the footsteps of Pacifica but extending their philosophy even further, Milam endorsed the need to use community radio to facilitate not only free speech (with an emphasis on dissenting opinions) but free sounds and silences of all kinds unavailable elsewhere on the dial. Reporting after KRAB’s first three months of broadcasting, Milam wrote of KRAB’s primary function as filling gaps in the local radioscape rather than engaging in direct competition:

This means a great deal of pre-Beethoven. This means a great deal of post-Webern. This means a lot of jazz—either without comment or, in the few jazz-with-comment shows that we do have—a great deal of intelligent comment (and this means more than reading off the record jackets). It also means no small amount of folk and ethnic music of other countries, and at least one program a week drawn from older, strictly lo-fi recordings. In other words, we play the material that would be suicide on the commercial stations but which is sheer delight for us. (1986, 10)

Milam’s description here positions KRAB as a wellspring of the radiophonically unusual, whatever that might entail given a specific broadcast context, and makes clear that it is able to be such because it does not have to cater to advertisers. The range he cites also indicates a narrow mainstream for music radio: Western art music from Classical to Romantic eras, Anglo American popular music of the then-modern day, and certainly no jazz. In other essays for program guides and small publications, he expands this idea of sonic experimentation to include discussion about experimentation with the human voice, including embracing making mistakes, allowing for lengthy pauses, and speaking from different distances, noting being “appalled by the silky voice of commercial radio and the stereotyped voice of the automated stations” (7). The sonic details of Milam’s and others’ radiophonic experiments and irregularities bear much closer examination in chapter three, when I discuss the aesthetics of community radio in more depth. I mention them here to underscore the movement toward deliberate sonic play inherent in Milam’s philosophy as he tended to community stations across the country and his understanding of such play as part of community radio’s revolutionary potential.

It is crucial for me to recognize that many people were and are involved in each of the stations to which Milam contributed and others that followed in the loose Pacifica-KRAB tradition. These are sometimes referred to as the “KRAB Nebula,” described on an online archive page as “an informal ‘network’ of somewhat slightly similar, but strongly independent, radio stations with staff, volunteers, and listeners who sought out diverse programming unlike anything heard on commercial stations” (Reinsch). Past and present KRAB Nebula stations have operated in California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. Many of them shared tapes of pre-produced programming. Each has its own story and aims in serving a sense of community. KBOO’s website, for example, describes its founders as “a group of Portlanders, disgruntled at the lack of a classical music station” when they turned to Milam, who, for whatever he thought about the need for “classical music” on the dial, nonetheless helped them organize the station, which now includes a much wider range of music and public affairs programming (KBOO). Across the Bay from KPFA, San Francisco’s KPOO—“Poor People’s Radio”—was founded by Joe Rudolph, who, with fellow San Francisco State University student strike organizer Terry Collins, also ran a media center in the city’s historically Black Fillmore District before conceiving of the station (Lipsky 2015). At first working with Milam and other predominantly white community radio activists, Rudolph, Collins, and the station’s predominantly Black volunteers and listeners eventually came into conflict with the outsiders. Ultimately, Milam ceded control of the station to the local community in 1974, at which point it began focusing on intentionally multicultural programming, considering it “of paramount importance to have shows that focused on Native American, Irish, and Palestinian issues” in particular (KPOO-FM). By the 1980s, KPOO had “broadened its target audience to include San Francisco’s Latino, Asian, and Native American populations” (Barlow 1999, 288). It continues to state its mission as one dedicated to providing media access to disenfranchised and underserved San Franciscans. United by common origins and desires for alternative media, each of the Milam-adjacent stations is nonetheless distinct as a brilliant mote in the cosmic formation of the KRAB Nebula.