Chapter 1: Radio as Lightning Rod

Free-Form Radio: Programming for People

So far, the histories of community radio I have noted here as important to the WFHB context are overwhelmingly dominated by highly educated white men from affluent families. With notable exceptions (such as KPOO), early community radio programming tended to target similar demographics. Whether or not this was intentional, it limited the appeal of the Pacifica-KRAB model in a way that many audiences looking for alternatives to mainstream media formats noticed. An article in a 1972 issue of rock and roll magazine Crawdaddy offers a blistering critique of non-commercial media that still resonates in today’s national radioscape:

Whether it broadcasts dull, ‘educational’ programs on behalf of an established institution or even if it’s actively experimental and listener-sponsored, non-commercial broadcasting invariably falls into the trap of elitism. It’s not readily listenable. It preaches… The commercial and non-commercial radio… are in fact, two parts of the same. They perpetuate the dichotomy between the intellectuals and the masses, between art and kitsch, between the cerebral and the precious that one must strain to appreciate and the anesthetizing. One is demanding and rigid. The other makes no demands at all. (Yurdin 1972, 30)

Yurdin goes on to discuss what he feels would make for a worthwhile free-form radio station: creativity, flow, a move away from conventional jargon, non-condescending entertainment, genuine diversity in on-air personalities and programming. None of these aspects are necessarily incompatible with Hill’s and Milam’s visions, but nor are they insisted upon in Hill’s and Milam’s foundational broadcasting principles. Yurdin’s proposition for engaging radio focuses not just on who can be on the air and what they can do there, but on the sonically mediated relationships between programmers and listeners. The ideal broadcast operation, as Yurdin renders it, is not a transaction between buyer and seller or artist and witness. It is between people.

In his Crawdaddy article, Yurdin is specifically interested in the potentials of “free-form radio,” a broadcast format marked by the near-total musical control given to its programmers. “Hippies took that radio so seriously,” said one WFHB founder who sat with me for an interview, expounding on the significance of the article to him as a young prospective broadcaster. “And there was still part of it that was super idealistic.” He lent me an original copy of the Crawdaddy issue with Yurdin’s article, which he described as foundational to his own understanding of radio leading up to his work establishing WFHB. Both he and Yurdin noted that the ideals of free-form radio were not always easy for broadcast organizations to implement. This was especially the case for commercial outlets. Yurdin relates an attempt by U.S. national network ABC (the American Broadcasting Company) to capitalize on the perceived cultural capital of free-form radio among “alternative” groups by developing its own, for-profit free-form radio operation:

Probably the most dramatic failure of the free-form approach took place at ABC-FM’s New York station, lately named WPLJ. While all seven of the ABC stations were affected by v.p. Allen Shaw’s brief flirtation with the alternative culture, the New York station was the only one where an attempt was made to provide a real alternative to what already existed on the air… [Shaw] had gotten all the ABC-owned FM stations to invest vast amounts on automation. It would have been bad corporate politics for them to have admitted that they’d blown it, so consequently more than half the day was still devoted to the automated replay of tapes recorded several weeks before on the West Coast specifically for that purpose. The tapes sounded canned and unspontaneous. Each tape was often heard several times and the automation equipment itself proved quite undependable. The use of automation also broke the live programming up into isolated segments and destroyed any cohesiveness the station might have had. (1972, 30).

In this case, ABC’s concerns for profit margins kept them locked in to pre-recording practices and automation technology. The network’s attempt to emulate free-form programming without prioritizing local and live programmers did not translate to interesting radio, but instead came across in Yurdin’s estimation as contrived. It is the grassroots, non-commercial nature of community radio that makes it more compatible with free-form ideals. Many community radio stations employ free-form programming to some extent, WFHB among them. For two decades before WFHB went on the air, though, Bloomington’s most overtly free-form radio station was WQAX, often seen as WFHB’s immediate if indirect predecessor.