WHFS in Bethesda Maryland.

Coming to you from high atop the Triangle Towers.

Ease on back, take your clothes off and have some wine.

W-H-F-S W-H-F-S All right, you're talking to Captain LouAlbano baby, manager of champions, brother.

Hi.

This is Carl Perkins.

John Prine.

Hi, I'm Bonnie Raitt.

No you're not Bonnie Raitt, I'm Bonnie Raitt.

You're Freebo.

I’m mizable right... Joe's Record Paradise and the 9:30 Club.

Make the ladies happy, make the children happy.

Hello, this is Frank Zappa, and I would like to say you are listening to WHFS in Bethesda, Maryland.

Such a deal.

It was the greatest station I'd ever heard.

The idea behind it is to introduce new music as opposed to a brainwashed music format that is the result of either ill advised consultants or people who are not really into it.

We never played anything that wasn't of our own choosing.

You know, there were no rules.

It was very improvisational and freewheeling.

You could hear a Bonnie Raitt tune followed by a Joni Mitchell cut to a Jimi Hendrix cut and then you go to some, you know, “Wipe Out” Or if you wanted to play five songs with the word "Blue" put together with other things that I'd never heard from a different genre.

You wouldn't get bored.

They were almost a cult radio station, literally sending out on their airwaves, this drumbeat.

HFS, of course, was like, outstanding.

They were like, top of the heap.

People still are talking about HFS.

There is a passion attached to that that has been removed from the medium.

Well, this is where it all began.

Back in 1961, Bill Tynan and Bob Carpenter conceived the idea of a brand new Class A FM radio station, one that would broadcast in stereo.

WHFS's.

first location was at 8218 Wisconsin Avenue in Bethesda.

The Bethesda Medical Building.

We were in the basement.

This is a test transmission from radio station WHFS, Bethesda, Maryland, operating on 102.3 mega cycles.

Two really incredible engineers, Bob Carpenter and Bill Tynan, got the money together and actually built HFS from the ground up.

They obtained the license.

They invented, if you will, the equipment.

Well, I met Bob Carpenter on the air, on amateur radio.

We were both amateur radio operators.

"Hams" as they called us.

So we found out we were both interested in FM broadcasting as well as amateur radio and we decided, why don't we build a station of our own?

Didn't have a lot of money.

There was no stereo equipment available.

Bob built the console.

He was concerned about building a power supply for it that was quiet enough to lower the hum.

So we used a car storage battery to run the console.

We used the time off the air to charge the battery.

That main part of the transmitter had been given by Major Edward H.Armstrong, who was credited with the invention of FM radio.

So it had some historic value.

We also had to look for a frequency, and the only frequency we could find that looked reasonable was 102.3, which is what was then called a Class A Lower Power.

Bob came up with the call letters, and it stood for Washington High Fidelity Station.

A young soldier walked up to his front door and rang the doorbell.

That young man was Marlin Taylor.

I read about a new FM station being granted for Bethesda, Maryland, at 102.3.

So I quickly got myself together and hustled over and knocked on the door.

Bob Carpenter was, to me, an electronic genius.

Basically, this radio station was built out of what I called a pile of radio junk.

And then we hired Alvin Jeweler.

Anybody who worked here was doing everything.

We had a transmitter, two desks, a record library, and a studio.

We were first in Washington with stereo, and WHFS hit the air on November 12, 1961, barely six months after the FCC had approved stereo.

FM radio was actually invented back in the 1940s, but it was something that was used and known only by people inside the industry for some years.

And even once radio programming began on FM, it was very much a niche kind of operation.

It wasn't until the mid 1960s that things began to change dramatically.

Two things happened.

First of all, the FCC decided that it was no longer sufficient for someone who owned an AM radio station to run the same programming on AM and FM.

So you might have a station that ran Beautiful Music or Pop Music or even News, and they would have an AM station and an FM with exactly the same programming.

And the FCC, in the interest of encouraging diverse programming, said, "you can't do that."

You can't simulcast.

You can't simulcast.

You can't simulcast.

You have to spread it out and create some original programming for FM.

That happened in the mid 1960s at exactly the same time as the auto industry, under pressure from broadcasters, started making AM FM radios standard equipment in cars.

I tell you, Wally, I'll be the only character in Mayfield High with an FM radio in his car.

Boy, FM.

That's really neat!

I tell you, when you're out on a date and you turn on the Beethoven, man, the girls really think you're an operator.

Government and industry coming together to make FM into a viable alternative and improvement over FM because of the higher fidelity and because of the vastly expanded programming.

We start our entire day of stereo broadcasting with "Pops in the Afternoon."

We were mostly classical music with some lighter classics and semiclassics thrown in.

We were smart enough to keep our day jobs, which, by the way, made running a radio station, both technically and businesswise, very difficult.

We sold the station in 1963.

As I said, we were out of money by then.

I knew Alvin Jeweler in high school.

Alvin's father, Max, died, and Alvin came and said, look, one of the assets of my father's estate was an interest in this company called Military Corporation.

And they own a radio station in Bethesda, and I'm the manager of the station.

And we have a great opportunity.

We could buy that station.

I didn't know how bad, well, I did know how bad the station was doing, but I was young and stupid.

I was 26 years old at the time.

Alvin and I put a deal together.

We went to some of our friends.

He went to his uncle.

When we finally got Marvin interested, his attorney, a fellow named Jim Bierbower, who represented one of the Watergate defendants, became interested.

And Phil said,"let's go talk to my father, Bernie Margolius."

And I said, "Dad, I need you to help me out."

So we went to George and said, "we have a piece of land, a vacant piece of land in Ohio that's worth a fair amount of money."

We put that up as collateral.

We bought it for $160,000.

Triangle Towers was under construction, and they were very amenable to the idea of giving us space in the building for our studios and transmitter in exchange for us, saying "Broadcasting from Triangle Towers."

It got us out from under having to pay rent and got us the addition of 160 or 180 feet in elevation.

A guy came walking in the station dressed in red and green plaid pants, carrying an umbrella on a beautifully sunny day.

And he comes in and says, "I can sell this station."

"I can make you a lot of money."

He was a little tipsy.

And I said, "Well, I'll tell you what."

"Give me a test."

"Go out and sell some advertising and come on back and we'll talk."

30 minutes later, he was back in the door with a signed contract.

We had nothing to lose because we weren't doing any business.

And while we didn't do gangbusters, we were doing a lot better.

He came on board, and everything changed.

Freeform Radio was really invented at Pacifica, which was a small group of FM stations that started back in the 1940s.

But by the 1960s, it was beginning to be a place where the counterculture was expressing itself on the radio.

In San Francisco, where a lot of this really got off the ground.

There was a guy named Larry Miller who had the overnight show on a station that did foreign language programming all day long, but he played album rock starting in the middle of the night.

Then came along an AM Top 40 DJ named "Big Daddy" Tom Donahue.

And Big Daddy was the ultimate screamer AM Top 40 jock who had grown to hate himself and the music he played on the radio.

Because he went home every night and played completely different music for himself than he was allowed to play on his AM Top 40 station.

And he wrote a piece in one of the first issues of Rolling Stone Magazine declaring Top 40 Radio to be a "rotting corpse."

In the immediate aftermath of that piece, he went out on the street and tried to find a radio station that would give him time to run the kind of show that he wanted to run.

And he found it at that foreign language station, which was dying financially.

And he went in and they gave him a show and he used that time to play the album rock, the progressive rock that he and his friends listened to at home.

And that was the beginning of what became KMPX, the first real "Freeform" underground rock station.

That model began to expand from there both to college stations and to a handful of commercial stations around the country.

This was the first time that people of our generation were the disc jockeys.

The guys we grew up with, the Cousin Brucie's, and them, they were our parents' generation.

Even though they were cool, you know, cooler than our parents, they were still another generation.

These were our people talking to us and that was what was important.

You're in tune with WHFS Stereo, the home of Underground Radio in Washington DC.

Frank Richards is the, the godfather of progressive rock music in the Washington DC area.

And Frank was a very laid back stoner, or at least that's the presentation he made on the air.

He had a very eclectic music taste.

He liked what he liked and he had a very arrogant attitude about him.

I've been back on the air exactly a week as of today, and I think it's safe to say that the quality of the show has doubled in that week and I think it's going to keep doubling.

The DC area was void of progressive rock music.

As a fan of that music genre, I was delighted and I really enjoyed listening to his programs.

That's the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band from their hit underground LP Gorilla.

Actually, it's not a hit.

I mean, I bet you knew that.

Actually, nobody cares about it except me, and I like it.

However, I have a sneaking suspicion that you don't like it.

and if that's the case, call us up and tell us why not.

We thought it would be fun to try doing a radio show, underground radio show, for the students at American University, which we prerecorded.

And just by knowing the right people in the right circumstances.

And this WHFS wanting to get into the progressive rock business, it just fell our way.

For the forest and further on Painted wagons...

I think it was late '69, early '70, and I had an FM radio in my car trying to find something to listen to.

and I heard Quicksilver Messenger Service on the radio and I said, "Wait a second, what is this?"

And apparently it was a show called “Spiritus Cheese” Ohhhhh, what you do to me For WHFS, the music of the '60s really began with a few individuals that brought us kind of an enlightened type of radio.

And if not for them, we wouldn't be here tonight telling you about the '60s.

Weasel wouldn't be here with his insanity and Cerphe with his, and so on and so forth.

Started with people like Frank Richards and Electric Brew.

But no one could possibly deny the impact that Spiritus Cheese had on the Washington area.

So tonight we pay tribute to Spiritus Cheese, and we have a little bit of one of their shows for you right now.

I met Josh Brooks when he was known as Henry Stanford Brooks, and we were college mates at Bard College in upstate New York, and we were also college mates with Walter Becker and Donald Fagan of Steeley Dan.

Chevy Chase was another college mate of ours.

When we got out of Bard, we decided we wanted to start a radio show.

And the idea was hatched at another friend's apartment in New York, this loft in New York that was above the "Spiritus Cheese Company."

And we came up with the idea of naming the show "Spiritus Cheese."

We went around, looked around at various cities.

Boston already had something, New York had something, Philadelphia already had something along the lines of what we wanted to do.

We decided to go down to Washington DC because we were selling Owsley Acid.

And we had friends down there, including John Hall, who we knew from Bard College.

First day they came there, Claude Jones Band had a gig at the British Embassy, and Mark and Josh arrived just in time for us to drive off to this gig.

So we all loaded up on LSD, as we used to do for those gigs, and went to the British Embassy to perform for the hip ambassador's wife and her friends.

And the next morning there was a picture of all of us, including Josh, staring the acid stare.

He's been in town less than 24 hours and his picture is on the front page of the paper.

Sara Vass joined us later.

She was also a college roommate of ours and we ended up starting Spiritus Cheese.

Mark and I became a couple.

I basically ran away from home.

Literally.

I mean, even though just out of college, times were different and I was sort of panicked about what the repercussions of that was going to be when my parents found out.

And I packed things like my Raggedy Ann doll.

This is the WEAM Team Pick Hit of the Week Understand this is the time of Top 40 radio was king and AM radio was king.

So we went looking for an FM station that might be amenable, and we started listening to WHFS, which at the time was billing itself as a "Beautiful Music" station, which meant a lot of Mantovani, some Frank Sinatra and basically "Middle of the Road" or background music and it was losing money hand over fist.

We met a guy named Jake Einstein who was the sales manager there and he said "Well, I'm not going to hire you, but I'll sell you the time."

Jake came to me and we sat down and talked with them and we talked about it and came to the conclusion that we were so far in the red that it couldn't make things any worse.

And if they were going to buy the time and resell it, this would be at least some source of income and we had no idea where it was going to go.

We certainly didn't know what was going to happen afterwards.

They were willing to take our money, which we didn't have by the way.

We sold the time to buy the time.

We started out buying 2 hours from 6 until 8 Monday through Friday and then on weekends we had from 6 until 10 on Saturday and then midnight til 6 in the morning overnight.

And we decided we were going to have to do something to get people to tune into our show.

We had to make it appointment listening.

And Mark was a walking Encyclopedia.

I mean he could tell you by listening to a song for 2 seconds that it was the same drummer that played in a studio band somewhere else that happened to be on that record.

Our programming resonated with our listeners to the point that they were amazed sometimes when we would do for instance, a week of Rolling Stones music.

We would feature the Rolling Stones.

but in addition to playing their music, we would play the original versions of their songs, which many times are from black blues artists that people had no knowledge of.

Well it’s hard to tell, it’s hard to tell When all your love’s in vain All my love’s in vain We would also feature the side men say Billy Preston for instance, and play his music.

So we would tie it all in.

We would make the connection much as what Amazon does now or even iTunes now, saying "if you like this artist or this group, then you might like this other artist and this group because they’re related.” And what was amazing is we'd get people calling up when we’d play a Stones song that had been done by Muddy Waters.

Now look what you’ve done Now look what you’ve done They would say, "My God, we had no idea.

We thought that was the Stones."

So that was, for me, very satisfying to open people's minds to the roots, basically, of where the music came from.

We weren't DJs before we just decided to do it, and we just did it.

Now look what you’ve done Now look what you’ve done Look what you’ve done babe We put out these flyers and on one side it had what our hours were and what time we were on, and on the back it would have who we were doing a show on and who we were playing.

When we started the Spiritus Cheese show in 1969, we were doing everything to produce our show.

We were on-air announcers.

We were also putting the music together and we were also getting advertisers.

The advertisers that we would find would be head shops or the hip clothing stores or hip theaters and the record stores.

They were very good at programming, but they were not so good at sales.

And so there were a lot of trades for Beatle boots, Bell bottom pants, different vests that had the pioneer look and the buccaneer look and the frontier look.

and...

It was fun, but it was a lot of work.

And I forget how we exactly got involved with Woodstock but they became an advertiser on The Spiritus Cheese Show.

The support that we got from the FM stations in that area was critical, I think, because not only did it talk about the event, talk about the acts, but it also talked about kind of the philosophy behind it, which is what set the tone for Woodstock.

One of the perks about being a Woodstock advertiser was we got to go to Woodstock.

We drove up, Joshua and Sara and I, and we got relatively close.

We trekked our way in.

But I bought a new pair of shoes and decided to wear them.

Strappy black patent leather sandals, which after a two and a half mile walk, were already just torturing me.

We'd gotten a Nagra tape recorder through my dad who worked for Billboard, and we started taking interviews of townspeople and people as we walked in.

Then we tried to get into the backstage area and they told us, "Get out of here."

"You don't qualify."

But just at that time, they were helicoptering in the bands and that was right by the area where the entrance to the backstage was.

And they happened to be helicoptering in Johnny Winter.

Well, we had gotten to know Johnny Winter before and had gone down to Nashville with him when he was cutting "Second Winter."

And as we watched the helicopter land out comes Johnny Winter we got his attention and he saw us.

"Oh, hey, Josh, Mark, Sara!"

"Yeah, come on!"

So they got us in.

And there we were at Woodstock - in!

We spent two days backstage at Woodstock doing interviews with Neil Young, and with Jerry Garcia and a number of other people that were back there.

It was very funny.

When I was at Woodstock I saw people with tape recorders and I didn't know who they were.

And then when I got back to DC, I found out that it was Josh Brooks and his people interviewing Garcia and all these people and they would play the interviews over the air.

And they were basically the first radio station to do that.

So they were artist intent, artist oriented, artist focused in every way, shape and form.

So they called me and they told me I could go on the air.

In their absence, I was playing music and taking calls from them from Woodstock.

So I was going on the air.

This is my greatest first hour on the radio telling people NOT to go to Woodstock because it was too crowded and there was no food and it was a major traffic jam on the highway up there.

More people tuned in.

Woodstock was televised as a news story on national news.

What happened at White Lake this weekend may have been more than an uncontrolled outpouring of hip young people struggling as they did to survive.

First the 20 mile traffic jams and five mile hikes, then the intense heat and sudden rain, the thirst and hunger from the shortage of water and food just for the opportunity to spend a few days in the country getting stoned on their drugs and grooving on the music.

We came back to DC on our Saturday shows.

We'd play snippets from that Woodstock thing.

and word got around all of a sudden that got us a huge amount of listenership.

We were the ones that really broke through and made an impact in DC.

And also we got Washington Post articles written about us too.

In the late '60s and early '70s.

It was a momentous time for social upheaval, of social consciousness.

It was more than just the hippie ethic of Timothy Leary, you know, "turn on, tune in, drop out" and of course, the incredible antiwar sentiment against the Vietnam War.

And we wanted to give voice to our generation.

I mean, I guess we didn't think of it as our generation at the time, because you don't think that way when you're young.

What's your name Miss?

None of your business.

Asshole!

The music was a reflection, really, of what was going on.

Yeah come on all you big strong men Uncle Sam needs your help again.

He’s got himself in a terrible jam Cheech and Chong, even.

Hey, come on, man.

Who is it?

It's Dave man, will you open up?

I got the stuff with me.

Who?

Dave, man.

Open up!

Dave?

Yeah, Dave.

Dave's not here.

Counterculture products that was reflecting stuff that was there but wasn't normally heard on radio.

And in fact, Nicholas Johnson, who was the Chairman of the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, became a great admirer of The Spiritus Cheese Show and loved it, saying how much he enjoyed the show.

Jake Einstein called us in and said, "Be careful what you play."

"The Chairman of the FCC is listening."

"Play nothing that reflects what's going on outside of here."

"Stick to the music."

Ooh ooh ooh ooh Have another hit I came to WHFS from a station in Gathersburg, Maryland.

It's called WHMC with Barry Richards.

He concocted the East Coast progressive rock station on AM.

He was an innovator.

I knew there were changes being made at WHFS.

Spiritus Cheese was having problems selling enough advertising.

They really weren't salespeople.

So Jake approached them about coming on as employees, and we would pay them.

So he puts Mark and Sara and Josh on salary and starts selling the time himself.

You can't exist without advertising dollars.

Jake and Alvin both needed money to pay for all these arrogant young people playing music for them.

A pittance it was, I suppose.

So I helped them bring in the advertising through record promoters, from the manufacturers, through local businesses.

They were "head" commercials.

That's basically what we did.

We tried to trip people out with commercials.

And they always want you to know where they're at.

They're upstairs, high above everybody else.

Josh, Mark and Sara were the intellectuals of our station.

They were pioneers.

Their music was somewhat eccentric, and they brought that music to the ears of people who had never heard a lot of their stuff.

They just approached it with a mindset of educating listeners.

And as that format took off, and as Jake was able to make inroads into the recording industry, the nightclub industry, there was more and more money.

So we decided more and more of our emphasis in broadcasting would be devoted into that genre.

But as we became more and more political, they frowned on that.

And they also had a problem with me, that I was vocal and outspoken and didn't hang back on my opinions.

There was a group called the Firesign Theatre.

Very funny.

And we got an advance copy of their album and we played it in toto on the air.

Not now, Mudhead.

They need me at the last meeting of the Philatalists Club.

I didn't know you masturbated.

Aw, creepy, Mudhead.

Where's your school spirit?

That's in the rumble seat.

You want to snort?

Very funny.

That same night, I got a call and a man said, "my name is Richard Battle," "and this is the kind of filth that's ruining America."

And I thought it was a joke.

He could have been someone who had stepped out of the album.

So we laughed.

That turned out not to be a joke because he also called the FCC and filed a formal complaint that we were lewd on the air.

And Jake and the station chose instead of to defend us and say, of course, there's free speech.

We were suspended from doing the show.

And she wasn't going to take anything from Jake, so Jake fired her, and Mark Gorbulew quit in solidarity.

Josh stayed on because he needed the money, he liked the job, and it was a happening thing.

That's when Jake brings his son David Einstein in as program director.

David had gotten out of the service, didn't have a job.

Jake said, "I'm going to hire David."

And I said, "if it'll bring us in money, go ahead and do it."

And David took over as program director.

You know, we were all program directors.

We were all we all programmed our own shows.

David had this titular position, and he was sort of the personnel guy.

Okay, it's about two minutes after 2:00 in the afternoon.

This is WHFS.

We're in Bethesda, Maryland.

We're presenting, as we will every Monday, commercially and uninterrupted music.

We all supported each other, and those guys I relied on, I relied on David for good advice.

And he was like a businessman right from the beginning, but he also knew music.

And my name is Cerphe.

I’ll be with you until about 9 PM tonight playing some tunes.

When I was a kid growing up in Boston, I was listening to stations like WBZ and WMEX, and I had this little transistor that I would listen to radio late at night in bed.

And I was fascinated by actually by the music.

Not so much the presentation, but the music.

And then later I started listening to a station in Boston, WBCN, this really creative FM station, and they were playing stuff like the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead and blues and stuff like that.

And this was new radio.

This was a new art form.

Do away with people blowing my mind So when I came to school in Washington, DC at American University.

A friend of mine who was two or three years ahead of me, a guy named Steve Walker, had a show on WHFS.

And Steve and I were both very passionate about music, and he said to me, "come and sit in on the show sometime with me and see what it's all about."

I'd never been in a studio, and I sat in with him.

One thing led to another.

He said,"you should do a show!"

And I thought, okay, I'll do a show.

So I get hired to do Saturday nights, once a week, seven to midnight, and eventually it turned into a full time gig.

But, radio by happenstance, but thank you Steve Walker.

He provided that kind of fresh, clever personality that I think they needed there at WHFS.

He could interview people like crazy.

He was great.

Welcome to Washington.

How's Washington treating you?

I haven't had a chance to see it yet.

No one knows I rode around the Beltway twice before I got into town.

That's it.

So, uh (laughs) We spend a lot of time on the Beltway.

Love your new record.

This is your first album?

I heard this record when it came out, and I just immediately liked it.

It's funny, one of your songs about it.

You talk about taking out a full page ad in the trades.

The trades seem to be treating you well.

Yeah!

They take out a full page ad in the trades to announce their arrival We might say that Cerphe was the first real personality on the station.

What Cerphe brought to who obviously was a velvety smooth voice, and what he also brought was the thematic thing, the concept of the segue.

He was an expert at doing that.

On HFS, we generally let the music be the star.

The music, we hosted the show, but the music was the star.

So if we had something like peace marches and protests going on in DC.

We would talk about it on the air, let people know where and when it was.

But then we would play musical sets of tunes of songs having to do with either protest or venting our spleen, pretty much, and letting people know how we felt.

And we would go from little bits and pieces of speeches that the politicians or Nixon would make.

My own station, this is WHFS.

And we would go and go from the Beatles "I'm a Loser" into Bob Dylan's political music.

And on the day that Nixon resigned, I did a whole long set on his resignation, ending with the very last song and Abbey Road "Carry That Weight."

"And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make" And we would let music sort of be the conduit without getting on the air and ranting and raving.

People listened to us for our attitude.

They responded to our attitude.

And we sort of mirrored who was listening to us, our cohorts at that time, there were a lot of us.

We're doing a special Monday night on the missing White House tapes, and we will have it's being narrated...

Wait a minute.

They were just a second.

They were right over here.

Where are they?

They were here.

Who took the tapes?

Just a second.

Well, if he finds them, we'll do it Monday night in the tradition of Louis Prima.

Bebe Rebozo will be doing the narration.

Oh, I think we're all Rebozos on this bus.

Damian was the coolest guy in town.

People like Jesse Colin Young had a natural affinity for Damian.

So the summer of '72, we went and played, and I think it was Damian's show that we played on.

And I remember we set up in the hallways of the radio station because we had the whole band.

And then he gave me his phone number.

I put it in my pocket, and we went back to the hotel.

And then they threw us out of the hotel.

So I called Damian.

I said, we need a place to stay.

And we stayed up talking for hours.

And he talked to me about all the time he had spent in the Library of Congress and all the old blue singers that we had listened to.

And we became fast friends in an evening.

Damian would go to these music festivals and hang out backstage.

And he also played a little bit, too.

He played harp.

Let’s have a hand for Damian on the harmonica.

Outta sight brother.

Thank you very much.

He was really knowledgeable about music.

Obviously, he put in some energy into playing and being involved in it.

But as far as being a DJ and working at radio stations, he was really on it.

He was around solid.

We came to town, we'd see him.

He had connections to all these stalwarts.

Jonathan Edwards and even bluegrass people like Seldom Scene and Country Gentlemen, and Old & In The Way.

So that crossover was happening at the time, too.

Jerry Garcia was playing bluegrass music.

That was the perfect HFS kind of synthesis, was Old & In The Way.

You had the Grateful Dead meets Bluegrass.

And I remember how great it always was to see him always positive and always energetic, and we really looked forward to coming to town and hanging with him.

You're listening to WHFS Bethesda, Maryland.

My name is Damian.

I'll be here til one o'clock playing some music for you tonight and saluting the triptic '60s.

We'll be back with more music and things like that right after these messages.

David and Damian Einstein.

Damian, a little more the esoteric thinker.

David, practical like his father.

So it was refreshing to have the owner's kids come in and they dealt with their dad, who wanted to be financially successful.

Ah babe.

Ah babe.

Of course, we heard the news that Murray was about to come to WHFS.

I was what is known as a board operator.

And one day, Murray did a great concert at the Kennedy Center.

He produced a concert when the Kennedy Center was just open.

Chuck Berry and Bo Diddly that I never got a chance to see it because Murray took the day off.

And we sat down and we're going to do some voice tracks on tape.

And we got through about two of them.

And he all of a sudden stopped and I said, "Murray, what's wrong?"

"Something wrong?"

And he kind of looked at me and says, "Weasel, why don't you just do the show?"

"You know this as good as anybody."

"Why don't you just do just do the show!"

I came in and filled in for Murray the K, and that's how I finally graduated from being the board op and to actually being on the air.

And then in July of 1971, we went full time, so we had to fill up all of the shifts.

And then David kind of took over the midday shift and Josh was back doing one to five PM and Cerphe started doing the five to nine shift, Damian was on from nine to one.

And then I cemented the whole thing by being the overnight jock.

If I did anything right at all, it was realizing that the people that came in, David, Damian, Cerphe, Weasel were musicians.

They weren't voices.

They weren't hired to be an announcer.

They knew the music.

And I just left them alone.

And the less I had to do with it, the more free they were to practice their craft.

And they did it admirably.

Hey, kids, this is Rick Danko.

I'm sitting here listening to Thomas on WHFS, Bethesda, Maryland.

Are you?

Radio was changing, the political climate was changing.

The war in Vietnam was a crucial issue at the time and FM was coming into its own.

I was at Prince George's Plaza registering voters for the Eagleton - McGovern campaign.

And I called up the radio station and I got Damian on the phone.

He had me make a tape while I was there.

Go in the library, pick some albums, tell me what you'd do on a show for a half hour right on the spot.

And I did that.

I went in on Monday and Jake hired me to be the First Class Engineer.

And a fine Saturday morning to you.

This is WHFS in Bethesda, Maryland, at 102.3 FM.

It's 5 minutes after 10:00.

My name's Adele, and I'll be playing the tunes for you up until the remote.

And so you can get yourselves ready to go over and deal with Weasel and Damian in person.

I'm sure it will be an experience you will never forget.

In 1974, I graduated from University of Maryland and I got a job in radio right out of the gate at WINX, which was an AM station playing the hits, playing Top 40 music.

WINX Rockville And I was also selling radio advertising for them as well, producing commercials, pretty much anything they needed.

And after working there for several months, I heard that WHFS was looking to possibly put a woman on the air.

And I was encouraged by a couple of friends to send an aircheck to them.

I used one that I had done for my college radio days because that was progressive music.

And of course, I was a huge WHFS fan in the early '70s listening to it just as a college student.

So I sent the tape in, thought I didn't have a chance in hell of ever getting interviewed.

And to my surprise, I did get a call and they set an interview up.

I was interviewed by the program director and I was interviewed at the Psyche Delly over a couple of beers, I might add.

And we got into a fight over which was the best Miles Davis album.

And I thought here I'm disagreeing with the program director.

I have just blown my opportunity.

And much to my surprise, I got a call probably within about 24 hours, and I did my first show the following Saturday.

So it was a a rapid-fire rise to stardom, obviously.

Howdy, this is Jerry Garcia.

You're listening to Bob on WHFS, Bethesda, Maryland.

Bob Showacre was such a sweet guy.

And Bob loved The Grateful Dead.

He absolutely adored that band.

That was his favorite band, hands down.

Wanna light up a number, kick off my shoes put on the Grateful Dead Bob, he was like the guy if you wanted to hear great jam band music before jam bands were called jam bands, you listen to Bob "Here".

Good T minus one.

This is WHFS at 102.3 FM.

Bob "Here" we have music due until five this afternoon.

I always knew that Bob Showacre was a very passionate man about his music.

How could you not know that if you talked to him for more than five minutes?

And I was very pleased that he was able to get into radio at a point in time like I was, where we could both use our passions to program music, bring music to the people.

I heard that he had gone to HFS, and I thought, yeah, well, you know, this is exactly where he ought to be.

Bob, of course, after back-announcing back, saying the artists and the songs would say, "this WHFS, Bob here."

Instead of saying, "hey, my name is Bob."

"This is Bob talking to you," he would say, "Bob here."

So one afternoon during this switch over, we were talking and I said, "Stay tuned for Bob "Here" Concert information, for right now Bob "Here" will update the concert calendar at ten minutes after seven o'clock this evening Here's Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers... And I saw Bob Here's mouth sort of clinch, clinching his teeth like it was the end of it.

And I thought he was about to haul off and sock me.

And then all of a sudden, people started calling him Bob "Here" but after about a week or two where Bob kind of smiled at me, because he instinctively realized that Bob "Here" all of a sudden had gained notoriety, that he was now Bob "Here".

I know that he meant a lot to the listeners of HFS, because, again, he was one of the stalwart stewards of music and was bringing it to them, bringing them the good stuff.

This is WHFS, Bob "Here" That was Julie Davidson.

This is a new album entitled "Take a Chance" and that was her version of "Tell Him".

Well, I was very happy to be doing radio and really happy that HFS was going around the clock with the format.

And I thought, gee, maybe I can get a full time job here, too.

And so I was happy to take whatever part-time gigs that were offered and fill in spots and engineering gigs for the foreign shows on the weekends.

It was an exciting time.

It was great to be so much at the very center of the culture of DC at that time.

I think a lot of the programming there was always like you felt like a friend was winking at you, letting you in on a little secret.

It was an art to it.

Everything worked.

We'd play bluegrass, we'd play reggae, we'd play classical, sometimes comedy.

Hello.

We’re glad you made it.

Welcome to the future!

Stations like WHFS were also pivotal in our reach in our outreach to an audience because they weren't afraid of counterculture comedy.

The first time that I was really aware that we had an audience at all was when we went back east in 1970, in the spring April, and we sold out three shows.

And they used to play like 20 minute sets of Zappa records.

So it wasn't shocking to play a long comedy album as well.

They knew where to needle drop.

Oh no.

Come on, squeeze the wheeze.

Many people like to.

See?

I doesn't hurt me.

I think we're all bozos on this bus.

And so any DJ worth his salt who was going to play us would drop that needle right at the right place and just maybe even pull just a couple of lines out of the album and then go into a song.

That's the first time that ever happened.

So the station became known as a place to listen to for surprisingly new and different radio formats, if you will, and we were part of that revolution.

We were so delighted that people knew who we were.

I wanted to say to all those Cheech and Chong fans out there, to come on down and see us.

Be there or be square.

Guys in ties.

Girls in pearls.

No Levis or Capris, please.

Straight ahead.

Cheech and Chong.

That's our doorbell.

People from across the street come by every once in a while and ask us if we have a spare sandwich or something.

Really?

I like it here.

It's nice.

You haven't been to Washington in a year or so, I guess.

No, but I remembered exactly how to get here.

I remember the deli downstairs.

I remember what floor it was and everything.

I had a good time.

Being able to go to these radio stations in a given town Such as that playing at the Cellar Door and going to HFS was the greatest promotion you could ever ask for.

And you would find yourself playing to much larger crowds.

For dancing in the nude Not only would they play your record and let you talk, and talk about your record and maybe play your record again, they might actually help you change your mood while you were there.

We won't go any deeper than that.

They didn't even feel like interviews.

They just felt like you're... you go hang out.

It was a small time radio station in a big time market.

When I got there, they were still doing foreign music shows on the weekend, and that's typically not going to happen at a big time, big market radio station.

But it was money that came in and it was money that allowed us to do the kind of music programming that made a difference in DC into the '60s.

The end of the ‘60s, you're dealing with anti Vietnam and a lot of civil rights stuff.

Safe to say that the country was a bit torn.

It was more than just the politics.

It was the cultural thing.

We had our hair too long, I think, about how my hair is now.

And that would have been considered enough to get me sent home from school.

We were breaking the norms in a lot of different ways, and music was another one of them.

It dealt with cultural issues in ways that regular music didn't.

I mean, John Prine is singing about mountaintop removal and devastation of the hills of Appalachia, and there was just a whole different culture, and music was a part of it.

Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land You had this open landscape where people could come on the radio and do something that was different from what the parent generaton expected and was comfortable with.

I was one of the kids that was marching in the anti war demonstrations.

I was the one that one of the kids who didn't like the Nixon administration, didn't like what was going on in the country.

And I finally had a place that I could listen.

Four dead in Ohio Gotta get down to it Soldiers are cutting us down It was culturally the right time.

I saw Jimi Hendrix at Merriweather Post Pavilion in 1969, and that was the beginning of this amazing ramp up and cultural change of music.

And it was a cultural revolution.

There was a certain political and social content to the music.

You would hear stuff like, "Something happenin' here" You'd hear "Four Dead in Ohio" these were things that had to do with what was going on socially.

You know, in Vietnam.

They were protests.

The public would get information through the artists, through the creatives, through the music.

And to me, that was huge.

And it helped affect society.

It helped bring down and end the Vietnam war.

Suddenly there was something that was political to my generation that mattered.

And I have to confess, I didn't get that from HFS.

HFS taught me to admire musicianship.

I don't know that I thought of it as political in any way, and I'm not sure they did either.

But it just it grounded me in what I love about my country and about American people and how that's expressed musically.

The musicians who were at Woodstock and many others of that era were really very involved in the social movements and political movements, the anti war movement, and so they were kind of like our voice.

If we hadn't had FM radio starting to sort of break through, even around the time of Woodstock and then afterwards, a lot of the acts that became important would have had a much tougher time, sort of surfacing.

AM radio was not playing them.

Their exposure was really completely attributed to freeform radio.

And we would take our albums home, listen to them, and try to figure out what kind of a set we could put them into.

Most of us wrote what we called books of segue.

And these were spiral binders.

We'd sit there and try...

I could play this, I could play this, That'll go with this, that'll go with that.

So that was the musical aspect to it.

There was a spaceshot.

I pod up the net and there they are talking about it.

I dash into the music library, which fortunately, was in the next room, and I'm picking out all the space music I can think of.

The guy said, "well, they're 135 miles above the Earth and about 8 miles downrange" - pff!

8 miles high!

Eight miles high He could have said 9 miles, he could have said 100 miles.

He said 8 miles high.

And I just let it go.

And people would call in and go, like, "Dude, how did you make that happen?"

Well, it was luck.

Our turntables were two steps away from the library.

We all knew that library.

Every inch of it.

Knew where the segues were.

What this song we were listening to, how it related to what was in the library.

You could have a disc jockey, like Cerphe take a piece of music that would start on a D chord.

If you were a musician you would know these things and take it all the way through, and it would end on a C chord.

And that would segue directly into the next song, which would start with a C chord.

They had the ability to basically change your mood.

Everything got better late.

It seemed like the DJs got weirder and no one was paying attention from the management side, so they could do whatever they wanted.

I treasure staying up late at night listening to Weasel, when he would play old swing, old blues, old jazz stuff that nobody else was playing.

You got to answer the phone calls and talk to all the public out there, and they say, "Play this and play that," you know.

And after you play it, they call back and say, "Play more."

I say, "Well, I just played it."

And I said, "I'll play it again."

Like Woody Allen, "I'll play it again Sam."

Weasel's musical taste was extraordinary, and he really pushed the edge of things, and he talked about the music and the artists, and that was I thought he was just exceptional.

And I thought Damian pretty much the same way.

He was really personally involved, it seemed, with the music.

And I always get the feeling like I I go out there and I see Damian at clubs, and the people in the bands still know Damian, and he knows them.

And there's this really kind of intimate relationship between him and them.

He was more than just somebody who spun records.

He was really kind of connected into the music in a really personal way.

And when I still see that today, I'm reminded of what, you know, how different a relationship that is.

WHFS broadened my horizons because Top 40 was, you heard the same thing on every station.

The hip sounds of Washington WEAM, the lively one!

You went to WEAM, WPGC, you were hearing pretty much the same stuff.

And then you went to WHFS and there were all these artists you'd never heard.

It kind of taught me to experiment and to expand my horizons.

And to look for new music and listen to new music.

And we had The Cellar Door and places like that in Georgetown, and you got to see a lot of great new artists.

When you listened to Weasel or you listened to Cerphe, you came away with a lot of knowledge.

Damian turned me onto all kinds of great blues.

Josh turned me on to all kinds of, like, bluegrass and acoustic and country music.

I was a classic rock guy.

when it was new music!

I'd walk into the station and David Einstein would be interviewing Charlie Mingus.

Imagine Mingus being in your radio station.

I mean, that cat was into jazz.

I learned so much from the radio station, but the people that worked there came from all different backgrounds, all different kinds of economic strata.

It was amazing.

It was so much fun, and it went by so fast.

And I remember going to concerts.

I went up to Neil Young, told him I was from HFS, and I was playing "Roll Another Number", and I gave him a bumper sticker.

He put it on his leg.

Well, when I first went to Jamaica in 1977, I basically walked across the island of Jamaica.

I spent three months there.

So when I would go from town to town, I started collecting 45 rpm records.

And after I had amassed a pretty great collection, a friend of mine said, “Why don't you do a radio show, check out WHFS, give them a call.” So I gave Jake Einstein a call and said, “I want to do a Reggae show on WHFS.” And he said, “okay, kid, you're on this Sunday.” No money.

Go get your own ads.

You pay for the show.

And you know I just learned to spin Sunday night on the radio.

I remember hearing music that appealed to a sensibility I didn't know I had.

Cerphe gave me Little Feat as a DJ.

I think he was the real Little Feat champion.

And to this day, if I think about bands that I want to see right now that I would drive or fly a thousand miles, I want to see a Little Feat show.

Let's hear it.

F F E E A A T T Please welcome Little Feat Lowell George was hanging around doing some recording with Mike Aldridge.

There was a lot of stuff going on locally, and I believe that Linda was there at the same time, and she and Lowell went up to the station and did a version of "Willin'" Are we on?

Yes, we're on the air.

Did you work on the chorus?

Are we gonna rehearse?

No, you don't have to keep the headphones on when you play if you don't want to.

I like the headphones on.

It reminds me of the studio.

I know what you mean.

Why don't you get this part here down cuz I... And I’ve been from Tuscon to Tucumcari Tehachapi to Tonapah Driven every kind of rig that’s ever been made.

Driven the back roads so I wouldn’t get weighed.

And if you give me...

The idea of live radio, you know, it's happening at the moment.

So you have the DJs that are playing the music that's that they're excited about, and then you have people coming into the station and actually playing live.

It's a living being.

It's not something that's static.

At that time in Los Angeles, on the FM dial, there were the pop stations where you had to be the Jackson Five or something like that to get on it.

And we weren't cracking any of those markets, to say the least.

We were approached by our manager.

He said, "Steve Boone from the Lovin' Spoonful has got a studio in Hunt Valley, Maryland."

"Why don't you guys come back here?"

"Let's ease into the water with this."

"We got a great studio."

"George Massenberg is going to be the engineer."

So once we moved back there and we were kind of ensconced in the area, if you will, and started to perform a little bit around this mid Atlantic portion of the US, especially around Washington and Baltimore, things started to improve rapidly for the band.

We were cognizant that that station was really doing us a lot of good.

It was a disoriented time, but with Cerphe and later Damian, those guys really helped center things for us.

We were afforded special treatment by WHFS, by just plugging us a whole lot, and more and more people would show up at shows.

I think we had like-minded people with HFS, and I think that's when Little Feat really really got known because there was a kind of a synergy there, and it was very much a family affair, and it wasn't nepotism.

They weren't playing it just because they knew it.

They played it because they liked the music.

Good night everybody.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Cerphe!

Any old time You got your dial tuned in "Yankee Stadium", I think, always was the perfect record because every track on it was perfect.

So that's what really cemented the relationship.

And that's when I started playing every track on the "Yankee Stadium" LP.

You did.

We did.

And then that's when you sort of became our house band.

WHFS meant everything to the band, man.

They put us on the map down there.

It was our biggest market, even more than New England.

But they were playing us so much.

They played us constantly, probably too much.

You were the freeform thing.

We were the freeform thing.

And all of a sudden, you were like a part of us.

You guys had genuine enthusiasm, and that's what was great about HFS.

It wasn't fake, you know.

I mean, sometimes we'd have a DJ come to announce the band, and then five minutes later, where'd he go?

He's going, you know, and you guys really like the music.

You love the music.

And you stirred up real enthusiasm, I mean, for the whole scene.

Well, Weasel came to see us for every show we ever did, except for one.

I think he missed one.

And the only reason I remember that is he only missed one.

It was a certain time where a lot of great new artists were coming out, and they were the only people supporting these new groups.

That went on to be a big deal.

Nobody gave a damn about Jimmy Buffett, but HFS got on it, and of course, now you got all these clowns doing the Shark Head or whatever they do.

I was at The Cellar Door, and I really got along well with those guys that work there.

And they said after the show, they said, "You want to go down to HFS?"

And I said, "What's that?"

They said "No, the radio station WHFS.".

"They play your stuff."

"They're playing your record."

So we went, and they were glad to see us.

And we'd just sit around and talk.

They'd spin records and we'd have little conversations they'd ask questions, but the feeling was that you were in on something that you had connected.

People would stop you on the street and say, "Chris, I heard you on HFS."

"You know, and it was it was great."

"And they play your music all the time."

You know, it was exhilarating.

Believe me when I tell you I could love you like a man Going back to 30 or 40 years ago when my first album came out.

I do remember seeing Damian from HFS quite a bit.

He would frequently introduce me at concerts.

Being able to play a large theater like the Warner, I must have been getting significant radio play, and I imagine that HFS was the chief station in the DC area that enabled me to do that.

And so what gets them to the show is their familiarity with the music.

And in those days, that happened with radio, and it happened with FM, underground radio, because we were not making, you know, Top 40 hit songs.

We were just playing good music, and HFS was playing good music.

We really didn't have a platform on AM.

We didn't have an AM platform, but FM, because it didn't have anything to lose by playing us.

Many of us made albums that really were like kind of complete stories, and they could just put an album on, let it roll and flip it, or have two of them and flip over the other one, and bang, get going.

FM really gave me a big fan base that is loyal to today.

Washington, DC was one of the most important marketplaces on the East Coast because of WHFS.

Because what would happen was they would put a record on, for example, like an artist like Joan Armatrading, and nobody else in the country other than possibly San Francisco or Boston that had these kind of radio stations like WHFS would be playing Joan.

Yes I’m so happy that you’re happy with me Joan Armatrading returns to Constitution Hall July 21.

They were important in getting people to know who I was.

When they introduced me or whoever to the audience.

The audience felt they were getting something that they felt the DJs were genuine about.

It created a touring market for her, so she was able to come in and play clubs like The Cellar Door to a sell out audience.

You never knew who you were going to run into.

I remember some tall guy came in one day and wanted to go across the street to the Psyche Delly to get some coffee and volunteered to get us all coffee.

And then I realized that's Roger McGuinn!

I first learned about HFS or went there when Mike Klenfner from Columbia Records took me on an acoustic promotional tour of radio stations only.

I didn't play any venues.

I just went to radio stations and I'd do interviews and sometimes I'd sing a couple of songs and Cerphe at HFS was a supporter.

He would invite us to come over.

It was just a love affair between the record distributors and HFS.

It was a starter station.

It was just the fact that they were playing new music in times where virtually nobody else was doing it.

To that extent, HFS was way ahead of the pack.

People don't know how hits happen on the radio.

Well, at least in those days there was a method to it.

And you’d report to trade magazines, Billboard, CMJ, College Music Journal, R and R Radio and Record.

David Einstein would report this new music he was playing.

Other people from around the country would see what he was reporting and that and that every week he's putting in, you know, whatever the new band was and oh, who's this Elvis Costello?

You know, it's like he just added somebody called Elvis Costello.

And eventually they'd see it moving up the charts.

So and then another station would add it, and another station, another station, eventually it reaches critical mass.

And then it's everywhere, and the next thing you know, Elvis Costello becomes a household name.

You’d better listen to the radio Because there was a very interesting grassroots local music scene in DC that I was fortunate enough to to find my way into, mainly through Bill and Taffy Danoff, who called themselves Fat City.

There was so much music, so many artists that were going to make it on the national stage, but even the ones who didn't make it on the national stage, they were a really important part of the fabric of a musical.

A local music community is so incredibly important.

And in a town that wasn't considered New York or Los Angeles.

I'm not sure The Nighthawks could have rolled off as we did without HFS.

The Nighthawks recorded our first album and it came out on Billy Hancock's Aladdin label.

I remember carrying the album up and handing it to Weasel and him putting the record on.

I mean, that was amazing because it was right there.

But then within a week, I was in a car on the beltway and heard it in the car radio.

And if you've ever heard yourself on the car radio, it's a magic moment.

Absolutely the coolest thing that can happen in your life.

One of the great things about WHFS was the support that it gave to local musicians.

It's the WHFS-Psyche Delly Homegrown Music Festival and it's featuring all your favorite area bands like The Nighthawks, the Rosslyn Mountain Boys, Danny Gatton and the Fat Boys Roberta Flack, Andrew White, Love Cry Want, Nils Lofgren all the way up to Root Boy Slim.

And we have a special guest in the studio this afternoon, Mr. Root Boy Slim.

Me?

You’ve got a record... Have I got a record out?

I think so.

Give me some brain cells.

Pass those brain cells over.

It's going to be out on Warner Brothers Records.

When is it coming out, by the way?

It'll be out when the people, it'll be out when you get it.

All right, well, let's listen to something from it.

What we're going to listen to?

Let's listen to "Used to be a Radical".

The true story of the '60s.

Okay.

All kinds of local bands were up at the station all the time.

There were so many good acts that came out.

Billy Hancock, Tex Rubinowitz Hey, all your boppers out there This is Tex Rubinowitz the Hot Rod Man I’m here with the Bad Boys and we want to let you know that you're listening to WHFS in Bethesda, Maryland.

The rock n roll connection in the Nation's Capital.

and these guys are really known now internationally.

But they started off with WHFS.

Rock rock rock and roll radio Rock rock rock and roll radio We were playing the Psyche Delly pretty regularly, of course, across the street from HFS.

HFS and Psyche Delly were this little nexus where everybody who was involved in music on a national level, who came through town, ended up there.

Put on your high heel sneakers because it's dance party time.

This is Evan Johns and me and the H Bombs will be at the Psyche Delly in Bethesda this Friday night for an all night dance contest.

Being across the street from HFS, once I realized what was going on, it was like a gold mine.

When I got to know the jocks, they would discuss with me certain acts certain acts that were coming to town and seeing if I wanted to book them there.

Then they said, you know, that they would interview them.

I brought a bunch of groups in, and HFS was always so good about doing interviews.

And it, you know, it didn't have to be Led Zeppelin in order to be publicized or talked about or interviewed.

You just had to be interesting, that's all.

From my way of thinking, I couldn't do a concert without using HFS as one of the advertising media.

And it's interesting because they had the smallest numbers in terms of listeners, but their listeners paid more attention and were more responsive to the advertising.

So I had to use them.

Which brings us up to the present moment.

We have about five minutes of news coming up with Suzanne coming to you live right after this message.

I got the news As far as I know, I was the first female news director in the Baltimore-Washington area.

So Jake was definitely ahead of the curve there.

in getting a woman not just on the air, but in a management position in news.

So news, public affairs, interviewing local people, interviewing people who came in to be on the air.

Wavy Gravy was my favorite all time interview.

We must be in heaven, man!

Call any vegetable and the chances are good So much happened in those years.

Earth Day got started, concern for the environment, concern for Diet for a Small Planet, concerned about meat consumption.

And all those things were reflected in the music and all those things were reflected in the news that we did on WHFS.

And the Vegetarian Cookbook was responding to it.

Your favorite vegetable It's the HFS New Vegetarian Cookbook Homegrown Recipes.

Remember, you can get your new copy of Homegrown Recipes now.

It's filled with the favorite recipes of HFS listeners.

Vegetarian recipes by the page.

To get yours, you can stop by the HFS... "Think globally, act locally."

And we were the epitome of that on HFS.

I mean, we were talking about stuff as simple and local as "Lost Dog and Cat Reports" or somebody needed a ride to Georgetown.

We would announce their name and their phone number.

Which is about as local as you can get A community bulletin board.

It wasn't just rides.

It was all sorts of ways to hook up.

It just brought everybody together.

You had that unifying radio station that told you where all these gigs were and what was going on.

That fatal day.

I remember it very well.

There was a guy named Teddy Wagner who hung around with all of us.

"Rubber Buddy", they called him.

That was his CB handle.

He and his friends, Toby and Teddy, they had come by the studio that night.

I was on the air, and they were going to a party.

Teddy Wagner knew a shortcut.

It involved going to the end of a dead end street and driving across a field.

Rubber was going way too fast.

He always went way too fast.

But when he was partying, it was like you always took your life in your hands when Rubber was driving.

And he went over the curb, but there was a pedestrian bridge there, and he was going so fast that when he hit the curb and went straight into the pedestrian bridge, the two other guys were dead on the spot, and Damian was in a coma.

And then miraculously, he came out of it.

And God bless Patty Ebbert, who's been with him ever since, so stood right by him then.

I had the blues so bad He had a long, hard rehabilitation.

We were all pulling for him.

But I’m feeling so much better I can cakewalk into town And what a blessing that when he did come back his musical knowledge was still intact.

His sensibilities about putting music together were still intact.

At that time, all of us started moving into the Triangle Towers.

Almost the entire Air staff at one point actually lived there.

David moved in there, Damian, Patty moved in there also, so Damian could recover.

And I think one of the things they wanted with Damian was to have him near the station and have him near his colleagues.

And we'd start to talk about the music and you could see him gradually kind of rehabilitate and become back to normal.

I can tell you that Damian is here by the grace of God and the fact that Jake would not let him die.

Everybody had given up on Damian, and Jake was just like a bull.

Nothing was going to prevent that kid from getting better.

There's still time for you to become a DJ and program your own two hour radio show here on WHFS.

Well, "Radioactivity" was a sort of a contest where listeners could develop a radio show, as their music and submit it to the station.

And if you were selected, you got to come on air and do your thing, play DJ for a couple of hours.

Once again, my name is Beth Dawson.

I'm going to be sitting in with Larry from 8 to 10, playing some music.

I hope you enjoy it.

Good morning, I'm Diane.

I'll be here with you until 10 this morning.

Then it's Damian to take you through until 1 this afternoon.

5 past 9...

I had relocated to Hagerstown, Maryland.

And one of the people I met there through friends in D.C. was Diane, who was living in Hagerstown.

She was working at WQCM up there.

And one of the first things we found out we had in common was this mutual love and fanatic feeling about WHFS.

and time went by.

I was there for only about a year or so, and I came back to the D.C. area and Diane at that point had made her way to HFS.

She'd gone from QCM to KTK in Baltimore, and then she finally got the dream come true.

She was on the air at WHFS.

We were just listening to John Prine from Sweet Revenge and Mexican Home preceding Bonnie Raitt from Home Plate and Your Sweet and Shiny Eyes.

We began with Tom Waits and The Piano Has Been Drinking.

Good morning.

It's 20 minutes... Hi, this is Carl Perkins, and you're listening to Yeah, you know her.

Diane.

Hi, Diane.

Sometimes I've been asked, "Were you influenced by WGTV", which was a college station from Georgetown University that also had a similar free form format, and they were a little bit ahead of us in terms of pushing both New Wave and also what I would call Punk Rock.

It’s 20 past 8 o'clock, this is WGTB FM.

We've got two of the most prestigious writers in the Washington Metropolitan Area and now we're going to get down to the serious questioning.

No more jokes, fun and games.

At WGTB we felt kind of a little bit of a competition with WHFS because they were bigger than we were.

We felt that it was kind of country-oriented, what we called granola rock, which in our mind was kind of a put down and we felt that we were really cutting edge and WHFS was behind the times.

I could certainly remember getting requests for things and people would say, oh, I heard this on WGTB, how come HFS isn't playing it?

In early 1979, after WGTB went off the air, I received a call from David Einstein and he said he'd wanted to get together and talk with me about possibly doing a radio show and since I had nothing going on, said "Sure, why not?"

So here I was going over to the Enemy, or, of course we weren't there anymore.

I was just going from a place of nothing to maybe something else.

And we talked about what he wanted and he said you know, he talked about New Wave and what was happening.

And I explained to him that there was like three contingents of music.

There was the British New Wave: Joy Division, Stranglers, Buzzcocks.

There was the American: Ramones, New York Dolls, B-52s, Runaways.

And then there's kind of a Pub Rock thing: ian Dury and the Blockheads, Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello.

And I said, you could bring these three fields of music together and I think I could probably do something that would meet your requirements.

He was big on Joy Division, a lot of Joy Division he wanted.

I didn't particularly care for them, but I had to play "Love Will Tear Us Apart" about every other week.

There were a lot of local bands that I tried to bring on to WHFS that weren't being exposed - The Slickee Boys, Razz.

There was a lot of small bands and I tried to feature them on my show, so I tried to bring everything that was positive about GTB to WHFS and bring it into the new era.

You gotta gotta tell me why this always happens to you David Einstein was very much behind it and although a lot of it was British acts, US labels were promoting it.

And so, you know, there may have been, you know, a little bit, look, this is some new stuff.

It's great that you're playing all of our catalog stuff from 1972, but how about playing some new stuff too?

The English Beat, the latest super successful Two Tone group to emerge from England and on Friday, they’ll be emerging as the opening act for the Pretenders concert at Lisner Auditorium.

I told my friend I'd check for you HFS, of course, was like outstanding.

They were like top of the heap, how could I forget this?

They added all twelve tracks on my first album.

It wasn't like, oh, are they going to add the single?

They just played the whole thing and immediately we just saw the impact of that.

Marshall Mania is returning to Washington Friday, July 29 when I.M.P.

and the 9:30 Club presents for one show only at the Warner Theater, Marshall Crenshaw.

Well, I'm goin' out I’m goin' out lookin' for a cynical girl We'll call it New Wave music that came out was that there were some female groups.

The GoGos, Been running so long I’ve nearly lost all track of time It’s a cruel, cruel summer Bananarama is another one that featured a lot of women singing.

Joan Armatrading being one, obviously.

I think WHFS absolutely was important to people getting to know me.

Show some emotion Put expression in your eyes It wasn't corporate, it was playing music to play music.

And I still like a lot of that music.

It's kind of like with anything the good stuff endures and the bad stuff nobody listens to 30 years later.

It recycles itself.

If there was some really good stuff that really hung in there and made sense, and it's timeless here, it is still there Love, love will tear us apart again From Day One.

Jake said, "I'm not a broadcaster."

"I'm in this to build it up and sell it."

Jake had a history of taking businesses, building them up and selling them.

In fact, we used to joke about the fact that invariably people would buy the business because it was so successful, and then turn around and change it.

Radio is basically a business.

We packaged a fantastic product.

Now if somebody doesn't see fit to honor those efforts and to take it further, and it's a business decision.

They bought the station.

They do what they want to do.

That's the American Dream.

The so called glory days of Freeform Radio were really remarkably short.

It was really just a couple of years from 1967 when Tom Donahue started off at KMPX.

That was a small, privately owned station.

But when he found some success with Freeform, the station was bought by Metro Media, a big national network of stations.

And immediately a kind of corporatization took effect, not only in San Francisco, but at a number of these stations across the country.

What killed AM was Payola.

What killed FM was corporations.

And that's what happened.

All these stations that were Freeform, that were doing exactly what HFS was doing, were bought up.

They also were taking a lot of control, and they were taking the control away from the disc jockeys.

The power of the quote unquote "jock" to create a compelling set of music was taken away bit by bit, where they had to play certain things at certain times.

At the few places like HFS, where the ownership remained independent.

They had a freedom that extended beyond that glorious window of 1967 to 1969.

Their window extended well beyond that because they did not come under the kind of pressure that the networks brought to bear on these stations to make profit margins, to regularize their programming.

HFS stayed true to its roots.

Radio is something you have to stay into it yourself.

You have to eat it and sleep it.

You have to eat it and sleep it.

But Einstein's partners are tired of waiting for their profits.

They've agreed to sell to the outlet company for $2.1 million.

We got together at Bernie Margolius's office and we went in and and the guy was there, and he just handed each one of us a check.

And I took my check and I looked at it and I said, "Well, I guess it was worth it."

Freeform radio was a part of an era.

We're out of that era.

So music has become more of a DIY kind of a do it yourself kind of thing.

And the Internet radio, Pandora, where you can program your own stuff, that's freeform to me.

You can go on Pandora and you can do what kids do today, but it's not the same as everybody.

We were a community.

You'd go into school and you'd say, "Did you hear what Damian said on.

The radio last night?"

Or "Did you hear that new song, that Cerphe was playing?"

There isn't that sense anymore, and I think it's missing, and I think kids don't realize that they're missing a lot.

And I'm very happy that we had that opportunity.

You know, The old paradigm is like shaking at the knees and not knowing what's going on and trying to hold on.

And the new paradigm is just, "Here we are, and here it is."

And I think that most people don't recognize that it changes all the time.

That's all there is really going to it.

If I can look back, I look back, like, seven decades, and it's all been about change.

Having WHFS was this connection to the world of music, of knowing that you were going to not just learn something, but every time you turned it on, you were going to be touched in a way.

You were either going to hear something that you maybe just needed to hear at that moment or didn't even know you needed to hear it, or you were going to be turned on to something that would get you excited.

Music is not made in a vacuum.

But it all started back with WHFS.

That was the Mothership.

If I could only win your love So what exactly is going to happen now when the station signs off the air... Oh, we'll bid goodbye to all our friends and we'll steal away into the night, and tomorrow morning we'll be here and they're coming in to take inventory.

And then we'll go to settlement.

And then I'm going to head for the nearest air conditioned restaurant and have a lunch.

Hey everybody, (H-F-S) Come on John, (Forever) Steve and Patty, come on.

And then we're going to go out with that.

And let me see if I if I remember this from broadcast school.

Okay?

For the past so and so years, you've been listening to WHFS radio in Bethesda, Maryland.

WHFS has been operating for all these years on channel 272 A, as licensed by the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, DC.

It's been owned by High Fidelity Broadcasters, Incorporated.

It's been operating on 102.3 MHz with an official radiated, effective Radiated Power of 2.3 Kw, with studios, offices, and transmission facilities, high atop the Triangle Towers at 4853 Cordell Avenue, Bethesda, Maryland.

Are there any last words?

All right, we did it.

The next couple of months are being brought to you by the Shady Rest Home.

We are going off the air.

Ladies and gentlemen, for the last time.

WHFS Bethesda, Maryland, at 102.3 One two three If you close the door The night could last forever Leave the sunshine out And say hello to never All the people are dancing and they're having such fun I wish it could happen to me But if you close the door I'd never have to see the day again If you close the door The night could last forever Leave the wineglass out And drink a toast to never Oh, someday I know someone will look into my eyes and say hello you're my very special one But if you close the door I'd never have to see the day again Dark party bars, shiny Cadillac cars And the people on subways and trains Looking gray in the rain as they stand disarrayed Oh, but people look well in the dark And if you close the door The night could last forever Leave the sunshine out And say hello to never All the people are dancing, and they're having such fun I wish it could happen to me 'Cause if you close the door I'd never have to see the day again I'd never have to see the day again, once more I'd never have to see the day again Now, what about the future?

Oh, the future.

I believe in the future.

I mean, if there weren't any future, we wouldn't be here tomorrow, right?

As a matter of fact, this is the first second of the rest of your life, right?

Today is first, but the future is just like the past.

God forbid.

Well, we're supposed to learn from our mistakes, right?

Yeah, right.

You learn from your mistakes, and the future is nothing but a gas.

I heard that in a Bill Holland tune once, and I guess he knew what he was talking about, so it makes a lot of sense.

Yeah.

I was talking on the phone to a friend of mine she said have you heard it’s in the paper today I said no I haven’t but it can’t be that bad And she said oh yes it can and she began to wail My radio’s no good without HFS There’d be nothing on my dial if it did not exist My radio’s no good without HFS.

Let it roll... Serious depression was invading New Year’s Eve How quickly bad news travels in a town this big I called another friend who has an answering machine I left a sad message at the sound of the beep, My radio’s no good without HFS There’d be nothing on my dial if it did not exist My radio’s no good without HFS.

Let it roll... My airwaves are ill.

I need that Bethesda Breeze I’m locked in on it’s beam One oh two point three I can hardly believe that there is not a list What with The Door, The Delly and Despo’s and this I wish there was something more that we could do Is there really no one else that we can turn to My radio’s no good without HFS There’d be nothing on my dial if it did not exist My radio’s no good without HFS.

Let it roll My radio’s no good without HFS My radio’s no good without HFS Hello this is Steve Cooper from The Sleepers and when we’re in town we always park our dial on WHFS Bethesda Maryland My radio’s no good without the Whuffus My radio’s no good without the Whuffus Keep it on the air What the hell is going on here Party guitar Party guitar