Bob Fass - Lasting Influence

Lasting Influence

In his book about life at WBAI, Playing in the FM Band, Steve Post describes Bob Fass as: “a gigantic man with receding blond hair and thick black-rimmed glasses, with hands so huge they appeared to dominate his enormous frame. His voice, soft & gentle, which I heard coming from the office monitors seemed somehow detached from his body.” Post, who began as WBAI’s bookkeeper before hosting a program of his own, The Outside, describes how Fass took him under “his ample wing” and allowed him to watch him at work, teaching him what he knew, demystifying the whole process.

Julius Lester, a former SNCC photographer, recalls being so in awe of Fass that for the first year he did his own program at WBAI people constantly mistook him for Bob.

Larry Josephson who would became WBAI’S morning man and eventually station manager, remembers, the first time Bob motioned him into Master Control, “it was like Dorothy entering Oz.”

Indeed, Fass creates such a magical atmosphere and makes it all seem so easy, he has encouraged dozens of wanna-be DJs. His continuing impact is clear, according to Marc Fisher, author of Something in the Air (Random House, 2007), who says Fass has inspired countless other personalities like Sirius shock jock Howard Stern (who listened to Bob a lot as a kid) Tom Leykis in L.A, and Vin Scelsa, to ride the radio waves.

“I like the idea of sharing, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” says Fass. “I want to connect people in one city with people in another. I think information can cure almost anything.”

As previously noted, Fass has always been ready to lend an ear and share the air with absolutely anyone who felt they had something to say. This largesse often leads to endless, boring mouthing off that only a mother could love, but equally often leads to dynamic, intimate flurries of insight, energy, humor and understanding.

Unlike almost any other radio or television personality one can think of, silence never scares Bob Fass. Seconds pass as he seemingly ponders the thoughts of his guests, leaving them or you, the listener, a large space to fill in the blanks. In addition, to being a congenial master of ceremonies, Bob Fass is a good listener.

Fass has never been a brilliant monologist like Jean Shepherd who preceded him on WOR in the late 50s, nor a star interviewer. His style is to make a few gentle stabs at drawing his guest out, and then he’s content to go with the flow. His singular talent, as Jay Sand notes in The Radio Waves Unnameable, is for orchestrating the great mix; “For Fass, beauty exists in the way events intertwine… the art came in the complete presentation.. and for better or worse, the divergent strands of life which Fass presented would have fused to form a lucid whole by the time he said, 'BYE BYE'.”

Looking back at the great “audio bazaar” he’s presided over for more than forty years, Fass says it’s the little moments that stand out for him. “Once at 3 am, a guy called from the Lower East Side and was talking about something, then said, "Whoa! do you hear that thunder?" A woman in the Bronx who was also on the line, paused and then said, "Wow! Look at the lightning!" You could hear the thunder claps moving up town and you got the feeling of a network of the whole city."

Remembering the appearance of the Brooklyn Black Panthers on Radio Unnameable back in the day, Fass says, “I kind of like it when people come up a little hostile and suspicious and I and the audience warm them up and win them over by the end of the show.”

In 1971, a man called in about 2:45 in the morning and announced that he had taken pills and was going to commit suicide. He asked Fass to promise not to call authorities, but Fass refused. "I didn’t want to lie to him," Fass explained to a reporter the next day. “If the last thing someone says to you is a lie, that kind of cheapens life.” Fass spent the next two hours talking to the caller live on the air, as other WBAI workers contacted the police and the phone company attempted to trace the call.

Later that morning, the police finally found the caller lying unconscious on his bedroom floor. His telephone was off the hook, the radio tuned to WBAI. He was taken to the hospital in critical condition but survived. Fass says the man contacted him later and thanked him for being there. The press tried to turn Fass into a hero but he demurred. When a Daily News reporter arrived at his home, wanting to take his picture, Fass passed him a photo of his colleague, Larry Josephson, through a crack in the door. Josephson made the front page, identified incorrectly as "Bob Fass, WBAI’s heroic DJ." Fass later commented that he thought, “Larry would enjoy having his picture in the paper.”

Columnist Jimmy Breslin observed Fass on the job in 1985: “a large man in a tie dyed T-shirt, Fass had two or three callers on the air at once. They spoke about battered wife syndrome and low income mortgages. One caller arguing with another said, “Pathetic left wing drivel!” Someone threw the door open and said, we have food!” As Breslin left, he passed Melanie on her way in, just arriving to sing on Radio Unnameable.

In the mid-1980s Fass was nearly homeless. AJ Weberman rented a truck for Fass and a large storage unit to hold his archives, paid in advance for many years.

Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher remembers spending a night at WBAI in 2005. “A caller phoned in to say that kids were being roughed up by cops in Brooklyn. Bob effortlessly went to the phones and the show became an open forum where listeners offered almost play-by-play accounts of the encounter from their different perspectives. It was an amazing mix of old counter culture stalwarts and a new BAI audience of west Indians and African Americans. Bob Fass was the circuit that linked them.”

Fass was last paid for his radio time in 1977. Musicians like Dave Bromberg turn up at tributes to thank Bob “for giving us our careers.” Many of his protégées have turned colleagues, like Steve Post, Larry Josephson, and Vin Scelsa, and have spoken of his generosity with his time. Listeners have made donations to his retirement fund. “It’s better than BAI paying me that people remember me, I guess,” Fass says.

In 2005, attorney Neil Fabricant, President Emeritus of the School of Social Policy at GWU, organized a rent party for Fass. “The right wing has spent billions of dollars to revise the history of an era and to distort the collective memory,” Fabricant says. He suggests that restoring and properly archiving the 45 years of Bob Fass’s program “would be a giant first step in reclaiming that history.”

80 hours of Radio Unnameable have been acquired and are currently available at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York. There is a documentary film currently in production about Fass and Radio Unnameable,.

“Like many others, Bob wanted to change the world. Unlike many others, he had access to the airwaves and therefore a very real opportunity to do so.” says Jay Sand.

Good Evening Cabal, a weekly show on a Florida-based community FM station, is named as a tribute to Bob Fass by its host, Curt Werner, who as a Brooklyn teenager listened to Fass in the 1960s on WBAI. The program, which features music from the 1960s and 1970s and live interviews with artists and writers from that era, has been on the air for four years on WSLR 96.5 LPFM in Sarasota, Fla. Fass himself appeared as a guest on the show in 2007.