Musicians
A long list of musicians have appeared on Radio Unnameable, including Townes Van Zandt, David Peel, Richie Havens, Jose Feliciano, Joni Mitchell, The Fugs, Patti Smith and Phil Ochs (parodying "Positively 4th Street"; half pretending a comic competition with Bob Dylan, but later telling disapproving callers that it was Dylan’s right to play with an electric guitar and a band behind him). Jerry Jeff Walker and David Bromberg introduced the song Mr. Bojangles on the show, The Incredible String Band came over from England with their manager, Joe Boyd, Happy and Artie Traum often stopped by before heading back to Woodstock.
After Arlo Guthrie debuted "Alice’s Restaurant" in 1966, hundreds of people called asking where they could buy the record. Arlo didn’t even have a recording contract yet. Bob knew Dave Van Ronk, from the Village folk scene, from Conrad’s shop. (They shared a birthday and Fass remembers they once celebrated by sneaking into the Carmine Street Pool after dark.) Garland Jeffreys, Buzzy Linhardt and Moogy Klingman are hometown guys who still make repeat visits.
Other performers include Taj Mahal, Paul Siebel, Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, Skip James, Rosalie Sorrels, Tiny Tim with his ukulele, Jake & the Family Jewels, Cat Mother & the All Night Newsboys, Melanie, Penny Arcade, Rambling Jack Elliot, Tom Rapp and Pearls before Swine, Frank Zappa, flute virtuoso Jeremy Steig, The Holy Modal Rounders, Sis Cunningham and Sammy Walker.
Bob Dylan was a significant guest on the show. Fass met Dylan before he began his radio career, double dating with Carla Rotolo, one-time stage manager of The Hostage, and her sister, Suze, who was Dylan’s girlfriend. “We went out to dinner in the Village and played poker at Dylan’s apartment over The Music Inn on W. 4th Street,” Fass remembers. “When I started the show, he listened and occasionally I could squeeze a suggestion out of him. He turned me on to Lightnin' Hopkins.”
Dylan first appeared on Bob’s show doing comic improvs with Suze Rotolo and John Herald in 1963. Listeners also got a preview of his forthcoming album, Freewheelin'. In 1966, in the midst of recording Blonde on Blonde, he returned to Radio Unnameable, taking phone calls from listeners. When Dylan’s crusading anthem, Hurricane, came out in the mid 70s, Fass played it all night for five nights in a row and in 1986, when Dylan turned 45; he organized a 45-hour marathon of his music for WBAI.
Fass explained the connection to NPR reporter (and former WBAI news reporter) Jon Kalish, this way: “Bob Dylan is the leading bard of our age. I feel grateful to have been alive while he's been writing. In a way, it’s like having known Shakespeare.”
Read more about this topic: Bob Fass
Famous quotes containing the word musicians:
“Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)
“As if the musicians did not so much play the little phrase as execute the rites required by it to appear, and they proceeded to the necessary incantations to obtain and prolong for a few instants the miracle of its evocation, Swann, who could no more see the phrase than if it belonged to an ultraviolet world ... Swann felt it as a presence, as a protective goddess and a confidante to his love, who to arrive to him ... had clothed the disguise of this sonorous appearance.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“We stand in the tumult of a festival.
What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?
These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?
These musicians dubbing at a tragedy,
A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this:
That there are no lines to speak? There is no play.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)