Bob Fass - Radio Unnameable

Radio Unnameable

The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett, which Fass was reading at the time, gave the show its title. His signature greeting, “Good morning, cabal,” came from a listener. “I wanted a sign-on line, like William B. Williams “Good morning, world,” says Fass. “Someone sent in a postcard suggesting, “Good morning, cabal.” I looked it up in the dictionary and discovered that the word, cabal, comes from “horse.” Originally, people met on horseback at night with their identities concealed-even from each other—to plot or plan something subversive. And I thought, that’s it: “Good morning, cabal.”

Fass brought his acting training to the radio via his voice. Filmmaker Susan Lazarus recalls listening to Bob’s show as a teenager. She drifted off to sleep and woke some hours later to hear Tom Rush singing a beautiful song live in BAI’s studio. It was called Urge For Going, by a new Canadian songwriter named Joni Mitchell (who would also go on to sing and play the piano on Radio Unnameable). Lazarus remembers the sense of discovering something with Fass at the very instant of transmission. “It was like magic.”

Nowhere else, Jay Sand writes, could you hear a DJ “playing two records at the same time or backwards, or the same song over and over and over again, simply because he liked its message. Nowhere else in the early 60s could you hear callers and hosts alike criticize LBJ for escalating the War in Vietnam, encourage men to burn their draft cards, or talk in glowing terms about their drug experiences. Radio Unnameable was a counterculture radio show before anyone ever applied the term to America’s drop-out youth. Bob Fass was a hippie before there were hippies.”

From the earliest days of Radio Unnameable, Fass experimented with sound, inspired by the audio art he’d heard by John Cage and Bill Butler. He collaborated with Gerd Stern and Michael Callahan’s media collective, USCO, which had produced sound fields for Timothy Leary’s Fillmore East shows, then dove in and began creating dense mixes on the air.

On the spur of the moment, Fass would layer four or five sources of sound; an instructional typing record… a Hopi Indian ceremony…an anti-war song…cannons firing…an excerpt from a play. He would weave the sources in and out; make them louder, then softer, introducing new voices and noises that would comment on the state of the nation or just create a mood. When everything came together in a moment of perfect timing, the effect was mesmerizing.

Watching the production of these mixes behind the scenes was sometimes just as entertaining as listening to them on the air. Fass would get a brainstorm only seconds before a cut would run out and fly into the record library in search of the perfect segue. “He existed on a slightly different plain than the rest of us,” Steve Post recalled in his memoir of life at WBAI, Playing in the FM Band. “He was more spontaneous. We all copied him, but he was the best.”

Fass always pressed to expand the boundaries of radio communication. In the mid 70s, he asked the station’s Chief Engineer and resident technical guru, Mike Edl, if there was any way to rig up a contraption that would allow him to put as many as ten phone calls on the air at the same time. The system Edl built became a centerpiece of Fass’s show, allowing more of his listeners to connect with him, and with each other. Fass rarely rushes callers off the phone. Community organizers know they can always count on Fass for airtime to spread word of current crises or upcoming events. He is an ongoing outlet for the unsung, unspun, ignored and unknown. At least one suicidal listener called in to receive on air counseling.