The 1970s
Bob Fass continued to do his show as New York City and WBAI went through radical changes. In the 1970s, the Movement split into factions and new program directors and station managers brought into revision the station attempted to portion out blocks of airtime to feminists, gay rights activists, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and other interest groups. Fass and many others felt this approach was the very antithesis of the personal character of WBAI. In 1977, Fass found himself at the forefront of a power struggle for the future of the station. He participated in a staff attempt to form a union. Management accused him of “living in the past” and ordered him not to discuss the station’s internal business on the air. That was a request he found impossible to adhere to because he felt strongly that listeners paying to support non-commercial radio deserved to know and have a voice in what was being planned. The stand off ended with some staff members seizing control of WBAI’s transmitter at the Empire State Building, while others (including Fass) remained barricaded in the studios, broadcasting until the phone lines were cut and the police arrived to haul them away.
New York City’s free speech station padlocked the front door and suspended broadcasting altogether for 35 days. Fass was banned for five long years, during which he returned to stage acting, did a guest residency at WFMU in New Jersey, and campaigned to return to his rightful throne at WBAI.
Since his reinstatement in 1982, Fass has continued in the same vein. Singers like Jeffrey Lewis, Roy Zimmerman, Debby Dalton, Kathy Zimmer and Rav Shmuel, blues guitarists Toby Walker and Guy Davis, radical environmentalist Keith Lampke (AKA Ponderosa Pine) and visual artists like Keith Haring, Art Spiegelman and McArthur Fellow Ben Katchor, are just a few who have joined the roster of Radio Unnameable guests. Fass reassembled the members of The Lovin' Spoonful on the air, emceed the Phil Ochs Memorial, (a tribute to the life and music of the folksinger broadcast live from the Lower East Side in December 2005) and flew to Houston to celebrate Jerry Jeff Walker’s birthday, which he taped and played on the radio.
Fass was a fierce and consistent critic of, as he calls it, “Bush’s war for oil” and continues to speak out against capital punishment, often putting prisoners who call from jail on the air. He has returned to the issue of homelessness in New York numerous times, raising awareness about the dangerous city shelters, reporting on the gentrification of many of the city’s neighborhoods which traditionally had offered affordable housing, and slamming the city’s “ assault on rent control.” In the mid 1980s, Fass made remote recordings at the tent city the homeless had erected in Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East Side. He went on to work with the Living Theater and members of that community to produce a piece of theater based on their experiences (which included both professional actors and homeless people), called The Hands of God. By 2006, Fass’s time on WBAI had been reduced to just one night a week.
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