Bob Fass

Fass's death was announced via the WBAI Twitter account: "Bob Fass, Legendary Icon, the Father of Free Form Radio who had a program and home @WBAI since 1963, passed away peacefully April 24, 2021. He was 87 years old. We love you Bob. Rest in Peace." Fass's widow stated that Fass, after recently recovering from COVID-19, died of longstanding congestive heart failure.

By 2006, Fass's time on WBAI had been reduced to just one night a week. He continued to host in that single weekly overnight time slot. On October 4, 2019, WBAI was illegally seized by a minority faction of Pacifica's board without authorization, and canceled all of WBAI's original programming including Fass's show, replacing it with canned programs from California. This lasted a month before it could be reversed through court action and Radio Unnameable was restored.

A documentary film about Fass and the show, also named Radio Unnameable, aired on the World Channel series America ReFramed on September 17, 2013.

Fass 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.

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."

Since his reinstatement in 1982, Fass 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 and visual artists like Keith Haring, Art Spiegelman and MacArthur 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, and flew to Houston to celebrate Jerry Jeff Walker's birthday, which he taped and played on the radio.

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.

He 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.

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.

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 said.

At least one suicidal listener called in to receive on-air counseling. In 1971, a man (later identified as Michael Valenti) called in at about 2:45 AM and announced that he had taken three kinds of sleeping pills and was going to commit suicide. Fass spent about an hour and a half talking to the caller live on the air, as other WBAI workers contacted the police and the phone company attempted to trace the call. 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".

In the mid 1970s, Fass asked the station's Chief Engineer, Mike Edl, if there was any way to rig up a contraption that would allow Fass 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.

Over the long years of Rubin Carter's incarceration for a murder he did not commit, attorney Flo Kennedy called Radio Unnameable regularly "to keep the case in the consciousness of at least listeners to late night radio," says Fass. He remembers visiting Woodstock during the early 1970s and telling Bob Dylan "Carter was being railroaded for being "an uppity nigger." Several years later, Dylan produced his epic song telling the story of the unjust conviction (Hurricane) and formed his Rolling Thunder Revue specifically to raise funds for Carter's defense. Fass calls the subsequent retrial and vindication of Carter "one of the great cooperative efforts where hippies and blacks united to achieve change before Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition."

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 began to alter the thrust of the programming, apportioning 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.

Not every one appreciated the Yippies' sense of humor and it proved hard to keep things light in 1968. Fass and his friends spent months on the air plotting a march on Chicago to coincide with the Democratic National Convention. They dubbed it the "Festival of Life", in contrast to the "Festival of Death," they felt the political power brokers were advancing in Vietnam. As a kind of a practice run for the big event, the Yippies decided to hold a Yip In at Grand Central Terminal in New York in March 1968.

In the weeks leading up to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, callers and guests on Radio Unnameable debated the wisdom of marching directly into the path of Mayor Richard J. Daley's troops. Fass cautioned listeners "to know what they were getting into should they choose to go. They don't mess around in Chicago." Vin Scelsa, later a major NYC radio broadcaster in his own right, then a WBAI listener, told Jay Sand, "We all should have been indicted as co-conspirators, not just the Chicago Seven. We were all in on it. That whole thing was planned on Bob's show."

Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso, turned up multiple times. Over the course of the years, activist attorney Flo Kennedy kept listeners abreast of the latest injustices in America's court system. Steve Ben Israel and Judith Malina of the Living Theater, actor Rip Torn (and more recently his son, director Tony Torn), Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, and the rest of The Fugs, all made themselves comfortable on Fass's show. Abbie Hoffman, the former civil rights organizer turned political provocateur appeared regularly during the tumultuous years from 1968-1973.

The internet archive has available a sound recording (in various formats) of a program "featuring live interviews with Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Phil Ochs": Bob Fass in Chicago - August 27, 1968

Some believe it began one night on-air in 1967, when Fass invited "the Cabal" to join him for the Fly-In, a get together at JFK airport where he and his friends could meet and party with Radio Unnameable listeners and their friends, while aircraft took off and landed in the background. ("My vision was like the Hawaiians who greet you when you get off the plane with leis, a kiss, and song," Fass says.)

About a month later, on February 11, 1967, 3000 people showed up at midnight "on the coldest day of the year", to play guitar and hang out at the International Arrivals Terminal. Fass told author Jay Sand, "that was the first inkling I had that there were so many people and that they wanted so much to get together." "Something about this electronic thing - this radio station - makes it possible to listen to other people like themselves and they get the idea they aren't alone."

Excited by the response to the Fly In, Fass and his friends looked for another opportunity to gather. Emmett Grogan of the Diggers suggested the next get together should put all that energy towards a good purpose, "like cleaning up the junk on the Lower East Side." They announced plans for a Sweep In which would be held on April 8, 1967 and invited the audience to join them in cleaning up Krassner's garbage-strewn block; 7th Street between Avenue D and Avenue C. Word of the upcoming spring-cleaning eventually reached New York's Sanitation Department. Apparently embarrassed by the idea of dirty hippies doing their work for them, city trucks were dispatched in the wee hours to clean the block, from top to bottom, a hitherto unprecedented occurrence. That didn't dampen the enthusiasm of Fass's listeners. When they arrived armed with brooms, mops, sponges and cleaning solutions and discovered the original mission had been accomplished; they simply moved down to 3rd Street and started scrubbing there. The New York Times reported a sizeable group of participants were kids who came in from Westchester County and Long Island.

It wasn't long before the movement nurtured in NYC went national. Abbie Hoffman became a household name in August 1967, after he led an anti-capitalist demonstration at the New York Stock Exchange, showering the traders with dollar bills. Radio Unnameable became the communications hub of the Yippies!, the Youth International Party, started by Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Fass, Krassner, and a few others, to bring flower children, acidheads and old lefties together into one group that could change the course of American society.

In 1963, he began working at WBAI, operated by the Pacifica Foundation. Novelist and poet Richard Elman, a friend of Fass's from high school, who was producing programs for the station's Drama & Literature Department, helped Fass get a job as an announcer. He then was given the midnight to dawn time block to use as he wished.

Dylan's first appearance on radio was on Radio Unnameable 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 calls from listeners. When Dylan's crusading anthem, Hurricane, came out in the mid 1970s, 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.

He appeared on stage in Brendan Behan's The Hostage at Circle in the Square, The Execution of Private Slovik with Dustin Hoffman, and The Man with the Golden Arm at the Cherry Lane, among other New York productions. In 1960, he took over the role of the warden in the legendary off-Broadway production of Threepenny Opera with Lotte Lenya. Over the next two years, he played a variety of roles in the show, also acting as assistant stage manager.

Neil Fabricant, Legislative Director of New York's ACLU during the 1960s, has said that Fass was "a midwife at the birth of the counterculture." Ralph Engleman, in his book, Public Radio & TV in America: A Political History, cites Fass as "the first to develop the full potential of free-form radio and make it a major vehicle of the counterculture." and Wavy Gravy refers to him as "the father of freeform radio."

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, Florida. Fass himself appeared as a guest on the show in 2007.

Robert Morton Fass (June 29, 1933 – April 24, 2021) was an American radio personality and pioneer of free-form radio, who broadcast in the New York region for over 50 years. Fass's program, Radio Unnameable, aired in some form from 1963 until his death primarily on WBAI, a radio station operating out of New York City.

Robert Morton Fass was born June 29, 1933 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Syracuse University in 1955. When he went into the army in 1956, he started a theater at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Fass received a scholarship to study acting with Sandy Meisner and Sydney Pollack at the Neighborhood Playhouse and was also a member of Stella Adler's workshop.