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.
Early years 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.
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.
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.
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."
Show content The show was described as a free-form show often with random phone calls and political discussion."Fisher, Marc, (2006) "Voice of the Cabal", The New Yorker, December 4, 2006
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 [President Lyndon B. Johnson] 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.
Fass collaborated with Gerd Stern and Michael Callahan's media collective, USCO,Gerd Stern, "From Beat Scene Poet to Psychedelic Multimedia Artist in San Francisco and Beyond, 1948-1978," an oral history conducted in 1996 by Victoria Morris Byerly, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2001. Retrieved on August 15, 2008. which had produced sound fields for Timothy Leary's Fillmore East shows, then dove in and began creating mixes on the air.
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.
Response to the show 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."
He also plays a major role in Marc Fisher's book, Something In The Air, which covers radio's impact in the post-TV years. The Washington Post columnist describes how the "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!" scene in the film, Network, grew out of an actual incident when WOR's Jean Shepherd exhorted his listeners to throw open their windows, stick out their heads, and shout, "Excelsior!", then he goes on to write "Radio Unnameable would inspire a monsoon of musical, sexual, pharmacological, political, and social change"
Shepherd took the unseen audience and let them see each other, but it's Bob Fass who took that to the next level, giving it social and political meaning. Fass really opened the door and summoned the audience into the action. He used the mass media to amass a very real movement.
"Midwife to a Movement"
Human Fly-In 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."
Sweep In 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.
Yippies 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.
The Yippies! got worldwide attention that October when they applied for permission to levitate the Pentagon during a massive anti-Vietnam War demonstration that attracted 50,000 to Washington, D.C. Fass can be heard on tapes of the event (along with Ed Sanders of the rock group The Fugs, and Mountain Girl) chanting, "out demons, out!" as they attempt to exorcize the evil spirits in the Pentagon.
Yip In at Grand Central 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.
It began as a happy go lucky party; a reunion of people who'd met at the Fly In and the Easter Be-In in Central Park the previous year. WBAI had reporters on the scene and Fass was broadcasting calls from Paul Krassner and others at Grand Central, describing the good vibes and great turn out. Then suddenly, things turned violent. Several hippies from the commune, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, decided it would be a symbolic gesture to rip the hands off the clock at the train station in "a rape of time." A couple others set off firecrackers and the NYPD began cracking heads and smashing cameras. As the panicked crowd streamed for the exits, over 200 cops cornered them, throwing individuals like Village Voice reporter Don McNeill, through glass doors, and dragging others out and arresting them.
Radio Unnameable provided a link between people inside the terminal and the audience listening at home. He broadcast eyewitness accounts from the scene and spoke to Abbie Hoffman, who was getting his wounds patched up at Bellevue Hospital. Washington Post reporter, Nicholas Von Hoffman, came directly from Grand Central to join Fass on the air.
It was a brutal initiation for the Yippies but it was also the moment that solidified Fass's place in the city. He was providing up to the second, unfiltered news that citizens wary of mainstream press coverage could trust. As Sand points out in the Radio Waves Unnameable— "Bob Fass did not just report the news, he helped mold the events of the time."
Columbia occupation The next month, when Columbia students occupied school buildings to protest the University's stance on the war and a plan to evict Harlem residents in order to build a gymnasium, WBAI, with Fass's show in the lead, "acted as a nerve center for the demonstrators." After the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, Fass provided in depth, ongoing alternative coverage, giving listeners and independent investigators a chance to grieve, discuss theories, express opinions and trade information considered too controversial for the major media.
1968 DNC 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."
Fass rarely left his command center in WBAI's Master Control but at the very last minute, he flew to Chicago and recorded everything he saw and heard. After reporting a noise that sounded like "an M1 cracking against someone's head," Fass noticed that some of the national guardsmen "look very frightened. They are putting on their gas masks. They aren't very experienced with them."
The ensuing attack, roughing up hippies and network news reporters, was broadcast live on television. When the dust settled, several of Fass's comrades were arrested for conspiracy and inciting to riot.