Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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the FCC renewed the licenses of KPFK and the other two Pacifica stations in 1964, the station and the network could claim a historic victory over McCarthyism—one that transformed forever the political identity of the station and the network.
Despite all of this political conflict, KPFK had not started out as a left-wing station. It was part of America’s first listener-supported radio network, run by the nonprofit Pacifica Foundation, which had started with a station in Berkeley in 1949, founded by Lewis Hill and a group of pacifists who had refused to fight in the Second World War. The original Pacifica charter declared their goal was resolving conflicts “between nations and individuals” through “understanding” and “dialogue”—not exactly the Marxist position.15
In 1959, when KPFK got started, listener-supported noncommercial FM broadcasting was a radically new idea. L.A. had no public radio stations—KCRW wouldn’t start broadcasting for another ten years, when it would become the region’s first NPR station (and ten years after that, KCRW hired KPFK’s general manager, Ruth Hirschman). Regular programming began on KPFK at 9 a.m. on July 26, 1959, with Pablo Casals performance of Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 1—recorded the previous year at the Casals Festival in San Juan. (Casals refused to play in the United States because of the government’s support for the Franco regime in Spain.) After an hour and a half of Casals came a half hour of poet Kenneth Rexroth, “Recorded in Aix-en-Provence, for KPFK.” Rexroth was one of the elders of the San Francisco scene. Like the Pacifica founders, he had been a conscientious objector in World War II. In his youth he had been active in anarchist politics—the Communist Party had rejected his application for membership in 1930 because of his anarchist leanings. In the Fifties he had sold anarchist newspapers at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, and he was among the first American poets to explore haiku and other traditional Japanese poetic forms.16 After Rexroth came a folk music show hosted by Ed Cray—for decades afterward a professor at USC’s Annenberg School.17 That was it for day one.18
Day two began with two and a half hours of classical music, followed by Harvard theologian Paul Tillich with a one-hour lecture on “Basic Religious Questions of Our Time.” After that came more classical music and a short story. Later in the week, jazz shows featured Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, as well as Django Reinhardt and earlier players including Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet. There was a book show, a Jewish folklore show, children’s programs, and live drama—a reading of George Bernard Shaw’s Man of Destiny in KPFK’s own studio.
The public affairs programming in the first month included several of the big thinkers of the day: left-wing sociologist C. Wright Mills lecturing on “The Decline of the Left”; social critic and Harvard professor David Reisman on “The American Future”; Aldous Huxley, British expatriate novelist and author of the dystopian Brave New World, on “The Human Situation”; and UCLA chemist Willard F. Libby on “nuclear energy” (he would soon win the Nobel Prize for discovering radiocarbon dating).
The first KPFK Folio, the publication for subscribers that included the program guide as well as editorial comment, made its political stance clear: “All shades of the political spectrum are represented,” the Folio declared; “ten commentators view the news from a different perspective.” KPFK was committed to no political position. “Our aims are humanistic,” it concluded. “We want to be a concert hall, a lecture room and a part of your living room.” Notably missing: any promise to focus on civil rights or nuclear disarmament or the Cuban Revolution—big issues for the Left in 1959.
But KPFK’s original management, unlike the Pacifica Foundation, did not come from World War II–era pacifists. The first general manager, who built the station, was Terry Drinkwater, later an award-winning reporter for CBS News. Far from refusing to serve in the military, Drinkwater had been an ROTC company commander as an undergrad at Pomona College, and after graduating in 1958, he served as a lieutenant in the US Army infantry. As a Pomona student his passion for radio had already been evident: he founded the Pomona College student-run radio station, KSPC, his roommate Spencer Olin recalled, “and spent countless hours there acquiring equipment, raising funds, and building it up. He was totally committed to that project.” But politically Drinkwater was “not especially ideological,” Olin recalled. “His father, Terrell Drinkwater Sr., was a very conservative Republican and president of Western Airlines. But Terry was not outspokenly Democrat or Republican.”19
Between leaving Pomona and KSPC and coming to L.A. to start KPFK, Drinkwater went to Berkeley to work at KPFA. His Berkeley roommate, John M. Anderson, recalled that, at KPFA, “he promoted the idea of a Pacifica station in Los Angeles, the Pacifica board agreed, and sometime in mid-1959 he moved to L.A. to help start KPFK.” Anderson agreed that Drinkwater “had no strong attachment to either major party”; he “saw the world with a reporter’s skepticism.”20
The original KPFK news department “was anything but left wing,” recalled Ed Cray, the first assistant director of public affairs and one of three people who produced the news with journalist Gene Marine, who had come down from KPFA along with Drinkwater. (After helping set up the KPFK news department, Marine would return to work in the Bay Area, later writing for the Nation and then Ramparts, as well as publishing one of the first books about the Black Panthers.) The news was “straight down the middle,” Ed Cray recalled. “Gene and I had plenty of opinions, especially on local politics, but we were trained in the old school: your opinion doesn’t count.”21
The first week of programming also included Alan Watts’s “Way Beyond the West.” Watts had started broadcasting a weekly show in 1953 for KPFA in Berkeley, and by 1959 he was well known not only in the Bay Area but nationwide for his book The Way of Zen. He became the most listened-to programmer in the history of the station. Part of his strength was that his programs were not taped public lectures like those of Aldous Huxley, David Reisman and C. Wright Mills; Watts talked alone in a studio with a microphone, speaking with remarkable clarity, calm and flawless diction, and seemingly one to one. Then there was his message: the self is an illusion; the goal was for “cosmic consciousness” to replace “self-consciousness,” to live in the here and now, in the “eternal moment,” rather than thinking about the past and the future—in particular, worrying about death.
Watts was “the perfect middle-class Zen master,” historian Matthew Lasar argues. According to Watts, you didn’t need to engage in the rigorous discipline of meditation and study with an approved teacher to achieve a Zen-like state. He called that “square Zen.” He rejected, as well, a second false path, “Beat Zen”—dropping out, rejecting the world. In fact, Watts was promoting what we now call “Orientalism,” what Lasar calls the “well-worn imperial stereotypes” of an earlier era. But in the Cold War context, telling Americans they had a lot to learn from the Chinese was a bold and subversive message.22 And it was clearly “un-American” to embrace Zen Buddhism in a deeply Christian country that had recently added “under God” to its pledge of allegiance (in 1954) and made “In God we trust” its official motto (in 1956).
KPFK’s first week was greeted by the print media with enthusiasm. The Times headline read “KPFK ‘Cultural Bomb’ Will Explode Today.” Calling it “the non-commercial, educational station,” the paper declared that “listeners will be glad to hear that editorializing is reserved for the commentators and will not be contained in regular news shows.” It added that “commentators range from liberal to conservative, so that all shades of opinion will be presented.” A Times columnist called KPFK “the ultimate in FM broadcasting.” And the LA Examiner declared that the station “will have the support of influential and creative people.” “Thirty commercial FM stations are currently beaming their daily programs to the 52 percent of Southern Californians who own FM receivers,” said Westways, the widely read magazine of the Automobile Club of Southern California; “Now we shall be fortunate enough to receive the first non-commercial, listener-sponsored FM station in the area … our Southern California brain stimulator.” Time magazine was equally enthusiastic: “Don’t subscribe yourself unless you’re prepared to be caught up in something: A radio station operated for adult minds really does get to be a religion, after you’ve had a