R.I.P.: Bob Fass, Influential Underground Radio Host

Bob Fass (June 29, 1933-April 24, 2021)

Bob Fass, who for more than 50 years hosted an anarchic and influential radio show on New York’s countercultural FM station WBAI that mixed political conversation, avant-garde music, serendipitous encounters and outright agitation, died on Saturday in Monroe, N.C., where he lived in recent years. 

He was 87, The NY Times reports.

His wife, Lynnie Tofte, said he had been hospitalized with Covid 19 earlier in the month, but he died of congestive heart failure.

Fass called his long-running show “Radio Unnameable,” because its freewheeling format did not fit into conventional categories like Top 40 or all talk.

Fass was not the first freestyle disc jockey in the country, but he became the most prominent. He helped forge the identity of WBAI, a noncommercial, listener-sponsored station already known for his leftist stance, and paved the way for other popular WBAI hosts like Larry Josephson and Steve Post.

At times Fass, who helped found the Yippies, served as the instigator of what today might be called crowdsourcing. In February 1967, he urged listeners to flood the International Arrivals Building at John F. Kennedy International Airport for a “fly-in,” to greet incoming travelers after midnight. About 3,000 people, many of them intoxicated both by marijuana and by the excitement of taking part in a seemingly pointless communal escapade, showed up.

Fass’s provocateur persona sometimes got him into trouble. In 1977, he was a leader of a unionizing effort at WBAI, exploiting his microphone to garner support against his employers, the Pacifica Foundation, and changes it had instituted in management and format. He even barricaded himself in the studio, which at the time was in a church at East 62nd Street, and continued broadcasting until executives called in the police. He was banned from the station for five years.

While other hosts got more mainstream jobs in public radio, Fass was determined to find another formless show, according to an account in the 2007 book “Something in the Air: Radio, Rock and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation,” by Marc Fisher. Having never earned more than $175 a week, he was forced to live off unemployment checks and the proceeds of fund-raising benefits. His obduracy alienated friends; Mr. Josephson, another WBAI host, said, “None of us were pure enough for him.”

He finally accepted an unpaid offer to do his show once a week on WFMU, a noncommercial New Jersey station. The station let him retain his “Radio Unnameable” format, but it did not have the New York City audience he craved. He was miserable until WBAI took him back in 1982, although the station no longer granted him five nights a week, and in 2006 his airtime was reduced to once a week.