TWO TURNTABLES AND A MICROPHONE By Andy Baum, C’72

Growing up, my only career ambitions were to write for a newspaper and to be on the radio. When I was admitted to Penn I saw the chance to achieve both. So during freshman year I heeled both the Daily Pennsylvanian and WXPN.

The DP was an august institution. A bunch of unpaid students somehow produced a well- written, full-sized print newspaper every weekday without benefit of computers. Everyone on campus read it. A leadership position at the paper was a serious credential, and helped launch many journalistic careers. The highlight of my heeling was spending election night in 1968 standing by the UPI teletype, ripping off and then delivering to the correct desk the election return reports. It felt important.

WXPN wasn’t important. It was lodged in a few run-down rooms on the top floor of Houston Hall. Its AM station broadcast through electrical wires in the dorms. It had a Top 40 format. Since it was easy for students to hear the real thing on WFIL or WIBG, the audience consisted mostly of friends of the student DJs and a few other souls looking for an easy way to win a Campus Joe Pagano pizza by being the “third caller.” (Often, the winner was the only caller.) The FM side was more serious business, but it didn’t have much impact on campus life, and was barely known off-campus except among alumni who tuned in to hear Penn football games. I made the cut at both. The DP told me that if I wanted to remain on staff there, I’d have to drop WXPN. But I really, really wanted to be on the radio. I dropped the DP instead.

My timing was good. 1968 was near the dawn of the golden age of FM radio. Album rock had become a serious art form. In the pre-Pandora, pre-blogger era, FM radio was pretty much the only medium for conveying what was new and worthy. WXPN-FM was by no means a rock station –there was a lot of respectable classical music, with blocks of jazz, folk and blues. But upperclassmen like Michael Cuscuna, Michael Tearson and Art Sando were beginning to shake things up, playing more rock, integrating the new and obscure with the traditional and obscure. People began to take notice. Then the pioneers went off to their professional careers. My generation picked up and expanded what they started.

We called it Phase II. It was all about the mix – not just among genres of rock, but genres of music of all kinds. We had a fantastic record library with thousands of records: new and old jazz, city and country blues, old-timey and bluegrass country, folk music from everywhere, and rock from A to Z. We also had a daily influx of new records as the industry began to recognize the value of exposing new music through college radio.

We’d spend hours listening and one-upping each other with what we found. The coolest achievement was figuring out a great segue – integrating the end of one track with the start of a new one to produce a sonic or thematic effect. Follow a harpsichord sonata with a bluegrass banjo solo? Sure, why not. We took this all very seriously. A lot of it was nonsense, but some of it was good.

Someone once said that radio is full of shy egotists. I guess that was true of WXPN. It was mostly a bunch of shaggy guys in flannel shirts and uncertain facial hair (hardly any girls at first), many of whom smelled like weed. We weren’t cool, but we had memorized all of the Firesign Theater records. We were obsessed with the music and each of us had favorites that we were sure the world would love if we played them enough. I am confident that no DJ in the country played more Fairport Convention than I did.

We also had fun with the weird technical little things you could only do in radio, skills that don’t matter anymore. Like cuing up a record or editing tape with a razor blade or knowing how to do a legal ID on the hour. We had FCC third-class licenses so we could operate the FM board ourselves. For me, with no aptitude for the manual or technical, it was the only trade I ever mastered.

I had fun on the AM side, too. There I left behind my [low, modulated, mellow FM voice] and tried my best to imitate Dan Ingram or John Records Landecker. No Son House, no Doc Watson, no Frank Zappa, but lots of Creedence and Chicago and the Grass Roots. We knew the length of the musical introduction to each song, and the game was to talk over the

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“Super 73” had commercials. Sometimes the advertisers didn’t get what they paid for. Budweiser’s slogan then was “the best reason in the world to drink beer.” On more than one occasion I read it as “the best reason in the world to smoke dope.”

By the fall of junior year, we had relocated to snazzy new studios at 3905 Spruce Street. I was station manager by then, and Nick Spitzer was program director. Nick embodied the Phase II ethic. He dug deep into the music like the anthropology major he was. He was cool but enthusiastic on the air. No surprise that he’s gone on to a terrific radio career, first on WMMR and then as the host of “American Routes” on NPR. When I hear Nick now, the spirit of XPN shines through.

It wasn’t all Phase II, though. We continued the block programming for specialized musical genres. One character who stood out was Joel Melamed. No one could mistake him for a hippie. He was from a wealthy New York City family and knew everything about opera. He wore suits and a caped overcoat that made him look like an impresario. The Firesign Theater meant nothing to him. His hero was Milton Cross, the long-time host of Texaco’s broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera.

Joel had a four hour block on Wednesday nights called The World of Opera. In his emphatic nasal staccato, he would introduce the featured work, with erudite plot summaries and criticism. One week he decided to bow to current tastes and feature The Who’s “Tommy.” All he knew about it was that it was called an opera. He graciously allowed me to stand in and provide the introduction, and he found it satisfactory. It was a proud moment.

Other obsessions flowered at the station. Terry Seelinger was the guru of country music, old and new. Dave Fenimore was Captain Beefheart’s best friend on the radio. Andy Ostrow hosted a weekly hour of Indian music. And Michael Levine was universally known as Michael Grateful Dead Levine.

In 1969 I had become friendly with Carol Miller, who was dating a fraternity brother of mine. At that time her only career ambition was medical school. We bonded over her love of the Beatles and ‘60s pop. Female DJs were a novelty then, but I thought she’d be great on the air, and encouraged her to come out to the station. She finally did, debuting on a Saturday night. She didn’t last long there. Within a year she was a professional at WMMR and went on to a 40-year career on the air (still going) and a spot in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

By the spring of 1971 we had begun to develop a bit of a following off campus. We decided to run a fundraising marathon, raising money to pay four of us to keep the station going over the summer. It worked! For 80 bucks a week, Nick and I, along with classical music director

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Howard Lesser and tech wizard Dave Parris, had full-time paying jobs in radio. We put in 12 hour days and relied on our corps of talented volunteers to keep the lights on all summer.

Weekdays from 5:00 until 6:00 didn’t belong to us, though. It belonged to Radio Free Black America, whose Umoja News Service presented a decidedly different world view from the all- white XPN staff. Things were sometimes tense with “Rafreeba”. In the spring of 1970, the station’s governing board had voted to take it off the air, on the ground that they were using individuals who hadn’t completed our seven week training program, and were therefore allegedly damaging our lofty broadcast standards.

Somehow we missed the fact that this would be an unpopular decision in the West Philadelphia black community. We soon reversed it. By the summer of 1971, Rafreeba was an institution at the station. Its leader, the dashiki-clad Olu Hassan- Ali, was initially an intimidating presence to us white suburban boys, but as the summer went on we managed a cordial and even friendly relationship. It was my first clumsy exposure to racial politics.

I also had my first encounters with intellectual property issues. One night the jazz great Sun Ra was playing a date in a building near the station. We thought it would be a cool idea to string a wire over there and record the concert. It never occurred to us to ask permission. The next day I got a blistering dressing-down over the phone from a member of Mr. Ra’s Intergalactic Arkestra, who threatened unspecified but dire consequences if the tape were not destroyed. The tape was destroyed.

We also decided to stage a dramatic reading of Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth.” About ten of us sat around a big table in Studio A, each reading a different part, doing a chapter each week. Just like old-time radio! About three weeks in, we got a letter from a lawyer. We were infringing Mr. Juster’s copyright, so we could either stop the show or take a license for a sum of money. We had no money. We stopped the show.

I’m now a copyright lawyer, and I’ve written a lot of letters like that myself. I’ve always tried to remember that people, especially young people, often do dumb things just out of naiveté or inexperience and not out of any evil intent. Lawyers often forget that, but I think they would get better results for their clients if they didn’t.

By senior year, after nearly four years of a fine Ivy League education, my ambition had not changed. I wanted only to be a radio professional. I signed up for the GRE but slept through it, and didn’t even consider taking the LSAT. I spent dozens of hours making an audition tape.

I achieved my ambition. I spent a few months as the morning DJ at a rock station in San Jose. Then I came back east and caught on as production director at WMMR, hoping to move up to a regular daily slot. I got an AFTRA union card, met some celebrities, saw Springsteen at the Main Point.

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But by then I was facing the fact that I didn’t have the pipes, the obsessiveness or the magic to be an on-air FM radio star. Making it as a newsman meant years toiling in small markets to build up a resume, with only long shot at getting a desirable job. Getting into the business side of broadcasting meant starting in sales, which I hated. A legal career started looking pretty good. By September of 1973 I was in law school, and my radio romance was over.

Soon after our graduation, bad things started to happen on the air at WXPN. They nearly led to the loss of the broadcast license, and gave the University the opportunity to staff it with professionals. I suppose that this would have happened sooner or later anyway. It wasn’t irrational for the trustees to decide that an FM license in a big city was too valuable an asset to be handed over to a bunch of half-baked undergraduates.

But I’m still sad about it. Because the single most amazing thing about my years at WXPN is that Penn’s administration was basically invisible. To paraphrase Orson Welles, they gave us the best train set a bunch of kids ever had, then backed off and let us run it. We learned how to build and run an institution that was meaningful to people inside and outside the school. If that isn’t bang for the educational buck, what is?

You can see the DNA of the old Phase II days in the current WXPN. Unlike most NPR stations, it’s a fulltime source for a wide range of musical genres. The Blues Show is still on Saturday night. Our old stalwart Chuck Elliott is still doing Sleepy Hollow on weekend mornings.

I understand that they allow a few undergraduates to work there as interns. I’m sure it’s fun for them. But they don’t know that the real party ended long ago.

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