Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
its estimated 2,000,000 FM listeners.”23
KPFK’s first fund drive illustrated the station’s early emphasis on “balance” and “quality” over left-wing programming. A one-day event, it came two days after the broadcast of the documentary on the HUAC protest in San Francisco. The problem, the Folio declared, was that “a scant 7,000 homes have subscribed … not enough.” The fund drive featured actors James Mason with Jack Lemmon and Rod Serling; an interview with Aldous Huxley; Vincent Price reading from Henry V, and Ray Bradbury reading one of his stories; a performance by Pete Seeger; Stan Freberg talking about advertising; humor from Mort Sahl; and a special jazz program for KPFK with Buddy Collette, Terry Gibbs, Shelly Manne and others. Fund-raisers pointed to the other distinguished programming of the previous month, including the Beckett play Embers, recorded by BBC; Faulkner reading from As I Lay Dying; and film director Jean Renoir talking about Albert Camus in the wake of his untimely death that January.24
After just one year on the air, KPFK in 1960 won broadcasting’s highest honor, the Peabody Award. The citation—for locally produced programs—praised the station for covering “a wide range of subjects,” naming the programs “Arming to Parley,” on which Cold War liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr discussed “American military and political problems”; “Conversations on Freedom,” with Brandeis University faculty talking about civil liberties; and “Not Merely a Business,” a documentary on “Freedom and control of radio and television in a democratic society.”25 The station won a second Peabody the following year.
In 1963, the station launched the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, billed as “a benefit for the support and preservation of KPFK,” to be held in May. KPFK subscriber Phyllis Patterson had the idea—she taught history and English in LA public schools and had assigned a class project of setting up a “Renaissance fair” in her backyard in the Hollywood Hills. More than 300 people showed up at an organizing party for her idea of a station fundraiser. Eventually 600 people “contributed materials, time and talent” in putting together the structures, booths and activities, with grounds—in North Hollywood—designed to suggest a spring market fair in England around 1580. Or, as the Folio put it: “Up the dusty lane procede the motley bande of revelers. Jesters leap high, the bright be-decked oxen pull commedia players on their cart … bells of Morris dancers jingle loudly and they raise the Maypole.” Also “canopied tradesmen’s stalls … recorder grounds, dancers and jugglers … candles, jewelry, leather goods, paintings, pottery … trestled tables laden with piping hot beef, leg of fowl and rich, dark breads; pastries, tartes and cakes”; and for the kids, “Punch and Judy, puppet making, fortune telling and donkey carts.”26 The first one was a complete success, with over 3,000 people buying tickets. The Faire became a huge event in subsequent years, a countercultural celebration of precapitalist village life that spread across the United States. Later, in the Nineties, it was taken over by a profit-making corporation.
In 1963, after fighting off HUAC, the FCC, and SISS, KPFK stopped trying to be a neutral forum. “The struggle for dialogue,” Matthew Lasar explains, “seemed pointless in a society that swiftly punished those Americans who spoke their minds.”27 And the concept of “balance” was now radically redefined: instead of the station balancing Left and Right in its own programming, its public affairs shows would provide balance to the mainstream media and their unquestioning adherence to Cold War anti-communism in both domestic and foreign policy. At the same time, several of the station’s leading commentators on the right had refused to appear on a station that broadcast programs featuring Communists—so the notion of “balance” in programming was undermined by the right as well as being redefined by the Left.
The political transformation became clear pretty quickly. Later that year, KPFK and Pacifica began airing I. F. Stone and Bertrand Russell opposing the US war in Vietnam, two years before the anti-war movement developed. In June 1964 the station broadcast an interview with Che Guevara by Betty Petty Pilkington, a freelance journalist.28 Then, in 1965, KPFK broadcast WBAI reporter Chris Koch’s reports from North Vietnam, making Pacifica Radio the first American news organization to send reporters to the North. In 1966 KPFK broadcast discussions of the future of the civil rights movement with leaders of SNCC, CORE, SDS and the SCLC.
The folk music, classical and jazz shows continued, and the children’s programming continued, as did Alan Watts. In fact, even at the end of the Sixties, classical music still filled more hours at KPFK than anything else: on a typical broadcast day in January 1969, which ran from 6 a.m. until midnight, KPFK ran three one-hour programs of classical music. Though they did run a one-hour special about the Beatles that month, it was preceded by a Mozart piano concerto, and followed by Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace.29
KPFK had become a key institution of the Left in L.A. In 1969, the station opened the “KPFK Watts Bureau,” a project to train a dozen Blacks in South Central about radio production, writing, and reporting. Their work, broadcast on KPFK, included a thirty-minute documentary, The Black Man 1970.30
Then, on June 7, 1974, KPFK broadcast a tape that began, “This is Tanya.” She said, “I want to talk about the way I knew our six murdered comrades.” Tanya was Patty Hearst, heiress of the right-wing newspaper family; she’d been kidnapped in Berkeley three months earlier, when she was nineteen, by the Symbionese Liberation Army, which aspired to be an urban guerilla organization. A month after the kidnapping she had released a tape saying she was joining the SLA. Two weeks after that she was photographed robbing a bank; a month later, 400 LAPD officers surrounded a house in South L.A. where several SLA members were hiding. A furious gun battle broke out, broadcast live on TV, which ended with the house catching fire. Six SLA members were killed by the LAPD that day. Two weeks after the shootout, on June 7, 1974, the tape from “Tanya” was dropped off outside the KPFK studio in North Hollywood, and the station put it on the air. After paying tribute to each of her six dead comrades, “Tanya” concluded with the SLA motto: “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people!”31
A federal grand jury investigating the SLA subpoenaed the tape, but KPFK general manger Will Lewis refused to hand it over, arguing that the subpoena violated the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press. Officials said the subpoena had been “personally approved” by Attorney General William Saxbe—who had been appointed by Nixon during the “Saturday Night Massacre” at the climax of the Watergate crisis, after Elliot Richardson opted to resign from the post rather than follow orders to fire the Watergate special prosecutor. Lewis pointed out that he had given authorities a copy of the tape, but not the original, which might have contained fingerprints or other identifying information about its source, and that journalistic ethics required the protection of sources. The federal judge presiding over the case, A. Andrew Hauk, found Lewis guilty of contempt and ordered him jailed for the duration of the grand jury term—three months.32 (He was released—after sixteen days at the federal prison on Terminal Island in L.A.—on an order from Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who declared that the case raised “substantial First Amendment claims.”33)
The jailing of KPFK’s general manager marked the political climax of the fifteen-year history of the radio station that had become a key institution of the Los Angeles Left. At that point, the station, whose budget came from listener contributions, had 15,000 subscribers (donors), according to the Times, and a listening audience of 300,000.34 That’s why, in 1974, it was KPFK rather than any other station in Southern California that would broadcast the tape that began, “This is Tanya.”
A Quarter of a Million Readers: The LA Free Press (1964–70)
The underground press of the Sixties is often described as self-indulgent; critics said it “trampled the tenets of accuracy and fairness,” while the mainstream media of the era is often portrayed as bland and cautious,