by Mark Moran
Fifty years ago, circa early 1973 when I was about to turn 13, a friend of mine known for eccentric traits and tastes urged me to listen to an FM radio station that was nothing like the AM pop music stations I was used to. I tuned in, expecting nothing special, and found it at first rather weird – the DJs talked like regular guys, not in the pumped up, over-hyped diction of AM DJs, and they played long, uninterrupted playlists of 20 minutes or more. It was just odd enough to make me come back for more, and in time WHFS, broadcasting “high atop the Triangle Towers in Bethesda, Maryland,” became a mainstay of my adolescence.
So it was, I can only assume, for the 400 people – nearly all of them, I feel certain, over the age of 55 or 60 – who filled every single seat at The Avalon Theater on February 22nd, for a premier showing of Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS 102.3 FM, as part of the DC Independent Film Fest.
Many others, in their 70s, had been listening to the station as young adults. Dozens who couldn’t get tickets were turned away at the door, and the film was voted “Best Documentary Feature” at the festival. Jay Schlossberg, who conceived and directed Feast Your Ears, says, for now, there are no plans for other showings in DC, but he is shopping for streaming possibilities. Stay tuned at feastyourearsthefilm.com.
A labor of love nearly a decade in the making by Schlossberg, the movie tells the history of WHFS (its call letters initially stood for Washington High Fidelity Station) from its beginnings as a jazz and classical station in the early 1960s, occupying a small studio at the Bethesda Medical Building on Wisconsin Avenue. In 1966, Jake Einstein, an entrepreneur open to daring ideas, was hired as a salesman. He later became the general manager.
Two years later, three DJs proposed and sold Einstein on the idea of a new kind of free-form radio show they called “Spiritus Cheese” (after a defunct cheese company in New York) that blended rock and roll music, political commentary, and edgy humor. The show was short-lived, but Spiritus Cheese was the model and inspiration for what HFS (as its devotees referred to it) would become in the 1970s: one of the pioneer alternative radio stations playing a wide range of music and artists who might not ever make it to the Billboard Top Ten, but whose imprint on American musical culture would be far more lasting. Those long playlists were often thematically linked; one artist followed by another who was influenced by the previous one, or a whole set of bayou blues, or covers of Chuck Berry songs by contemporary artists.
It was during this period in the early/mid 1970s the station had a stellar lineup of DJs including John Hall, Damien Einstein, Don “Cerphe” Colwell, and Jonathan “Weasel” Gilbert, the station’s overnight DJ. The station also featured “Thor’s Bluegrass Hour,” and Adele, among the first female DJs on FM radio, on the weekends.
Feast Your Ears recreates this era with archival recordings and contemporaneous interviews with many of the DJs, as well as with the artists who sometimes dropped by the station’s studio to play live – Emmy Lou Harris, Roger McGuin, David Bromberg, Joan Armatrading, Jesse Colin Young. There was a decided anti-establishment political edge to the commentary, and the film helpfully places HFS and the burgeoning alternative FM radio phenomenon in the context of the counterculture and the era’s turbulent politics. HFS had an “underground” feel to it, in part because of its politics, but also more simply because you were never, ever going to hear Tom Waits on AM radio.
WHFS also celebrated and promoted local DC bands, especially the Nighthawks, but many others as well, and the joints in Bethesda and DC where local and national acts played – the Psyche Delly, across the street from the Triangle Towers; the Red Fox, also in Bethesda, the Bayou and the Cellar Door in Georgetown; Mr. Henry’s on Capitol Hill; and the Childe Harold in Dupont Circle, where Bruce Springsteen played before megastardom.
Feast Your Ears recalls a time and a place gone by, a musical and cultural ethos, shared by everyone at the Avalon that night but experienced by each of us uniquely. Radio is like that – it can reach millions simultaneously, but the listener hears it individually wherever he or she is. The movie also recalls the Bethesda I grew up in, a town now plowed under and buried over a hundred times.
The owners sold the station in 1983, and the call letters jumped about to other frequencies with different formats. Fifty years later, FM radio has become corporatized and homogenized. People today can create their own long, commercial free playlists on Spotify or Pandora, a splendid development, to be sure. Lost, however, is the communal experience of radio that brought together four hundred people at The Avalon Theater last month.
I don’t know how far the HFS signal could be heard, but I know it reached deep into the lives of all of us who were regular listeners. Our teenage years are rarely the most pleasant recollections, but the memory of WHFS is an unreservedly good one. Feast Your Ears brings it all back.
Correction: The original article said Jake Einstein sold the station in 1983. WHFS owners, not Einstein, did so.
Lawrence Impett says
Truly the golden age of radio in DC, now lost forever.
BTW, in those days WAMU was promotion free…one could listen to a broadcast uninterrupted for one hour at a time.