Welcome to the New York Radio Archive

While there are many radio sites and forums on the web, short shrift is generally given to 1960s-1970s free-form, progressive and underground FM rock radio. In addition, when air checks and other collectables are loaded to Forums on the web, they are frequently lost as the postings are removed or it's hard to follow which postings had the associated attachment. This site will serve to remedy those situations. So we'll cover the free-form radio FM scene, mainly for New York radio stations, but we'll also add some goodies for New York AM radio fans that don't exist on other sites.

The New York Radio Archive (NYRadioArchive.com) will feature articles, advertisements and other documentation about New York radio culled from the journals and newspapers of the day. In addition, it will contain a repository of airchecks and other radio archive materials. And we might even put up some rare one-of-a-kind materials for sale for those of you who want more than an electronic copy.

Come back often to see what's new on the New York Radio Archive as we'll be posting new airchecks and other archival material at least once a week. We've got some great contributors lined up who have promised to donate unique radio-related archival materials to this site.

Please post any feedback or just say hello on the Guestbook page. We'd like to know who is out there.

Contributors...

We especially thank producer, radio executive and "restorian" Rob Frankel for many of the airchecks that appear on this site. And we also thank radio fan Kimbal Brandner for his contribution of surveys, articles and images.

If you have airchecks or other materials that you'd like to contribute, send an email to info AT nyradioarchive.com (replace the "space AT space" with an "@" sign.)

Have any info about Bob Fass and WBAI in the 1960s and 1970s?

Bob Fass has been on the air in New York City for over 50 years. Before WNEW-FM and even before WOR-FM, Fass played progressive music in an adult format on WBAI after midnight. While those who only listened to commercial radio might not have heard of or remember him, he was a big influence on all the free form radio jocks who followed.

Even though it all seems so obvious in retrospect, before people like Fass (and Steve Post, Larry Josephson and Pete Fornatale), the possibility of playing rock by a personality who acted like an adult was not realized or considered.

A filmed documentary is being produced called "Radio Unnameable", which has always been the name of Bob's show. The producers are looking for photographs, filmed records, programming sheets, etc. about Fass and WBAI in the 1960s and 1970s. They're especially looking for photos or film of the WBAI studios in the church and information about the 1977 strike.

Radio Unnameable Movie.com link

If you have any material or other information, send an email to sarah.l.ayers AT gmail.com (replace the "space AT space" with an "@" sign.)

The Latest...

Go to the "NEW and REVISED" section below for the link for each of these as well other updates:

*Some airchecks of Scott Muni from 1971 and 1972 provided by Rob Frankel.

*For those Bill Drake fans, we've added (to the WOR-FM page) the first ten parts of the History of Rock & Roll. As usual, we had to scope it, but it's still a really exciting "rockumentary", filled with interviews and music montages.

*Restorian Rob Frankel has also provided us with samples of WNEW-FM's jingles. Jingles? That's right. WNEW-FM had jingles in 1967 and 1968.

*Rob has also provided us with another amazing artifact: the joint broadcast by WNEW-FM and WPLJ of the last night of the Fillmore East from June of 1971. Go to the "NEW and REVISED" section below for the link.

*We've made it easier to navigate from the update list. It will now take you to the exact entry, not just the top of the page.

*We've completed some more historical schedules. See the update list below.

*We've added an interesting artifact from the era of progressive rock: a Tip Sheet from 1970. You'll find it on the General Radio History page. (posted 6/1/2010)

*Long-time New York DJ Pete Fornatale is also a writer of numerous books on media, music and radio. His latest is "Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock and How It Changed A Generation", which has done so well, it has just been released in a new paperback edition.

What I like about this book is that Pete sought several sources for each "fact" mentioned to confirm its accuracy. Disclaimer: I'm briefly quoted a few times in the book.

*Posting a mention of the paperback release of Pete's book has given me an idea for a new section for this site: we're going to create a new page that details great books about radio and music. Look for it..umm..sometime. (Posted 5/17/2010)

Great radio wasn't destroyed only in the U.S....

I was in London a few months ago (one of the reasons why there weren't any site updates that week) and I happened to catch a TV documentary about "Channel 2", their pop-music radio station. Although a bit more like a U.S. top-40 station than a prog rock station, they faced many of the same issues as progressive rock stations here: initial freedom, followed by censorship, firings, DJ ego problems, centralized control, etc. But it was fun to watch. It was like being in a parallel universe. One thing I noticed was that the station used jingles that sounded exactly like PAMS jingles. (Posted 5/17/2010)

Fornatale article at the Huffington Post

Check out this article about WFUV (and former WNEW-FM and K-Rock) DJ Pete Fornatale.
Fornatale Article

Browser bugs...

Just a friendly reminder to always click your browser's Refresh button to make sure you're seeing the latest content. Many browsers cache the content from the last time you visited the site and won't display the latest without a forced refresh.

NY Radio & Twitter

We've setup a Twitter display to show postings about New York Radio. This will display the last 100 Tweets. The second one is searching for some specific commercial radio station call letters, but it's not working as well as we'd like: everytime someone ends their post with "world" or "work", but it gets cut off to "wor", we incorrectly get a hit, even if it's not about radio. And WKTU seems to pick up many posts in another language, so we cut back that search term to KTU radio. But it's still fun to see some of the posts, at least the ones that are decipherable.

Zacherley Today!

Here's a recent article about John Zacherley, who is 91 and appeared recently at the Chiller Theatre convention in New Jersey April 16-18, as he's done twice a year for many years. Thanks to Bernard Ente for the link.
Cool Stuff: The still cool ghoul
Chiller Theatre Convention

Bernard also let me know that Zach recently attended his 70th (!!!) college reunion. My bet is that he still looked better than half the people in the room. (Revised post 5/18/2010)