Welcome to the New York Radio Archive!
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.
What's New?
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to jump to the list of the latest additions. And if you don't see anything new, click Refresh in your browser. And by the way...this site looks best in Safari.Pete Fornatale Dies at 66
We have the very sad job of letting you know that we've lost our very good friend Pete Fornatale, who died earlier today (Thursday, April 26th). Pete Fornatale had been involved in New York radio for almost 50 years. He began as a student air-personality on WFUV 90.7, the Fordham University Station. In April of 1964, almost exactly 48 years ago, he hosted the "Friday Musicale", which quickly became the "New Friday Musicale" and then "Friday in New York". In September of 1964, he hosted a show called "Swing Easy". In November of that same year, he recorded a pilot for a Saturday morning show to be called "Campus Caravan". The first "Campus Caravan" was broadcast on November 21, 1964.
Pete, along with such WBAI personalities as Bob Fass and Steve Post, created what would later be known as free-form radio. They played rock music, but presented in a style that was suitable for adults. No screaming, no jingles, no crazy sound effects, no echo chambers, no hysteria. And they taught us about the music as they were learning it themselves.
It wasn't necessarily apparent from those early shows that Pete would become a legendary New York DJ. Playing any rock on WFUV at that time was revolutionary, but Pete's taste in those early days was fairly conservative, leaning towards groups like the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons. He also played a lot of middle of the road music such as Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr. And at first, he didn't like Bob Dylan much.
In the Fall of 1966, when Scott Muni, Murray the K, Johnny Michaels and Rosko joined WOR-FM, Pete became a big fan, especially of Rosko, and Rosko (Bill Mercer) eventually became Pete's mentor. When progressive rock moved to WNEW-FM beginning in the Fall of 1967, Pete set his sites there and eventually was invited to audition. But he was so nervous that he failed his first audition. Before trying again, he worked at a number of local radio stations and taught media at the college level. He successfully auditioned again for WNEW-FM and he premiered on the station on the eve of the Woodstock Festival in 1969.
By July of 1970, Pete was doing early mornings and when Rosko left in March of 1971 and Jonathan Schwartz took Rosko's spot, Pete moved to the 10am-2pm slot, which he held until about 1982. By this time, Jonathan Schwartz and Alison Steele had left the station. It was becoming much more commercialized and formatted. Pete decided to devote his energies to a show where he could still have creative freedom, so he moved to weekends and created his "Mixed Bag" show, which premiered in December of 1982 and was named for the first album of another one of his heroes, Richie Havens.
From around 1988, he moved to WXRK, where he followed Howard Stern, staying until January of 1996 when WNEW-FM returned to the "Classic Rock & Classic Jocks" format, where he resided until late Summer of 1998, when WNEW-FM started to evolve to a hot talk station.
Pete returned to WFUV in 2001, where he held down a four-hour shift reviving his "Mixed Bag" show on Saturday evenings. The program featured thematic song selections, live studio performances and amazing interviews with such musicians as Brian Wilson, Graham Nash, Tony Bennett, Richie Havens, Cyndi Lauper, Lyle Lovett, Carly Simon and Regina Spektor. Eventually, many of the interviews were spun-off into another syndicated show called "Mixed Bag Radio" which was also heard on XM Radio.
Pete was also a successful author, having written such titles as "Radio In The Television Age", "All You Need Is Love: And 99 Other Life Lessons from Classic Rock Songs", "Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock" and "Simon and Garfunkle: Bookends", among others. He created a number of multimedia shows in conjunction with those titles. At the time of his death he had been working on a new book about The Rolling Stones.
Pete Fornatale was also involved with many charitable ventures: he has been associated for decades with WhyHunger, an organization co-founded by Harry Chapin and Bill Ayres. And he could be frequently seen on WNET-TV 13, hosting many rock & roll and folk music shows during fund raising.
In late 2011, Pete was honored as a recipient of the AFTRA Foundation's 2012 AFTRA Media and Entertainment Excellence Awards (The AMEES) (see below).
We will all miss Pete. If you wish to leave a message for Pete's family, you may do so at Pete's website: PeteFornatale.com.
Here's a link to the NY Times Obituary: NY Times website
There are already many airchecks and other ephemera about Pete on this site. But over the next few weeks, to celebrate Pete's life as a broadcaster, we will be posting many more airchecks from throughout his career.
Rock 'N' Roll Never Forgets: Dix Hills Performing Arts Center: Dennis Elsas
WFUV, Sirius and ex-WNEW-FM DJ Dennis Elsas presented his multimedia show about his radio career a few weeks ago at the Dix Hills Performing Arts Center. Click the image for more info.
Link
Pete Fornatale Honored with a 2012 AFTRA Foundation AMEE Award
Veteran New York air personality and friend of this site, Pete Fornatale, was honored by AFTRA at a gala benefit held Feb. 6, 2012 along with the actress Phylicia Rashad and singer Rosanne Cash.
Shelby Scott, AFTRA Foundation President and former AFTRA National President said, “Pete, Phylicia and Rosanne have each made significant contributions to their fields and continue to do so with integrity, a commitment to excellence and admiration for their audiences and colleagues. We are thrilled to be able to honor them.”
Legendary disc jockey and respected rock historian Pete Fornatale has been a fixture of New York radio for almost half a century. He started his career in 1963 as a Fordham undergraduate hosting “Campus Caravan” on WFUV 90.7, which many cite as the first regularly-scheduled program to play rock music on FM radio in New York. He joined WNEW-FM in 1970 where he stayed until 1988 when he moved the K-ROCK. He re-joined WNEW-FM in 1997 when the station returned to its "classic rock and classic jocks" format, where he continued on the air until the Summer of 1998. He currently hosts his weekly show, “Mixed Bag.” on 90.7 WFUV.
The program features thematic song selections, plus in-depth interviews and live in-studio performances with some of the world's most historically influential musicians including Tony Bennett, Ben Folds, Richie Havens, Cyndi Lauper, Lyle Lovett, Graham Nash, Neil Sedaka, Carly Simon, Regina Spektor and Brian Wilson.
Fornatale is the author of several books focused on media, pop culture and music including “Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock,” “Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends” and “All You Need Is Love: And 99 Other Life Lessons from Classic Rock Songs.”
Fornatale co-hosted the 1991 HBO telecast of “Paul Simon Live in Central Park, ” and has regularly served as an expert guest commentator on PBS specials featuring legendary performers such as Bob Dylan; John Fogerty; The Grateful Dead; Jimi Hendrix; Roy Orbison; Peter, Paul and Mary; James Taylor and others.
His work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the coveted Armstrong Award for Excellence in Musical Programming. He is a board member of WhyHunger and an honorary board member of the Long Island Music Hall of Fame.
Fornatale grew up in the Bronx and graduated from Fordham University. He currently resides on the beach in Rockaway and is the proud father of three grown sons.
We congratulate Pete on this great honor.
While we're talking about Pete, he frequently gives multi-media presentations based on his books. Perhaps some of you caught his show about Woodstock. More recently, he created a new presentation around his book about the making of Simon & Garfunkle's classic “Bookends”. That was followed by a Richie Furay concert and of course Pete introduced that show. Pics here: Richie Furay show
Update: On December 4, Pete gave this presentation again at the Irvington Town Hall Theatre. Only this time, someone very special showed up as well: Art Garfunkel. Story and pics here: Pete Fornatale with Art Garfunkel
WNEW-FM's 44th Anniversary
We celebrated the 44th anniversary of WNEW-FM on October 30th. So we posted tons of newly found airchecks of WNEW-FM, especially from their anniversary shows, largely thanks to contributor Ken Tullipano. Click here
Record Store Day Countdown
Countdown until record store day:
Here's more info about record store day: Record Store Day site
Our Contributors
Ken Tullipano
Ken Tullipano has an amazing archive of airchecks, primarily from WNEW-FM. He has graciously agreed to share them with us.
Ken tells us that he's lived in New York State his entire life (originally Port Chester and now Carmel) and that he loved listening to rock & roll on the radio going back to Murray the K on WINS and Scott Muni on ABC. When he discovered WNEW-FM, he was "hooked".
Ken started recording shows in 1977 and like all of us, he wishes he recorded a lot more. Ken tells us, "It never occurred to me that someday they wouldn't be around. They always made me feel like I was part of a big music loving family. Thankfully WFUV is carrying on the tradition." We couldn't agree more.
Rob Frankel
Rob Frankel has been in radio for years, has worked as a producer for Drake-Chenault, the RKO and ABC Radio Networks and is known by a title that only he holds: restorian. Rob is expert at taking old scoped airchecks and seamlessly adding back the music. Rob was also responsible for remastering the airchecks heard on WABC's Rewound program from 2000 to 2009. Rob was one of the producers of The News Blimp through most of the Eighties, and he is currently Senior Producer for Citadel Media, where since 1989 he has been one of the producers of Flashback!, a weekly classic rock series.
Myles Putman
Growing up on the Jersey side of the NYC metro area, Myles Putman, began actively flipping the radio dial and playing with recording devices since about age 9. He has wantonly engaged in creative "de-construction" (re-editing) of really, really bad music for over 30 years; and portions of his "montage" and "Skipping Delights" recordings were aired on WFMU in the 1980's.
Myles also created a large body of "real time- recording" collages of radio and music edits for "aesthetic" and possible historic value; in addition to a gallery of re-edited political speeches. He now resides in the Hudson Valley with his wife Judy. In his spare time he continues to sift through the back catalogue of radio edits and sound checks, and digitally concocting new forms of audio mischief on occasion.
Kimbal Brandner
Kimball is a great fan of New York top-40 radio and has contributed most of the WABC surveys and many of the WABC promotion materials that appear on this site.
David DiSanzo
David has worked for a number of music labels and is an intensive music collector and radio fan. He also fondly remembers his friendship with Alison Steele.
Dr. Zoet
Dr. Zoet, who is the creator of this site, but prefers to remain otherwise annonymous, grew up listening to New York top-40 radio and then to the FM free-form and progressive rock stations from the first day they joined the airwaves.
He worked in college radio, then became a recording engineer and producer and has produced thousands of hours of syndicated radio shows. But he now wishes that he saved more of the airchecks that he recorded and then erased (because recording tape was expensive!)
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.)
Book Review
1950's Radio in Color: The Lost Photographs of Deejay Tommy Edwards
by Christopher Kennedy
(The Kent State University Press - ISBN: 978-1-60635-072-0)
In the media section of this site, we've put up a videography of movies about radio. We've always wanted to also publish a comprehensive bibliography of the best books about radio, but we haven't gotten around to it yet. But today, a book came in that's going to be our first entry.
Christopher Kennedy is an accomplished musician and songwriter who has released five albums with the band Ruth Ruth. For years, he's been looking for a copy of the long-lost rock ‘n’ roll film The Pied Piper of Cleveland, which purports to contain the earliest known footage of Elvis Presley. He still hasn't found that film, but in the process of looking for it, he came across a treasure trove of photographs taken by Cleveland DJ Tommy Edwards, mostly at WERE-AM and some concerts between 1955 and 1960. In addition, author Kennedy separately found copies of Edwards' own “T.E. Newsletter”, a remarkably comprehensive review of the music industry in Cleveland as well as Edwards' personal weekly survey of important pop and country records.
The photographs in this book are remarkable because they show artists from all genres of music (and film) at their very raw, unvarnished and un-manipulated beginnings. And many of the Ektachrome photographs, in spite of some color deterioration, are amazingly beautiful in spite of the fact that they were photographed with a mere Kodak Brownie camera. Against a bright red stage, we see the deep blue pants of a 29-year-old Chuck Berry, playing then as now, with a pickup band. We have some great shots of Elvis from 1955. And we have Gene Vincent, a pimply Roy Orbison, Dion and Sam Cooke. But there's also pop stars like Billy Eckstine, Jerry Vale, Andy Williams, Patti Page and Johnny Mathis, movie stars like Charlton Heston and Henry Fonda and country stars like Johnny Cash. But my favorite photo in the book is a photo of soul singer Malcom Dodds, sitting at an old heavy-duty broadcast turntable.
The book contains several essays and each artist's photo is accompanied by a short article by the author, with many containing quotes about the artist from the “T.E. Newsletter” as well as contemporary comments from those involved. There's a lot of research contained in this volume.
What's important about this book is how it demonstrates that radio and the radio DJ were once the core of the country's culture. The DJ was completely immersed in the music and the artists that they played. Artists sought out the publicity that only radio could provide. In the case of Tommy Edwards, his newsletter was as insightful as those published by any radio consultant in later decades. I think it's all too easy to forget just how important and powerful radio was and how much radio was responsible for the birth and development of rock ‘n’ roll. And yet, at least in Cleveland, rock ‘n’ roll lived comfortably along with country music, just as Ray Charles would later prove that soul and country could be one thing as well. I dare say that if a new genre of music evolved today, it would not survive because none of the media that exists today could act as its guardian the way that radio guided rock. Buy this book. It's one of the last memories of what made 1950s American radio great.
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.)
And...
*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.
New York: Rock My Radio by Gerry Dieffenbach
What a great track! Thanks to Rob Frankel for forwarding.
Link to song
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