This is an opinion column
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Today’s guest columnist is Terry Barr.
Before music streaming, there were CD’s, cassettes, 8-tracks, 33, 45, and 78 records, The Sony Walkman, Apple iPods, and of course, AM and FM radio.
Birmingham has a storied radio history but there was one radio station I heard about while sitting in the back of my church.
It was fall, 1974. I was home from the University of Montevallo for the weekend, and on that Saturday night—still warm for late September or early October—as I was preparing to meet some friends, I heard words that literally stilled my soul:
“This will be my last show,” the voice said. “On Monday, the station is changing formats.”
Of course, I knew that radio stations did this occasionally. I remembered when WERC shifted from some banal middle-of-the-road playlist (about as Pop as they got were songs by The Association and The Fifth Dimension) to Pop/Rock. “The Big Switch,” they called it, and on a Sunday at noon, the switch meant that “Ticket to Ride” could be followed by “Hold Your Head Up.”
I also remember my father lamenting that yet another station that played “your music” had infiltrated his car radio, leaving him only WCRT, which played big band and other standards from Dad’s youth, to WAPI, which played, well really, who remembers what they played?
I should have been kinder to Dad. Didn’t he deserve a few stations, since now “we” had WERC, WSGN, WVOK (50,000 watts!), and maybe even WAQY was still around.
But greed affects even the otherwise most considerate of us.
So call what happened with WZZK, which had formerly been WJLN-FM, a karmic payback. And yes, even in my devastation, I realized that the universe does like to play these little tricks on us [In full disclosure, when I lamented this change in life’s circumstances to my father, he actually was sympathetic, even if he had no idea what “Free Form, Underground FM” meant.]
Free Form. Underground. FM. No playlist.
To my memory, WJLN-FM (sister station to WJLD-AM, one of B’ham’s soul stations) began its progressive shows with a DJ named Father Tree, whose time slot was usually the evening—after 6 p.m., though I can’t be sure because I listened only once or twice given that I was still a Top 40 junkie. Father Tree was a legend, and that has to be true because I first heard about him in that most scared of spaces, the back row of our church, during service.
FM radio was a novelty even in the early 70s. I remember when WBRC-FM (106.9) decided to play a rock and roll format, with every other hit being “solid gold.” Later, WAPI-FM did something similar, though what I think is that everything they played early on was an oldie. Stunning, too, was the day my father bought a new car with an AM/FM radio, though he continued listening purely to AM.
As good of a memory as I have, however, I cannot for the life of me remember the first time I really tuned into WJLN (104.9), and even more to my sadness, I don’t remember what my motivation was other than I had likely grown tired of not being as cool as my friends who lived for bands like Wishbone Ash, Cactus, Humble Pie, and, of course, Black Sabbath.
I wasn’t against tuning in a progressive station, but I did think doing so would mark me, would put me in danger, would make me want to…
smoke pot.
At some point WJLN started programming Free Form Progressive basically all day—from 9 a.m. till at least 10 p.m. I think on this now and understand that they either thought they had enough support in the Birmingham community to do so, or they understood that their FM frequency was only simulcasting the AM to a lot of dead listener air.
So it was a summer, and let’s call it 1972. I worked for my father at the wholesale jewelry store he managed, my job being to box up and price new merchandise or reprice older stock. That I made $1.65 an hour doing this still amazes me, though in the moment, my weekly wage afforded me a rash of new 45s and then, real 33 and 1/3 LPs. Sure, I saved for college, too, which even in 1972 seemed a distant forever.
I sat in a back office, away from the other clerks and billers. I didn’t mind, because in that office was an old-fashioned tube radio that took its time warming up, but then allowed me to tune in to whatever program I wanted. So in that summer, I decided to try WJLN, which was relatively commercial free, given that most of the ads were for head shops, record stores, and a place called The Angry Revolt.
Radio with no set format, no robotic playlist, felt like floating, except that I had never heard of half the bands making it on air: The Michael Quatro Jam Band, for one. Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, for another, though I figured this had to be the same Manfred who hit with “The Mighty Quinn” back in the mid-60s. Maybe their song “Buddha” did have a kinship to Quinn. I always wondered.
They would also play entire album sides and/or fifteen minute songs like Yes’ “Close to the Edge.” What I particularly loved, though, was that they took requests, and I don’t mean that, like AM, someone would call in and request “Down on the Corner,” a song that was already in rotation and so would have to be played anyway, request or not.
No.
I called in often, requesting Neil Young and Buffalo Springfield tunes. It felt so personal to request “Bluebird” and then hear it come through the radio maybe five minutes later.
One of my best memories, though, was the day after I watched an ABC Tuesday Movie of the Week, a script adapted from a book about a teenaged girl who got heavily into drugs. The film was titled Go Ask Alice, and during it “Alice” listened to a haunting song that I vaguely knew, or at least I knew it was by Jefferson Airplane, a band I thought, again, was too out there and scary. Did I think they were too hippieish? Too “revolutionary?” Too into drugs? Or was it Grace Slick’s voice, which certainly did haunt my dreams?
So the following day, I called in to WJLN and requested the title I thought was correct: “Go Ask Alice.” The DJ, Bob Gilmore, was his usual friendly self. In fact, whenever he introduced himself, he added, “Your friend” to the “Bob Gilmore.”
“Sure man, I’ll get that on soon.”
And when he played it, by request, he didn’t add that the kid who requested it didn’t know that the song was really called “White Rabbit.”
A kid would remember such a gesture, for sure.
And, of course, that song was about drugs, and Alice in Wonderland.
The other main DJ, the morning guy, was “Brother Bill Levy.” Bill was nice enough, though always a bit distant. I loved his voice, and sure, I wanted to be as cool as he was. My memory says that he had the hippie banter down well, but loved nothing more than to get on air and treat the rest of us to a deeper cut from Vanilla Fudge or New Riders of the Purple Sage.
I listened faithfully to the station in those years. It eventually changed its call letters to WZZK, and sometimes the DJs even referred to it as Z-104. They never formatted anything regular, though, and up until the very end, they were playing The Band, or Jethro Tull, and even The Moody Blues.
I know. This sounds like a Classic rock station, except classic rock stations now won’t play the ten-minute version of “Cowgirl in the Sand,’ will they?
So it was Bob Gilmore I called after he announced the end.
It was Bob Gilmore who informed me, with utter distaste, that the station was going “country” (in hindsight, a very shrewd business decision).
And it was Bob Gilmore who played the very last song I ever heard on the only progressive free form FM station I ever heard in the Birmingham of the early 1970s, or ever.
The song was by The Moody Blues, from their LP To Our Children’s Children’s Children.
A song called, “Watching and Waiting.”
And for many years after, that’s what I did.
If anyone knows what happened to Bob or Bill or where they are, please tell them I think of them often, with love.
Terry Barr is a native of Bessemer. He has been a Professor of English at Presbyterian College in upstate South Carolina since 1987. His most recent essay collection, The American Crisis Playlist(Redhawk Publications 2021) is available at Amazon.com, and you can find his work at medium.com/@terrybarr.
David Sher is the founder and publisher of ComebackTown. He’s past Chairman of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce (BBA), Operation New Birmingham (REV Birmingham), and the City Action Partnership (CAP).
Invite David to speak for free to your group about how we can have a more prosperous metro Birmingham. [email protected]
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