The veteran radio producer and longtime Takoma Park, Maryland, resident wanted to create a space — both on-air and physical — that would be a neighborhood social, cultural and educational hub. So she jumped at the chance to submit an application to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to create one of the small, noncommercial FM stations.

The result is Takoma “T-Rex” Radio, otherwise known as WOWD-LP, a low-power station that comes on the air July 16 with a listening radius of 2 to 5 miles. The station, broadcasting at 94.3 FM from studio space rented from Airshow Mastering on Westmoreland Avenue, will reach neighborhoods in upper Northwest and Northeast D.C. and parts of Prince George’s and Montgomery counties in Maryland.

Many voices: The microphones were open, but the station wasn’t broadcasting yet at the open house event.

Takoma Radio won’t be the first or only community radio station in the region — Arlington, Virginia, has the low-power (LPFM) station WERA, and a handful of other small projects such as Anacostia’s We Act Radio maintain livestreams and periodic FM broadcasts. But it’s perhaps surprising that a hotbed of DIY culture like Takoma Park — with its reputation as “the Berkeley of the East” — didn’t already have one. More than 2,800 applications were filed with the FCC, and Takoma Radio received the only new license in the D.C. listening area.

“I’m talking about a mission to serve the community and pockets in the community,” Partridge says. “If you look at the radio dial in D.C. it’s a wasteland. I think also our ideas about ‘internet has killed radio’ is a very privileged perspective and that still a lot of people listen to the radio in their native languages, read newspapers in their native languages and in their communities.”

T-Rex programming will be determined by the people who tune in and want to participate, so Partridge expects shows will be as colorful as the community. Volunteer programming coordinators have been fielding applications for shows for several months, and the diversity of those ideas — combined with ideas from Partridge and her team — encompasses children’s shows; Spanish-language and talk programs; music including blues, local hip hop, punk, acoustic Congolese and a show called Bayou Boogie; live and recorded poetry; gardening tips; local news; and interviews on everything from pinball to astronomy in a program called The Thought Bowl.

“We just have to consider who’s not going to NPR programming and offer some really strong programming for niche audiences right up against those shows,” says Partridge. “Who listens to All things Considered? Well, not people who only speak Amharic.”

A grant will fund an audio production based on a yearlong education program with young people of color from diverse backgrounds and foreign countries. The youths will reflect on their culture, languages, community, music and sense of belonging.

Outreach initiatives like the youth program and live readings and concerts — along with technology training in everything from DJing to Google Drive — are intended to serve as a “come-togetherness” component complementing the on-air content.

There’s a lot of thought behind the station’s process. The overall consolidation of American media in recent decades is triggering a desire and need for local, community-driven LPFM stations like the one WOWD plans to be, says Michael Richards, a communications attorney and former broadcast journalist who helped Takoma Radio win the FCC license. Even the NPR system has been part of the trend toward centralization of news and public affairs content, Richards says.

“There was a tendency to have less that was locally produced because there was so much wonderful national programming,” Richards says. “But what you sometimes lost by having all of these wonderful voices like Ira Glass and all of the programs that were spurred by that, even before the podcast revolution, is that there was less and less space on many public radio stations for something local that wasn’t necessarily news.”

In response to the radio industry’s consolidation and evolution, the Local Community Radio Act was enacted 2010, limiting new LPFM licenses to commercial-free nonprofits only. Corporate broadcasters, worried about signal interference and losing airspace, pushed back and lobbied for restrictions. But nonprofit groups — most notably Prometheus Radio — fought back, and in 2013 a new licensing window finally opened, this time including availability in major urban areas.

Historic Takoma steps up

The realization of Takoma Radio has been more than five years in the making. Partridge says she had been planning even before the FCC announced the new round of licensing.

“From the very beginning of me saying to people, ‘I’m going to start a radio station,’ depending on their age group, the young people were going, ‘What, why, huh?’ and the older people would say, ‘Uh, really, there’s so much. For what?'” Partridge says.

Skepticism wasn’t the biggest hurdle, however. Getting the FCC license required sponsorship by a nonprofit organization, one with a board that had to be vetted by the government (sample questions: Have you ever done pirate radio? Are you a convicted felon?) and could fill out the application for the station. At the eleventh hour, Art for the People, the organization originally sponsoring Partridge’s project, bowed out.

“There was this really scary moment. Then, with hours to spare for filing with the FCC … Historic Takoma voted yes,” Partridge says. Although she calls the vote an “upset” for the board “one person quit that very night, right then and there” — she says most saw a unique opportunity in the unanticipated partnership.
Historic Takoma, Inc. was founded in 1979 with a mission of “preserving the heritage” of Takoma Park and the nearby Takoma neighborhood in D.C. Diana Kohn, the organization’s president, is one of the biggest advocates for taking on Takoma Radio.

“To our knowledge, no other historical society in the country has a radio station, but [novelty] never stopped anybody in Takoma Park from doing anything.” —Diana Kohn, president of Historic Takoma Inc.

“We are trying to collect the history of this community, and radio struck me as being a very unique way to capture not just the current history, but a flavor for the diversity of the people who make up the community now — a portrait of who we are,” Kohn says. “It’s not just that we get something out of the radio, but the radio can foster that more unified sense of identity.”

The group’s involvement with the radio station certainly upends the traditional expectations for a historical society’s role in its community.

“To our knowledge, no other historical society in the country has a radio station, but [novelty] never stopped anybody in Takoma Park from doing anything,” Kohn says.

Kohn points to some of Takoma’s defining moments as proof: The city began in 1883 as the first commuter suburb; residents built their own schools instead of waiting on jurisdictional arguments between D.C. and Maryland; and in 1963 residents stopped a freeway from being built through the center of the town by protesting and establishing historic districts that could not be razed. To her, the creation of Takoma Radio just makes sense.

“One of the things that makes Takoma unique is the insistence of the people who live here to do things,” Kohn says.

That attitude has helped the station build resources, too. The team behind Takoma Radio collectively has decades’ worth of broadcast, technical and outreach experience. Partridge’s connections in and around Takoma Park — and within the often insular radio community — clearly count for a lot, too. The team’s relationships have been vital for significant contributions like cheap rent for the studio, website-building help, spaces to hold fundraisers and donated auction items and equipment.

“We really try to give full projects to people and just say step up and do that,” Partridge says.

Nothing is certain

Volunteers have been hard at work. Program applications have been vetted and the broadcast schedule is being refined. The studio is furnished with a sparkling soundboard, and an antenna is on the roof. On the surface, WOWD-LP looks like it’s already inked into Takoma Park’s history books. But this isn’t necessarily an “if you build it they will come” situation.

Station Manager Tatyana Safronova — who also works part-time at the D.C. Public Library on their audio podcasting and oral histories projects — recognizes that outreach is essential for long-term success. The station has offered workshops for students at the Silver Spring library, partnered with the Takoma Park recreation center to engage youth groups, sponsored a go-go show at the town gazebo and featured a visiting Ethiopian poet. Safronova says the station leadership “can’t expect people to just come into the studio.”

But, she adds, once they do, “they need to bring their own programming, their own ideas about what radio should sound like. Because we can’t dictate what the radio sounds like; it would become obsolete in five minutes.”

As with most nonprofits, raising money will continue to be a challenge, likely a make-or-break one. And even in a community like Takoma Park, which seems like a natural fit for an LPFM station, true staying power will have to be earned — especially in an era when people often have multiple screens vying for their attention at any given moment. And so Partridge is suitably blunt when talking about the future of the station.

“We want it to be really vital in this community,” she says. “In five years it’s either going to be vital or dead.”

The grand opening of Takoma Radio takes place from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, July 16 at 7014 Westmoreland Ave., Takoma Park, Md.

Undisturbed by the forces of gentrification reshaping other stretches of Georgia Avenue, the building houses Listen Vision, a full-service recording studio. It’s only been in this location since 2006, but Listen Vision has already played a key role in D.C. music history.

Hip-hop and R&B have boomed in D.C. over the last decade, and Listen Vision deserves part of the credit for that.

Wale, Tabi Bonney, Trey Songz, Fat Trel, Raheem Devaughn, Maino — autographed CDs and memorabilia from those artists and many others hang on the walls in the studio’s main lobby. They all benefited from the company’s services — recording, mixing, mastering, photography, graphic design and digital distribution — in one way or another.

But it’s obvious what the company is banking on. Entering the studio you are greeted by the neon “on-air” and “hot beats” signs of the broadcast room, the focal point for the online station WLVS Radio.

A ‘beautiful mistake’

While aspiring young MCs and hopeful musicians still put their dreams in the hands of Listen Vision’s recording booths, the business is now split 50-50 by WLVS. The station hosts 74 live shows every week. But unlike podcasting and traditional radio, WLVS has a visual component. A camera rolls the whole time, and video streams of the station’s shows go up online.

Starting WLVS was “a beautiful mistake,” says Listen Vision’s founder and director of operations, Jeremy Beaver.

“Right around when the economy couldn’t have been worse, this group was paying good money to set up their own equipment in the studio space and stream live. It got me thinking,” says Beaver, aka DJ Boom. “So I got on the horn and called my old radio friends, and the next thing you know, I looked up and we had 13 shows, then 27. Then at 50 I thought, ‘Oh God, we might have something here.’”

This happy accident has turned into what Beaver — perhaps dubiously, given the rise of podcasts — considers the future of broadcasting.

Eddie Kayne, the self-professed “voice of independent musicians” and a host of one of WLVS’ 74 programs, seems to agree with Beaver.

“You no longer need the machine. [The] Internet has made it even more possible for people to become stars overnight,” Kayne says.

A 30-year veteran of the music industry, Kayne says that his show on WLVS allowed him to compete with local radio stations that weren’t playing local artists.

There was “no platform for [independent] artists,” Kayne says, “and I thought that there were so many that weren’t getting the opportunity to be discovered.” He claims partial responsibility for breaking the careers of locals, including rapper Fat Trel, who’s signed to Rick Ross’ Maybach Music these days.

“Now, it’s funny that those stations recommend me to out-of-state promoters and businesses when they want to deal with independent artists,” Kayne says, “because I have such a voice here.”

In essence, WLVS is radio you can watch. And apparently, people do. According to Beaver, more than 250,000 listeners and viewers from 135 countries tune in each month to shows that run a gamut of topics including talk radio, dating advice, a dude reminiscing about ’90s music videos and even a comedy hour.

Beaver says the key to WLVS’ success is high-definition, direct-to-consumer streaming that can be accessed anywhere.

“I say to people, ‘Would you rather be local in radio, or global in video?’ It’s a no-brainer.”

Doing the most

While WLVS sets the table for Listen Vision’s future, there are still plenty of people looking for something simpler: A place to test out a concept. A professional’s advice. Support for an idea. For them, Listen Vision exists as much for the community as for the services.

Renee Allen is a retired military veteran, singer, public speaker and promoter who lives in Maryland and hosts a weekly show on WLVS. She says that Listen Vision has been instrumental in helping her find herself, as well as new clients.

“You walk in on that stage, into that studio and it’s 1-2-3-4,” Allen says. “Everyone knows their parts, your timeline, and everyone is just rocking and rolling.”

The studio recently told Allen that they want to help her pitch her show to the Oprah Winfrey Network, Eccentric and other mainstream networks. “They’re really about creating platforms, multiple platforms where people really do grow and develop,” she says.

Along with women like Allen, independent rappers, singers, DJs, producers, musicians, businesses and students all take advantage of the space. Beaver rattles off the various services: “tours, field trips, seminars, classes,” including a training curriculum called LV Academy, which teaches DJing, production, engineering, beatmaking and video directing.

Sometimes all the people want, though, is an old-school setup. Beaver points out the smallest studio, a closet-sized soundbooth with foam walls and nothing but a fuzzy microphone and tall stool in the center.

“The kids always love this one,” he says.

An evolving enterprise

Listen Vision dabbles in live performance, too. If there’s a prominent event in the neighborhood or a big parade passing through, the studio will host a showcase or a mini-concert on its front steps.

The now-defunct Caribbean Carnival parade was a prime opportunity for Listen Vision. So is Howard University’s homecoming weekend, particularly the day of the campus Yardfest concert.

But while those showcases are conspicuous calling cards for the business, Listen Vision is ultimately focused on recording and streaming content. Beaver started the business as a record label in an era — the late 1990s — when the Internet was just beginning to have an effect on the music business. Applying what he learned then, and in jobs with XM Satellite Radio and Virgin Records, he shifted his focus to remaining a trusted name and face in the community, while meeting the demands of increasingly tech-savvy musicians.

His model appears dependent on drawing in new clients via WLVS, and retaining them by showing what Listen Vision is made of once they get there.

Beaver points to what he calls his “magnum opus,” “10 Rhymes or 10 Dimes,” in which longtime client Cisco Kid chronicles the history of hip-hop from 1978 to 2008 by impersonating 10 legendary rappers.

“I produced it myself, it took a year, and it contains over 550 samples,” Beaver says. It appears on the company’s recent compilation, Best of Listen Vision 5.

It is yet to be seen whether Beaver’s claims about Listen Vision’s evolution and the future of broadcasting will hold true — he admits there are challenges to stay ahead of the technological curve, to find investors and perhaps partners that can help the business expand, and to decide if remaining in the Howard University neighborhood as that expansion happens is realistic. But at 1 p.m. as The Olivia Fox Show‘s namesake host holds court in the front studio, the speakers outside are bumping for anyone nearby to hear — and a new listener has just tuned in.

“Maybe it’s the person who checked in a couple of weeks ago from Mayotte,” laughs Beaver. “Have you ever hear of Mayotte? We didn’t even know [it existed] until they started listening.”

All photos courtesy of Listen Vision

When WERA 96.7 goes live on Dec. 6, the first song the station will play is Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” says Arlington Independent Media Director Paul LeValley, whose nonprofit is launching the low-power station.

“Halfway through we’ll crossfade to a recording we just made in our studio of a bunch of people singing it,” LeValley says.

That musical introduction suits the community-oriented ethos of WERA, which plans to serve the needs of local residents. Formally known as Arlington Community Access Corporation, Arlington Independent Media has been around since 1982, providing mostly video-making resources to the community. But a few years ago the group’s board of directors asked LeValley to research the possibility of adding a low-power FM radio station to the organization.

“We didn’t know how we would fit a radio station into what was already a pretty full plate,” LeValley says. “But the more we thought about the mission of community radio the more we realized that it fit very well with what we do.”

LeValley says Arlington Independent Media wants to get everybody producing — not just consuming — media. “Our idea is that media shouldn’t be reserved for a few professionals here and there,” he says, “but that everybody should participate.”

Powered at a maximum of 100 watts and staffed by volunteers, WERA will be noncommercial. AIM plans to derive some income from equipment-use fees, but if volunteers help others produce radio work, LeValley says, they can earn “credits” toward equipment use.

Members of the public can volunteer to produce shows and radio packages on WERA. A board of 15 people called the Programming Advisory and Review Council will review volunteer applications for live radio programs as well as produced packages.

“Let’s say you want to produce a live music program about the blues. You submit an application to the PARC and describe what you have in mind, maybe you even have a little clip that you’ve produced at home,” LeValley says. “They’ll review it and perhaps work with you to make a suggestion or two to improve it. Then once approved, you’ll work with our radio coordinator to determine the time it’s going to play on the radio.” (WERA will also stream online at wera.fm.)

LeValley says the PARC has received around 45 applications so far, and he hopes to receive hundreds more. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, and approved programs will be reviewed annually.

WERA isn’t the only new low-power station coming to the D.C. area: WOWD in Takoma Park, Maryland, wrapped up a successful crowdfunding campaign this year. Both WOWD (which hasn’t begun broadcasting yet) and WERA arrive in the wake of the Local Community Radio Act of 2010, which allowed the Federal Communications Commission to grant licenses to new low-power FM stations.

The legislation led to a bumper crop of little stations across the country, offering local, noncommercial alternatives to mainstream radio. That’s the kind of community service WERA plans to provide, says Arlington Independent Media’s director.

“As a general approach,” LeValley says, “we want to be as inclusive as possible.”

WERA hosts a family-friendly launch party Dec. 6 from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Arlington Independent Media.

“I can see a cuss word — you know, from doing so many clean edits,” Mullis says. “I don’t even have to listen to them a lot of times, because I recognize what an ‘S-H’ looks like, what an ‘F’ looks like, in a waveform.”

Back in the early 2000s, Mullis was an engineer at The Zone, a popular recording studio in Atlanta. He worked with many of the big names in Southern rap at the time — Ludacris, David Banner, Young BloodZ and others. After recording the artists in the studio, Mullis was often responsible for going back into the mix and making a broadcast-friendly version of a track.

“For a long time, that basically meant going in and chopping out the cuss words,” Mullis says. “But one thing that I got known for was making the clean edits part of the song.”

He won major credibility in that regard after he tackled a Ying Yang Twins track called “Wait (The Whisper Song).” The song is incredibly raunchy, and to make it safe for airplay, Mullis had to work a lot of magic.

To make his edits sound natural, he replaced certain naughty words with ad-libs, sampled from other songs by the group (hence the clean version’s distinctive hook, “Wait till you see my … oh!“). Elsewhere, a woman’s moans, which Mullis pulled from a stock sound effects library, get the message across.

Mullis’ edit helped the song become a hit, but his version wasn’t safe enough for some outlets. He says that while there are certain specific words that broadcasters are prohibited from airing, there’s also a lot of gray area.

“MTV had things that they were more sensitive to, and then BET had things that they were more bothered by — and so we did all these different versions, brought them back into the studio, recorded alternate lyrics,” Mullis says.

Once a song ends up in the hands of a radio station, it can make even more changes. Power 106 in Los Angeles is one of the biggest hip-hop stations in the world, and its music director Emanuel Coquia, better known as DJ E-Man, takes clean edits seriously.

“You’ll hear a clean version that comes in and it could be partially cleaned — you won’t hear the full F-bomb edited out,” E-Man says. “We want to make sure that it is completely taken out, not leaving the ‘F’ or the ‘CK.'”

His rule is that before any song plays on Power 106, three sets of ears must screen it for profanity, sex and drug references. “We do it for every song, because you never know,” he stresses. “I heard the new Ariana Grande record — she said ‘s***.’ No one is gonna expect that from her.”

If they feel anything crosses the line, they edit it out with one of a few go-to techniques: A word can be reversed, slowed down so it’s unintelligible, or muted entirely. E-Man says muting is the safest option, but if you listen closely you’ll hear different types of tweaks on different stations.

There are networks that play it even safer. “The word ‘damn’ is something that comes up from time to time, and that is something that we do not allow,” says Phil Guerini, general manager of Radio Disney.

Though it’s now almost exclusively a satellite and streaming entity, Radio Disney still makes lots of edits because of its target audience, 8-to-16-year-olds. Guerini says Disney has a standards-and-practices department that pores over songs word by word — and then listens to how those words come across in context.

“When said in an up-tempo manner, it may not be an issue,” he explains. “But if it’s said suggestively — or, we talk about the tone in the voice: Is that sensual? What is that?” Radio Disney is big enough can go back to a label and say it wants songs cleaned even more. Artists often oblige so they can reach the tens of millions of teens, tweens and moms who tune in.

When I spoke with Guerini, he said almost half of the more than 50 songs on rotation at the time had been edited. That includes a tweaked version of Meghan Trainor’s “All About that Bass,” in which the line, “She says boys like the girls for the beauty they hold inside” stands in for the more explicitly booty-positive original. The goal, Guerini says, is that families can listen together and things won’t get weird.

Over at Power 106, DJ E-Man says things can get weird when stations clean up songs too much, too often. It can drive listeners to the competition — be it another station or an online streaming service.

“It’s tough. We can’t take away from the creativity or the freedom of speech in the music, and if it happens to be the audience’s favorite song, OK — this is what they wanna hear,” he says. “But let’s present it to where it’s appropriate for everyone to listen to.”

Besides, if a dirty version is what you’re after, it’s only a click away.

Priska Neely is a reporter at KPCC in Los Angeles, and a former producer for weekends on All Things Considered.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

If you listened to D.C.-area radio station WHFS in the early 1970s, you might have heard that station ID. Recorded by a local character named Fang, it was one of many wild-and-crazy sounds floated on WHFS’ airwaves during its scrappy heyday — long before the freeform station went mainstream and lost its, well, fangs.

Jay Schlossberg is one of many Washingtonians who recall WHFS as the coolest thing on the local radio dial. That’s why the North Potomac resident is leading the creation of Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS 102.3, a documentary about how WHFS went from occupying a room in a Bethesda medical building to owning space in thousands of hearts — at least those belonging to a more adventurous sort.

“This is what we called freeform progressive music,” says Schlossberg, 60. “No suits. No corporate control.”

Feast Your Ears, in the works since 2013, launched a Kickstarter campaign last week. Schlossberg and his co-producers hope to raise $60,000. It’s an ambitious goal, but he sounds confident that folks will chip in. WHFS lovers are “fanatical” about the station, he says.

Why? Because music radio now is “pasteurized and homogenized and corporatized,” Schlossberg says, “and WHFS was the antithesis of that.”

A station like no other

Asked what types of music WHFS played during its golden years from 1969 to 1983, Schlossberg responds with one word: “yes.”

“Name some music. Yes, they played that,” the director says. “Classical, yes. Jazz, yes. Country, yes. Bluegrass, rock, psychedelic, Celtic, you name it.”

Schlossberg worked a summer gig at WHFS when he was 17 years old, several years after the former classical and jazz station embraced rock ‘n’ roll with a short-lived but influential show called Spiritus Cheese. Schlossberg found himself in awe of WHFS — not only because he’d occasionally see a midlevel celebrity around the office, like the “Fifth Beatle” Murray the K — but because it felt like a true community resource.

“They had a vegetarian cookbook. They had a ride board. They had a housing board. They had a jobs board. Maybe between sets, they’d do the ride board, and you’d hear things like, ‘Steve’s going to Maine. If anybody out there is going to Maine, call Steve.'”

“[WHFS’ era] was like ingredients in a sauce. You taste it and go, ‘Oh my God, that’s delicious. What are the ingredients?’ And the chef goes, ‘I’m not really sure.'”

He misses that feeling on today’s music radio. “There’s nothing local about it anymore.”

The director hopes to capture that community feel in Feast Your Ears, which takes its name from an old WHFS slogan. He talks to original DJs and listeners who still view the station as an oasis in a vast radio desert.

“‘HFS had no ‘commercial’ competition on the FM band at all,” Schlossberg says. Other commercial stations played it comparatively safe, he says, and college outlets — like Georgetown University’s WGTB — didn’t have the same listenership or consistency.

Schlossberg suspects that today’s under-30 crowd would appreciate the free spirit of WHFS. Young folks are “really unhappy about the corporatization of everything,” he says.

As far as the filmmaker is concerned, no other station since has emulated the unique flavor of WHFS in its early years. He says it must have derived its special power from the era in which it began — namely that pivotal year, 1969, when Spiritus Cheese first took air. The moon landing. Woodstock. Social upheaval.

“Everything was changing, and that whole counterculture was just ready to explode,” Schlossberg says. “It was like ingredients in a sauce. You taste it and go, ‘Oh my God, that’s delicious. What are the ingredients?’ And the chef goes, ‘I’m not really sure.'”

A sea change

While WHFS 102.3 remained freeform for longer than a decade, corporatization eventually struck.

Amid loud protest from listeners — and many desperate attempts to save the station — WHFS was sold for $2.2 million in 1983. General Manager Jake Einstein and his partners later bought the 99.1 frequency, slapped the WHFS call letters on it, then sold that in 1987. WHFS changed hands many times afterwards, but it lived longest as the mainstream rock station that hosted an annual concert called HFStival and competed with the growing DC101.

In 2005, WHFS lost all ties to its original format: 99.1 became a Latin station. Now, it’s talk-radio outlet WNEW. The WHFS call letters live on at 104.9, “Baltimore’s rock alternative.”

Jonathan “Weasel” Gilbert, one of WHFS’ most popular DJs, now jocks at Baltimore’s WTMD — and he still lives in the Triangle Towers, where WHFS landed after it relocated from the Bethesda Medical Building in the ’60s. He’s a consulting producer on Feast Your Ears. So is former Washington Post music writer Richard Harrington. Maryanne Culpepper, ex-president of National Geographic Television, joined as an executive producer.

Feast Your Ears is about two-thirds finished, Schlossberg says, and if he makes his Kickstarter goal, he’ll spend that money filming more interviews, hiring a scriptwriter and continuing research.

The director says he has no clue what the film’s final price tag will be, particularly because the cost of music rights remains a question mark.

Then again, he wonders whether WHFS earned enough goodwill in its day to encourage some musicians — if they own the rights to their music — to donate snippets of songs to his film. Maybe even musicians like Jesse Colin Young of folk group The Youngbloods, who cracked the pop charts with “Get Together.”

“I interviewed [Young] a few weeks ago,” Schlossberg says. “I asked him, ‘Is there anything else you want to add?’ He said, and I will quote it exactly: ‘WHFS was the best f*****g radio station in America.'”

Top photo: An undated image of WHFS DJ Weasel, pop musician Cyndi Lauper, DJ Damian Einstein and advertising sales manager Patti Ebert (Courtesy Jay Schlossberg).

The original version of this post inaccurately referred to Jake Einstein as WHFS’ owner. He was the station’s minority owner and general manager.