The Birth of Free Form Radio and the Crazy Wisdom of Wes "Scoop" Nisker

When the world doesn’t make sense, we find the need for crazy wisdom. Since the world never made sense, and probably never will, crazy wisdom remains an eternal remedy, a universal panacea in times when the only way to go forward is to embrace paradox. Where can the crazy wisdom be found? Sometimes you can hear it on the radio, if you happened to be tuned in to the right frequency at the right time. But some sometimes a bit of time traveling is also in order to find the stations with crazy emanations.

One purveyor of crazy wisdom over the airwaves was Wes “Scoop” Nisker, born December 22, 1942 in Norfolk, Nebraska. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Poland and he was raised in the faith of his father. Somewhere along the way he migrated to San Francisco with many of other burgeoning freakazoids who had been drawn by the allure of hippiedom to the west. At age 26, just a year after the summer of love, he got his start on the FM station KSAN.

In the sixties rock music on FM was still a rarity. AM was where you went to listen to rock and roll, and that was just the first generation of rock music, not the weird psychedelic stuff coming out of the burgeoning freak scene. Before Nisker would be able to get his Scoop, that portion of the broadcast band now allocated to FM had to get pioneered. We’ll take a brief detour into one of the ways that shook out, and how it related to Nisker.

​One of the early FM pioneers was Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue. Donahue’s radio career had started in 1949 at WTIP in Charleston, West Virginia. Then he moved to Philadelphia’s WIGB where he was on the air for nine years, only to make a sudden departure. That departure came just as WIGB was under the gun by authorities looking to uncover the payola racket afflicting the industry. It later came out that Big Daddy had been in on the take. In the meantime, he worked at WINX before heading out west for San Francisco where he’d been given the opportunity to “make a winner out of loser station” KYA by former WIGB program director Les Crane. The year was 1964.

While Big Daddy was trying to make KYA suck a little bit less, he also got involved in the racket business. Er, the record business I mean, starting a record label with another WIGB alumni Bobby Mitchell (later known as Bobby Tripp on stations in LA). Together they formed Autumn Records that had hit numbers by the likes of The Mojo Men, and none other than Sly Stone as one of their producers. Their records really started charting after they signed The Beau Brummels whose career Donahue boosted. It was a happening scene, man, and soon Big Daddy was getting his fingers into the pie of the nightclub game with his own psychedelic host spot, a place called Mothers if you can dig. Later Donahue started producing concerts as well, helping to get people moving and shaking.

By the time 1967 was underway, Donahue’s mind was getting blown by the strange sounds wafting out of the underground. AM radio didn’t want to have anything to do with that kind of high weirdness though. In response to their establishmentarian minds he wrote an influential article for Rolling Stone, titled, “AM Radio Is Dead and Its Rotting Corpse Is Stinking Up the Airwaves.” He took the Top 40 format to task, and in the wake, ended up taking over the programming of foreign language FM station KMPX. What emerged was the first free-form radio station in America. At the time nobody really paid attention to what was happening on those FM frequencies making it a perfect place for freaks to plant their flags. Big Daddy had made his move ushering in a new era and style of transmission, helping to invent what came to be known as underground radio.

KMPX was a commercial station, but during his four-hour long broadcasts of music fresh from the psychedelicized minds of hallucinating hippies, he was able to promote not just the music, but the permissive lifestyles of those who wanted to let it all hang out. It became a sensation, man.

The listenership of KMPX bloomed and boomed, probably bonged too, soon catching the interest of those in the advertising biz, as well as the record stores and head shops. Donahue’s success was copyable and the management at KSAN asked him to help shift its gears towards rock. KSAN was still a corporate outfit though, owned by the NYC corporate conglom Metromedia. They found a way to gain a listenership by appealing to the youth movement and created a distinct voice by bringing in DJs who were part of the counterculture and could spin the right records and whose political talk would jibe with the patchouli scented paisley vibes of the times.

They took chances on the airwaves that other commercial stations would be afraid to do, for fear of losing the almighty advertising dollar, such as when they opened up the phone lines for community discussion following the stabbing death of a concert goer at the Altamont rock festival in 1969. When the first volleys in the war on drugs were being thrown after President Nixon took office that same year, free speech was also being targeted. Radio stations that catered to the counterculture were seen as a threat. Then FCC commissioner Dean Burch proposed that any stations playing music that had drug-related lyrics be kept under the watchful eye of Big Brother. He wanted to ban such music entirely. All of this put DJs in a bit of a pickle. It was already hard enough playing what you wanted as a DJ if you worked for one of the more mainstream station managers. The more adventurous stations such as KMPX and KSAN chose to stand up for free speech and keep on playing what they wanted when they wanted all while delivering satirical political commentary.   

It was in this milieu that Nisker was able to make a name for himself on the airwaves, and get the scoop on his nickname in the first place. Nisker wrote songs, and he also found himself at the forefront of audio collage art. Part of his practice involved cutting up and splicing together disparate bits of music, along with interviews and sound effects to create surreal sound worlds whose humorous juxtapositions called into question the standard positions on offer in the lamestream media.

Nisker became a newsman for KSAN, migrating to KFOG later in his career. But his news was unconventional and filled with dark comedy. He’d give traffic reports where he’d say things like, “People are driving to work to earn the money to pay for the cars they're driving to work in. Back to you.”

The audiophile Steve Feinstein called him “the dean of FM rock radio newspeople,” saying further that, “since 1968 and the days of progressive pioneer KSAN, he's been crafting irreverent, satirical sound collages that present news as an ongoing drama in the theater of life. The timing and rhythm of his work brings to mind music; no wonder that two record albums have compiled his newscasts.”

He first got his nickname from Abbie Hoffman when he got the scoop on the Chicago Eight defense team, learning that they would be calling uber beatnik Allen Ginsberg to the stand for poetic testimony. Recalling the end of the conspiracy trial years later, Scoop reports that “in 1970, after the guilty verdicts in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial were announced, the San Francisco Examiner had an article saying that the rioters (in Berkeley) were listening to the KSAN news to find out where to go. And they were, of course, because we were giving them directions.”

Some of his other highlights include the time hippies were rioting in People’s Park because a parking lot was due to be constructed. He was on the air with John Lennon at the time who told Scoop to “tell them all to be peaceful.” For hippies, they sure did seem to riot a lot. The Black Panthers and Timothy Leary were among his many other illustrious and infamous guests.

As with many people in his generation, Scoop looked to the East for spiritual wisdom. In rejecting convention, the hippies also rejected a lot of things that could have given them direction that were part of the West’s wisdom traditions and rich spiritual heritage. He converted to Buddhism where he found a home for himself, in time becoming a meditation instructor, and co-editor of the Buddhist journal Inquiring Mind. He later combined his gift for comedy and stand-up with his gift for elucidating the eight-fold path. His comedy routines played up the paradoxical nature of human experience and religious experience. In this he remained true to his Jewish roots and the rich history of comedy and humor in the Judaic tradition. In a way, Scoop had become a kind of rabbi, even if not a traditional one. He was a teacher. Through his presence on the radio, and the gravitas developed through years of meditation and study of eastern scripture, and his various writings, his status as counterculture veteran and royalty, he was able to give his unique take on things all while making people think, laugh, and reflect on the commonalities that bind us together in the human condition.   

Back in 1995 when his book If You Don’t Like The News…Make Some of Your Own, whose title came from his tagline while on the air, came out, he wrote of the times that “it's obvious we can't go back to the America of the '50s, where people are moral, where there's no violence in the streets, where everybody has a nice house in the suburbs with cars and kids. That America never really existed, anyway. The whole country is on a completely different course.” The same seems true today, when so many hippies have been humbled by age and the shattering of their idealism. The world they envisioned hadn’t materialized out of the aether the way Scoops radio transmissions did. Yet there are still things that the Aquarian generation symbolized that are worthy of considering, and sometimes enacting. Their commitment to freedom of expression and speech, and their animosity towards being surveilled by their own government remain live issues. The voice of alternative media itself, embattled as it is, was a key win for all people who wish for a kind of radio that is different, that is local, that gives its DJs and programmers creative control.

Scoop thought that his generation and those who came after him were born in a transitional era. One of Scoop’s famous audio collages was when he interviewed a hippie who had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge for “spiritual advancement.” He presented that audio alongside Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” over top of The Byrds song “Eight Miles High.” Now we are in the long come-down phase from those kind of high hopes. Yet we are still in need of direction, whether it comes from the traditions of the west or the east.
Scanning the headlines today I think we could really use the crazy wisdom embodied in Scoop’s tagline: “If you don't like the news ... go out and make some of your own.”

I look forward to reading the stories created by those who are wise enough and crazy enough to go take his advice.

.:. .:. .:.
This article first appeared in the Radio Enthusiast e-APA coordinated by Frederick Moe.

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Read the other entries in my American Iconoclast's & Eccentrics series:

Harvey Pekar: Working Class Intellectual and Everyday Visionary

Gary Warne: Communiversity and the Suicide Club

Who Was Matokie Slaughter?

The Sacred Music of Mary Lou Williams

Fakir Musafar and Friends

Going Native In America

Weird Weather with David Wills

Running Off to Join the Circus with Jim Tully

Dwelling on the Fringe with the Hubbards

Brother Blue: The Butterfly Bard

Raymond Thundersky: The Cincinnati Construction Clown

Tiny Tim: The Goodhearted Troubadour of Popular Song

Joy Bubbles and the Church of Eternal Childhood

Ray Hicks: Bard of the Blue Ridge Mountains

On A Pilgrimage with Peace

The Long Memory of Utah Philips

The Iconoclastic Shenanigans of Henry Flynt
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