Eighteen thousand names on an Internet petition of protest don't begin to tell you why the conversion of a radio station from rock-and-roll to Spanish dance hits is a cultural watershed.
For nearly a quarter of a century, rock fans in the Washington area have argued about exactly when WHFS began to, you'll excuse the expression, suck. Some say the glory days of free-form rock ended when the station stripped deejays of the right to play whatever music they were into. Some say it happened when the station was sold to a big company that wanted the deejays to sound as smooth and solid as polished jewels.
Now, it hardly matters. The station that introduced Washington listeners to The Who and Root Boy Slim, to sandals at Georgetown Leather Design and bongs at local head shops has flipped to tropical love songs.
In Frederick, where Josh Brooks has lived since he left HFS in 1978, this week's format change won't change listening habits -- Brooks catches up with new tunes on Internet stations that play music you can't hear on the radio -- as much as it serves as a reminder that the '70s were a long time ago. Brooks, now 58, was one of the original members of Spiritus Cheese, the trio of deejays who took over HFS starting in 1969, adding underground rock to a station that specialized in the serene sounds of Mantovani and the 101 Strings.
Brooks, Mark Gorbulew and Sarah Vass came to Washington that year fresh from Bard College in New York, intent on getting their music on the radio. "Everybody threw us out of their offices," Brooks says of their job search. "At WHFS, Jake [Einstein, the owner,] wouldn't hire us, but he would sell us time." So the kids bought two hours of airtime each evening and spent days hitting up record stores, used-clothing outlets and head shops for commercial spots.
"We had spent our years in college being stoned and listening to music, and we wanted to be able to continue that," Brooks says. "We just wanted to get the music out there and make enough money to sustain ourselves."
FM radio was still new. Car radios generally were AM only. FM was wide-open terrain, a technology sufficiently obscure that it could be entrusted to 22-year-olds running on passion. Einstein was intrigued to see the kids who bought his airtime connecting to a generation with no media voice of its own. A few local kids, including an American University student named Tom Trapnell, came to HFS in the summer of '68 to play the songs they'd been spinning on college stations, and all of a sudden, HFS was where young people turned for the ride board, concert information, open talk about drugs and shows called "Through the Looking Glass" and "Stoned."
Trapnell, now art director at the Los Angeles Times, got $80 a week to do his rock show, but he'd have done it for free. He did it to share his music, and he did it because the phone didn't stop ringing. "A guy called and said, 'If you don't play [Bob Dylan's] "Visions of Johanna," all the acid in the D.C. area will turn to peanut butter,' " Trapnell recalls. He played the record, because who would want to take that chance?
HFS never won huge ratings numbers, but as Brooks says, "It was always much more fervent than it was quantity." Rockers playing Washington gigs would make the pilgrimage to the studios on Cordell Avenue in Bethesda and play on the air, then maybe stop by the Psyche Delly nearby. Listening to HFS was a marker, a cultural identifier as powerful and telling as what you wore and where you hung out. It meant that you spurned conformity, sneered at the slick and cherished rebellion.
Brooks took pride in being a deejay with no shtick. "I just played records," he says. "The whole point was not to have slick deejays with a trained delivery. It was about the music, not the personalities." So when Einstein sold the station to a big, out-of-town company in 1987 and that company replaced the old HFS jocks with guys who sounded polished, Brooks, who had long since moved to Frederick to work in radio sales, stopped listening.
He still plays deejay at home, burning CDs with songs that fit themes, just as he used to craft his shows on HFS -- songs about Valentine's Day or songs about rain, songs about Mardi Gras or songs about trains. He passes them out to friends, and the music brings them closer, just as it did on the radio, when it was all about the tunes.
