At 6:15 p.m., two weeks ago one Sunday at the intersection of West End and White Bridge Road, three words that hadn't been heard in Nashville in three decades crackled from a car radio. "This is Radio Free Nashville," said a voice emerging from a staticky haze.
This was only a test. The official sign-on of Nashville's only community-owned and -operated radio station was still 45 minutes away. Anyone who wanted to be there in person had to make tracks. It meant hauling ass past the Loveless Café and the Natchez Trace to the RFN office, located high on a ridge in the community of Pasquo.
As the light dimmed on a road snaking through the foothills near Bellevue, a listener might well have thought himself lost—except for the signal. It got stronger and stronger the higher you climbed. Near the top, the trees cleared and suddenly the music on the radio—the amped-up Bach of Apollo 100's early-'70s single "Joy"—was echoing off the nearby farmhouses. The beacon had been traced all the way back to the lighthouse.
The lighthouse, in this case, was a hastily finished office and broadcasting studio in the back of a prefab home overlooking the hills near Highway 70. The yard resembled a cross between a tent revival and the parking lot outside a Dead show. A mobile-home command center was plastered with sheets of paper and mission statements, while pamphlets on community activism sat anchored to a table against the strong April winds. On folding chairs, nearly 100 giddy volunteers downed a quick dinner of donated Baja Burritos.
Ten minutes before the official sign-on, technicians tiptoed around the studio's fragile wiring. "Watch where you step!" commanded April Glaser, a teenage Nashville activist whose mobilization skills belie her age. Muddy footprints remained from the previous two days' torrential rains, one in a barrage of last-minute setbacks that had the feel of biblical wrath. "There were a whole lot of wet people here," says Ernie Smithson, a volunteer electrician who helped run wiring in a downpour to meet the station's do-or-die Sunday deadline. And yet, he adds, "I wouldn't want to be anywhere else."
These electric last minutes were the culmination of a pipe dream. Eight years ago, a small, scrappy band of Nashville radio enthusiasts met in a Shoney's to discuss an idea: what if Music City had a real community radio station, one owned and operated by its listeners, that played anything it wanted? It was a great idea, but utterly impractical. No money. No license. Doomed.
Now here everybody was, standing outside a station building and a hand-positioned antenna tower, surrounded by reinforcement troops from as far away as Seattle and South America. All that remained was for somebody to turn on the microphones rigged outside on the station's landing.
"Rick!" somebody yelled. A sports watch blinked 6:59. "Throw on the switch!"
Ginny Welsch, the station's co-founder, prepared to speak the first words that would go out officially over the air. A veteran radio personality, she nevertheless was scarcely able to talk. Tears streamed down her face. "This is Radio Free Nashville, 98.9 FM, Pasquo, Tennessee!" she shouted, her voice cracking. "Low power for the people!" The woods rang with cheers and cathartic sobs.
Long into the night, there were campfires and bluegrass jams, and fervent hugs between new friends. But now there is a station to run, to finance and to fill with programming. Its $25,000 annual budget, though a pittance, will have to come from listener contributions and underwriters. Its 80-odd programmers will have to show up week after week without pay. And there is an unknown audience to reach on the most modest means imaginable.
It is safe to say that Nashville hasn't heard anything like Radio Free Nashville—for those who can hear it. At present, the nonprofit low-power station broadcasts on a tiny 100-watt signal that barely reaches Belle Meade. It streams over the Internet from its website, www.radiofreenashville.org, but even there the limited bandwidth means that only 20 people can listen at once, although more than 700 logged on at some point during the first 12 hours.
For those who can access WRFN, though, it shows Nashville to be a quirkier, livelier, more distinct—and yes, more radical—place than you'd gather from anywhere else on the FM band. That Monday morning, the city woke to an alien sound: unashamed, unabashed, honest-to-God liberal radio. It was "Democracy Now," the syndicated news show produced by Berkeley's Pacifica Radio Foundation.
In 1949, Pacifica created San Francisco's KPFA, the country's oldest listener-supported FM station. Left and proud, its programming today makes "All Things Considered" sound like Bill O'Reilly's pillow talk. The featured stories on Monday's broadcast included government secret-search abuses, Iraqi war coverage and the death of Japanese American civil-rights champion Fred Korematsu. Since Radio Free Nashville is the only Pacifica affiliate in the state, that should give some idea of its founders' political leanings. One logo jokingly considered by the station had the letters "WRFN" with a circle and slash through the "W."
"We're here to give a voice to people who are ignored or shut out by the mainstream media," explains Beau Hunter, president of Radio Free Nashville. Asked if the station would consider a right-wing show, he says, "There's 100 hours a week of hard-right talk on the radio. Get them to balance their programming, then come talk to us."
In other words, don't expect a Phil Valentine to cancel out the staunchly liberal discourse on Mary Mancini's talk show. And yet Radio Free Nashville allows room for programs that not only are thoroughly apolitical, they could be enjoyed even by people who disagree vehemently with the station's slant—such as Will Reynolds' weekly NASCAR update.
Many of these are superb volunteer music shows: singer Kristi Rose spinning "pulp country" on Wednesday nights; Grammy-winning Night Train to Nashville producer Michael Gray and world-class record collector Mike Smythe at 8 p.m. Thursdays, preceded by Scott Sanders' "Hold the Funk" show; Billy Block's Western Beat hoedown on Fridays. The variety alone makes the station a novelty. For sheer diversity of taste, nobody else in town has beaten DJ Carrie Waterston's segue from Sleater-Kinney to Rodney Crowell.
Other shows are downright unclassifiable, part of a gray area between public affairs and personal obsessions. A Hendersonville man who calls himself "Dr. Future" hosts a Tuesday-night discussion of what to expect in the years ahead. There are advice shows on handling stress and training animals. Perhaps best of all is a Monday-morning show by Walter Bell, a 48-year-old lieutenant with the Metro Fire Department who delivers fire-prevention tips in the guise of a multi-character radio play with continuing storylines—like the teen slacker who needs a battery for his remote and finds one in his dad's smoke detector. Please, somebody, get a tape to This American Life's Ira Glass.
"I just read about [Radio Free Nashville] in the paper, and I thought it sounded interesting," says Bell, a self-described "shy guy" who isn't above rapping to fan the flames of fire safety. He records the show in his off time, and so far he says his supervisor is happy. "I educate about fire safety," he says, "and it's my job to keep it interesting."
That he does. More than the political programming, it's the Walter Bells who give Radio Free Nashville its feel of newfound community. Technically, the station is ragged: it broadcasts in mono to shave costs, and shows worked out their kinks on the air all last week. One call-in host greeted news of phone trouble with 15 minutes of on-air gratitude, after an hour that escalated from pleading ("I certainly would appreciate a call about now...") to desperation ("Give me a call!"). But even that makes it seem more real, less packaged. It's a broadcast from a city you never knew you lived in, a secret signal that flies literally under the radar.
For a decade, Nashvillians have eyed with envy the freewheeling, galvanizing community stations in cities such as Memphis and Austin. As of 7 p.m. on April 3, 2005, our city has one, broadcasting everything from advice shows to zydeco, from punk to public affairs. The question for the station—and for the city—is, "What now?"
Three of Radio Free Nashville's founders are asking themselves the same question on a Wednesday afternoon before the launch. There is slightly more than a week to go. They do not yet know it will be the most draining, nail-biting roller-coaster week of the entire eight-year process—a week full of natural and technical calamities, as well as acts of heroism, camaraderie and physical risk. At the moment, they are anxiously sipping coffee at the 12 South Portland Brew, grateful that someone else is buying.
"I still can't believe we're here," says Beau Hunter, who was there at the very first RFN meeting. He laughs, as do his comrades at the table, Ginny and Greg Welsch. Somebody has to say it: what a long, strange trip it's been.
Radio Free Nashville, WRFN 98.9-LPFM, is not Nashville's first underground station. It's not even the city's first Radio Free Nashville. The first was reportedly founded on Election Day 1968 after a student DJ-in-training spent all day at a Burger King drive-in, listening despondently as Nixon took the White House. His home station on Woodmont Boulevard lasted approximately a year, until word of an impending FCC bust triggered a speedy sign-off. Later, in the mid-1970s, the station that ultimately became Fisk University's WFSK-FM started as Radio Free Nashville. Early on, WKDF's sister station WKDA reportedly flirted with the name.
There might never have been another, if not for an unlikely motivator: the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which cleared the path for unlimited consolidation of the public airwaves. That year alone, the holdings of the top 50 radio-chain owners rose 40 percent, from 876 stations to 1,187. At the same time, the FCC began to crack down on low-power "pirate" stations across the country. In Tampa, a microbroadcaster and his wife were held at gunpoint by agents as the husband's broadcasting equipment was seized; in Memphis, agents busted the Bluff City's own Radio Free Memphis.
Instead of crushing the scalawags, though, the crackdown had the opposite effect. It forced the nation's isolated, disorganized microbroadcasters to band together. They hired lawyers and filed petitions. They rallied around figures such as Stephen Dunifer of Radio Free Berkeley, Jenny Toomey of the Future of Music Coalition, and Pete Tridish, a Philadelphia pirate broadcaster who founded a hugely influential resource network called Prometheus Radio.
About this time, in 1997, Beau Hunter, Ginny Welsch and her brother Greg became the core of a small group who began to meet each month at the Nashville Peace & Justice Center. All were lifelong radio fans. Living in San Francisco in 1967, Hunter—who was once described as a slimmer and healthier David Crosby—grooved on the free-form station KMPX, a counterculture lifeline, as well as Nashville's own WLAC. Fifteen years ago, when the nondescript Nashville EZ station Lite 100 morphed into a dynamo called Radio Lightning, the voice of on-air talent Ginny Welsch signaled the change.
By the mid-'90s, though, they wanted something like the radio stations they had grown up with: musically fearless, politically progressive and beholden only to the listener. They also wanted a station that had a broad
range of community voices, as well as the flavor and diversity of the city—qualities that were getting lost as media barons snapped up local radio stations across the country.
"We didn't know how many other people were out there until we started the meetings," says Greg Welsch, an aspiring filmmaker who also reports for the Spanish-language newspaper La Noticia. If the first few meetings suggested the makeup of a waning food cooperative, by 1999 they'd grown to include college-radio hosts, teenage punks, a certified public accountant, a utility worker and a labor activist. Meeting twice monthly, the proposed Radio Free Nashville began drawing between 20 and 30 people each time.
Then came the reality check. First, there was no money—certainly not enough to buy a small AM station, as was suggested. Second, despite signs that then-FCC Chairman William Kennard favored granting low-power "microradio" licenses to counteract the effects of consolidation, the proposal went nowhere fast—thanks to government bureaucracy and well-funded lobbyists for the broadcasting industry. As the process dragged on, members dropped out and energy flagged.
Radio Free Nashville might have petered out, if not for a left-field surprise. By 2001, under pressure from low-power organizers as well as advocates such as U.S. Sen. John McCain, the FCC had reached a compromise: it would issue low-power licenses in every state, as long as they didn't interfere with another (i.e., commercial) frequency. With nothing to lose, the RFN group submitted a request in January. No one was more stunned than the weary organizers when the FCC granted them a tentative construction permit in May 2002.
What transpired next was a series of deadlines that demanded zero-to-60 action, but stalled at every intersection. After the permit was granted, there was a 30-day wait to see if another station would contest the frequency—a mere formality. Surprise! A Lebanon station filed a petition to deny. Sixteen months passed while the FCC got around to a ruling, in RFN's favor. As of Halloween 2003, the group now had 18 months to build a station and get it on the air, or it would blow its chance. The deadline: April 30, 2005.
Nothing to do now but set up shop, hoist a transmitter and sing "Kumbaya" over the liberated airwaves, right? Surprise! In a tragic development, a ham-radio enthusiast who had volunteered space on his tower in Pasquo fell ill and died. By that time, RFN was locked into its coordinates and had to find a site within two kilometers. The process of finding a new location that wouldn't bleed onto another signal took another several months. What little money the station had raised from benefits and donations was dwindling. The clock was down to eight months.
These hardships, however, were mosquito bites compared to what Radio Free Nashville faced in the week before airtime. Day Eight: a planned benefit by the Davidson County Democrats had to be called off—there went needed operating expenses. Day Seven: the station's intended signal tower was deemed unusable and a land dispute arose. Day Six: the final electrical inspection had to be pushed back to midweek. "The past 48 hours," Ginny Welsch said in an e-mail update, "have been the worst I've experienced in the whole process of getting RFN on the air."
She spoke too soon. On Friday—April Fool's Day—a massive storm front hammered the site just as volunteers were to start digging three-foot holes to anchor the new 75-foot tower. Water stood several inches deep under the studio as RFN helpers hurriedly dug trenches and laid cable. Then came severe winds that ripped through the tree line—not exactly ideal conditions for raising a spindly signal tower. And because a crane couldn't reach the property, the tower had to be hoisted and positioned by hand. Only a dramatic reversal of fortune would get Radio Free Nashville on the air in 36 hours.
Yet Radio Free Nashville's luck had a way of seesawing. Months earlier, when the tower's original owner died, the station's hopes seemed dashed. That was when the Glaser family stepped forward. April Glaser, 17, is a political and social organizer who has worked with causes ranging from the Firebrand media center in East Nashville to Food Not Bombs. She had been attending the monthly meetings, and she told her father Ed about the snafu.
"My daughter's an unstoppable force," says Ed Glaser, a mechanical engineer and podiatrist whose company Sole Supports has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing in the state. A "die-hard liberal," as he says, he and April discussed moving out of their apartment and buying land in Pasquo that could house themselves and the station. After three months of sleeping on blow-up mattresses and beanbag chairs on his office floor, they purchased a mobile home that could double as Radio Free Nashville's headquarters.
The studio was almost finished as the crucial weekend loomed. But Radio Free Nashville's staffers were about to snap. Between breaks at her day gig—doing news segments on Oldies 96.3, ironically enough—Ginny Welsch was frantically trying to put out whatever fire sprang up next. At that point, the cavalry arrived, led by a bearded, energetic man in a floppy red hat.
"These are all incredibly special groups," says Pete Tridish, who's been to 40 states in his quest to spread the low-power gospel. Tridish—everyone calls him "Petri"—is one of the reasons the world of low-power radio is so close-knit. His Prometheus Radio Project has become an invaluable resource for fledgling community stations. Not only did Prometheus keep pressure on the FCC to enforce its low-power mandate, it provided advice, support and a network capable of mobilizing other stations if need be. Prometheus sent out a nationwide call for help with the "barn-raising" in Nashville.
On Thursday, dozens of volunteers began to arrive. There was a contingent of women from Radio CPR, a low-power station in Washington, D.C. There was the team that came straight from building community radio stations in Ecuador. There was the Japanese media professor here to document the sign-on for his classes overseas. They worked until 4 a.m. each morning, digging holes and laying carpet and installing fixtures; they took turns warming up around a campfire.
The biggest challenge came Saturday night. It was time to hoist the radio tower. With no crane, it would be dangerous and tough. At the signal, more than 90 people helped heave the tower aloft. An engineer, Bill Bors, who had set up Army stations, devised an elaborate triple-rope pulley system by which teams would then position the metal tower. A block and tackle had to be attached near the top. As the teams watched, agape, an Indiana college student named Liz Arnold shimmied 65 feet up an adjacent tree and hung the device.
If the mood Saturday had been weary and frazzled, on Sunday the pall had lifted. After a punishing eight-year process, the founders of Radio Free Nashville were light-headed. Calls began to pour in from the station's first listeners, and the RFN staff reacted to each new piece of information with delighted astonishment. "Twenty-two miles!" shouted Greg Welsch, whomping Beau Hunter's back. "They said they could hear us 22 miles away! Low power for the people!"
All around were punks with unicorn belt buckles and "Please Don't Feed the Models" T-shirts; middle-aged women in peasant skirts; hippies and bikers, country singers and actors from local theater; out-of-town activists in bandannas; techies with ruddy skin from working outdoors; a slight fair-featured kid plunking a ukulele. Ginny Welsch's young son, Matthew Muldoon, navigated the crowd in a Radio Free Nashville T-shirt with "Radio Rules" written on his cheek in eye pencil. It felt like a new city.
Already, the party was breaking up. Lanterns moved through the dark toward barely visible tents as vans began to inch out of the gravel lot. Somebody leaving asks how far the signal reaches. "I'll tell you what Prometheus told me," Greg Welsch says. "Get in your car and drive until you can't hear it, and that's how far it reaches."
And so. As a car noses away down the foothills of Pasquo, past the Loveless and the Baptist church and Ensworth School, the sound of Joy Division's "Transmission" stays clear and sharp, followed by calls from merry well-wishers. "I'm out here in Fernvale," a voice crackles, "and we just thank God there's somebody out there tellin' it like it is." A hiccup of white noise grows louder and longer as the Belle Meade Kroger comes into view. A listener can only feel a pang as this new community begins to recede into the static, and hope it'll keep him company for just one more mile.
