The Death of a Radio Pioneer

A broadcast pioneer just died in southern Mexico, a few weeks shy of his 87th birthday. Back in the 1960s and '70s, Lorenzo Milam helped launch about a dozen offbeat FM stations—eclectic, adventurous outlets that tried to avoid the straightjacket formulas of both commercial and public radio. He also wrote one of my favorite books about radio, Sex and Broadcasting, and one of my favorite memoirs, The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues.
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KRAB didn't run ads, and in those days it didn't get support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting either—the Corporation for Public Broadcasting didn't exist yet. So it wasn't commercial radio, and it wasn't government radio either; it was, along with Pacifica, a model for something new, something that came to be called community radio. Though that wasn't how they initially saw themselves. "We weren't called community stations," Lorenzo told me. "We were called listener-supported stations. That was the key….We were part of the elite, and we knew it. And we for no minute confused ourselves with being representative of the community. We were there to lead in an enlightened way." The community-participation part of the credo came later, as the '60s melted into the '70s.

Lorenzo launched more listener-sponsored stations after he left Seattle, in places ranging from Dallas to Los Gatos, California. He had an indirect hand in starting several more: If someone disagreed with him about how a station should be run, Lorenzo might stake him some money to start another outfit in another city and try things his way. Veterans of those outlets in turn started stations of their own. These stations then mailed tapes to each other, allowing their programs to pop up in other parts of the country. In this way they formed an informal network, dubbed the KRAB Nebula, parts of which persist to this day. (Lorenzo also co-owned, but did not run, one of the most gloriously quirky commercial stations of the '70s: KFAT, a free-form country station in Gilroy, California. Its motto: "It's all country music. It just depends on what country you come from.")