One of the greatest broadcasters ever to create live radio over WBAI’s or anyone else’s airwaves has died. Steve Post was 70 years old when cancer finally took him from us. He died at his Manhattan apartment on August 3rd.
Steve’s WBAI career had its roots in a childhood whose solitary hours were spent creating fantasy variety-type radio programs; he named his radio persona “Luke Warm”. Steve first walked into the WBAI facilities, then a cramped space in an East 39th Street brownstone, in 1965. He’d heard that the station was seeking an editor for its program guide, the Folio. He arrived for an interview, and by the time he walked through the exit, Steve had been hired as WBAI’s bookkeeper. Apparently his warm body was enough to fill the stringent requirements for such a position of great responsibility. He must have been warm indeed, as Post had flunked out of both English and Math at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx.
Nine months into his bookkeeping duties, it became apparent that Steve was not a good fit for the job. He had lost the accounts payable book, and was fired. But his deep, warm and relaxed voice (except while venting a point of protest, when it would characteristically rise and tighten) rendered him useful to the station’s directors. Post was offered what he’d really wanted: an on-air position. As Steve wrote in his book, “Playing in the FM Band – a Personal Account of Free Radio” (Viking Press, 1973):
“At WBAI, incompetence in pursuit of ambition is no vice.”
During those early days, Steve had discovered the wonder that was (and continues to be) Bob Fass, creator of Radio Unnameable. And that was it. Fass, along with seemingly the very air that circulated through the BAI studios, had brought about the germination of Steve’s radio gifts, and he began to produce and host his first regular program, “The Outside”, in the weekend overnight slot. Steve’s radio show, like Bob’s, was about intimacy with the audience, an intimacy strengthened by the shank-of-the-night hours it aired. Radio for the sleepless and disconnected.
He spoke about political issues, or whatever flew into his mind, and needless to say, bowed to no one. He mixed in musical selections, as he had heard on Radio Unnameable. Steve soon exhibited the natural and very personal gift of his entertaining variety of crankiness (“contrariness”). He never descended to viciousness, but frequently rose to amusing cynicism. It was Post’s gift of curmudgeonly humor, often self-denigrating, that endeared him to his audience. They knew that beneath his contrary, though never truly sour exterior lay a man who was sweet on his listeners.
Who could forget his stock reply to listeners who phoned in during the show:
Post: “BAI you’re on the air”.
Caller: “Hello, Steve?”
Post (dripping with curt contempt): “Yeah, Steve.”
Steve Post kept on keeping on over WBAI’s airwaves, even becoming Station Manager for a time. After the usual vicissitudes experienced by most WBAI producers, Steve became the 7-to-9 morning man, with his new program “Room 101” (get it?) three days a week, Monday through Wednesday.
Steve left WBAI in 1979, and soon found his way to a 20 year stint hosting “Morning Music” on public radio WNYC, taking over from the staid Robert J. Lurtzema. Of course Steve revolutionized the program and made it his own. After his illness prevented him from broadcasting regularly, Steve left WNYC, but rallied and returned in 2002 to launch a new program, “The No Show”, which ran until 2009.
There is little doubt that Steve’s most creative years were those he spent at WBAI, where he produced talk shows that included some music, as opposed to music shows that included some talk, as brilliant as his talk always was, in large or small doses, regardless of the frequency that carried his voice.
For his friends Steve’s greatest achievement was simply the man he became, with his warmth, generosity (do I ever know that aspect well!), free-ranging wit, and a particularly well-developed sense of egalitarian justice that seemed an innate and vital part of his being.
Just as Post had been drawn to Bob Fass, I began to gravitate to Steve. In 1971, after returning from a 2-year jaunt through the Mysterious East, and tipped-off by my friend David Rapkin, a recording engineer at the station, I entered the WBAI studios in a desanctified church on E. 62nd Street to practice on their Baldwin grand piano, as I was between instruments at home. I met Steve and began to hang around during his show. He allowed me to take the hourly transmitter readings for him. Between readings I observed how Steve created a virtual planet, over which he had total authority (Larry Josephson did the same, in his own way).
We became fast friends, as the expression goes. At the conclusion of each broadcast of “The Outside”, Steve signed the station off the air until the morning show host signed it back on a few hours later. Before actually throwing the switch that shut down the transmitter (he let me do that, too), he read his own version of a scripted legally-required statement that included announcing the wattage of the transmitter expressed as vertical and horizontal power, “depending on whether you’re standing up or lying down.” We would then, in the softly rumbling predawn darkness, leave the station and make our way to the red VW Beetle he’d parked on 62nd Street.
Despite occasional interruptions in our contact, Steve remained absolutely my dearest friend for 43 years, most intensely during the lush and eventful early summer of our lives. We spent many, many hours and days together at his successive country homes in Rhinebeck and Cherry Plain, New York, as well as at his apartment in the city. Early on, I was given my first weekly WBAI radio program, Friday Morning Music. Days before the debut broadcast, Post and I were together on one of our frequent trips to his country “estate”, a demobilized trailer-home in Rhinebeck, NY. (I called him Post. He called me Irsay. At the beginning of every phone conversation, up to the last, we would greet each other with a mutual “Hello Schmuck”) One night, he decided it would be fun to take out the Ouija board and see what the oracle might have to say about my upcoming program. We sat cross-legged on the floor, set the board between us, lit up a fat one, and then placed our hands on the plastic pointer. Sure enough the pointer slowly began to move, touching a series of letters:
“H-O-T S-H-I-T”
We took an epic road trip down south, to the Carolinas. Post was a true man of the wheel, and loved to drive. When we reached the small hamlet of Green Swamp, North Carolina, we decided to stop in at a tiny AM radio station we’d noticed by the side of the slender country road. So tiny that the programming was beamed out from a Roberts tape recorder. The young locals who ran it invited us to stay the night, drawling the promise that there would be “plenny-uh-girls.” It became one of our favorite catch phrases. During a loner-period of sparse female companionship, as we sipped the fine wine we both loved while listening to some music, another catch phrase was born: “Wine… and song.” This is classic Post.
From the beginning it was an exciting friendship. At one point, we jointly announced on WBAI that we would marry in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow. No, we did not marry, nor did we intend to (heterosexual men that we were). Besides, his ever-devoted partner Laura Post might have objected. But so strong and fulfilling was our friendship that we just had to tell the world!
As the years progressed (imagine calendar pages flipping by) our lives grew further entwined, professionally speaking. After Steve began doing Morning Music on WNYC, he selected me to be his regular fill-in host whenever he could not do the show, whether for single days or vacations. I loved doing his show, because I knew he had “softened the target”, and I could relax and be myself.
But how could Post or myself ever imagine, back there in the dimly-lit master control of 1970’s WBAI, with me clicking out the transmitter readings and him working his magic as I paid careful attention, that 20 years later we would be divvying up almost the entire New York classical radio audience between us? When I was hired by the Classical Station of the New York Times, WQXR, in 1991, I was assigned the mid-morning shift, 10am-3pm. Our shows overlapped in the morning hours. Need I mention how much we loved that?
All through our friendship, to the awful day last weekend at his and Laura’s apartment when we lost him, I never sat in a chair when I visited, but always lay down beside him in bed, his and Laura’s hangout spot. If Laura happened to be home, more often than not if she left the room for a minute she would return to find that I had moved up from the foot of the bed to the pillow she had been resting her head against moments before, close to Steve. For such a friendship, there is no one to take his place.
Farewell beloved Stevie. Strength and love to Laura.
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James Irsay is the host of Morning Irsay which is aired on WBAI Fridays from 10am to noon. James specializes in historical recordings, with an emphasis on piano music. Yet he is just as likely to throw in music of any kind that has sparked his interest during the preceding week. He is not a radio wallflower, so be prepared for extended, unfiltered, free-flowing shpiels on any subject at all. When the subject is music and the recordings he airs, James takes an analytical path, a path that runs through groves of highly personal opinion, gardens of historical and technical elucidation, and – wait for it – sandboxes of embarrassingly juvenile tomfoolery.
