Full Moon Edition August 2025
It’s been a while since we’ve mentioned our Freeform Radio project (HERE), but not because we haven’t been developing it. Rather, the effort we’re making is reaching a little higher and getting a little more complex. We’ve been working with an excellent art direction team in California and back East to create a pitch deck that tells our story succinctly to investors – people who might underwrite the telling of this story to the widest possible audience.
That exercise was quite an undertaking, spanning three months and many different iterations of the deck, particularly the video, which went through several cuts before the final and very excellent version (HERE). G2, the team of Greg Bokor and Greg Wells at BeCause Communications, worked their magic, David Shepardson pitched the name, which we all agreed to, and – voila! RadicalRadio became Radio Active. A star is (re)born.
If you like what we’re doing, please share this notice with anyone who might be interested, especially anyone you know who has deep pockets or deep knowledge about producing documentaries. This tale of the freeform radio era and the major talents who brought us the Classic Era of Rock Music might be the Greatest Story Never (Yet) Told. We want to tell it and any help you can give us is welcome!
When we think of the great soundtracks that have married tunes to video or film, many are focused on a single act, such as Purple Rain or Becoming Led Zeppelin, or a specific event, like Woodstock, Monterey Pop, or Summer of Soul. Beginning in the Sixties and on through the brilliant era of Hollywood film in the Seventies, movies like Easy Rider, The Harder They Fall, and Apocalypse Now brought great music to the screen as an essential part of telling the story. My personal favorite was Martin Scorsese’s soundtrack for Mean Streets, which rocked from beginning to end, but there are any number of contenders.
Imagine the soundtrack for Radio Active. We did our video for the Pitch Deck with parts of three songs (HERE), but for a full length feature, a four part series, or a season of shows, the choices would be a cornucopia. The thing about that period in music and the commercial freeform stations that played it was the staggering wealth of creativity that came our way. Every day a new band came along that blew you away and the bands you already knew kept turning out one great tune after another.
What songs come to mind if you imagined programming a film – say, a 90 minute feature? Which cuts from which albums of all that great music would you choose for your soundtrack? Which performers would absolutely have to be part of it and which of their songs best represents them? The one thing you can be certain of is that somewhere at some time in some town on some freeform station, that song was played in the middle of a brilliant set by a radio artist who got it. Just like you did.
Six degrees of separation is ever at play. My first nightly encounter with freeform radio was a midnight to six a.m. show Brian Kreizenbeck, the Super Warthog, did on KFML-FM in Denver c. 1968. It was a classic example of the type where a highly innovative radio artist generated a lot of attention at a nothing station and was eventually fired for his extreme creativity. Just as quickly he was hired at WMAS-FM in Springfield, Mass by Ham Agnew, who was turning that little station into a freeform rocker.
Rob Abrams found RadicalRadio on his own and got in touch. He was an enthusiastic listener to what WMAS was doing back in the day. When a friend of his said, “Let’s go down to the station. I know the guy there who’ll let us in,” they beat feet to town, knocked on the door, and who should answer but the Warthog himself. “Hi,” said Rob. “I guess we both are,” said Brian, and so began a long association between the two of them and a stellar career in radio for Rob, although it ended at WMAS rather abruptly.
He was doing his show as he had so admirably for a couple of years now when two cops arrived at the station one day and arrested him while he was on the air. He tells the story in our interview on www.radicalradio.media (HERE), and although that pretty much ended his work in Springfield, he continued to rock the airwaves in Hartford, CT and Denver, CO before finally embarking on a highly successful career in commercial aviation. He found his way back to radio, too, doing a weekly show with his long time associate Jim Shannon at WWUH-FM 91.3 in Connecticut. He says being back on the air is “like settling into the left seat of a Lear Jet cockpit.” He speaks from experience.