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Josh and CerpheWHFS DJ's Josh and Cerphe

The Baltimore Sun
"REMEMBERING WHFS:
The beloved progressive station that was 'exactly the opposite' of radio today"

By Chris Kaltenback, Contact Reporter

Mention the call letters “WHFS” to music lovers of a certain age, and don’t be surprised if a smile instantly appears on their face, or a twinkle seems to light up their eye.

Memories of a magic place right out of the ’60s counterculture playbook — of airwaves where you never knew what song you’d hear next, only that it would be a good one; of a land populated with people named Cerphe, Damian and Weasel; of a community where informality and congeniality were the watchwords, and corporate-speak was avoided at all costs — will do that to a person.

MORE . . .

NBC4 FEATURES PIECE ON 'HFS DOC

On Friday, Nov 4 Wendy Rieger aired a great segment on the upcoming documentary, interviewing Jay and Weasel. You can view the segment online - (click here)

Former WHFS DJ Jonathan "Weasel" Gilbert

Sept. 8, 2016
Influential '60s FM Station WHFS Chronicled In New Documentary
Jim Clash, contributor, Forbes.com (part 1)

If you grew up in the Washington, DC, area in the 1960s and 1970s, as did this reporter, there was one consistently hip radio station that the cool people listened to: WHFS, broadcasting from high atop the Triangle Towers building in Bethesda, MD.

The station was neither high-powered (just 2,300 watts) nor commercial, but its progressive choices in rock music, politics and equality programming caught the wave of a turbulent time period and rode it for two decades – from 1961 to 1983 – on an FM frequency of 102.3 MHz. “We were right in the middle of it,” said Jonathan “Weasel” Gilbert, a former long-time DJ for the station.

more...

Sept. 14, 2016
'Feast Your Ears' Producer Jay Schlossberg Dishes About Anticipated WHFS Documentary
Jim Clash, contributor, Forbes.com (part 2)

In Part 1 of this series we introduced readers to the upcoming documentary, “Feast Your Ears, The Story Of WHFS 102.3,” about the iconic 1960s/70s/early 80s Washington, DC, area FM radio station WHFS. Here, we interview the film’s producer, Jay Schlossberg, 61. Schlossberg’s day job, by the way, is president of Media Central LLC. He is a former staffer of WHFS.

Jim Clash: What made WHFS so special versus other FM stations?

Jay Schlossberg: Though WHFS started playing mostly classical, jazz and/or middle-of-the-road music in 1961, like most FM stations in the era, things began to change in 1968 when they aired their first “free-form progressive” show and, within a year, this changed everything.

more...

August 31, 2016

AND WHAT A TIME IT WAS

by Ellyn Wexler



Jay Schlossberg wants to take us back in time to an “era of cultural, social and political upheaval.” During those years–from 1961 to 1983, he and countless other mostly teens and twenty-somethings were steadfast fans of the free-form progressive radio station that rocked the metropolitan area’s airwaves from the Triangle Towers apartment building in downtown Bethesda.

more....

Bethesda Magazine, July - August 2016

WHEN BETHESDA WAS COOL

In the 1970s downtown Bethesda was the center
of the local musical universe
by James Michael Causey



It was March 14, 1979, in downtown Bethesda, and radio disc jockey Don Grossinger was sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped on-air studio of Washington High Fidelity Stereo (WHFS) 102.3 FM with reggae legend Peter Tosh, co-founder of Bob Marley and the Wailers, and Program Director David Einstein. “All of a sudden, Peter decides he wants to play some music, but he doesn’t have a guitar,” says Grossinger, now 64. Not wanting to miss the opportunity to hear one of his idols perform, Grossinger thought quickly.

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Montgomery Magazine, June/July 2016

Those Were The Days, My Friend
by Jim Bindeman

Growing up in Bethesda in the 1960s and 70s, the soundtrack of my youth was broadcast on an jupstart, rebel radio station that wasn't afraid to leave orthodox radio programming behind and as a result changed the way Washington's younger generations listened to radio and heavily influenced rock 'n roll radio across the country.

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Listen to Jay & Weasel on WMCR Artist Spotlight
and also Jonathan Edwards doing his own Artists Spotlight.
eRadio PODCAST

YouTube video broadcast:
WRC news correspondent Mark Segraves, Montgomery County Councilman-At-Large Marc Elrich, DJ Weasel and film director Jay Schlossberg discuss Jay's feature documentary film, “Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS 102.3 FM”. 

In anticipation of playing for us at the May 7th, 2016 fundraising concert for our documentary, "Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS 102.3 FM" at Montgomery College in Rockville, MD (along with Jonathan Edwards!), the lovely and talented singer/songwriter Danny O’Keefe took the time to be interviewed by legendary ‘HFS deejay, Cerphe for his show on Talk Planet Radio.

Click the link which will take you to “Cerphe’s Audio Vault” and you’ll see the Danny O’Keefe file there so click there, sit back and enjoy! This is an excellent interview with some great stories and memories from both Cerphe and Danny!

http://talkplanetradio.com/cerphes-audio-vault/


CHECK OUT THE HFS SEGMENT ON WUSA 9
with Weasel, Jay & Jon Carroll :
www.wusa9.com

(photo courtesy of Bill Bronrott)

PODCAST INTERVIEW:

Twister Lister Episode 35-
Featuring Jay Schlossberg on the HFS Documentary
and Radio legend Cerphe

WHFS Documentary Drawing Big Support
‘Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS 102.3 FM’ hopes to tell story of
Bethesda-based station that introduced freeform radio to Washington

BY AARON KRAUT
The original "Gates" board at WHFS 102.3 FM in Bethesda
Oct. 13, 2015

For many who grew up in the Washington, D.C., area during the late ’60s and ’70s, WHFS 102.3 FM provided the soundtrack for a generation of protest and cultural change.

The station, which until 1983 occupied a cramped office and studio in Bethesda’s Triangle Towers apartment building, was the first freeform radio station in the area and essential for fans of progressive rock. It built a large following, produced local radio legends such as Don “Cerphe” Colwell and Jonathan “Weasel” Gilbert and introduced listeners to artists like Bruce Springsteen and Emmylou Harris.

If a group of WHFS veterans and longtime fans can raise enough money, the station that beamed its music “from high atop the Triangle Towers” will be the subject of a roughly 90-minute documentary that’s in the works from director Jay Schlossberg and a team of producers.

Since launching a Kickstarter campaign last week to raise $60,000 for the project, more than 100 contributors have donated almost $15,000 and a recent fundraising concert at Bethesda’s Villain & Saint brought in another $6,300.

more... http://tinyurl.com/ozoykoq
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‘No Suits. No Corporate Control.’
Remembering The Freeform Heyday Of WHFS 102.3

By Ally Schweitzer
WHFS staffers (shown with musician Cyndi Lauper, center) reflect on the progressive radio station in a forthcoming film
Oct. 13th, 2015

WHFS in Bethesda, Maryland, coming to you from high atop the Triangle Towers. Ease on back, take your clothes off and have some wiiiine…”


If you listened to D.C.-area radio station WHFS in the early 1970s, you might have heard that station ID. Recorded by a local character named Fang, it was one of many wild-and-crazy sounds floated on WHFS’ airwaves during its scrappy heyday — long before the freeform station went mainstream and lost its, well, fangs.

Jay Schlossberg is one of many Washingtonians who recall WHFS as the coolest thing on the local radio dial. That’s why the North Potomac resident is leading the creation of Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS 102.3, a documentary about how WHFS went from occupying a room in a Bethesda medical building to owning space in thousands of hearts — at least those belonging to a more adventurous sort.

Feast Your Ears, in the works since 2013, launched a Kickstarter campaign last week. Schlossberg and his co-producers hope to raise $60,000. It’s an ambitious goal, but he sounds confident that folks will chip in. WHFS lovers are “fanatical” about the station, he says.

Why? Because music radio now is “pasteurized and homogenized and corporatized,” Schlossberg says, “and WHFS was the antithesis of that.”

more...http://tinyurl.com/njl7pax

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New WHFS Merchandise Is Available
for the First Time in 30 Years
Fresh T-shirts and bumper stickers promote a documentary about the station.
By James Michael Causey
Nancy H. Showacre, who was married to the late DJ Bob “Here” Showacre, Adele Abrams, Ty Ford, and Jonathan “Weasel” Gilbert
show off HFS merchandise new (Weasel's shirt) and vintage (everything else). Photograph by Deborah Jaffe.
July 27, 2015

Last Wednesday, dozens of former WHFS DJs and other personnel gathered at the Bethesda Blues and Jazz Supper Club to unveil the beloved radio station’s first bumper stickers and T-shirts in more than 30 years to promote Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS 102.3 FM, a documentary in progress by Jay Schlossberg.

Schlossberg announced that he plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign and a new website for the project this September. He has already spent nearly two years making the film.

Feast Your Ears will focus on the station’s heyday from 1969 to 1983, when it was a beacon of anarchic music and personality in a sea of bland corporate radio. The documentary features interviews with HFS staffers and period DC music luminaries like Nils Lofgren, Bill Danoff from the Starland Vocal Band, Mark Noone of the Slickee Boys, and 9:30 Club owner Seth Hurwitz. Marshall Crenshaw, Roger McGuinn from the Byrds, and Terry Adams from NRBQ are among others who will appear.

DJ Jonathan “Weasel” Gilbert, who was for many the signature voice of the station and is a consulting producer for the documentary, received the evening’s loudest cheers when he and other station fixtures were introduced before a performance by NRBQ. He was joined by a line of colleagues wrapped in thick applause including DJs Ty Ford, Thom Grooms, Josh Brooks, and Fred Sirkey.

“This is old home week,” said Adele Abrams, one of the station’s few female jocks in the early ’70s and into the ’80s. Today Abrams has a law firm in Beltsville, but the reunion took her back via “good flashbacks” to a time when DJs set their own playlists, changed songs on a whim, and generally did whatever the hell they wanted while on the air.

Some brought old HFS paraphernalia to compare against the new stuff, but Abrams may have retained the best souvenir of all: 4,500 LPs and 1,500 45s stored in her Takoma Park home. “Someone who wanted to steal my collection would need a strong back and a big truck,” she added.

After Schlossberg finished the introductions, Weasel jumped on stage to welcome the “WHFS house band.” NRBQ founder Adams saluted the HFS crew as his band kicked off its set. And for a night, the sound of the old WHFS was back in the air, if not on it.

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Feast your ears:
Film to tell homegrown radio story of WHFS
by E.B. Furgurson III

Many former WHFS radio deejays appeared at a reunion of sorts in Bethesda last week celebrating the upcoming film
Feast Your Ears, The Story of WHFS 102.3 FM. The film's producer, Jay Schlossberg, left and deejays Jonathan Gilbert - known as Weasel -
and Damian Einstein before the celebration and concert by NRBQ. (By E.B. Furgurson III / Staff)

July 27, 2015

Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, there was a little radio station named WHFS.

For six years the station fed eager listeners its eclectic mix of music from studios in Annapolis. But before that, from about 1969 until the station moved here in 1983, WHFS was a vanguard of progressive radio, molding musical tastes and reflecting the culture — and counterculture — of several generations, from Woodstock to punk and new wave, and beyond.

A documentary film, "Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS, 102.3 FM," now in mid-production hopes to showcase the times, people and music that capture WHFS' influence on the local music scene.

The film's producer Jay Schlossberg hopes to have a rough cut by the end of the year and have the film ready to roll sometime next year.

More... http://tinyurl.com/ppdtk98
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Radio rewind:
When WHFS was D.C.’s on-air hangout
for cool people
by Neal Augenstein

Cerphe's guests on WHFS during its heyday included Lowell George of Little Feat (Photo courtesy Cerphe Colwell)

July 22, 2015

WASHINGTON — Long before the Internet and Google, a place existed where local music fans could hear obscure songs and learn about artists they’d never heard of — its “URL” was 102.3 FM.

The in-the-works documentary “Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS 102.3″ will take viewers “on a psychedelic trip back to the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, when free-form, progressive rock radio was in its heyday,” the project’s website says.

From an unassuming studio “high atop the Triangle Towers” in Bethesda, WHFS was an important rallying point for many music fans.

“I can’t wait to see it,” says former WHFS DJ Cerphe Colwell, who appears in the film.

Cerphe was hired in 1970 to do a Saturday-night show from 7 p.m. to midnight. “It was just part time. I was broke at the time. I was a starving art school major. Once I landed that HFS gig, I looked at the world like I was seeing it for the very first time,” Cerphe says.

Some of WHFS’s DJs will be feted Wednesday evening at Bethesda Blues and Jazz Supper Club, where NRBQ, which was often featured on WHFS, will perform.

WHFS was the first station in the D.C. area to broadcast in FM stereo — resulting in the Washington High Fidelity Stereo call letters. Cerphe says the station wasn’t just technologically ahead of its time.

“We were a social art form before social media,” he says. “We were eclectic — the listeners knew that, and they loved it.”

More... http://tinyurl.com/o2vpd6s

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Remembering the days when WHFS ruled
a tiny slice of D.C.’s airwaves

by John Kelly

Mark Gorbulew and Sara Vass, in a 1970 photo, were two of the three Bard College graduates who brought “Spiritus Cheese” to the old WHFS (102.3 FM) and transformed the radio station in Bethesda, Md. Not shown is Joshua Brooks. (Ken Feil/The Washington Post)

July 20, 2015

“Spiritus Cheese” sounds like a character from a Harry Potter novel or perhaps an incantation a Hogwarts wizard might chant to make Stilton palatable to the lactose intolerant.

In fact, “Spiritus Cheese” was “the Washington area’s most imaginatively programmed radio rock show.” At least it was in 1970, when those words appeared in The Washington Post.

Spiritus Cheese was also the trio of Bard College graduates who created the program and basically made the WHFS of local legend — a Bethesda-based radio station that in the 1970s and early 1980s occupied 102.3 on the FM dial and a special place in the hearts of Washington-area music lovers.

A documentary film is in the works — “Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS 102.3” — and some of the station’s DJs will be celebrated Wednesday evening before NRBQ’s show at Bethesda Blues and Jazz.

The connection? NRBQ was what you might call an ’HFS act. Others included Little Feat, John Prine and Bonnie Raitt, groups that if you only ever listened to that station you’d assume were huge everywhere.

The documentary is being produced by North Potomac’s Jay Schlossberg, whose day job is providing camera crews for productions all over the world. He worked one summer at the station as a teenager and was a fan after that. His movie will cover the station’s history up until 1983, when WHFS was sold.

Jay told me that he had missed a 2013 panel discussion on WHFS sponsored by local music figure Joe Lee but that he was inspired when he saw a photo taken there of some of the old DJs.

Jay said: “I uttered the words: ‘Oh, my God, they’re not all dead yet. Somebody has to do something about this.’ ”

More....http://tinyurl.com/o7m6cdd