We’re about halfway through my series of radio sources for the Firesign Theatre’s 1969 album How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All. I hope to have these all up in time for my Cornell Library talk about the album next Wednesday, September 10 (but we’ll see). Click here for details and for a link to pre-register if you want to watch remotely.
Today’s offering would not have directly informed How Can You Be in Two Places at Once — Firesign had just finished recording the “War of the Worlds” side of the album by the time of the broadcast — but I can’t resist including it in this series, for reasons both obvious and less obvious.
In 1968, Buffalo’s WKBW was the city’s predominant pop music station, a 50,000 watt AM station that would have been the equivalent of KRLA-Los Angeles, where Peter Bergman’s “Radio Free Oz” had moved in 1967 (before he and Firesign returned to low-wattage underground stereo FM stations later in the decade: KMET, KPPC, KPFK). Unlike the FM stations, KBW and KRLA maintained the tradition of big-personality DJs that had defined the AM pop format (“super box number time!” according to Firesign’s parody on HCYB) while at the same time bending their playlists to include the heavier head music of the late sixties.1
On Halloween 1968, though, WKBW did something less typical. On the thirtieth anniversary of the original Orson Welles broadcast, KBW staged its own improvised version of “The War of the Worlds,” dramatizing an alien invasion supposed to originate on Grand Island, just north of Buffalo (it was to B-lo what Grover’s Mill NJ was to New York City). Brainchild of program director Jeff Kaye, the broadcast is still quite astonishing to hear, and is all the more impressive and effective because it featured the familiar voices of the KBW news team, who were improvising from cues rather than reading a script (which is what those charlatans in the Mercury Theater had done!). KBW’s massive broadcast range meant that it was heard all across western New York and into the midwest and Canada.
The Buffalo ‘68 “War of the Worlds” is, moreover, a remarkable document of its moment in history. As the broadcast turns from the typical broadcasting (Beatles, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Cream) to fictional Mars-invasion reports, we hear a final, consequential piece of actual reporting: LBJ’s announcement of a bombing halt in North Vietnam and promise of peace negotiations with the Vietcong. This was an eleventh-hour attempt to boost Hubert Humphrey in thue following week’s election. Unfortunately for LBJ and Humphrey, candidate Nixon had already covertly sabotaged the October surprise.2
One final point about WKBW: this would not be the last of their special Halloween broadcasts. They would follow up next year with “Paul McCartney is Alive and Well … Maybe” — a sterling contribution to the month-old and rapidly metastasizing Paul-is-Dead rumor.3 This is something about which I have a lot to say! But you can read some of my ideas about Paul-is-Dead in Firesign; let me also recommend Andru J. Reeves’s sui generis history of the rumor.
“The sizzle was as important as the steak,” as a KBW documentary hilariously puts it. https://www.allserviceswny.com/wkbw-radios-war-of-the-worlds-the-legacy-continues/
Ken Hughes, Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate (Charlottesville: U ofVirginia P, 2014). See also my Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums (Oakland: U California P, 2024) 72-74.
Many of the WKBW Halloween “spooktaculars” can be heard at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/wkbw-halloween-archive
