Apparently wary of solvency, KPFK general manager Leslie Radford has changed midnight to 3am programming Monday to Thursday nights from the long-running and popular Something’s Happening hosted by Roy Tuckman a.k.a Roy of Hollywood.
Radford is swapping out the 4th biggest fundraising program block KPFK has from the last fund drive for an untested assortment of music, comedy, sex and therapy programs, including “Music To Resist By”, the DJ efforts of her roommate Adam Rice.
The program change targets the late weekday evenings/early hours of the morning where Tuckman had carved out an extraordinary audience of night owls, posting Arbitrons at one in the morning higher than many of the station’s day-time programs and bringing in $15,000 during the station’s last fund drive from hours that usually raise virtually nothing for Pacifica stations.
Radford left untouched Saturday and Sunday overnights, which were unable to raise any listener donations at all during the station’s recently completed fund drive
Radford appears to be following instructions from the Siegel/Brazon faction on the local station board, Grassroots KPFK, which acquired an unelected majority from the station’s failure to meet quorum in 2012. The group has been saber-rattling at Tuckman for weeks.
From Wikipedia: “Tuckman has been a KPFK staff member since 1972. His awards include a Major Armstrong Award for the documentary “Upton Sinclair: The Reverent Radical”, and an AP Best Spot News Coverage award (shared with Elliot Mintz) for his live, on-air interview with Iranian hostage-takers inside the American embassy in Tehran in November 1979″.
Uprising host Sonali Kolhatkar featured Tuckman in a 50th birthday tribute tribute to KPFK on July 27, 2009. You can listen here.
The change, announced in the weekly program guide issued by Something’s Happening, which is emailed to subscribers and posted on the web, are effective January 11th, 3 weeks prior to the station’s February fund drive start date.
Tuckman has been the most active of KPFK’s programmers in promoting the local station board election and has been providing detailed voting instructions on every show and in every weekly program guide since the election began in October.
The current replacement for programing at midnight is just to intense for this time of night ( not calming) .If it were day time of earlier evening it would be fine,,but i just unfortunately have to TURN IT OFF,,,,i doubt if it is nearly as popular as Mr Tuckmans program..i am loosing my faith in KPFK and may not support it financially if it keeps up..
I hope the station never comes to its senses. I hope there is a go fund me account so all of us former kpfk listeners can support Roy Tuckmans show at a much more deserving & appreciated forum/ station.
time warp ride apparantly.. its now may 21 and yeah i heard it too, a couple weeks ago and u wrote your post in 16?
well he does good radio and shouldn’t be axed to save something… bob fass (who gave freeform radio to the rest of us) of wbai just died and ken freeman of wfmu likes music only. though he knows stuff that I would personally like to hear about…
but wfmu was freeform and very cutting edge, antiwar anti racism in spirit but freewheeling and hip and talkie/creative with awesome music too… once.
The communication these days is being sucked out of community itself. Tragic and scary but then there was radio. Nothing to replace old radio from the real box that we knew we all heard together so it meant something communal. And now that its gone or almost gone, real connections between real people must survive and its more challenging but more urgently necessary now than ever. And I dont mean that politically exploitive or religiously exploitive stuff or corporate-ly exploitively stuff either. Stay there Roy!!
I never paid attention to station politics, but listen to kpfk I have. Yet Roy of Hollywood has been my mainstay of sanity, hope and humanity itself for as long as I remember.
I have been so sad since he can’t be found. I have become not only sad, but angry in a way I have never been accustomed to.
Yes, I feel angry to the point that I actually feel hatred for the so called management.
I have decided never to listen to the station, never to donate and never to suggest again what i do alway, that others listen to what use to be a station that had a principle.
It is now in my opinion a travesty of what was.
My heart aches for this unpardonable sin of eliminating Roy of Hollywood. God, we miss him.
KPFK and the local airwaves are too valuable for silly music programming you can find anywhere else.
It’s financial stress comes from it failing to take its role and responsibility as a valuable asset giving voice to those who have none and airtime to the other.
Amongst all the migrants, impoverished, homeless, and divergent communities – the people doing new media, battling their own demons, or those in the community, KPFK couldn’t find anyone and is doing music?!
I could do this better than that. Really.
Something’s Happening is truly a masterpiece. Brilliant in
its selection of thought provoking topics and subjects. Always enthralled. Just having Alan Watts, Jack Harris, Thom Hartmann, all of the sounds true speakers, never ever seized to lose my attention. Quite the contrary, Roy has and continues to have the pulse on very significant, thought provoking and soul enriching programming. I truly hope the
station establishment comes to their senses.
This smells of: Not about money, station support, listener diversity. There has been a systematic campaign to destroy free thought. All radio today is either evangelical programming, sports, disinformation, or nonsense used to squelch your free speech. Free speech is not allowed on commercial radio as it is owned by interests that are not interested in radio as money makers in themselves; but only for propaganda, for other interests. Pacifica, has been a thorn they have been trying to destroy for years now. Same interest want to destroy listener supported radio as well.
The rubbish that has replaced Roy has no value whatsoever . It may be that a lot of Roy’s material has been weak for a long while, but what was called for was some help and redirection, not this horribly offensive nonsense replacement. I’d rather listen to the boring BBC world service than this drivel.
It is as absurd as it is tragic to try to brush venerable and trusted soul server Roy Tuckman aside. What more richness of generous expression, of exactly the principles of inspiration and deep important multi-disciplinary discourse for cultural and intellectual and spiritual inspiration, could anyone ask for, than his lively pure stream as it articulates the brilliant best that Pacifica has to offer!? Stomping and hollering, bring back roy!!
No Roy = no KPFK.
I figure the Millennial silliness which has usurped the legendary “Something’s Happening” will pass soon enough… Bad programming is bad programming, while money talks and b.s. walks. Meanwhile, I’ll simply chalk this up to yet another triumph of the dumb, however temporary.
No more contributions to KPFK and I am going to suspend my sustainer donation until this foolishness at KPFK stops. I’ll refrain from name-calling. I’ll just let my money do the talking. Less Roy= no money.
please bring back Roy 12 to 6!! his program is priceless and they are replacing him with mindless garbage, really, I tried to listen and it was absolutely pointless. This is a travesty. We love you Roy and we are waiting for kpfk to come to their senses.
I just realized, Roy of Hollywood has been done away with. WHAT A MISTAKE & TRAGEDY OF EPIC PROPORTION!!
Young & sexually themed radio as I heard last night simply will not do. The station manager hasn’t a clue.
Roy of Hollywood’s contribution to the listening audience (WORLDWIDE BY THE WAY), is absolutely unequalled and never will there be another like ROH.!
It’s likely they’ll need to bring him back!! We’d all be the better 4 it!!!
anyone can write to KPFK directly, and express themselves there boldly , forcefully and honestly too…. if it is read or noted is another question.
See: http://www.kpfk.org/index.php/program-comments
that says: “ Program Comment Corner
Have a reaction to what you heard on KPFK? Email address – [email protected]
Please provide us with your feedback. If you have a general comment or question, like “WHAT WAS THAT SONG”, please use the Comments Line at [email protected] or call (818) 985-2711 ext. 504……” [ and more – see ]
and if someone wants to copy all the 10 comments, above as listed [the most seen on this website about any 1 article] to the KPFK website, directing it to the above, or also writing directly to the GM, iPD, or LSB members, that could also be done.
and more similar can be comments solicited and added there too. Just to show that there is not just silent +intimidated+ passive+ agreement with how the programs are being scrambled, cut, mutilated, etc.
Activists like to take action. Assume that everyone above is doing more of this same work elsewhere also.
The new content midnight to 3am seems like a slap in the face to us night people that have listened and supported kpfk so that we’d be assured of a venue that we love. I’m worried what will happen to Roy, on a personal level, first and foremost. I can always find something to listen to, but not another Roy. I find it distasteful and disrespectful that the brass replaces him with inexperienced people who trod over the timeslot with little to no regard for the history, listeners or content they are replacing.
At least replace it with something relatively parable. Or rather than ‘slam bam here we are’, a tapered segue Would have been wise instead of a thumb to the nose.
Sad times. Saw the downfall coming awhile back, yet didn’t really want to face the dismal truth. Had hope and now the writing is on the wall.
Start a podcast Roy or app. We will support you.
Killing time waiting to hear our friend. Now 2:40am
I’ll catch my weekly Alan Watts and crash for a couple of hours til I have to go to work.
I’ve been listening to What’s Happening since the very beginning. I can’t imagine why they would cut his hours. I listened to the first week of the new stuff and what a bunch of junk. Terrible selections of content for us insomniacs. I will be listening to KFI from midnight to three am from now on. KPFK ‘suits’.. come to your senses and give us back the informative and interesting programming that only Roy can create!
Isn’t there a new local board? Did anyone ask them if they wanted Roy removed? Or was this done before the new board could be seated?
I listen to the 2 NPR stations at night as well as Roy and those overnight people are never, ever asked to raise even a nickle. They stop fund raising at 8:00 PM and don’t start up again until 6:00 AM. So in a time slot that no one else raises a nickle Roy raises $15.000 per fund drive.
I hope the new board has a couple of business people on it.
I can get Ralph Nader, Thom Hartman and Dave Emory on their own websites but it was nice having them all together.
Now that KPFK has dumped all the shows I’ve liked over the years I guess I’ll find something else to listen to.
There goes another $200 a year.
Good work guys.
I’ve listened to Roy for almost four decades and supported the station the best I could along the way(last donation was $500, didn’t want any premiums).
New blood comes along and blindly bulldozes everything the station was built on. I feel plowed over and dismissed and sadly, one of the most devoted radio hosts has been as well. New blood doesn’t get it and think if they plant a seed it will grow. Why remove an established oak to plant a seedling. Surely there can be more creative ways to find a middle ground.
Yet this pretty much sums up the way of the land. Push the old aside. With age comes wisdom. We need wisdom these days.
The call letters KPFK really meant something to people like me.
Fortunately, technology affords incredible alternatives and if things keep going the way they are at KPFK there are podcasts that guys like Roy can resort to and continue the quest and service for people that get it and truly appreciate it.
Roy has devoted his life to his work and the station. Another Vet shoved aside?
What a mess.
Dave in Calistoga
I have observed a recurring pattern at KPFK over the decades.
Whenever the nation’s political scene gets “interesting” the management says “OMG, we gotta DO SOMETHING”, and dials up the “revolutionary” content… at the expense of general-interest content.
The problem is that the listening audience eventually burns out on all-politics-all-the-time radio. Attempts to appeal to a younger, more ethically diverse audience are a worthy goal, but young people are listening to Pandora and podcasts these days, not FM-radio… and for the most part, they’re too broke to sustain yet another monthly subscription.
The older, less-diverse, suburban listeners do have the wherewithal to subscribe. If they’re like me, they don’t mind subsidizing a certain amount of airtime devoted to the younger audience, the Spanish-speaking audience and the urban/minority audience.
But we do require a certain number of hours devoted to our bourgeois interests as well: informed political commentary, eclectic music, health, spirituality, drama, history and culture (and yes, even cars and computers).
To reach the young urban audience, the station needs the financial support of the middle-class suburban audience. The management should recognize the need for balance and tinker with the proportions very carefully.
Yes – I am a long-time listener supporter and sustaining supporter of KPFK and I totally agree with the previous comments. I’m not opposed to testing new programs, but proven programming like Somethings Happening, with loyal listeners, that makes money for the station, should not be replaced as a testing ground for newstuff. Friday, Saturday, or Sunday nights would be better choices. I tried listening to the new programs last night (Tuesday night; but I missed the midnight to 1 program). The poetry program was good; maybe the rap music that followed was too – wouldn’t know, it’s not my thing. I do know the rap shouldn’t be sandwiched between poetry and Something’s Happening – like putting bad meat between two good pieces of bread (sorry my prejudice is showing). Anyhow, bottom line is, the excellent quality of Something’s Happening never waivers and should be left in its midnight to 6:00 slot.
I am flattened. I have been listening to Royalmost since the begining. His show has been my deep political ,musical, literary, spiritual, medical, anthropolical, psychological education, His selections and comments have reached and changed my central perception of Life and the world. He was the only one present when the police raided KPFK after midnight in was it 1974 to find the SLA Patty Hearst tapes and he was able to handle them and deflect them from great damage.
He was the ONLY ONLY media person to reach the Iranina hostage takers in Iran during the Hostage Crisis. He continues to shed the inner light on the dynamics of our very dangerous world and makes loads of money for the station during what is elsewhere dead time.
But, There is no use telling any of this to management. There are ovbviously ulterior motives that have nothing to do with quality, or popularity or donations to the station. What it is, I am not sure of, but getting rid of your political enemies and shooing away their supporters from involvement with the station would be a good start. I am really deeply dissappointed that the Program Director and the General Manager have not, for the sake of the station, stood up to those in the background maneuvering all these changes.
His was the only overnight program worth listening to when I lived in an area I could receive the station. Now all I can get is that pathetic program on AM where nobody has the courage of their convictions when talking about UFO’s.
No wonder you are loosing listenership when you replace “What Works” with wannabes
My sentiment exactly: it says a lot about things Southern California in general, when out of arguably the prime media market in the world, the only show you could get worth listening to in the wee hours around L.A. has been Roy of Hollywood.
But to truncate the presence of that offering by half, what a shameful atrocity. Shows the kind of trolls calling the shots right now, not that the listeners’ interests or input are going to have any impact on their attitudes.
I haven’t posted this for them.
Seems like someone wants to launch his little pathetic radio career at the dedicated listener’s expense. Also, at Roy’s expense, but he never puts his own welfare ahead of the listeners. I predict the hip new radio programmers better keep their day job – oops, that might be in jeopardy too – well, I wouldn’t get too comfortable in the chair in the studio, Adam.
This sucks. Roy of Hollywood is an institution surviving in the former institution of kpfk. I miss so many of the former programs of kpfa/kpfk. Almost nothing left. Mama O’shea-gone; Ed Archer “Preaching the Blues”-gone; Andrea L’Enthall ” 12 o’clock rock”-gone. Tim and the Gang on “Maximum RocknRoll”- gone. Just a few of the volunteer programmers who were rudely and suddenly dumped and replaced with what? I can’t even remember because the replacements could never connect with the audience. So the audience finally left.
KPFK SHOULD HONOR THIE LOYAL AND SUCCESSFUL PROGRAMMER ROY TUCKMAN. I PLEDGED MANY TIMES FOR HIS SHOW, AND MISS HIS LATE NIGHT,EARLY MORN PRESENCE.
Dear Roy, I love you man. Some 25 years ago I was an avid listener to your show. For my , alchoholism went to Jamestown prison. As a clerk I became friends with incarcerated Indians. They had NO archives to there history, I wrote you and you sent a box of cassettes of Pow Wow’s, etc. Bless your heart. I really miss Laural Kenner Blues. ( and my friend Berney Pearl ). Just wanted to say I’m still with you. Bicycle Bob (KLON), now in Durango, CO.