Joshua Brooks, who brought underground rock to D.C. airwaves, dies at 73
Joshua Brooks, who brought underground rock to D.C. airwaves, dies at 73
By Adam Bernstein
Obituary editor
Feb. 10, 2020 at 9:21 p.m. EST
Joshua Brooks, an original member of the Washington DJ trio known as Spiritus Cheese, which helped transform WHFS-FM into a haven for underground rock and a respite from Top-40 blandness that pervaded the music scene, died Jan. 30 at a rehabilitation center in Frederick, Md. He was 73. ... The cause was complications from lung cancer, said his son, Zachary Brooks.
WHFS began life in 1961 as a 2,300-watt station in Bethesda, Md., that beamed the string instrumentals of Mantovani, the serene pop of Patti Page and other easy-listening favorites. Some wags suggested that the station’s call letters, an acronym for Washington High Fidelity Stereo, stood for We Have Frank Sinatra.
General manager and part-owner Jake Einstein, an advertising salesman who came of age in the 1920s and ’30s, had not grown up a rock enthusiast but had instincts for profitable radio.
Mr. Brooks and Weasel (Jonathan Gilbert) hosting the “WHFS Farewell to Josh/Root Boy Slim Record Release Concert” in 1978. (Peter Dykstra/RipBang Pictures)
“Then a guy named Frank Richards came in one day wearing cutoffs and a leather vest, played me a tape of rock music from Los Angeles,” Einstein told The Washington Post in 1983, adding: “We were losing so much money that another couple of dollars couldn’t hurt, right? So we put him on. My God, the calls! I never knew we had an audience!”
He became convinced he could drive up ratings — a paltry 800 listeners a night — by changing to a more contemporary format. He was receptive when three young Bard College friends and aspiring DJs — Joshua Brooks, Sara Vass and Mark Gorbulew — walked into WHFS in July 1969 and proposed a free-form blues and rock program they wanted to call Spiritus Cheese. They also agreed to pay Einstein for the privilege, $160 for each segment, to run four consecutive Saturday nights.
“We had spent our years in college being stoned and listening to music, and we wanted to be able to continue that,” Mr. Brooks told The Post in 2005. “We just wanted to get the music out there and make enough money to sustain ourselves.”
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Mr. Brooks, Vass and Gorbulew spent their days scouring local record stores, recruiting advertisers and interviewing musicians at clubs and festivals. They managed to get backstage at Woodstock that August, thanks to a musician friend of Mr. Brooks. “We had access to anybody we wanted,” he later told the Frederick News-Post, noting Jerry Garcia and Neil Young among the acts who agreed to interviews.
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WHFS
The last I heard, Weasel was at WTMD.
= new reply since forum marked as read
That was the print title of the article that appeared on page B3 of the Washington Post for Tuesday, July 21, 2015. Did I ever pick a good day to clean my cubicle.
Local
Remembering the days when WHFS ruled a tiny slice of D.C.’s airwaves
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)
By John KellyJuly 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.’ ” ... By “do something about this,” Jay didn’t mean hunt down the DJs and dispatch them one by one, but make a documentary about them and their beloved station.
The story really starts in 1969, when Mark Gorbulew, Sara Vass and Joshua Brooks came down from New York City in search of a home for their “underground” radio program. What they found was WHFS, an easy-listening station that didn’t have many listeners. ... Spiritus Cheese — named after a defunct New York City cheese factory — struck a deal: They would pay the station $160 for each show they broadcast. Before long, ratings had risen, they were on the air every night but Sunday — and they shared a $100 weekly paycheck from the station.
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Twitter: @johnkelly
For previous columns, visit [link:http:s//washingtonpost.com/johnkelly|washingtonpost.com/johnkelly].
‘No Suits. No Corporate Control.’ Remembering The Freeform Heyday Of WHFS 102.3
Ally Schweitzer
Courtesy Jay Schlossberg
“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.
“This is what we called freeform progressive music,” says Schlossberg, 60. “No suits. No corporate control.”
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.”
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