VOICE OF THE CABAL.

Any night but Thursday, Bob Fass likes to wait until after twelve o'clock, after his wife, Lynnie, has gone to sleep, and then drive his banged-up old Chrysler from his house, in Staten Island, to Manhattan, where he bombs up and down the avenues, imagining the radio show he might be doing. For nearly five decades, the hours before dawn have been Fass's prime time. He's an all-night radio man, a shy hulking fellow, round-shouldered and fleshy, with a few remaining strands of hair pulled back in a thin ponytail. As he drives from Staten Island through New Jersey and into the Holland Tunnel, Fass reviews the events of the day, the latest on the war in Iraq, the pronouncements of President George W. Bush, and with each clip of Bush's voice he summons a piece of music, a lyric, a sixties protest song, or a choice snippet of irony from Richard Nixon or Lenny Bruce. Played back to back, or, better yet, played simultaneously, the right pieces of sound create a commentary, an audio art piece, the kind of blend that Fass has been mixing on his show on WBAI, "Radio Unnameable," since 1962.

When Fass, who is seventy-three, arrives downtown at the WBAI studios, he stops in to see one of the few old friends who still manage to keep his hours. Or he picks up his mail, or he just drives and listens for the connections. In his mind, he hears the juxtapositions of speech and song that, long before cable TV, the Internet, or satellite radio, made Fass's show on the listener-sponsored station a place where musicians tried out new material, political rebels plotted, and the young and the outsiders gathered to convince themselves that they were not alone. Fass's "Radio Unnameable" used to be on five nights a week. No more: most nights now, Fass tunes the radio to 99.5 FM and listens to his midnight successors: Moorish Orthodox anarchists, a bisexual pagan feminist, ravers, and an African-American comedy troupe--a lineup that reflects the factionalism that has come to consume WBAI. While much of the station's white, liberal audience drifted away, managers and program hosts went at one another with lawsuits, personnel purges, and fights over race, ideology, and how to appeal to the city's growing black, Latino, and Asian populations. As a result of those internecine struggles, Fass, the station's last link to its role as a narrator and an organizer of New York's nineteen-sixties protest movement, has been relegated to one night a week, Thursday.

For twenty years, Fass has been almost a ghost at WBAI. Some staffers know how he found a way, even at the pinnacle of the Top Forty era of shouting d.j.s and dance crazes, to put the counterculture on the radio. Some have a vague notion that he started free-form radio, each night creating a program with no format, an improvised melange of live music, speeches, and random phone calls. "Radio Unnameable" was a radio party line on which Fass piled one caller atop another and said, "Speak among yourselves." It was a forum for eyewitness reports from war zones and urban conflicts, recitations of poetry and prose, solicitations for political causes, testimonials for illegal drugs, and experiments with noise and silence.

Driving back home to Staten Island with the radio off, Fass keeps his attention fixed on the next show, even when it is a week away. As the Chrysler glides over the empty Bayonne Bridge, Fass is elsewhere: cuing up a Hare Krishna chant to accompany a speech by Adolf Hitler; or playing the first version of Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant," which Fass liked so much that he once played it repeatedly for the better part of five hours; or inviting Marshall Efron to recite "The Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld," in which snippets from the erstwhile Secretary of Defense's news briefings are rejiggered to make him sound like a steely version of a Beat poet.

Fass pulls up in front of his ramshackle bungalow, across from an abandoned chocolate factory. The inside of his house is a thicket of old clothes, towers of videocassettes, and hundreds of boxes containing tape reels, the primary archive of "Radio Unnameable." The tapes form teetering piles in the living room, down the halls, and into the bedrooms--boxes and boxes of them, thousands of hours of recordings featuring Bob Dylan and Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary and Wavy Gravy, Allen Ginsberg and Kinky Friedman. Many of the tapes are not labelled. Fass fumbles through a pile and finds a show to play. From the writing on the box, it's not clear if the show originally aired in 1969 or 1999. Whatever the year, the program begins the same way, a bed of quiet and then, very softly, "This is 'Radio Unnameable.' My name's Bob Fass. Good morning, cabal."

As the tape rolls, seven cats slip in and out of the room. Ceiling tiles droop down onto stacked tape decks and VCRs. Speaker wire crisscrosses the room, strung from one bookshelf to another, from the ceiling to the floor, a tangle of dozens of attempts to mine the sounds of the past. Worn rugs lie atop other worn rugs. Old sports jackets hang from a metal rod. In a shoebox, Fass finds a show from the height of the protests against the Vietnam War. He listens and waits for Thursday. "I'd like to do more on the radio," he ...