Fantasy Park revisited

Fantasy Park was a 48-hour theatre-of-the-mind music festival, an imaginary rock concert aired by nearly 200 radio stations over the Independence Day weekend in 1975. Cooked up by a Dallas radio station, it used a mix of cuts from live and studio albums backed with crowd noises, complete with stage announcements, backstage interview and sound effects.

I caught bits and pieces of it when it originally aired and then again this past Labor Day weekend when the program streamed online. The slate of artists was a mid-seventies wish list; today it’s “classic vinyl”:

Friday: Chicago, Elton John, Joe Walsh, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton.

Saturday: Cream, Shawn Phillips, Pink Floyd, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Carole King, Poco, Alvin Lee, Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Dave Mason, Steve Miller Band, BB King, Stevie Wonder, John Denver, Beach Boys, War, Grand Funk, Yes.

Sunday: Deep Purple, Steely Dan, Jesse Colin Young, Cat Stevens, The Who, Rolling Stones, Moody Blues, Marshall Tucker Band, Allman Brothers, Van Morrison.

Monday: Harry Chapin, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Santana, Bee Gees, Paul Simon, Seals and Croft, America, Joni Mitchell, Doobie Brothers, Loggins and Messina, CSN&Y, Bob Dylan, Beatles.

Looking back, it’s a little odd. John Denver, Seals and Croft, and Carly Simon? Shawn Phillips, whose highest charting U.S. album reached #57? No Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane (Starship at this point), The Band, Jethro Tull, ELP.

In two years, nearly half the Fantasy Park performers would begin losing traction artistically and in album sales, replaced by performers who had yet to work out their sound or were still toiling in the minor leagues, like Boston, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Frampton, Wings, Heart, Bob Segar, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty.

But for now, and as befitting a concert of the mind taking place during the smiley face decade, it’s nothing but good vibes all around. During the Beach Boys set, we’re told by the program’s roving reporter that the band was “really getting into it.” “It’s 1965 all over again,” he added after I Get Around, forgetting that the record came out in 1964.

Fireworks follow the Moody Blues, a Frisbee competition is held “over by the lake” and some dweeb talks kite-flying. During Joni Mitchell’s performance, a nurse who helped with the medical tent delivery of a baby is interviewed (a girl, 7 lbs., 10 oz., no name yet, but Joni would’ve been nice). No mention of any ODs or bad trips.

All 48 hours played over a looped bed of crowd noise that included a woman shrieking every couple of minutes, a Woodstockian Wilhelm scream that makes one wonder if the Ohio Players weren’t on the bill.

Fantasy Park naturally ends with the great white hoped-for, a Beatles reunion, a what-if played out repeatedly at the time in the rock press and during stoned conversations among fans. With between-song patter taken from Let It Be and other sources, their relatively brief set ends with John’s “We’d like to do something that we don’t normally get the chance to do,” – well, yeah – then A Day in the Life.

As the song ends, we can assume that the 750,000 concert goers have dropped through a trap door and the program ends abruptly with the sound of crickets chirping.

When it aired in 1975, listeners supposedly flooded radio station phone lines looking for tickets and directions. The IRS showed up at one station following up on gate receipts to ensure the government got its cut. Not quite as extreme a reaction that the War of the Worlds broadcast received in 1938, but maybe that’s an idea for a future special: Martians invade Woodstock.

Do you remember rock and roll radio?

AM radio has been marginalized over the decades into a continuum of right-wing clowns and sports talk.

(Which is a reminder that in 2017, New Jersey’s conservative Republican governor, Chris Christie, reaching his term limit, was considering a second career on sports-talk WFAN, on paper a peanut-butter-and-chocolate combination. He did a couple of fill-in stints, but it didn’t work out for the haughty and dismissive Christie. Arrogance worked for Mike Francesa, the afternoon host WFAN was looking to replace, but Francesa knew his shit. Christie wasn’t about to get his hands dirty digging into the minutia of the final seconds of a Knicks-Pistons game in the middle of January).

Tangents aside, there are occasional outliers on the AM dial that have resisted talk radio. WMTR, based in North Jersey, plays “classic oldies,” music for those of us who grew up between the Eisenhower and Carter administrations. Yeah, there are plenty of commercials and traffic and weather updates. Ski condition reports in the winter. And if you're listening while driving, you'll experience those waterfalls of static that occasionally wash over the broadcast. 

But the station owns a playlist that defies expectations. As part of a national chain of radio stations, there must be algorithms at work, but it seems programmed to purposely feel not like the spoon-fed comfort food one can expect on any of SiriusXM’s “oldie” channels.

Forgotten instrumentals? Here comes Cast Your Fate to the Wind by Sounds Orchestral. Obscure doo-wop? Morse Code of Love by the Capris. Novelty tunes like The Purple People Eater. Pure schlock like Danke Schoen. You Keep Me Hangin' On by the Vanilla Fudge. Love Or Let Me Be Lonely by The Friends of Distinction. The Cookies’ Chains. Out of nowhere, Thunder Road. WMTR can almost – almost – feel like free-form radio at times.

A shuffle through such a wide playlist creates strange bedfellows. You can bear sitting through Helen Reddy’s divorced mom saga You and Me Against the World if it’s followed by Billy Preston’s Will It Go Round in Circles. It works the other way as well: Nobody wants to come off Eight Miles High into Who Put the Bomp. Another strange transition was Wonderful! Wonderful! by Johnny Mathis leading into Wild Cherry’s Play That Funky Music.

But reconsider the seemingly randomness of playing those two records back-to-back: Mathis, an African American sounding safely Caucasian with a record produced by Mitch Miller and featuring the Ray Conniff Singers, followed by an all-white funk band doing a Rick James imitation on a song that went to #1 on the Billboard R&B charts.

If it’s an algorithm, it has a sense of humor.