The Pacifica Foundation, was born in the late 1940’s out of the (now nearly forgotten) peace movement surrounding World War II. Lewis Hill, a conscientious objector and Washington, D.C. newsman, was fired from his mainstream reporting job when he refused to misrepresent the facts. He started Pacifica Radio and in 1949 KPFA went on the air from Berkeley, California. During the 1960s Pacifica Radio and the Pacifica Folio magazine became a major part of the burgeoning counterculture, featured programmes were an eclectic mix, with everything from exposing FBI corruption on air, coverage of the awakening civil rights movement, Zen poems read by eastern philosopher Alan Watts to radio documentaries on Black Power origins, interviews with Jerry Garcia and Neil Young, investigations into California’s cult problem, breaking Seymour Hersh’s 1969 My Lai massacre news report.

Later in the 1970s Pacifica championed many of the new emerging youth subcultures, among them the Dungeons & Dragons craze. What started out as military strategy game quickly became a lifestyle and extension of the waning counterculture. Music taste, style and recreational drug use would all factor into this new burgeoning youth cult. The game was so popular by 1978 that U.S. Army intelligence sent two agents to infiltrate D&D founder Gary Gygax’s war-gaming circle in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, believing that the group’s tabletop re-enactments with miniature figures might be training sessions for would-be anti-government insurgents.

This collection is an homage to the stories of radical exploration and ideology of Pacifica Radio.