Gordon bahary biography

Born in Long Island, New York, Gordon Bahary started writing songs at age 10, self-taught on the piano. His dream was to have his own radio station. With radios and parts, and after sparks, electrical shocks, and blown fuses in his house, he produced a signal from a radio that could be heard on another radio down the hall and eventually could transmit music. By climbing trees and his roof, when his parents weren’t aware of it, he built an antenna and amplifier so that signal could reach his friends in school. On his show, he imitated various voices and borrowed his family’s records to play, and eventually hosted a telephone call-in show to his parents home phone number. The little station also gave him an opportunity to listen to musical detail more closely on headphones.
As the power of his station grew, the range expanded to hundreds of miles at night on AM radio and across the Atlantic on shortwave radio (“WGSB -FM” and “The Voice of Communism” on shortwave, which was Bahary’s parody on the cold war; listed in radio books and archived by listeners on the Web). Hundreds of post cards came in from all over the world. He couldn’t wait to get home from school to fire-up that transmitter. Homework could wait. A few years later, his friend gave him a powerful transmitter and showed him how to set-up a 400-foot long antenna; now he could be heard over half the U.S. at night. He went too far; one night he found out the Federal Communications Commission was searching for him for a year. They hunted him down, spreading the word that he’d better dismantle the station, or face grave consequences. The transmitter and tapes were buried underground at 4am as neighbors heard clanging and watched through their windows thinking something other than a transmitter was being buried. For now, his broadcasting days were over.
Writing songs became his passion, inspired by The Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and Harry Chapin (his next-door neighbor at the time). Bahary tried to reach Stevie Wonder for months to get his music heard, running up phone bills that he dreaded his parents might see the detail of. When Wonder heard Bahary’s songs in 1975, he asked him to fly to Los Angeles and gave him the generous opportunity to attend the recording sessions of the album “Songs In the Key of Life” at Crystal Studios in L.A. At 15 years-old, there was the dilemma of attending 10th grade while working with Wonder. His parents were supportive against much opposition in his school, which divided the school into two groups of teachers basically at war. He graduated studying mostly alone while traveling. in L.A. Bahary showed Wonder new possibilities of synthesized sounds he created, helping enable Wonder to play various instruments electronically through a keyboard. His hands were shaking as they held Stevie’s fingers and oriented him to all the buttons.