Oliver Stone 1938-2001 Jazz, Yoga, Revolutionaries and Ruffians
After studying architecture for a good long spell and itching to get back to his musical side, Mark Weaver was listening to the radio, suddenly got up and “on a lark” headed to KUNM one day back in 1982. “I just walked in,” he recalled.
Practically the first person Weaver encountered was a quirky fellow going by the name of Oliver Stone- the radio personality and not the Hollywood film director, that is.
Three years earlier the station had named Mr. Stone chief announcer, or “the chief jock,” in the radio world slang of ex-KUNM deejay Charlie “Mr. Hot Lix” Zdravesky. Holding a vital job in the day-to-day functioning of KUNM, Mr. Stone was also responsible for coordinating volunteers and training newcomers like Weaver.
Soon enough, Weaver and Stone not only shared the same radio airwaves but wound up playing clarinet and bass clarinet together. According to Weaver, Stone’s favorite jazz musician was Gerry Mulligan. He also especially liked jazz players Eric Dolphy and Jimmy Giuffre, Weaver added.
Oliver Stone’s own path to KUNM was a long and varied one, twisting and turning through the U.S. Navy, academia, music land, the countercultural press, taxi cab driver adventures, and the wreckage of automobiles and appliances.
Possessing a bachelor’s degree in English from Chicago’s Roosevelt University and a master’s in English Literature from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, the future broadcaster put his college studies to good use at SUNY and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where he taught English.
Once describing himself to the Albuquerque Journal as a beatnik, in reference to the generation of rebellious writers, revelers and renegades of the late 1940s and 1950s which gave the world Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and sundry friends, Oliver waxed philosophical: “I gravitated to universities. What’s wrong with that? The world is a learning place and the university is a kindergarten. It’s a place for personal growth and evolution. The rest of the world is designed for T.S. Elliot’s ‘Hollow Men…”
Like other restless souls of the era, Oliver Stone’s road somehow ended in a place called Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Tom Guralnick, former KUNM jazz show host and founder of Albuquerque’s Outpost Performance Space, met Stone through the New Mexico Jazz Workshop in the late 1970s, recalling that his new acquaintance played woodwinds as well as bass clarinet.
“(Stone) was a musician, a deejay, a character, and a good guy from way back when,” Guralnick offered.
Veteran KUNM deejay Claude Stephenson remembered when Stone became involved with Only the Radio, the station’s old live music show. Prior to its Saturday afternoon slot, Only the Radio aired early the same morning, after the bars closed, and sometimes featured musicians who had just finished a club gig and agreed to kick out a few more jams for KUNM, regardless of their musical acumen at the particular moment.
In its early days, Only the Radio was notorious for nighttime audio stunts like loading up hundreds of feet of audio cable on “something round they could roll it on” so crew members could stretch a line from the station located in UNM’s Oñate Hall to a microphone handled by a program producer at Girard and Central Avenue, where the intrepid interviewer might conduct live man/woman interviews on the street, Stephenson said.
“The idea was to go to Central, ‘cause that’s where they could find crazies,” Stephenson chuckled.
Oliver, however, missed out on that part of the action, he added.
By the early 1980s, Oliver Stone was a high-profile voice and the occasional public face of KUNM. Quoted in the New Mexico Daily Lobo in late 1981, he argued for management stability at KUNM, which had gone through four permanent or temporary general managers during the previous five years.
Meanwhile, the pipe-smoking programmer held down the 10 am to 2 pm shift of assorted sounds while assigned the task of breaking in the station’s new volunteers- to varying degrees.
Former KUNM Freeform deejay Mary Bokuniewicz (Mary B.) who ended a better-than 35-year run at KUNM one Friday the 13th in 2018, once wrote that she got her start in the “Oliver Stone school of train-yourself to be a deejay.”
Mary B’s erstwhile mentor was analytical about his latest profession.
“Radio is an unforgiving medium. Sometimes I think no one is listening,” Oliver was famously quoted. “We have to fight being electronic wallpaper…”
Contemplating the woes of the radio host, he said, “..People recognize my voice but I wish they could see the other side of it, the hassles and criticism from people who call in. These things can really sting you.”
Both Stephenson and Zdravesky attested to Oliver’s sometimes contentious style, part of the wardrobe of a man who was apt to ruffle feathers.
Zdravesky, for instance, recalled the occasion when Oliver stormed into the control room during a regular Saturday evening broadcast of Zdravesky’s Hot Lix oldies show, stridently complaining that he had recently heard Charlie Z. do one of his “Thanksgiving Football Day Alternative” shows, a live production that featured a B.B. King song which “offended” diners at a Thanksgiving dinner Oliver was attending.
“I said, ‘Don’t take it up with me, take it up with B.B. King’,” Zdravesky remembered telling Oliver. As it turned out, a studio guest and old friend of the deejay’s was on hand for the exchange.
The man, who not only proudly possessed a bagful of “phenomenal 1950s’ records” but also at one time happened to be a “small time enforcer for one of the Five Families in the Bronx” was angered at Oliver’s intrusion. He generously offered to contact a couple of heavies who were in the vicinity after Oliver “locked himself in his office,” according to Mr. Hot Lix.
“I said no, no, no, the guy’s harmless,” he recalled. Later, at a KUNM party, Zdravesky informed Oliver about the averted consequences of the B.B. King brouhaha. “He was turning white,” in front of everyone, “even whiter than he was,” Mr. Hot Lix added.
Still, the former host of KUNM’s old Saturday evening oldies show had kudos for Stone, who once hosted KUNM’s classical musical program when it ran on Sundays.
“He knew his classical music. I believe KUNM had the best classical music library in the state. I’d listen to him on the way back home and he seemed to know what he was talking about,” Zdravesky said.
Weaver agreed that Stone was “blunt and outspoken,” but found redeeming qualities in an off-beat radio man.
“He definitely championed original viewpoints and even provocative viewpoints, which I think is valuable. He was irreverent, which I also think is valuable. He had a great knack with the microphone, the oddball he was.”
Oliver Stone was actually born Phil Andrew Pukas in August 1938, the year before World War Two began.
In 1970, writing under his birth name, KUNM’s future Oliver Stone worked as a reporter for the Berkeley Barb, one of the pioneering publications of the underground press of the time.
He penned reports from the ground on the 1969-1971 occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay by Indians of All Tribes, the Gay Liberation Front of San Francisco, early Iranian student protests in the U.S. against the Shah of Iran, and the Soledad Brothers trial of George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Cluchette.
Accused of killing a guard at a California state prison, the Soledad Brothers were three African American prisoners whose case symbolized the emergence of the radical prison movement in the United States.
On a distinct note, Pukas covered the activities of the utopian, sex-centered OM United World Brigade cult, once writing about the time three members strolled down Telegraph Avenue stark naked “in their drive to save humanity.”
Pukas visited the group’s local offices, where he was served a “very heavy on onion” salad by “one of the goddesses.” He interviewed OM’s male leader, who claimed to hail from “spaceless space and timeless time to bring God’s message to men,” and professed a new world free of material worries. “On the side, he will eliminate ‘misery, strife and outcry.’ And while he’s at it, he’ll eliminate crime and empty the mental hospitals,” the Barb’s busy reporter informed readers.
Pukas wrote in the raw, uninhibited style of the countercultural press, his prose speckled with the unabashedly revolutionary vernacular of the times. In a piece on the Alcatraz occupation, he penned, “It’s been a year now that Alcatraz has been Indian land. A year since fourteen Indians truned (sic) the White man’s landgrab back on him took the rotting prison carcass and put life in it…”
Edgar Hoover’s G-men took notice of Pukas’ reporting. At least one of Pukas’ articles made it into an FBI file on the Black Panther Party and National Committee to Combat Fascism, as part of an investigation into alleged violations of the Smith Act of 1940, seditious conspiracy and rebellion and insurrection.
In hindsight, Pukas/Stone covered stories first hand that were social and political watersheds, many of which still reverberate today.
For instance, organizers of the 2018 national prison protest in the United States chose August 21, the day in 1971 that George Jackson was shot to death by San Quentin prison guards in a bloody, alleged prison break, as the beginning of protest actions that culminated on September 9, the anniversary of the 1971 Attica prison uprising in New York which left 39 inmates and guards killed by state troopers dispatched by Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
In his Duke City days, Phil Pukas a.k.a. Oliver Stone resembled a jack-of-all-trades. He taught yoga, worked for the classical music format station KHFM in addition to KUNM, and was employed by the Technical Vocational Institute, Central New Mexico Community College’s predecessor. The freeforming man even tried his hand at substitute teaching for Albuquerque Public Schools.
Volunteering his time, Stone pitched in with the New Mexico Jazz Workshop, United Way and the Cathedral Church of St. John. And that’s only part of his resume.
“He was a kind of mechanical genius. For a while, he was mainly supporting himself getting and fixing old electrical appliances…he would fix cars,” Weaver said.
Despite earlier differences with Stone, Claude Stephenson said he would give him tips on where to find old appliances to repair, sometimes “truck loads” of the stuff.
Stone lived and worked out of a Nob Hill home where “his room was kind of a music space,” Weaver recalled.
The residence was situated next to the alley behind the old Baca’s Mexican Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge on Central Avenue, an emblematic Albuquerque eating and drinking establishment that opened in 1949 and shuttered its doors in 1997. The business’ co-founder and owner, 60-year-old Milton E. Baca, was mortally stabbed in a 1975 crime near the restaurant that made local headlines.
Snuggled on the 3300 block of Central NE, the former Baca’s building was eventually torn down and the block transformed into a multi-level red-bricked complex that boasted a parking structure, upper floor living spaces and ground-floor stores offering trendy teas, cool chocolates, soothing smoothies, and upscale eyewear.
Stone’s old abode near Baca’s also succumbed to the fateful winds of history, when it too was demolished in a fit of gentrification. In 2018 the block often exuded a semi-ghostly air, as a near-empty parking structure and darkened lofts sat where Baca’s sizzling enchiladas and real New Mexico chile along with Stone’s serendipitous sounds and reborn refrigerators once added to the community ambiance.
Whether as a volunteer or paid staff member, Oliver Stone left an unmistakable print at KUNM between the late 1970s and early 1990s.
Gravely ill from cancer, he passed away in December 2001. An unforgettable spirit was survived by his two sons, Andrew Hermer and Nicolas Grace-Stone, his close friend Marilyn V. Ginny Grace, and many friends.
“He definitely followed his own path,” Mark Weaver said.
Sources: Mark Weaver, Tom Guralnick, Claude Stephenson, Charlie Zdravesky. Berkeley Barb, June 12-18 1970 and November 20-26, 1970. New Mexico Daily Lobo, October 20, 1981. Albuquerque Journal, February 19, 1982.
https://dev.radiofreeamerica.com/dj/mary-bokunewicz
https://www.tripsavvy.com/remembering-vintage-albuquerque-57221 file:///C:/Users/Production/Downloads/COINTEL_BPP_157-2753_2.pdf
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/47312573/milton-e.-baca
http://obits.abqjournal.com/obits/show/130504
Edited by Kent Paterson
