The WHFS Doc Is Finally Coming to Your TV

When Jay Schlossberg announced his plan to make a documentary about beloved former Bethesda radio station WHFS, there was an outpouring of public support: A Kickstarter campaign raised more than $65,000 to fund it. Washingtonian wrote a story at the time, saying the film was due out the following year. Uh, nope: That was back in 2015. But though it took much longer than anticipated, Schlossberg and his team have finally completed the movie, called Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS 102.3. It will air on WETA starting September 14 and on the PBS app.

For anyone who remembers WHFS only as a corporate alt-rock station from the 1990s, the documentary will come as a surprise. Feast Your Ears focuses on its earlier incarnation as a freeform hub for roots, blues, folk, and lots of other genres. Artists such as Bruce Springsteen and Bonnie Raitt would drop by, and the station was an early champion of local favorites like Little Feat and NRBQ. Now Feast Your Ears tells the whole story of the station’s unlikely rise and peak years, featuring interviews with DJs (Cerphe, Weasel, Josh Brooks), musicians (Emmylou Harris, Joan Armatrading, Roger McGuinn), and other people involved.

Schlossberg, who lives in North Potomac, had never made a film; he runs a company that provides production crews and equipment to content companies. When he was a teen in the early 1970s, he scored a summer job at WHFS, and he’s felt connected to the station ever since. The documentary idea struck him in 2013, when he saw a photo on Facebook of a panel discussion featuring some of the classic era’s DJs. “I said, ‘Oh, my God—there they all are!’ ” Schlossberg recalls. “ ‘Somebody needs to tell the story.’ ”

To make that happen, he reached out to Weasel (whose real name is Jonathan Gilbert) and Brooks, and they invited people associated with the station to a party at Bethesda’s Triangle Towers, where the station was located in the 1970s and where Weasel still lives. “We just had a little party,” says Schlossberg. “I stood in front of everybody and said, ‘This is my idea. I really want to do this. Are you with me?’ And they pretty much all said, ‘Hell, yeah.’ ”

Schlossberg assembled a team including Dick Bangham, an artist and motion-graphics designer who was a key collaborator. But work proved unexpectedly slow, especially after the pandemic arrived. Little old footage exists, so Bangham did a lot of work creating visuals that elevate the film beyond a series of talking heads.

Feast Your Ears was finished last year, and Schlossberg showed it at film festivals, including a couple of sold-out screenings in our area. Meanwhile, several people interviewed have since died, and Schlossberg is aware that the doc will preserve an important slice of the city’s culture. He wanted to tell the story of WHFS, he says, “as a record for this generation and future generations that this happened. It was great.”

This article appears in the September 2024 issue of Washingtonian.

Rob Brunner

Politics and Culture Editor

Rob Brunner grew up in DC and moved back in 2017 to join Washingtonian. Previously, he was an editor and writer at Fast Company and other publications. He lives with his family in Chevy Chase DC.