FM (11 page)

My classmates were by and large straight kids—they dressed neatly, drank beer, had sex with their girlfriends on Saturday night with the dorm room door open a crack, but were part of the establishment. They didn’t like certain aspects of it, but thought that the best road to change was to attain power themselves, and then shape society toward gentler values from within. They secretly cheered on the campus protesters, hoping that their long hair and unconventional dress would not detract from their message. I don’t know who was more naÏve, the protesters or those who remained silent.

Bruce Springsteen tells a story about growing up in that era. Through the sixties, he was constantly at war with his father, who disapproved of his long hair and guitar playing. High school grades were not Bruce’s forte, and after turning in a bad report card or getting into trouble with the authorities, his dad would often tell him, “I can’t wait ’til the army gets ahold of you. They’ll make a man out of you.” The drone was repeated time and time again as the youthful Springsteen got into one scrape after another. He saw many of his friends and peers sent to Southeast Asia, and some didn’t return. As Vietnam escalated and Walter Cronkite recited casualty lists, Springsteen’s father remained silent but stoic in his support of the armed forces. Finally the dreaded day arrived when Bruce received his draft notice and was told to report for a physical. Not wanting to allow his father that moment of triumph, he left the house a few days prior. He returned only after taking the physical to find his father waiting for him in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette in the darkness. “Where have you been?” he asked his prodigal son.

“Took my physical. Failed it.” Springsteen awaited the displeasure he knew was coming from his stern parent.

All he could see was his father’s silhouette, nodding in the cigarette’s glow.

“That’s good,” he muttered. “That’s good.”

Many of our generation had similar conflicts with parents. Raised during the Second World War, it took most of them a long time to realize that the government didn’t always act in their direct best interests or in those of their progeny. But rather than encourage active protest, many tried to avoid confrontation, hoping that Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, or even Richard Nixon would extract us from the quagmire, hailing “Peace with Honor.” Collegians wanted to believe as well, but distrust of anything the government told us was well founded during that era of lies and deception. The dichotomy between the protesters and the straights on campus was how they framed their dissension.

But even though styles of dress and recreation might have differed, there was one thing that united those on campus: listening to WNEW-FM, especially Rosko. The straights and hippies alike felt we had an ally in our concerns and that, just by listening, we were registering our support for what he believed in. His music was a beautiful rainbow of influences, from Sam Cooke and early R&B to the latest fusion of jazz and rock to Eric Clapton’s mournful blues. It was totally color-blind and a little daring, but not so risky that it didn’t reward those who trusted Rosko’s instincts. His poetry reading and storytelling could evoke tears, but he never wallowed in cloying sentiment or obtuse philosophy. His sensitive interpretation of Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree” actually made it onto vinyl and sold well locally. But despite the near unanimity of opposition to the war among the New York FM radio community, the charge was led even more voraciously on the West Coast by a former Top Forty jock with bloodlines similar to those of Scott Muni.

His name was Tom Donahue.

We Built This City

The father of progressive radio.

That’s how Tom Donahue is described in numerous publications and websites. Godfather would be a more appropriate term.

The story of his journey is a commonly told one in radio circles—Donahue was an ex–Top Forty jock who was a star at some major stations, chief among them WIBG in Philadelphia, where he spent ten years as “Big Daddy.” Not only was the moniker synergistic with the station’s call letters, but it was an apt description of the blond, bearded giant, who weighed over four hundred pounds. In 1961, he took off to San Francisco for another four-year term of hit radio at KYA.

By 1965, Top Forty radio had lost its attraction for him, so he turned to the record business. He founded Autumn Records and signed several local bands, including Grace Slick’s Great Society. Donahue began promoting concerts, including the Beatles’ final U.S. public appearance, at Candlestick Park in 1965. During those years, he would hold court at Enrico’s, a classy bistro in the heart of North Beach that was also the favorite dining establishment of Joseph Paul DiMaggio.

Legend has it that he was sitting in his pad with his second wife, Raechel, listening to the Doors’ first album in 1967 when an epiphany came: Why isn’t anyone playing this music on the radio? The story is partially true, but a man named Larry Miller was already on KMPX at night playing music in a free-form style months before Donahue came in. The station was foundering, a brokered time-share outlet that played to the city’s Portuguese population by day. Donahue and his crew came aboard in April of 1967, and soon generated the same kind of buzz in the market that WOR-FM had done in New York.

There is a contention between East and West Coast factions as to who was more responsible for free-form radio. Obviously, WOR-FM had already been on the air with live jocks since the previous October, so Donahue wasn’t the first to explore the new territory of FM. Since he was based in San Francisco, the hub of hippie culture, he generally is given credit by Left Coasters for pioneering the new format, even though Scott Muni and Murray the K were doing it at least six months earlier. To illustrate the schism, Muni offers this tale:

At a Metromedia managers’ conference in the Bay Area, Donahue offered to show Scottso the sights, along with L. David Moorhead, the general manager of KMET in Los Angeles. As they prepared to get into Donahue’s custom Mercedes, Moorhead drew Muni aside.

“Scott, no offense, but Donahue is my hero. He started this whole thing, and if it’s okay with you, I’d like to sit in the front seat with him. I’d like to talk to him, eye to eye. Is that a problem?”

Muni shrugged; obviously, he couldn’t care less. He and the fawning Moorhead piled into the car, and the smaller man pulled his seat forward so that Scott could ride comfortably in back. Donahue moved his own immense body to the driver’s-side door.

Both passengers were astonished when the legendary behemoth pushed the specially manufactured seat back on its tracks to accommodate his bulk. By the time it completed its journey, the driver’s seat was in the rear of the car. Donahue slid his massive girth behind the steering wheel, which had also been altered to fit his four hundred pounds. Donahue was now “eye to eye” with Muni—in the
back
seat.

In laying out his West Coast antiformat, Donahue did have some rules that were strictly adhered to. No jingles, even on commercials. No talking over the introductions to records. No screaming disc jockeys. Songs were laid out in sets, with no interruptions between records. Commercial time was limited to eight or nine minutes per hour.

Obviously, this is the antithesis of what Top Forty was all about. The music had become an afterthought to most AM jocks, mainly because they had so little choice in what they played. Everything was set at an artificially high energy level that left no space for earnest monologues about anything. Most stations had rules about how long the microphone could be left open without music playing underneath, and some went so far as to automate their systems to turn off a jock midstream if he didn’t comply. Rick Sklar’s original concepts were taken to a ridiculous extreme, making the WABC program director’s iron-fisted reign seem downright benevolent. So even if the DJs did have something to say, their mic time was reduced to spouting one-liners or reading station promotions over the beginnings of records. PDs were frazzled when the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” featured a twenty-seven-second lead-in prior to the vocal. Most could fit an entire newscast into that time.

But Donahue’s staff became musicologists, taking the time not only to identify each song in their sets, but often commenting on specific musical or lyrical aspects. The “rap,” as it was known, came to be the standard against which a jock could be judged. And as the music became more political, reflecting the turbulent times, so did the raps. There was no time limit, and coupled with the conversational approach employed, serious issues could be raised without sounding out of place.

Drugs started to play a large part in the evolution of societal norms. America’s youth experimented with substances hitherto forbidden and suffered no immediate consequences. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll got linked together in a rebellious spirit that resulted in the Summer of Love—1967. With Donahue’s KMPX as the soundtrack and Haight-Ashbury at its epicenter, hippiedom reached full flower. Timothy Leary championed LSD, and new designer drugs were sprouting up like weeds: Tune in, turn on, drop out.

Bands were popping up all along the West Coast, led by the Doors in Los Angeles, and the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Santana, Buffalo Springfield, and Quicksilver Messenger Service up north. The Monterey Pop Festival that year exposed many of these artists to a much larger national audience. As
Sgt. Pepper
broke the bonds of what an album should sound like, more and more groups were stretching out their licks and listening to other forms of music as influences—jazz, blues, and Latino rhythms. The Beatles experimented with India’s sitar ragas, notably on “Within You, Without You.” They all found a welcome home at KMPX. And as free-form radio progressed, not only were the bastardized rock uses of these forms explored, but their original sources: Mingus, Muddy Waters, Tito Puente, and Ravi Shankar. Since there were no three-minute time limits on records or restrictions on the manner required to properly present them, the DJs could actually explain what they were asking the audience to groove on. Listening became educational as well as entertaining.

It didn’t stop at merely talking music. Since the subject matter of the material was deeper than “silly love songs,” jocks felt empowered to involve themselves in the politics of the moment. Most of what came out in their diatribes were knocks at the establishment, a catchall phrase for anything they disagreed with, the attitude being that anything established should be questioned and torn asunder. Hypocrisy became
the
mortal sin, with materialism close behind. Jocks spoke openly of revolution, of destroying an old order based on hate and replacing it with one founded on love. Hippie communes were proliferating. Dabbling with communism on this small scale strengthened opposition to the war: Maybe Soviet and Chinese communism wasn’t the evil the adults preached. A sense of community was developing—the audience felt that the jocks were addressing their concerns in an intelligent fashion, instead of whistling past the graveyard in hard times. The DJs had the power to be catalysts because their words were viewed as having real value or “heaviness,” not just as filler between songs. A counterculture was forming that rejected anything remotely tied to the old ways. AM radio was the cultural icon representing the old school.

KMPX further codified some of the rules that defined free-form radio in its early days. Commercials that promoted the armed forces were rejected. Frequent time and temperature readings were excluded to the point where Donahue removed the clock from the studio. The approach was low-key and respectful toward the music. Donahue did have an idiosyncrasy: He hired only female engineers. Whether he was a pioneer in the feminist movement or just liked to be surrounded by women is something we’ll never be sure of.

In early 1968, Richard Quinn filled in for Donahue while he was away in Los Angeles trying to expand his broadcast empire to KPPC. Quinn, using the radio handle Tony Bigg, had also worked at KYA and had led a typical radio gypsy’s life to that point, working mostly in Top Forty. Upon finishing his work at KYA on Saturdays, he would often hang out with one of the big man’s engineers while she operated the audio console and thus he became a familiar face at KMPX. When Donahue went to Pasadena to negotiate for KPPC, he invited Quinn to substitute for him. Strangely, the man known as the father of progressive radio liked to hire former Top Forty jocks, because he felt they better understood how a station is supposed to be put together, with texture—the musical ebb and flow.

But while Donahue was away in Southern California, KMPX ownership was laying plans for his demise in San Francisco. Even though the station was the talk of the city and fast becoming an important cultural entity, revenues were not growing to management’s satisfaction and the flower children of Donahue’s team were having trouble paying the rent, given their meager wages. Upon his return, the air staff met to decide how they were going to handle management’s latest salvo. Even though they were hippies who sat on the floor and smelled of patchouli, they felt that they should organize into a union (whimsically calling it the Amalgamated Federation of International FM Workers of the World). One of the ringleaders stood up and insisted that they have unanimity. There could be no strikebreakers, including this new guy, Tony Pig, uhh, Bigg. The rest laughed nervously, as the man had not only flubbed the name but this Quinn/Bigg dude was sitting right next to him. They voted to strike and handed out picketing assignments. Upon leaving the room, Donahue suggested to Quinn that the accidental mispronunciation actually sounded more appropriate than his current name. So Tony Bigg became Tony Pigg.

During the strike, several bands, including Traffic and Creedence Clearwater Revival (while they were still known as the Golliwogs), came by the flatbed truck that was the center of the picketing activity to entertain and raise money for the striking workers. There was a large benefit concert held, with all the top bands from the Bay Area lending their support. But management held firm, with scabs filling their airwaves in a lame attempt to replace the staff.

George Duncan, who by now had been elevated to the head of Metromedia Radio, was trying to decide what to do with KSAN, the weak sister of the chain. He sought a meeting with Donahue and they agreed to transfer the staff of KMPX to KSAN, almost intact. Listeners abandoned KMPX as word got around about the new station, and in May of 1968, Donahue had a new base of operations.

Like WNEW-FM, KSAN had a prominently placed female (Raechel Donahue) and a politically hip black man (Roland Young, who was also a Black Panther). Young once got into trouble on the air when he echoed the statements of writer David Hilliard, who insinuated that he would murder anyone who stood in the way of his freedom. Young suggested that his listeners sign a petition vowing to kill anyone, including the president of the United States, who might abridge their rights. Three days later, as Tony Pigg auditioned records in his new job as music director, he was horrified to see three gray-suited Secret Service agents accost Young while on the air, and inform him that should any harm come to Nixon, he could be named as an accessory to murder. The Black Panther toned down his rhetoric.

Pigg was then making around three hundred dollars a week to do an air shift and serve as MD, but the money, although it was less than he earned at KYA, didn’t matter to him. He reveled in the sense of community that had sprung up around KSAN. The Berkeleyites, who controlled the area’s leftist political thought, found a friend in the station, but mostly it was sex and drugs and rock and roll that made it go. Free love wasn’t just an expression, and disc jockeys had as many groupies as the musicians did. Drugs were an integral part of the experience, ranging from marijuana to LSD, and in some cases heroin and cocaine. The effect of drugs on the air staff was palpable. Although the morning jock and several others never touched anything harder than alcohol, most did indulge and weren’t afraid to fire up on the air. Pigg admits that he loved the effect marijuana had on him while listening to music, and he felt that it sharpened his music sense to the point where he would be unerring in his selections. Of course, in retrospect, it’s debatable as to whether grass actually did have such an effect, or if it merely felt that way.

But the station was a labor of love for everyone involved, and Pigg recalls that he listened to it all day, not to scrutinize the music, but because he delighted in the way it sounded. In fact, his duties as music director were essentially clerical. He would listen to new releases and place them in a bin in the studio, to be available for the staff. He never marked suggested tracks to play, and if he didn’t add a record to the bin, a jock was perfectly free to bring it in from a personal collection. Music lists were not inspected after the fact either; they were merely kept so that DJs could tell the audience what they’d just played in their lengthy sets.

The music selections, like at WPLJ in New York, completely reflected the jocks’ personal tastes. They played everything from dissonant avant-garde jazz, to Indian ragas, to R&B, to the Archies, a bubblegum group that had a number of three-minute hits. Donahue would rarely criticize a jock’s choices and his music director never did. The shows were done not to cater to the audience, but to please themselves. They played what they liked, and thought, perhaps arrogantly, that the public would go along. Pigg recalls that he initially hated Led Zeppelin, thinking them a “bullshit English band,” and even disliked Santana, wishing that the local group would “just go away and leave us alone.”