FM

by Richard Neer

  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.”

  Segues were also overemphasized to the detriment of the station’s overall sound. In the jocks’ mind, the segue took precedence to the point that they would play several mediocre songs in a set, only because they meshed well together. But even then, Pigg used the tactic of dropping in his voice briefly to identify the station between songs that didn’t flow into each other, trying to play quality music instead of attempting to impress his peers with his musical acumen.

  Listeners had the feeling that KSAN belonged to them. Many of them, high on acid, were regular callers. In their drug-induced reveries, they’d say things like, “Wow man, I’ve been programming your station for the past half hour.” Donahue might try to bring them down to earth by retorting, “Oh yeah? Well, what am I going to play next?” Or when they’d call and request a Donovan track, the jock might refuse to play it.

  “I thought this was the People’s radio station, man,” the listener would moan.

  “I’m one of the people, and I don’t like Donovan,” came the reply.

  Break on Through

  (to the Other Side)

  In late 1969, as KSAN became established in San Francisco, Michael Harrison and I were in our senior year of college on Long Island. Our radio careers had stalled with the snobby, offhanded rejection we received at WHLI. WNEW-FM still seemed like a distant dream, and our best hope was to try to make a go of it at WLIR, working on the theory that if we could make this small nonentity a success, New York would have to sit up and take notice.

  Harrison put together a package called “Dimensional News.” Rather than the rip-and-read style that characterized a nonexistent news budget, we agreed to produce a full fifteen-minute news segment daily, with reporters and live audio from events. We wanted to capture the sound and gravity of a big-city operation. I handled sports, recording interviews with the coaches and managers of the Yankees, Mets, Knicks, Nets, Rangers, Jets, and Giants. I found that if I caught them in their offices in the late afternoon, they’d agree to talk to me on the phone for five minutes. Harrison did the same with politicians and cultural figures, and soon “Dimensional News” took on the patina of a quality product. We’d get friends or other jocks to call in with reports, essentially expanding on the UPI copy with our own colorful details. Thus, a staff of two used the theater of the imagination to sound like a crew of twenty.

  I must admit that we employed our imagination a bit too vividly at times. We couldn’t actually go out and cover many events live, so we used the station’s phone system and sound-effects library to re-create them. Once, when the offices of Long Island’s major daily paper, Newsday, caught fire, Harrison stood in the other studio shouting into the phone about the terrible flames and destruction while we played filtered sounds of fire engines and gushing water in the background. When the Knicks won the NBA championship, I was at home in a rented shack in Long Beach (where I had moved after fleeing Adelphi’s dormitories), listening on the radio. As the final buzzer sounded, I tuned my radio to a blank frequency and turned the static up loud, pretending it was crowd noise. I screamed a report over the din, as if I were on the court for the celebration. My roommate, playing the role of Willis Reed, shouted in the background, “Right on. Knicks are number one.” Part-timer Pete Larkin did reports purportedly from the state capitol in Albany while in his mother’s kitchen in Queens. I doubt any one of the dozen or so listening had any inkling it wasn’t real.

  My association with “Dimensional News” might have actually kept me out of jail on one occasion. On the way home one evening, I stopped at the now defunct TSS store in Oceanside. After rent and food, my roommates and I never had any money, and I’m ashamed to say that we occasionally would shoplift a can of stew so that we could have dinner. It was winter, and I had a down parka that could hide a whole bagful of groceries. When I thought no one was looking, I slipped a container of soup and a loaf of bread into my jacket and stole out into the parking lot. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I spotted a man following me, but dismissed it as guilty paranoia.

  Sure en
ough, as I opened the car door, that same man came up behind me and said, “Store detective. Would you open your coat please, sir.”

  Caught. I opened the zipper, revealing the pilfered merchandise.

  “Come with me, sir.”

  I followed him through the back of the store to the executive offices, where I waited as he filled out a report and paged his boss. “What have you got to say in your defense? We’re about to call the police.”

  I thought fast. Summoning everything I’d learned as a drama major, I smiled broadly. “Great job, sir. I commend you. I’m Dick Neer, a reporter for Long Island’s ‘Dimensional News.’ Maybe you’ve caught our show? Well, I’m doing an undercover report on shoplifting and I wanted to find out firsthand how you deal with it.”

  I could tell he wasn’t buying it. I was still only twenty and wasn’t dressed as you’d expect a reporter to be attired, even on radio.

  “Young man, I’ve heard some good ones in my time. That’s about the best I’ve heard. But gimme a break. You’re no reporter.”

  “I know what you’re thinking, sir. But I couldn’t present myself the way I normally do. I wanted this to be real . . . visceral. To put myself in the place of a thief.”

  He still wasn’t going with the story. So I took a calculated risk, knowing that Harrison was on the air and was quick-witted enough to catch on. “If you don’t believe me,” I said, “call my news director. His name is Michael Harrison. Here’s the station’s number. I’m entitled to a call, right? You make it for me.”

  The skeptical store detective shrugged and dialed the number. I’d given him the news-room hotline, knowing that it was always answered in case a newsmaker was trying to contact us. “Dimensional News, Harrison speaking,” I could hear faintly through the receiver.

  “Yes, sir. We have a young man named Neer here. He claims to be a reporter. Is that true?”