It feels like every fourteen years and four months I review a book by Santa Monica folk journalist Hank Rosenfeld from whom I sometimes get the feeling he thinks he’s funnier than I am. The problem is, he’s right.
So it was in June, 2009 I reviewed The Wicked Wit of the West, “an as-told-to” book Hank wrote with 94-year-old Irving Brecher a Marx Brothers screenwriter. But it turns out Rosenfeld also has radio chops as revealed in The Jive 95, his new book overflowing with outrageous stories from the first hippie-run radio station, KSAN in San Francisco, where he worked in the 1970s.
Music writer Joel Selvin called KSAN, “An FM station full of stoned hippies and crazed idealists.” Roger Steffens, host of “Reggae Beat” on KCRW remembers KSAN as, “The absolute efflorescence of American radio.”
Steffens listened to KSAN while serving in Vietnam aided by a listener who sent him broadcast tapes. Steffens depended on Jive 95 radical reporters to reveal what was really happening as there was no believing what Armed Forces Radio was feeding the troops. Steffens dubbed the reels and spread cassette copies to fellow grunts.
The Jiver DJ’s played whatever they wanted to, including the first records of Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Janis, Sly, Creedence, Van Morrison, Dan Hicks and Tower of Power! They even played complete LP sides from psychedelic pioneers like the Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service!
One of the main heroes of KSANS was large Tom Donahue, aka “Big Daddy,” who was the hippie-est of west coast hipsters. Among his many amazing accomplishments took place on August 29, 1966 at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park when he produced the Beatles’ last concert in America! (The warm friendship between Lennon and Donahue can be felt just reading their conversations.)
Just ahead of the summer of love in 1967, maybe Donahue’s most influential feat was inventing 24/7 free form FM radio which opened the gates for revolutionary radio. Inspired by Big Daddy’s KSAN and his sister station in Pasadena, KPPC, which stood for Pasadena Presbyterian Church where he broadcast from in the basement and suddenly radio heads from coast to coast started up their own versions.
I was a 1st year law student when I got hooked to the new sounds. After classes and studying as little as I could get by with, my nightly ritual included some weed, tuning into KMET, or putting Crosby, Stills,Nash & Young or Dylan or the Beatles on the turntable and headphones over my ears and just drifted off.
TheJive95 includes interviews with Jerry Garcia; Frank Zappa; Elvis Costello; and the Sex Pistols. KSAN broadcast the Pistols last concert as they broke up the following morning. An all-star cast from various fields logged time in the Jive 95 studio including: Howard Hesseman, DJ Johnny Fever on TV’s “WKRP”; Jaws author, Carl Gottlieb; gurus Ram Dass and Alan Watts; beat poet Allen Ginsberg; co-founder of the Yippies, Paul Krassner; and Harry Shearer who would become a legend from his satirical radio “Le Show” since 1983 and “The Simpsons” since 1987. (If only Harry could find steady work.)
Photographer Annie Liebowitz was a music intern; comedian Bobby Slayton got his start on Terry McGovern’s show; and Ken Kesey has a free-flowing mind-blowing conversation, from tapes Hank “liberated” from the station’s basement. Unfortunately, Rosenfeld was canned in 1980 by, as he affectionately called them, “The Goons from “Metromeaningless Corporation” who flipped KSAN’s format to country. Can you say, “Here came the Reagan years?”
Before the clampdown, Rosenfeld worked in the “Gnus” Department, and produced “Coyote,” Stephen Capen’s “The Morning Product,” 6-10 am. Always the trickster, Capen’s only contribution to this book is his annotated resume of more than two-dozen rock stations from which he’d been fired.
One of Rosenfeld’s KSAN closest mentors had been Wes “Scoop” Nisker who got his nickname from Abbie Hoffman while covering the Chicago 8 trial. Scoop was determined to stop the war and enlighten the universe. He advised listeners, “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own!” His 1969 interview with John & Yoko from their hotel “Bed-In For Peace” is a delight.
An inventive feature of The Jive 95 is its QR codes. Readers decades younger than I can simply point their phones and hear KSAN characters from a half century ago turning on a “peace & luv” generation!
Here’s a thought. Jive95 could make an enlightening gift for the grandkids. As Hank says “They need to know you’re not just a boring geezer! You were a brother and a sister to a community of kids trying to change the world.” Or, as comedian Darryl Henriques puts it as KSAN character The Swami from Miami,”All is one, and more’s the pity. Om shalom.” The Jive 95 lives!
Jack is at: jackdailypress@aol.com