The Birth of Progressive Radio, and My Small Part In It

Back in 1967, I was 10 years old, and my family and I lived in Pacifica, just south of SF on the coast. My dad was a bit of a stereophile, and one day he announced that he had found this incredible new station that was playing cool music. On a Saturday evening, he pulled out the big unwieldy reel-to-reel tape recorder, put the microphone in front of the speaker, told us all to shut up, and recorded two hours of KMPX.
What a great collection of stuff! Imagine a radio station today playing the following songs:

• "Buy You A Chevrolet" by the Jim Kweskin Jug Band (vocals by Goeff and Maria Muldaur)
• "Let's Go Get Stoned" by Ray Charles
• "National Hotel" by Ian and Sylvia
• "Day Tripper" by Sergio Mendez and Brazil 66
• The great "
  Green Rocky Road
  " by the doomed Tim Hardin
• "Candy Colored Dragon" by Jameson
• "Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procol Harum (along with a discussion of where the organ bit came from) and the lesser known B-side, "Lime Street Blues."
• "There is Something On Your Mind" by The James Cotton Blues Band
• and a long, weird song about a guy using a pepperoni for a pool cue

along with traffic reports ("be sure to turn on your lights -- the freeway is a fright") and discussion of the previous night's Ravi Shankar concert.
That damn tape was my dad's "party tape" for years. I thought we had lost it long ago, but I recently found the first hour, cleaned it up and made an MP3 of it. You can download it from:
http://www.scottpcook/kmpx/kmpx.mp3

Listening to it, I got a little obsessed with it. It really is a piece of history, recorded at the very moment when radio, and most of society, was poised to head off in many weird directions. So, lacking any other hobbies, I decided to research it.
First, some history. In the early 60s, the top-40 powerhouse in SF was KYA, 1260AM, with the legendary Johnny “The Teen Queen’s Dream” Holliday, Russ “The Moose” Syracuse, and Emperor Gene Nelson. One of my fondest memories of my youth was spending the night in my tent in the backyard, with my little transistor tuned to KYA at my side, and hearing, for the first time, "Eleanor Rigby," Paperback Writer," and "Paint It Black," one right after the other, in an orgy of brilliance. My brain hasn't been the same since.

The top DJ at KYA, however, was “Big Daddy” Tom Donahue. As the 60s progressed, however, Tom found that the songs he and his friends listened to were not the same songs he was being asked to play on KYA. So in late 1966, Tom got out the SF Yellow Pages and started calling radio stations until he found one that was interested in playing some different music.

The station he found was KMPX 106.9 FM, which at the time did mostly Italian and Portuguese language programs for the large immigrant fishing population in San Francisco. (People nowadays don’t think of SF as a blue-collar kind of town, but remember that Joe DiMaggio was a fisherman’s son from SF). The station was struggling, as were all FM stations at the time – most people didn’t have an FM receiver, despite the fact that the format had been around since the 1940s. (My family were the first on the block to have an FM receiver in 1966, and I didn’t have one in my car until 1978.) In fact, KMPX was so struggling that the phone had been disconnected, but Tom managed to negotiate a deal whereby the owner let him have the 8 to midnight slot to play whatever music caught his fancy. Tom went on the air on April 1967.

This concept later became known as “underground radio” or “rock radio” or “FM rock,” and to give credit where credit is due, Tom was not the first weird DJ at KMPX – a few months earlier, a Detroit DJ named Larry Miller started his own free-form show from midnight to 6 AM on KMPX. Between the two of them, they reinvented radio. Within a year, KMPX was “the stereo voice of San Francisco,” and the voice of a weird new generation.

My first question to research was the date of the recording. The DJ gives a few clues:

• He mentions that the foreign language shows were being phased out. According to some articles I ran across on the web, all the foreign shows were eliminated by August, so the tape must fall between then and the format's premiere in April.
• He tells everybody to be careful when driving, because it's "that weekend."
• There was a Ravi Shankar concert at the SF Auditorium the night before.
• He occasionally gives the current time.

I figured the traffic reference must refer to the Memorial Day weekend (remember those damn Memorial Day traffic body counts?), and I browsed around at some vintage concert poster sites until I found the Shankar concert. The tape was made between 5:20PM and 6:17PM on Saturday, May 27, 1967.
And in the course of my research, I found this photo: the KMPX staff, circa 1967.
Look closely at this picture. (People tend to forget that major components of the SF style in ’67 were Western outfits and big friggin’ guns.) First that’s Howard Hesseman – yes, the Howard Hesseman, who 11 years later became immortal as “Dr. Johnny Fever” on WKRP in Cincinnati, the coolest TV sitcom ever made, standing at upper left next to his wife. Next to Mrs. Hesseman is

Dusty Street

, who is still in the biz and now serves as a DJ for Classic Vinyl, live from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for SiriusXM. Three over from Dusty is Carl Gottlieb, DJ name “Egg,” who later went on to take Peter Benchley’s shitty shark novel and turn it into Jaws. (He wrote the script, and played the newspaper editor in the film.) Larry Miller is the odd little fellow in the Prince Valiant haircut in the right rear, next to some arch blond salesman who happened to wander into the lobby when the picture was taken.
Seated in the middle is Tom Donahue, in his new counterculture beard, with his child bride Raechel in the derby on his lap. Tom, alas, died in 1975, but Raechel has been in radio ever since, and until recently held Dusty Street's current job at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Tom also innovated in hiring mostly women to serve as the radio technicians and engineers, and a lot of them stayed in the business also.
I could go on about each of the people in this picture, because just by being at KMPX in 1967, they all became radio legends. (And I’d *love* to know who that psychotic looking blonde next to Rachael is.)
But back to the tape. What to say about the music? In addition to the above songs, the hour also included a bluesy version of "The Twelfth of Never" by Lou Rawls, an unknown piece by jazzman Jonah Jones, a Guaraldi-like version of "A Hard Day's Night," "Uskudar" by Herbie Mann, "Another Girl" by the Beatles, "Egyptian Garden" by Kaleidoscope, and (an especially cool find) "Miserlou" by the Devil's Anvil, a kick-ass proto-punk band supposedly from the Middle East (but actually from Brooklyn). Counting the first bar of "River Deep Mountain High" by Tina Turner that ends the tape, that's 19 songs in 57 minutes, an astounding amount of music. Of course, there are no commercials , despite the fact the KMPX was definitely a commercial station. Still don't know what the story is there.
The only thing that still bugs me about the tape is the name of the DJ. I think that was my dad's favorite part of the tape, actually, because he thought the guy sounded like Pat Paulsen. I distinctly remember that in the now-lost second hour of the tape, he said his name was Vince Something-or-other, but I can't find any record of a Vince at KMPX. I sent a scoped copy of the file to Raechel Donahue, Dusty Street, Larry Miller (who is now a faculty member at the Art Institute International in Boston) and the Bay Area Radio Museum, and no one recognized who the laid back Saturday afternoon DJ’s voice. I also sent the file to the master of cool, Gene Sculatti, but I haven’t heard back from him yet.
I’ll keep researching. Enjoy the file.

Still Not TOS

I’ve finally started watching “Star Trek: Enterprise,” and it’s not as bad as everyone said it was. Scott Bakula is always cool, and Jolene Blalock is hot in a Vulcan kind of way. There aren’t any lovable characters in it, though, and the dialog is the usual Berman and Braga crap. But I like the small, primitive nature of the ship, and it looks like an expensive production – those Xindi outfits with the Slinky wires all over them must have cost a fortune. And my favorite character, strangely enough, is the Andoran Commander Shran, kind of a cerulean Frank Borman. Cool guy - wouldn't mind having a drink with him sometime. My only gripe right now is that I sat through the entire third season – the whole season-long Xindi arc with the attack on Earth, the warring Xindi factions, the transdimensional beings, the anomalies, the whole damn thing – and the final episode didn’t record because my dogs chose that moment to chew through the FiOS cable. So the first episode of season four comes on, and all of a sudden the ship is orbiting Earth in the year 1944 while alien Nazis sit in the White House and we’re stuck in some kind of temporal war. What the hell did I miss? And don’t these folks ever get shore leave on some nice quiet planet? (And don’t even get me started on what a lazy crutch time travel is in “Star Trek.”)

Public Education in the 60s

Growing up in the Cold War had its advantages. I got to miss the whole last month of kindergarten because my Naval Reserve dad got called up for the Berlin crisis and we moved to Newport, Rhode Island to be near him. When I lived in Pacifica, California, on the coast south of San Francisco, we had four different school drills that we had to perform all the time: 1) the nuclear attack drill, where we all had to scrunch under our desk (which were somehow nuclear-bomb-proof, apparently); 2) fire drills which covered not only fires in the school, but what to do if the giant brush-covered hill in back of the school went up in flames; 3) earthquake drills, where all 35 of us would try to cram into a doorway (the strongest part in a building, we were told); and 4) the tidal wave drill. The last was our favorite – it consisted of running madly up into the hills, and about half of us just kept going until we got home. The school administration finally got smart and only scheduled the tidal wave drills for 3 PM on Fridays, the bastards. Between all those drills, and the time we spent twice a year running up the hill to watch the Enterprise head off to battle the godless Commies, we got precious little schoolwork done. Thank God for that.

Those Damn Foreigners

I have a small benign lump in the first joint of my right middle finger. When I was 5 or so, I misunderstood what the doctor said when my mom asked him about it – I thought he said it was “foreign matter.” So of course I thought it was Russian. I spent years waiting for the lump to rise up in a proletariat manner and smite me.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Might as well state my position right up front - I think the notion of anthropogenic climate change, erroneously hyped in the media as "global warming," is an absolute crock of shit. Just like the "global cooling" the same assholes were blathering about twenty years ago, just like Ehrlich and his population explosion, just like any other mass hysteria which, gosh, can only be solved by massive government intervention, loss of personal freedom and crippling, capitalism-killing cost.

Which is why this blog, "Watt's Up With That?" and its associated web site, surfacestations.org, are vitally important. Check it out, and then bug the hell out of NOAA and your congresscrook about it.

Dylan Hears A Who

This is the funniest damn thing I've seen in a while.

Dylan Hears A Who

Titanic Distress Call

The sound you can hear by clicking on the control above is a recreation of part of one of the Titanic's distress calls sent by Marconi operator Jack Phillips (left) aboard RMS Titanic just after midnight on Monday, April 15, 1912.

As best as my rudimentary Morse code skills allow, the message translates as follows:

CQD CQD SOS SOS CQD DE MGY MGY MGY

"CQD" was the standard distress call at the time; there were a whole series of "CQ" codes, and the "D" meant distress. In 1909, an international convention adopted "SOS" as the new distress signal-- not because it means "save our souls," as is often reported, but because the three dots, three dashes and three dots are a very distinctive signal that cannot be confused with anything else, especially by those not very familiar with Morse. (Even you can hear it, right?) "MGY" were Titanic's call letters. And the "DE" means "from."

Imagine sitting in some radio shack on one of the many ships in the North Atlantic that cold, still night, listening to the staccato mutter of the Morse spark, and suddenly hearing this call out of the ether. Anyone who heard the call that night remembered to his dying day the hair rising on the back of his neck at the almost incomprehensible message -- the Titanic in distress.

Cardinal Fang's Generic Marital Argument

Why go to the trouble of making up a new argument every time you and the wife have a disagreement? Use this handy-dandy generic marital argument!

Let A be the subject of the argument.

Husband knows A=true. A has been true all of his life. It is commonly known by all sentient beings that A=true. It is one of the bedrock strictures of his life.

In a conversation with Wife, Wife mentions that A=false. Husband questions this. No, she says. A is false, has always been false, and only a complete idiot (like Husband) would think otherwise.

OK, thinks Husband. She is the light of my life and I must support her. Let A be false forever.

Soon afterwards, Husband comes across a situation where he must act on A. His first instinct, nurtured by years of life experiences, is to assume A=true. But wait, he thinks. Wife said A is false. I don't want to get in trouble with Wife, so I will act as if A is false. He proceeds to do so, and feels good about it.

A while later, Wife comes along and observes that Husband has acted as if A=false. Husband proudly beams as he awaits his well-deserved praise.

Wife flies off the handle. How could you possibly think A is false?, she hisses in her best third-grade teacher sneer. Any idiot knows A is true.

But you said A is false, Husband replies.

I never, ever said that, says Wife.

Yes, you did, answers Husband, as the room begins to spin. You stood right there and told me A is false.

Not only did I never, ever say A is false, Wife opines, but I've never stood right there, either.

Husband rubs his temples and heads off, mentally, to a happy place (like his old bachelor apartment) and hunkers down for the obligatory 45-minute oratory on his failures as a husband, a human being and a carbon-based life form.

Tear Down the Jeff!

To live in Washington is to be surrounded by majestic buildings and inspiring monuments. Even after 30 years here, I can think no more dignified and fitting tribute to anyone than the Lincoln Memorial,and I still get chills whenever I walk by the Capitol. (Thinking about what our clown-like politicians are doing inside it gives me a different kind of chill, but that's another story.)

But I still cringe when, riding across the Arlen D. Williams Bridge (named after a victim of the 1982 Air Florida crash) into town, the road curves around that architectural monstrosity, that slap in the face, that crumbling piece of shit known as the Jefferson Memorial.

Why do I hate it so much? Here's why:

• Architecturally ludicrous. Jefferson was a big amateur architect. He especially loved Italian precedents, such as the work of Palladio and the Roman Parthenon. In both his home at Monticello and the Rotunda of the University of Virginia, he expertly took the notion of a spherical substructure and scaled it appropriately for both sites. The Lawn and Range rooms at UVa also convey a dignified sense of "less is more," a restraint that has kept these buildings alive and beautiful 200 years later.

  

  So when the incredible hack architect John Russell Pope was assigned to design a memorial for Jefferson in the late 1930s, he decided to go with the obvious and work from Jefferson's own architecture in designing his building. Of course, being a hack, the notion of perspective and restraint meant nothing to him. If six columns on the front and back of the building were good, why not more? Pope was stuck on the notion of an open-air memorial, with a 360-degree view of the city, a design that the Fine Arts Commission had already rejected for Pope's never-built Teddy Roosevelt memorial. (Although it couldn't have been worse than the junky statue they ended up building on Roosevelt Island.) On the other hand, a lot of people didn't want a closed structure, afraid that it would be too similar to the new (dedicated in 1922) Lincoln Memorial. So he ended up with an incredible pastiche of a design, an open, pedestal-like structure with 36 columns surrounding it and surmounted by the spherical Jeffersonian dome.

  The overall effect could not have been worse if he had stuck tailfins and chrome on a horse. Leaving aside the pure ugliness of the result, the open design ensured a perpetual chill wind off the Tidal Basin, a lot of rain damage and a shitload (literally) of pigeon droppings. Standing under the domed roof on even a calm day, the effect is as if you are standing in a wind tunnel, with various side eddies and dust devils stirring up scraps of paper and throwing dirt in the eyes of those trying to read the various inscriptions on the walls. (More on them later.)

  Fittingly, however, Pope never survived to see the thing built. He died in 1937, before construction even started, and his open design, much criticized at the time, was given the official seal of approval by FDR. FDR's other architectural fantasies, such as the main building of the Bethesda Naval Medical Center, show that he knew no more about building design than he did about the Constitution.

• Misleading and Misquoted Writings.

  What do you think of when you think of Jefferson's philosophy? Individual liberty? Freedom from government tyranny? Governing best by governing least? Well, that's not what the folks who picked the quotes for the interior walls of the Jefferson Memorial were thinking of.

  The memorial was built during the reign of the most vociferous proponent of meddlesome government intervention in the lives of the citizens the country had seen to date (although he looks positively libertarian compared to today's elected oafs). While wanting to give lip service to Jefferson's role in the founding of the country, FDR did not want to highlight his own differences with Jeffersonian philosophy. So his folks dug up the following quotes to adorn the memorial, often running two or three different quotes together to distort their meaning. The following quotes and sources are from the official National Park Service Jefferson Memorial site:

  "I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Taken from a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, September 23, 1800.

  "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men. We... solemnly publish and declare, that these colonies are and of aright ought to be free and independent states... And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour." Taken from the Declaration of Independence, 1776.

  "Almighty God hath created the mind free. All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens... are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion.... No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship or ministry or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion. I know but one code of morality for men whether acting singly or collectively." Taken from A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, 1777 (Passed by the Virginia Assembly in 1786). The last sentence is taken from a letter to James Madison, August 28, 1789.

  "God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate that these people are to be free. Establish the law for educating the common people. This it is the business of the state to effect and on a general plan." Taken from Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785. The last two sentences are taken from a letter to George Washington, January 4, 1786.

  "I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." Taken from a letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816.

  What a perfect hodgepodge of quotes, put together by a president who was in the process of trying to pack the Supreme Court and impose federalism on our educational and welfare systems. If TJ could see to what effect his quotes have been used against him, he might be forced to use one of the 60,000 hemp plants at Monticello for medicinal purposes.

  You'd think this would be bad enough. But it gets worse. A lot of the quotes are, believe it or not, misquoted and misspelled. The Washington Post ran an article about 10 years ago detailing about 30 instances of misspelling, bad punctuation, and misquoting. There was a lot of hue and cry about the tackiness of the errors, but the NPS has never gotten around to fixing it. What kind of memorial is it when the honoree's words are misspelled?

  Bad enough that the quotes are misleading and misspelled. They are also made of separate little bronze letters which have a tendency to fall off on occasion, making it look as if the father of the Declaration of Independence was dyslexic.

• Lousy statue.

  I don't know art, the old saying goes, but I know what I like. And I hate the Rudolph Evans statue at the center of the Jefferson Memorial. This picture is a little murky (I got it from the NPS site, and it may be murky on purpose), but you can see the total lack of form, feel and life in it. TJ stands with a constipated look on his face, his body language seeming to convey a vague disgust with the viewer, the lack of character in the bronze castings making him look like a computer-generated special effect. It's sad enough on its own, but when it's compared to the brilliant Daniel French sculpture in the Lincoln Memorial, it makes one wonder who had it in for TJ in approving it's installation. Amid the perpetual wind and the weird echoes caused by the shape of the interior, he looks decidedly uncomfortable.

So what do we do? As I've mentioned before, TJ is one of the few heroes in my personal pantheon. In a city named after the physical hero of the Revolution, there should be a better rememberance of the man who provided the Revolution's heart and soul. The only bright point in all this is that the memorial may be falling down on its own. There has not been a month in the last 10 years in which there hasn't been some kind of scaffolding sounding one part of it or other, trying to keep the cheap marble and granite from fizzing away in the jet exhausts from Reagan Airport just across the river.

Tear it down, and do it right.

I'm Sorry, Mrs. Bryfogel. I'll Do Better . . .

Time to get serious with this blog. More cool stuff to come soon.

My Britney Spears Fantasy

I saw Brit on NBC the other night, looking every bit the pregnant Louisiana hick with false eyelashes and cleavage you could drive a Hummer through. (Who the hell wears false eyelashes any more?) And it reminded me of my old Britney Spears fantasy.

No, not that one.

It's the one where I imagined that she woke up one morning, back before she became a mommy, looked in the mirror and had an epiphany; to wit, "I am a complete joke. Having somehow parlayed a so-so singing voice, a certain girl-next-door blandness, and dancing skills that look like a drunk trying to kill cockroachs into a $100 million fortune, I have become the only thing more annoying than trailer trash: rich trailer trash. The world thinks I'm an idiot - and I certainly act like one. That marrying-Jason thing: What the hell? Promising to be a virgin till I got married, and then posing topless on the cover of Rolling Stone? Look at Julia Styles and Kirsten Dunst - they are successful and respected because they are not stupid. I am heading for a full-blown Garland. I need to get real!"

So she cuts off her hair with some pinking shears and dyes it black. She ditches the makeup and flushes the eyelashes down the toilet. She rounds up the most normal looking things in her wardrobe and takes off the designer labels. She pays one of her bodyguards $6000 cash for his 1999 Camry, leaves a note to her mom, and heads east.

She gets a job at a Starbucks in Greenwich Village, probably the one at Spring and Varick. She learns who "FICA" is, and moves into a one-bedroom sixth-floor walk-up with seven other girls, all of whom swear they are really actresses. She tells everyone her name is "Kendra Kozak." She starts hanging out in used bookstores on her off-hours, and struggles through some Kundera and Camus, occasionally actually getting it. She takes a few course at CCNY, being careful not to flash her way-too-sunny Mouseketeer smile too often.

And lo and behold, her IQ starts going up. She holds intelligent conversations with anti-globalization protesters in Washington Square Park, pointing out why exactly they are so full of shit. Her clothes tend more towards utilitarian black. She stops thinking about all the bling her bank account back in LA could afford and tries to think of something noble to do with it. She volunteers at a homeless shelter. She misses her family, but realizes that what she's doing will mean more in the long run.

Then, of course, someone puts two and two together - after all, Britney Spears is missing - and Kendra is unmasked. Every tabloid shows up in the Village. It's the lead story on every network broadcast. She grants her first exclusive interview, not to Matt or Barbara or Katie, but to the Village Voice. She sounds halfway sophisticated, and doesn't use the word "ain't" once, except ironically in the pull quote: "I ain't no fucking trailer trash any more!"

Within two years, she wins a Oscar for playing a concentration camp detainee who smuggles heavy-water plans to the Allies . . .

Well, maybe that's enough. She didn't do it, and now she's going to name the next kid Amber or Tiffany or Crystal, and above all won't understand this blog entry at all.

But a fella can dream.