Cecile Lusby 1922 words
Underground Radio: A Splice of My Life
My favorite station does not show up on the Arbitron Radio Ratings, but though it no longer exists, KSAN changed my life. KSAN was a small classical music station before Metro Media bought it. From its initial broadcast of ‘community radio” in 1968, San Francisco’s KSAN was the nation’s first major underground radio station. Its music, news, and public service announcements were slanted to young progressives in the Bay Area.
FM Radio stations had been around for a while. Berkeley’s KPFA had started in 1949, with my father, Vince Lusby as its first Sunday morning jazz host. KPFA combined music and political programs, in those days presenting perspectives both left and right. KJAZ began its all-jazz format in1959, the summer Billie Holiday died and ‘I Love You, Porgy’ was Nina Simone’s first hit. FM programming was offering an escape from ‘bubblegum rock’ formats on AM radio alternating three minute ‘hits’ with loud ads. KSAN broadcast free form uninterrupted sets of music chosen by its staff, instead of a preset play list sent down from management or the hits on popular music charts. The success of albums and artists with longer songs and their experimental arrangements convinced the owners, Metro Media, there was money to be made in this new market, a genre called album oriented rock.
Led by Tom Donahue, striking KMPX workers moved over to KSAN, whose general manager, Willis Duff was looking for a chance to combine topicality and commercial success by blending music and satire. While most high school kids were happy with their AM top 40 stations, more sophisticated teens and listeners in their twenties were hoping for longer musical selections, sometimes six or eight minutes long, like the full length songs on albums by Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and The Beatles after 1966. FM (frequency modulation) gave a truer tone when compared to AM’s more static-y sound and was the more likely alternative for serious music lovers.
Music segments on KSAN were at least twenty minutes and often thirty minutes long before any ad interrupted the flow. The culture or personality of KSAN was expressed in the interplay between music, lyrics, news, and the news reporters in an often irreverent exchange. The process involved the newsman beginning his report and the DJ quietly lining up music that would touch on that subject matter. For example, one news item reported that after Richard Nixon was accused of being “out of it,” he responded, “I am hep.” Nixon’s incorrect use of the ‘e’ instead of ‘i’ in ‘hip’ made it clear that there really was an issue. The DJ on duty would prepare a musical response without saying a word and after the news ended, would begin playing a song like Dylan’s “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones.” They let the music do the talking, giving listeners the challenge of making their own connections.
For a new station breaking ground in the election year of 1968, news was everything. That year was arguably the most violent in our history. TV’s evening news covered the war in Vietnam, the assassinations of RFK and MLK, and the riots across the country in the wake of the killings. President Johnson’s withdrawal from the election campaign unsettled the Democratic race and that summer’s violent demonstrations outside the Chicago convention hall were televised, upsetting much of mainstream culture. Nixon’s victory and inauguration in 1969 brought an end to the New Frontier and the Great Society, leaving many of the younger generation furious or skeptical.
In the Bay Area 1968 was a year of strikes, one at San Francisco State supported by many of the labor unions, and a newspaper strike leaving readers of both the SF Examiner and the SF Chronicle without their papers for 52 days. We use the term “multimedia” to acknowledge that print, radio, and television all covered the news, but when mainstream readers lost access to the big newspapers, KQED, the local public broadcasting station began airing Newsroom every night presenting local journalists and radio people giving the TV audience a freer, local slant on the news and a substitute for print media. The alternative press flourished at this time when the Bay Area was home to at least eight underground papers: The Oracle, Berkeley Barb, S.F. Bay Guardian, Good Times, Bay Area Express Times and a feminist paper, It Ain’t Me, Babe. The Black press had the Sun Reporter and the Black Panther paper. On radio KSAN was the number one source of new music and news for the young, hip listeners of the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the center of this trend was Scoop Nisker making tapes blending snippets of news, pertinent song lyrics, and sound effects, spliced audio creations he called ‘collages.’
KSAN found a loyal audience, tapping into its youthful energy through news, commentary, and community bulletins. In the January 1971 Bolinas Oil Spill, KSAN broadcast the need for quick response, announced the rescue center’s phone number, and recruited volunteers to save sea birds and help cleanup the beach. I was there the next day, learning the technique then in use to wipe away the crude gunk off the grebes and gulls and ducks. This example was one way the station kept its listeners connected to the news stories.
DJs also participated in interviews with musicians and contemporary authors. My listening to folk singer and writer Jeanie Darlington describe her book, Grow Your Own brought me to my local bookstore and then to a lifetime of organic gardening. I made record purchases and bought my concert tickets based on information I heard on my radio. In those years KSAN’s music and commentary was everything from breakfast to bedtime on my days off, with occasional TV breaks. I listened every day.
As Scoop Nisker writes, “In 1970 after guilty verdicts of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial were announced, the San Francisco Examiner had an article saying rioters in Berkeley were listening to KSAN news to find out where to go. And they were, of course, because we were giving directions.”
The shadow side of this intimate connection between DJ’s, news reporters, and audience can be heard in the 1970 tapes of the reconfigured KMPX’s strike included on the website for KSAN Jive 95 news clips. KSAN carried their underground competitors’ revolutionary and often scatological demands and threats, followed by KMPX’s management cutting off the broadcast and their jobs. If KSAN showed the positive side of the youth culture, KMPX’s final days showed the uglier aspects of alternative life. Increasing violence and profanity in anti-war and student demonstrations brought the critical attention of then Governor Ronald Reagan, whose power over the UC Regents caused Berkeley’s Clark Kerr to step down and tuition to increase dramatically after 1970-71. The Reagan and Nixon administrations marked a change of mood in the state and nation.
In 1970 I graduated from college as a divorced mother of two, remarrying at the end of the year. In June of 1971 we bought a small house on 2 acres outside Santa Rosa, sixty miles north of Berkeley and San Francisco. We were ‘back to the land-ers’ trying to live simple lives away from the problems in the cities, but we still listened to KSAN. We grew our own food and livestock. My husband needed to earn money for the mortgage, and build his own business, but soon grew restless with responsibility and slow returns. I worked at the local hospital as an Emergency Room secretary. We had a baby in 1973 and in 1975, a divorce. In my bleak transition, KSAN began playing punk rock of the mid-1970s, and all of a sudden there was David Bowie and Elvis Costello—different, certainly, but easier on the ears than The Clash, the Sex Pistols, and the Ramones. The change in musical aesthetic was sudden and stark. It was all irreverence then.. KSAN avoided Disco, but more and more I lost that glow from recognizing my youth, my music, and my community. I read Rolling Stone for its coverage of music, appreciating the writing. Then in 1981, KSAN changed to a country music format without the same news. I was adrift.
Most of the DJs moved away from the Bay Area. Bonnie Simmons programmed shows for KVRE and works even now on KPFA Thursday nights. Many of the newsmen can still be heard, with Scoop Nisker on KFOG and showing up here and there (e.g., Spirit Rock Meditation Center) to talk about Buddhism, Dave McQueen just retired from CBS news in 2009, and Peter Laufer continues to write while on the faculty of the University of Oregon in Eugene. Terry McGovern has been a character actor on TV and in movies for decades.
The market appeal that attracted Metromedia and Willis Duff to KSAN eventually faded, so KSAN changed to country music. After leaving KSAN he continued doing market research. It was his job to track public tastes by auditioning would-be disc jockeys and potential news anchors in front of test audiences. He did not stop with pencil and paper scorecards; Duff used the old psychological tool of electrodes on fingers to gauge emotional response to the person trying out for the job. It was an audition by galvanic skin response or electronic market analysis. As tastes change, markets change and Willis Duff wanted to measure the possibilities for success. What he did for Progressive music and the marketing of controversy in news in 1968 he did by guessing that there was a demand and would be profit. He consulted with network radio and television to oversee the selection of news anchors. Think of the film, ‘Broadcast News,” or the new BBC series, ‘The Hour’ featuring handsome men with no experience in journalism who move up to anchor major network news, you know that truth really is stranger than fiction.
Strange things happen when we look the other way and just let markets sort things out. Radio has become balkanized with the rise of talk radio, mostly right wing and usually AM. KPFA is an exception on the left, and NPR’s news and interview format tries to remain neutral. Arbitron will tell you the demographic group that any station aims for in its broadcasting strategy. Americana or roots music music is my favorite, but such a specific musical programming is called niche radio, very characteristic of this time in our country. Music stations are common on the FM dial with fixed playlists of Top Forty sprinkled with a few examples of free form alternative music. Today’s radio is an archipelago of musical genres, each station its own separate island of age, race, and ethnicity.
What did we know then, with all our bright hopes for peace and freedom? How could we guess that by the turn of the 21st century nearly all radio, television, and newspapers would be owned by five media giants? Which of us had any idea that radio would be controlled by corporate consultants like Arbitron, or by media analysts who no longer cared for our words and music. Community Radio, in the words of Joni Mitchell, was just a dream some of us had.
For more on this topic, there is the online article by Marcy Rein from 1970, The More Times Change: Bay Area Alternative Press, 1968 – 1998. David Armstrong’s book, A Trumpet To Arms deals with both alternative press and KSAN.
Below, Bonnie Simmons formerly of KSAN, still heard on KPFA.
