Flashback to a Golden Age
Close your eyes. Listen carefully. You'll hear them. Voices from the underground of memory that was Rock & Roll radio in the late '60s and early '70s. It was "Underground" radio then, on the upstart FM dial, and prime among the voices was Tom Donahue, "Big Daddy" of Bay Area broadcasting.
With the late Donahue himself as the guide, those actual sounds and voices will materialize here through the marvel of the compact disc, in a mystical tour of musical memorabilia gone these 20 years.
It's a history rush, to an era that is never coming back, but will never go away either, a time trip for those who remember and a history lesson for those who wish they were there.
Coming at you is an hour of Donahue's fabled nightly show over San Francisco's KSAN, where Donahue took his resonant, mellow tones to new levels after abandoning Top 40 on the AM dial and moving to upstart FM and a format that came to be called "Progressive."
Master tapes and transcriptions provided by his widow, Rachel, herself then and now a radio personality, combine for a special hour glowing with the technicolor history of the time, from the moment Donahue signs on to the moment he signs off the air until next time.
Here are actual news spots, commercials and declarations that fully evoke the magic, mushrooming years 1968-1972, as they evolved in San Francisco, where weekend concerts at the famed Family Dog across from the Pacific Ocean were scaled at $3-$3.50; when "Big Daddy's" record store sponsor promised that a donation to the Berkeley Free Clinic was good for any record album listed at $3.98 or $4.98; as Donahue told everyone where they could go to sign marijuana initiative petitions.
Here all over again is "Big Daddy" raving about one of his favorite local bands, the Youngbloods, among those that nurtured the rawboned, spontaneous music that exploded into what became known as the San Francisco Sound and found a sunny slope on the universal landscape of those musical times.
Before dropping a needle on "Darkness, Darkness," he declares, "I'm looking forward to the day I can hear this in stereo, because it must be unreal."
Also unreal, especially in this sunrise of memory, where the technology of contemporary sound enhances the songs picked from Donahue's catalog of choice, are the likes of the Byrds' "So You Want to be a Rock & Roll Star;" the Chambers Brothers declaring, "Time Has Come Today;" Joe Cocker carrying on about the notorious "Delta Lady;" and another pass by "Big Daddy's" pet Youngbloods, "Get Together."
All the songs are presented complete and uncut as the decades continue to roll back on the tide of Rock & Roll memory, with Spirit and "Fresh Garbage," Leon Russell's telling of "Shoot Out on the Plantation," flower child Donovan visiting with "Atlantis" and "Hurdy Gurdy," and Lee Michaels asking "Do You Know What I Mean?"
"On the Road Again" with Canned Heat. Ten Years After telling how "I'd Love to Change the World."
The world does change, too, as we bounce from the past back to now, remembering all we can of these stars who swept the world into a new way of making music and, in the process, more than earned their lines and paragraphs in the history books of Rock & Roll.
We smile forlornly and fantasize wrinkles and pot bellies on these heroes from the Underground, and, wondering how and when we changed, too, (and why), we quickly run to a mirror. With Donahue's help, we reflect again only on what was then and, for the moment, it's Peter Pan staring back. With more than just the music to help us stay ever-young. The news of Donahue's day is presented as "obscene, dirty, immoral, filthy, smuttyish news. . . but, if you cook it in a brownie, it doesn't taste alf bad."
There are reports about city officials canceling two concerts by the Doors, fearing the performances by Morrison and company will be "obnoxious;" Nixon; the Maharishi; an inquiry into the actual location of funds from the Concert for Bangladesh; and an advisory, "The Vietnam war is still going on and, man, that's really obscene."
Those were the days, my friend. . . Hip was one of the words then. Psychedelic was another. There was LSD. There was Haight-Ashbury. Flower Power and festivals.
Even before making the transition from Top 40 radio in San Francisco, the "Big Daddy" of the Bay was any band's key to a shot at the big time in Rock & Roll. Donahue could help break and make the hits and hit artists by the mere act of programming a record. For a time, he even had his own record label, Autumn, where Sly of the Family Stone (among others) produced some of the first rock records to emanate from San Francisco.
Tom Donahue did more than quit Top 40 when he sensed the changing times. Briefly, he operated a psychedelic nightclub, whateverinhell that was, and then he tuned out to fine tune the infant notion of psychedelic radio.
This would be the underground format he brought to full flower at KSAN. No playlist for Donahue. Not necessarily rock that had the earmarks of Top 40 and the charts. Instead: album cuts based on what he liked and what he sensed would be next to be new.
Monterey Pop? That big, burly, bearded fella over there, that's Donahue. Woodstock. Altamont.
The Medicine Ball Caravan, with a band called Stoneground and a bunch of crazies traveling cross-country to take the music and the message to fans in the farthest reaches, and Donahue was among those declaring loud enough for protestors to respond, "We have come for your daughters!"
And, finally, there were only memories as today lapsed into yesterday and the music moved on to tomorrow.
Donahue?
He died young.
An early casualty among the superstars of the scene.
The format associated with his name, the "Underground Radio" that helped revolutionize the way music was played and heard and shoved myriad bands itching for success down a new road to glory? Alive and thriving to this day, and still the place where hits and heroes come alive.
"That's the way it was," "Big Daddy" will remind his listeners before wrapping up this hour, "and that's the way it is and it's always changing and it is always the same."
When Rock & Roll was young. Courtesy of Tom Donahue. R.I.P.
- Bob Levinson Peace...
http://www.jive95.com/
http://www.bayarearadio.org/audio/kmpx/1967/kmpx-fm-107_may-5-1967.shtml