The Jive 95 - An Oral History of America's Greatest Underground Rock Radio Station, KSAN San Francisco - Hank Rosenfeld

The author worked at "The Jive 95" in San Francisco,---the first hippie-run FM station in America. After interviewing the original crazy characters who were in their 20s when they created the phenomenon, I compiled this Oral History of America’s Greatest Underground Rock Radio Station. From 1967-80, it was the countercultural center/clubhouse/ vortex of consciousness for a new generation of young people in the '60s and '70s. A community-beloved commercial radio original, staffed by intrepid pranksters, drug-enlightened DJs and brilliantly radical news people.
From the revolutionary Summer of Love in 1967 Golden Gate Park, through the antiwar, civil rights, ecology-enlightened, crazy 1970s America, to the rebellion's bitter corporate-clampdown ending in 1980, KSAN was considered THEIR station (the love generation's) Invented by "Big Daddy: Tom Donahue (6'5", 400 lbs; 1996 inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame), almost overnight, KSAN became the voice of th counterculture. Rock gods, political and literary celebrities, including Jerry Garcia, Ken Kesey, Sly Stone, and John Lennon were all welcomed on-air by Big Daddy and his acolytes: DJs like Howard Hesseman (WKRP star), Dusty Street (first female rock DJ), turning on listeners to new musicians like the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Creedence, Country Joe and the Fish, Hot Tuna, among others.

So, how did KSAN go from a liberating free-wheeling voice of a community, to a corporate America radio cliché? It’s all here in Hank Rosenfeld's (a folk journalist for NPR, L.A. Times, Spy Magazine, etc) hilarious account.