Tom Donahue 1928 - 1975

"Big Daddy" Tom Donahue

"The disc jockeys have become robots, performing their inanities at the direction of programmers who have succeeded in totally squeezing the human element out of their sound, and reducing it to a series of blips and bleeps and happy, oh yes, always happy, sounding cretins who are poured from bottles every three hours. They have succeeded in making everyone on the station staff sound the same -- asinine. This is the much coveted 'station sound.'" – Tom Donahue “AM Radio Is Dead and Its Rotting Corpse Is Stinking Up the Airwaves”, Rolling Stone 1967

Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue has been called the father of progressive radio. As a deejay and executive at San Francisco radio stations KMPX and KSAN in the late Sixties and early Seventies, Donahue pioneered "free form" radio on the largely ignored FM band and revolutionized radio broadcasting in America. A Rolling Stone article that he wrote in 1967 bore the headline, “AM Radio Is Dead and Its Rotting Corpse Is Stinking Up the Airwaves.” As Rolling Stone noted in 1969, “Donahue was the moving force behind the transition of KMPX-FM [in 1967] from a foreign-language outlet into the country’s first full-time album-cut, hip-sounding station.”

Donahue started out in 1949 as a deejay at WTIP in Charleston, South Carolina. He worked at WIBG in Philadelphia and WINX in Rockville, Maryland, before moving to San Francisco in 1961, where he began deejaying at Top Forty station KYA. Donahue took KYA to the top of the ratings, beginning each show with his trademark line, "Here to blow your mind and clean up your face."

He left radio in 1965 to run a record label and produce concerts, but by 1967 Donahue clearly saw the need for stations that would play non-commercial music by album-oriented bands like the Doors, Blue Cheer and the rising lights on the San Francisco scene. He convinced the owners of KMPX to beginning playing album-oriented rock without playlists 24 hours a day, and thus did the underground rock radio revolution begin.

A large man, he had a deep voice “that rolled from his throat like thick oil pouring from the can,” according to journalist Joel Selvin. His commanding, no-nonsense delivery and anti-establishment mindset endeared him to the San Francisco counterculture. In 1968, he moved from KMPX to KSAN, where he encouraged deejays to program their own shows with music from different eras and genres and to build sets around themes, interspersed with political commentary.

Donahue (born Thomas Coman on May 21, 1928) had been a popular Philadelphia Top 40 radio disc jockey from 1951 to 1961, leading WIBG ("Wibbage") to the top as host of the daily "Danceland" show, while also serving as Secretary of Bristol Township in Bucks County under his real name. Prior to arriving in Philadelphia, his résumé showed stops at WTIP/Charleston, S.C., and WINX/Rockville, Md., as well as a stint as a military policeman in the Philippines.

In 1961, in the wake of payola investigations that had damaged the reputations of numerous East Coast DJs, Donahue — encouraged by reports from his former WIBG teammate Bobby Mitchell — decided to pack up and head west to join Bartell Broadcasting's KYA in San Francisco.

An instant success at KYA, Donahue soon began producing record hops and concerts featuring local and, later, nationally-known performers, in partnership with Mitchell as Tempo Productions. The pair branched out into other related businesses, including a record label, Autumn Records, and Mother's, one of the City's first psychedelic night clubs, located in North Beach. Donahue and Mitchell also pursued one of their other interests, thoroughbred horse racing, by starting Tempo Stables. (Their interest in the ponies is further evidenced by KYA's "Jockey Races" promotion, heard during this broadcast.)

Autumn Records is remembered today mostly for its biggest act, The Beau Brummels, who had two national hits on the label, "Laugh, Laugh" and "Just A Little," as well as an early version of "Somebody to Love" by The Great Society, which would later morph into The Jefferson Airplane. Autumn also recorded tracks by the Mojo Men, Vejtables, and Bobby Freeman.  Each of these records were produced by another popular Bay Area disc jockey, Sly Stone (Sylvester Stewart) of KSOL.

Donahue would depart KYA in 1965, remaining in San Francisco to oversee his numerous business interests, which culminated with producing The Beatles' concert at Candlestick Park on August 29, 1966 — the group's last scheduled concert appearance anywhere. (His business partner, Bobby Mitchell, went on to work for the Bill Drake-programmed stations KFRC/San Francisco and KHJ/Los Angeles as Bobby Tripp. He passed away in July 1968 at age 48 from Hodgkin's Disease.)

At 8 p.m. on Friday, April 7, 1967, Tom Donahue cracked open the microphone in the KMPX studio at 50 Green Street in San Francisco, firing a figurative shot that would echo across the local radio landscape forever.

Having left Top 40 KYA a year earlier, Donahue had spent those months searching for something different, something better. No longer interested in fitting into the tightly-formatted world of Top 40 — which was being rubber stamped across the country with the assistance of Bill Drake, who had worked with Donahue five years earlier at KYA — the gargantuan "Big Daddy" had taken to playing his favorite songs from rock albums for friends visiting his North Beach apartment, often playing cuts buried deep in those LPs, which had rendered them largely invisible to the radio programmers who sought out only the hits.

Donahue had even gone so far as to call on his former employers at KYA, seeking an opportunity to try this new, seat-of-your-pants style of choosing what to play, but was initially turned down. He was, however, offered jobs at the Bay Area's two dominant soul stations, KSOL/1450 and KDIA/1310, but chose to decline them rather than take a job from a deserving black announcer.

Taking a friend's advice to look at stations on the FM dial, Donahue sat at home one evening, tuning in the scattered stations occupying the band. Coming across one that seemed promising, KMPX, he looked up the station in the Yellow Pages and dialed its number, only to find that its phones had been disconnected. Rather than being discouraged, Donahue found that it made KMPX even more attractive to him.

KMPX had begun life a decade earlier as KPUP under the ownership of Franklin Mieuli. Mieuli, who had produced sports broadcasts for KSFO in the 1950s, bought the Philadelphia Warriors of the National Basketball Association in 1962, moved them to San Francisco, and — in order to help finance the deal — sold the station, which by this time was known as KHIP, to Leon Crosby. Crosby, who also owned KFMR in Fremont and would later own KEMO-TV (Channel 20), changed KHIP's call letters to KMPX.

Operated by Crosby on a shoestring budget, KMPX struggled with several formats, including middle of the road music, before settling on offering blocks of time for sale to various foreign-language programmers. The station broadcast several hours of programs in Chinese, Portuguese, Italian and other languages throughout the day, as well as playing music in the blocks of time that weren't sold.

Into this state of affairs walked a young folk guitarist and disc jockey named Larry Miller in February 1967. Miller had arrived in San Francisco several months earlier, looking for work in either the local clubs or at a radio station. He met with Leon Crosby and was offered the vacant overnight shift at KMPX for $45 a week. He accepted, and went on the air with a self-selected mix of folk and rock records.

A month later, Donahue made a similar pilgrimage to see Leon Crosby, albeit with a more elaborate plan and, by all accounts, without prior knowledge that Miller was already doing an all-night program with a similar theme. Crosby agreed to Donahue's expanded plan to program KMPX, at first hosting his own program from 8 p.m. to midnight each evening, then adding other announcers of Donahue's choosing as other blocks of time became available.

Tom Donahue & wife Raechel

The early recordings of his KMPX show capture Donahue at KMPX in the dawn of creating his ideal radio station for those times: a variety of music — rock, folk, Indian ragas, pop, soul — played by a disc jockey/programmer who selected the songs not by corporate edict, but by individual instinct. Donahue's relaxed, conversational announcing style, however, is not far distant from the technique he crafted in his earlier stops at WIBG in Philadelphia and across town at KYA; in fact, some of the music heard here — specifically, selections by Simon & Garfunkel, Ike & Tina Turner and the Spencer Davis Group — owe more to the contemporary Top 40 scene rather than the "acid rock" or "underground radio" format that this genre would veer toward.

In March 1968, a year after he first contacted Leon Crosby with his programming plan, Donahue walked away from KMPX. Having taken on additional responsibilities as programming consultant and announcer at co-owned KPPC in Pasadena — which reportedly led to missed shifts at KMPX — Donahue was told by Crosby to choose one job or the other. Instead, he decided to walk out. On March 18, 1968, the rest of the announcing and engineering staff went out on strike in sympathy with Donahue. Unwilling to give up almost total control of his station to people that he felt did not have his best interests at heart, Crosby hired replacement workers.

On Tuesday, May 21, 1968, a little more than eight weeks after the strike began, members of the former KMPX staff, including Donahue, began moving over to KSAN (94.9 FM), beginning the transformation of that station into the hallowed institution known as "The Jive 95."

Tom Donahue died from a massive heart attack on April 28, 1975, a month short of his forty-eighth birthday. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on January 17, 1996.