Darian O'Toole takes a nap

Radio can be a lonely job. The nights can be late the days can start early and they can run long blending into one long tiresome day. Coffee is a popular substance in radioland and though it's less often discussed so is dexadrine and a number of other over-the-counter stimulants. But still, sometimes the one manning the mic nods off.

It's a capital offense in radioland. Thou shalt not takes nap. So when Darian O'Toole started snoozing, it was no wonder that KIFR canned her. It might have something to do with her rambling incoherently and then nodding off while the mic was on. ...damn I'd love a tape of that.

Free FM is a brave new brand and it was only launched by Infinity to try desperately to maintain some of the TSL and QSL they had with Howard Stern. The King of All Media, had solid numbers after all these decades and they were committed to a certain drop off, but not an actual nod off.
They were so peeved they erased all references to O'Toole on the Free FM website overnight. PD Ken Kohl came stonewalled it saying only "I'm not free to discuss personnel issues," He politely avioded addressing the accusations of her painkiller "problem" and her supposed time in rehab.

O'Toole who is a Frisco residenty by way of Canada has been fired from some killer gigs, in New York and in San Francisco before. On http://www.darianotoole.com/ she put up a petitian to "bring back Darian. Nothing came of it apparently. She continues to maintain her blog here: http://darianotoole.blogspot.com/

Death threats between DJs

DJs, especially the pseudo-christian ulta-conservative kind are frequenty on the receiving end of death threats. You group fecalfiliacs, gays and pedophiles in the basket all three tend fto get a smidge offended. Veiling fascist tendencies in well-meant moralism can do that. [of course so does beligerantly syndicating Air America programming south of the Mason Dixon Line] But all politics aside, death threats are illegal. You can't do that on the radio. ...But it's happened oh-so-many times.

Take for example the relatively recent incident on 106.9 KIFR San Francisco's "Free FM" that reminded me of this in the first place.

DJ John London got on the air and [ironicly] offered $5,000 to anyone who would will Penn Jillette another CBS DJ. Before I tell you What Penn did, let me tell you this was not a joke. It wasn't even in the heat-of-the-moment. The next day he upped the bounty to $7,000... if he suffers.

So what did Penn do? Well Penn is more of a flaming Libertarian than myself so I'm sure that you are imagining something pretty bad. the truth is that he critisized Mother Theresa. Yep. Well wait a sec. It sounds bad at first, but until I heard a tape of what he said I withheld judgement.

Here are the basics. Penn called Mother Theresa a fraud. He claimed that Mother Teresa had set up refuges for dying people for her own peronal"sexual kicks.'' He followed that with the moral assessment that Paris Hilton was morally superior to the nun.

Apparently Penn had done a little reading on Ms. Theresa and found humor in the ironly of her squeaky clean image and her immoral and unrepentant actual self. I wont rehash it, there's plenty of reading out there. It should also be pointed out that at the time, Indian director T. Rajeevnath was actively courting Ms. Hilton to play Mother Theresa in a Bollywood flick. So in actuality very little of the offensive content originates in Penns balding head. But 100% of the death threats come from Mr. London.

But let me add that The World Famous Midget Master Blaster Television Spectacular managed to mock Ms. Theresa without either death threats or Paris Hilton: here

Classic Rock is born

Classic Rock is a radio format, not a genre. It contains many genres including actual oldies from the 1960s, proto-metal, psychedelic-blues, psychedelic rock, prog-rock, and others. It is an odd radio format in that it has become totally entrenched in our language as if it were a music genre. If you get deterministic about etymology; because we all use it as if it were, it has become so.

Interestingly enough, most Classic Rock stations originally played a little something we used to think of as AOR. Album-Oriented Rock. That too was a radio format but despite the persistence of the term, it no longer exists. The AOR format is completely extinct! The idea was to play album cuts, in addition to (or instead of) singles. It was very FM-focused as you'd imagine.

I have seen the argument that this was also the birth of alternative rock radio. I think this is mostly crap since the term alternative rock did not even exist in 1967. I see it as something that sprung organically, decades later from another generation of pop music. But it was very related to so called "Free Form" FM. 

Previously 106.9 KMPX had been many things, a jazz station, MOR (middle of the road) and others. But in 1967 KMPX was owned by the Crosby-Pacific Broadcasting Company and was brokered ethnic and running a mighty 80,000 watts. In 1967, rock promoter Tom Donahue scraped together some favors, some cash and some chutzpa and sweet talked Station manager Ron Hunt into phasing out some foreign language programs in favor his "hippie-station" concept: album-oriented rock music with an emphasis on San Francisco-based bands, and announcers who took a more laid-back approach to the mic. By August of that year they were hippie-rock 24/7. Donahue was the First AOR PD in the nation. Months later they picked up a sister station in Pasadena KPPC. Clips of Donahue talking here:

Early on, things were promising but not profitable. Staff worked for little or nothing. But a year later cash was flowing, listenership was up and so were their ad rates. But salaries were still ranged from terrible to non-existent. Management fired Donahue on March 11th and brought in Bob Prescott as PD. This is sometimes described as Donahue walking out, but with some nuance. [SOURCE] This led directly to a strike by the KMPX staff on March 18th, 1968.

Ever the capitalist, Leon Crosby opted not to meet the demands of the workers. Instead he brought in a replacement staff. It was much like the way Regan handled the air traffic controllers strike in 1981 except a mixing console wont kill anyone. The strike at KMPX lasted eight weeks. KMPX lost almost it's entire staff and most of it's advertisers and even lost some of it's playlist's core artists. Several rock bands including the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead requested the the station no longer play their music.

Then Donahue took the whole staff across the street to KSAN and reassembled his radio commune. KMPX had a limited revival but never recovered. By 1972 after a series of ownership changes the station flipped to a Nostalgia format. Today KIFR operates on the 106.9 channel in San Francisco, as a Infinity Broadcasting licensee running News/talk. KSAN is still a big classic rocker. More here including a documentary film.

NOTE: the book the Art of Rock has several of the now famous psychedelic KMPX promotional station posters. You can see it here.