When I talk about my radio career, I usually mention that Chris Knab (Cosmo Topper) and I started the first punk rock radio show on a commercial station in America— on iconic KSAN in San Francisco. Actually, the idea for the show, The Outcaste Hour, wasn’t ours; it was Norman Davis’, the station’s legendary overnight jock, who was looking for company, looking for listeners, looking to shake things up. One afternoon in 1977, he wandered into Chris’ independent record store, Aquarius Records, right next door to Harvey Milk’s camera shop on Castro Street. He said to Chris, “You’re selling all these great imported 45’s but at KSAN we aren’t playing any of it; would you like to come on my show and play some of these 45s.”
Chris went on and played some punk imports and after a couple of shows he still remembers telling Norman, “Ya know, I have a friend who knows everything about the local/national punk rock scene.” I knew exactly how the make that hour must-listen for the burgeoning punk scene. Chris and I started playing tapes of the local bands. All the members, their families, their fans, their friends had to listen. We played all their music— and it was on the most important radio station in northern California. Along with the UK singles by the Pistols, Buzzcocks, Clash, Siouxsie, we played everything from the Bay Area bands— from pretty harsh, hard core stuff, like Crime, to more pop-sounding “alternative,” like Pearl Harbor & the Explosions.
And we were the only game in town when bands came to play live. We’d interview all the bands from the U.K. and New York who came to play in the Bay Area. Usually when I talk about the Sex Pistols interviews, I talk about the one that Chris and I did with a couple of them down at KSJO in San Jose, where we also did a weekly show. We got suspended because of the Pistols interview, which was released as the title track of an album, Big Tits Over America. But the KSAN interview with Steve Jones and Paul Cook was pretty wild too. We opened up the phone lines and the suburbs started calling! OMG! The callers were very disturbed by the Pistols and a bunch from down the Peninsula threatened to kill us. And, provoked by Jones, they drove up to the station with that intent— or at least to beat the hell out of us for “playing that shit music.” We managed to escape out a back door but Jones and Cook wanted to fight them. I don’t remember what happened, probably because I was already in my old Mercury Comet headed back to the Mission.
Chris says that was when I started wearing my “famous leather jacket.” But my friends from college a decade earlier will attest that I was wearing one back then, in the middle of the hippie era. My friend Ellen claims I stole hers and she’s still complaining about it.
Chris also reminded me how cool Norman remained while we “interviewed” Roky Erickson in April, 1978, fresh from a stay in an insane asylum. I think I have a cassette of it in my storage closet upstairs but I took a look and found a couple minutes of it on YouTube:
Norman died late last month. He was 88; that's a pretty good run. And last week Sam Whiting wrote a tribute to him for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Fans of Norman Davis’ overnight show on San Francisco radio station KSAN-FM in the 1970s could usually tell when the DJ had eaten magic mushrooms before taking to the air at 2 a.m.
He’d open with something long and spacey, like “Dark Side of the Moon,” spliced with comedy segments from the Firesign Theater and off-center announcements in a deep voice that was extremely laid-back. It would go on like that until 6 a.m. with Davis somehow holding it together, the way he always did in an on-air career that lasted 70 years, on both AM and FM radio.
“Where am I?” was a typical Davis comment on “the radio program that tries to show you, the listener, exactly where you are.
He rode every musical trend from Top 40 to big band to punk. His favorite was the blues, which he was broadcasting on Radio Boise, KRBX, on Jan. 29, the day before he died of heart failure after years of struggling with lung disease. He was 88 and perhaps the only disc jockey to return to the air after six weeks in hospice care.
“Norman was a lovely, kind, sometimes irascible person, who was also funny, smart and very unusual,” said Bonnie Simmons, who still does freeform radio at KPFA-FM and was program director at KSAN during Davis’ tenure.
“While he may have gone out on his particular ledge, he also was always a completely competent and put together radio professional.”
KSAN, known as Jive 95, was legendary for pioneering non-programmed, DJ-driven radio, and is the subject of an upcoming documentary film “Something in the Air: a Rock Radio Revolution,” which includes extensive testimony by Davis. He didn’t hold back, recounting for the camera his 30-day diet of hallucinogens while doing his show. But he was only at 94.9 on the FM dial for seven of his 70 years in radio— 21 stations in all.
When he got to KSAN, replacing the late Edward Bear on the overnight shift in 1972, Davis had already made a name for himself with a long stint at KYA-AM, starting in 1959, the year after it launched its Top 40 format. KYA was Top 40 but Davis got separation from the playlist through a weekend show called “Norman’s Organic Mind Garden.” He is said to have been the first DJ to play Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd at middle-of-the-road KSFO.
He also worked locally at KOBY, KSAN, KSJO, KMPX, KKCY (the City), KTIM in San Rafael, KAFE in Santa Rosa, and KOFY.
“Norman was a very important part of Bay Area radio history because he explored radio and music in a way that nobody else did. He was unique” said Steve Kushman, director of the California Historical Radio Society Museum in Alameda, which will host a memorial tribute to Davis on April 7 from 3 to 6 p.m.
Norman Davis in a KSAN promotional photo from the 1970s. In an on-air career that lasted 70 years on both AM and FM radio, he rode every musical trend from Top 40 to big band to punk.
Norman Davis in a KSAN promotional photo from the 1970s. In an on-air career that lasted 70 years on both AM and FM radio, he rode every musical trend from Top 40 to big band to punk.
There will be a lot of history to discuss because Davis was inventive and meticulous, and kept notebooks into which he categorized songs by subject, tempo and key to make sure his segues were seamless.
He was often still feeling creative when his show ended at 6 a.m. and he’d go to work on special projects until his mind settled down.
Simmons recalled one such project that Davis let her in on.
“He finally invited me to hear what he had been working so hard on all those nights and the tape was for the most part blank,” said Simmons. “That is when we suggested that he might want to back off of the ’shrooms for a good while. Norman was definitely listening to the music of the spheres in there.”
With a reputation like this, Davis wasn’t going to be told what to play, and that was his downfall at KSAN, which started to change after its larger-than-life station manager, Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue, died in 1975. A few years later, a new station manager mandated playing a minimal number of select popular “emphasis tracks,” and Davis left the station in 1978.
“He was a tripper making radio for trippers,’’ said his daughter, Susie Davis, a Richmond-based keyboard player and backup singer who has toured with Van Morrison, Mick Jagger and Prince. “My dad just wanted to be putting that magic out there on the airwaves.’’
Norman Elwood Davis was born Feb. 26, 1935, in Walla Walla, Wash. During his childhood the family moved to Boise, where he grew up. His father, Moses Elwood Davis, was a blue-collar laborer. Listening to radio was a challenge because his mother, Hazel, was a strict Seventh-day Adventist who forbade all radio play unless it was a religious broadcast.
“Whenever his mother left the house, he would run to the radio and turn it on, then sit down at the piano and play jazz along with it,” said his daughter. “He was obsessed with radio from an early age.”
Davis got his first paid job in radio, at $1 per hour for 10 straight hours on air, on a Seventh-day Adventist college station when he was 18. By the late ’50s he was working in Spokane, Wash., where he met Rosetta Dolajak. They married in 1958 and moved to San Francisco. They were married for 22 years, living mostly in Petaluma and Corte Madera, before divorcing.
Davis’ first job in San Francisco was at KOBY, a Top 40 station. He was assigned the broadcast name Al Knight, which would have made sense if he were working the overnight shift. But he was still working days and weekends.
When Davis was hired away by KYA, in 1961, he was labeled Lucky Logan, but he eventually took on his own name, which appeared with his picture on a 1962 KYA album cover that showed six progressions of the Twist dance step.
According to his daughter, Davis first dabbled with drugs on the air at KCMO in Kansas City, in 1969.
“Dad was a middle-of-the-road kind of guy who wore a suit to work,” said Davis. “All of a sudden all of these hippies were hanging out at our house. I watched my parents transition from middle to complete counterculture devotees.”
After showing up for his morning shift while still tripping on LSD, Davis was unable to read a commercial aloud and was fired from KCMO for the infraction.
Leaving his wife and four kids behind in Kansas City until they rejoined him, Davis hitchhiked to San Francisco in a hippie caravan. After first being hired at KSFO in 1970, he didn’t leave the Bay Area for good until 1991, when he moved to a station in Long Beach. He stayed local by attending KSAN reunions and building the jive95.com website.
“Norman was the keeper of the KSAN flame,” said rock journalist and radio historian Ben Fong-Torres, who was a weekend DJ at KSAN in the 1970s. “He was devoted to the station and its legacy among the Jive 95ers. He just lived the freeform life.”
Comments