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Billy Bass
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From the moment that FM rock radio drew its first breath, Raechel Donahue has been among its liveliest champions. With her husband, Tom Donahue, she worked to create a new radio art form that eschewed the then-dominant Top 40 format in favor of a free-flowing, eclectic, and decidedly psychedelic ethos. First at KMPX and then at KSAN, she not only kept the station running, but hired and trained a largely female staff: “Tom suggested that we get all girls, because when women get technical jobs they try harder to keep them.” The progressive format that the Donahues pioneered in San Francisco, and later at KMET and KPPC in Los Angeles, quickly spread around the country, helping to incite the countercultural revolution of the 1960s. Although she had no desire to be a disc jockey, her husband persuaded her to join him on air one night, which ultimately led to Donahue having her own show. After Tom died in 1975, Donahue went on to spin for such stations as KWST and KROQ, however as radio fell under the sway of the corporate mindset, and playlists became more conservative, Donahue ventured into other media, becoming a sought-after voice actor in scores of motion pictures and the first entertainment reporter for CNN. Nowadays, along with hosting a show on SIRIUS satellite radio, she makes documentaries about music and other issues close to her heart.
Born Raechel Hamilton in National City, California, in 1947, Donahue began her professional career in 1964 with Autumn Records, the label founded and owned by “Big Daddy” Tom Donahue. Thanks to his “over 400 pounds of solid sounds,” Tom had become the top-rated AM disc jockey in San Francisco. As Donahue explained to the Denver alternative weekly Westword, “Tom thought I was 22, because I was going to San Francisco State, but I got out of high school early. I was only seventeen—still a minor.” Tiring of AM and its restrictive playlists—indeed, he wrote an article for Rolling Stone entitled “AM Radio is Dead and Its Rotting Corpse Is Stinking Up the Airwaves”—Tom looked to FM, which offered superior sound quality, but was largely used to simulcast AM signals, as the new frontier. When the Federal Communications Commission ruled that license-holders needed to develop original FM content, Tom Donahue persuaded the owner of a struggling Spanish-language outlet called KMPX to let him try an experiment. What he had in mind was a new form of radio that involved playing sets of songs with no interruptions or chatter; when the set ended (the songs would generally be linked tangentially, though not necessarily in any thematic order), he would offer his musings on the music and how it related to the community or to the world at large. This being the era of Vietnam and Nixon, the result was forward-looking and grassroots at the same time: Tom and Raechel, spun album tracks from such Bay Area acts as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, routinely offered political statements instead of the empty, fast-talking jabber of their AM brethren, and otherwise embraced the counterculture vibe that came to be associated with Haight-Ashbury. “We did lots of lost-dog announcements,” Donahue said, “partly because Janis Joplin’s dog seemed to get lost about once a week.”
After a year or so, KMPX’s owners tried to impose some structure on the anarchic operation. In response, the entire staff went on strike, demanding, among other things, summer solstice as a paid holiday. (The event came to be known as the Great Hippie Strike.) Later, after an astrologer cursed the parking lot (thereby dooming KMPX for all eternity, in Donahue’s opinion), the Donahues (Raechel and Tom married in 1969) moved the dispossessed workers en masse to another station, KSAN. The radio revolution continued at the new address—and at sister station KPPC, where they broadcast from the basement of the Pasadena Presbyterian Church—while also attracting the loyalty of many a rebel along the way. For instance, in 1974, when the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst, it used KSAN to communicate with the outside world. After Tom died in 1975, Raechel headed down the coast to Los Angeles’s KMET to try to clear her head. “It was just too painful to be around all those old memories,” she said. “San Francisco is a very small town, and it was just inescapable.”
Women in radio in that era were generally relegated to what was called the “housewife shift,” but Raechel decided that in Los Angeles it should be called the “out-of-work actor shift” and aimed her program toward a wider audience. On the strength of such innovative programming as The Blue Plate Special, Donahue soon became one of the highest-rated radio personalities in the area. In his book Radio Waves, Jim Ladd described her as “a being who was never at rest. Her brain seemed to work something like a pinball machine. What passed for her attention span was really more akin to a speeding silver ball, unleashing a different idea every time it bounced off a new synapse bumper.” However, as KMET succumbed to corporatization and rigid programming, Donahue decided to try to break into the world of voice acting. She cut a demo tape and began to make overtures to talent agencies. Informed that women were not a valued commodity in this arena, she decided to take a more direct approach: each day for the next month, she delivered her demo to as many ad agencies as she could. Disheartened by the constant rejection, she flopped her last demo on the desk of a man who decided to take a chance and give her a shot at a rape crisis public service spot. It ran for fifteen years. Her next job was a national spot alongside Maverick star Jack Kelly. She was on her way as a commercial voiceover actor, but it turned out that her friends had something more in mind for her burgeoning career.
Donahue credits actor Howard Hesseman, himself a former DJ, with gaining her membership in the coveted Screen Actor’s Guild. “The Bob Newhart Show folks were looking for a brusque receptionist and Howard suggested they cold call me. Since the caller was very vague about the intentions of the call and I was very protective of my privacy, I was quite rude and ended the call by a rude hang up,” Donahue recalled. “Apparently, I was just what they were looking for and I got a Taft-Hartley entrance opportunity. Howard knew me all too well.” Although terrified to perform a voiceover in front of a live studio audience, Donahue did well enough to survive several seasons of Newhart and went on to work on another MTM series, The Tony Randall Show. Her real adventure began when she was called by Allison Caine, the then-wife of Carl Gottlieb, who had also DJed at KMPX. Caine was casting voices for Slap Shot (1977), a comedy about a low-rent minor league hockey team, and was looking for someone who could do snappy dialogue and inventive R-rated language. “Again,” laughed Donahue, “they knew just what kind of a girl I was.” Caine went on to cast Donahue in nearly a hundred films and scores of television shows.
Although she had, for the first of many times, avowed she was through with radio, in 1984 Donahue accepted a job with the fledgling hard rock station K-West 106 (KWST-FM), where she worked a 6 to 9 p.m. shift in order to accommodate her movie work. She was ultimately offered a position as a female lead on a morning show, with the station taking a newspaper ad featuring a glamorous headshot of Donahue and the slug, “How’s This For The First Face You Hear In The Morning?” The ratings were astonishing, yet station executives soon decided to change to a Top 40 format. Although everyone else was dismissed, Donahue was allowed to stay on as the station made the transition to KMGG, or Magic 106 as it came to be known. The new programmers allowed her to play whatever she wanted for the next two months and then let her go. Although the astounding ratings for that period wouldn’t appear for months after her departure, the performance did not go unnoticed.
On the morning in 1982 that she was to depart from the transitioning KWST, Donahue received a surprising phone call from Doug Herzog, a young producer for the upstart CNN, inviting her to become an entertainment reporter. Even though she pointed out that she had never worked on camera before, she got the job. The interviews she did led to a regular live segment with Lee Leonard on People Tonight, a Los Angeles–based entertainment talk show on CNN. “I learned all my video skills from Ted Turner,” she said, “because you had to do everything fast and cheap.” When Leonard left CNN, Donahue felt the call of radio once more and joined her old San Francisco cohort Dusty Street at the alternative station KROQ, where she quickly found herself on the crest of the airwaves again as the tiny Pasadena station gained legendary status by introducing America to the new wave sounds of the Cure, Depeche Mode, and other cutting-edge British bands. Her next stop in radio was alongside KIIS megastar Rick Dees, who to this day calls her “the best voice in radio.” She wrote and delivered the news and gleefully played second banana to funnyman Dees. The twosome’s unique chemistry and snappy banter gained double-digit ratings, unheard of in Los Angeles. In 1985, a catastrophic off-road racing crash broke Donahue’s spine and left her in a body cast for nearly a year, and a brace for another year. She underwent three years of physical therapy, during which she wrote, produced and hosted over 300 episodes of a local music magazine show called On the Flipside.
Donahue returned to radio a few more times—The Edge with old friends J. J. Jackson and Jim Ladd; MARS/fm with KROQ cohort Freddy Snakeskin; a short stint at Radio Riviera in Monte Carlo—before making a complete career change in 1990. This time she decided she wanted to make a living as a writer, no small feat. From a small weekly art column, Donahue worked her way up to features editor for a group of local newspapers under the Brentwood Media Group. Along the way she managed to get into print with several U.K. magazines, including the British Film Review. Then she sold a screenplay; wrote three books in a series called The Golden Rules: Romance, Modern Etiquette, and Single Parenting; and coauthored The Ropes: A Grown-Up Woman’s Guide to Being Single, Sexy and Sensational with Judy Steinberg. In 2000, she wrote, directed and produced Phil Spector: Rock and Roll Genius, for which she interviewed such musical luminaries as Tina Turner, Ben E. King, Darlene Love, Atlantic Records kingpin Ahmet Ertegun, and Yoko Ono. She then produced, along with Carolyn Travis, the award-winning PBS documentary Rock Jocks: The FM Revolution, a rollicking look at how FM radio fueled the cultural revolution of the 1960s—a topic to which Donahue brought plenty of you-are-there veracity. The program was narrated by Donahue’s longtime friend Hesseman, who played Dr. Johnny Fever on the popular sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati and, as a devotee of jazz (rather than rock or pop), had often turned to Donahue to program the rock ‘n’ roll tracks he played on that show’s fictional radio station.
In 2006, Donahue again teamed up with Travis on the feature-length documentary Airplay, which explores the ongoing struggle between radio pioneers and powerful business, political, and religious organizations for the soul of the American airwaves. It is set to be released in 2007. Despite her interest in nonfiction film, Donahue remains enchanted with the dial. In 2002 she began a show on Denver’s KQMT (99.5, The Mountain) that was a throwback of sorts to the bygone era of freeform rock radio. “I haven’t been able to do this kind of radio in a really long time,” she enthused at the time. “I even got to play six songs about philosophers—you’re encouraged to think here, and take the music as far as your brain will take you.” Or as the station’s program director Dan Michaels noted: “We were looking for special people to be on The Mountain. We couldn’t just have people trained to be liner-card readers, because we have none. We had to find people who knew music inside and out and could talk about it intelligently. And that’s Raechel.” In July 2004, Donahue moved on to become program director of a syndicated radio show based at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, which is currently heard on SIRIUS Satellite Radio, proving that it is near impossible to give up one’s first love. Moreover, Donahue vows to stay in the game long enough to finish her provocatively entitled memoir Jock Itch.
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