Tom Donahue

As a Top 40 deejay in Philadelphia and San Francisco, “Big Daddy” Tom Donahue opened his show with a self-spoofing line: “I’m here to clean up your face and mess up your mind.” But it was on the FM band in the late 1960s and ’70s that Donahue changed the face—and sound—of radio. Along with a handful of others, Donahue invented free-form rock radio, in which hipster disc jockeys with a broad knowledge of music—usually extending beyond rock and into rhythm and blues, blues, jazz, folk, and country—played and said whatever they wanted.

Beginning at a lowly FM station, KMPX in San Francisco—where a deejay from Detroit, Larry Miller, was already playing an eclectic blend of music on the all-night shift—Donahue made free-form a commercial success. After a labour dispute, he and most of his staff moved to KSAN, a former classical station. One form of longhair music gave way to another, and KSAN became one of the most successful progressive rock stations in the country until the mid-1970s, when Donahue died (April 1975) and competing programmers came up with a mainstream version of free-form. This new format, album-oriented rock (AOR), meant the demise of free-form radio.