San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Bay Area radio’s counterculture voice
KSAN, the pioneering free-form San Francisco radio station was known for its disc jockeys spinning album sides amid on-air mischief, interrupted only by the authoritative voice of Dave McQueen, who delivered the news.
McQueen was so trusted by the underground that when heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped, he was a source trusted by the Symbionese Liberation Army to announce the ransom news delivered by audiotape.
“People called Dave the Walter Cronkite of the counterculture,” said Eric Christensen, a radio programmer in the early 1970s.
For a decade, McQueen developed such a following that when KSAN shocked its loyalists by switching from rock to country classics and gutted its on-air staff, McQueen was kept on. He also delivered the news at Top 40 KFRC and at the shortlived but deeply revered KKCY, where he had a Sunday morning two-hour interview talk show.
“No person chronicled the ’70s better than he did,” said John Evans, who worked with McQueen at KKSF and succeeded him at KCBS. “When he came on the air, he didn’t say Dave McQueen. he said ‘Dave Mack-wean’ in a deeply rich voice that had this bottom to it that kind of rattled the radio and commanded your attention.”
Last month, McQueen walked out of his Berkeley home to fetch the Sunday morning newspaper and never made it back. He was found on the driveway next to the sidewalk by a neighbor, having apparently fallen over backward. He never regained consciousness. The
cause of death has not been determined, said his wife, Mary Tilson. He was 78.
Peter Laufer, a professor of journalism at the University of Oregon, said McQueen’s gift was in talking the news — not reading it.
“His dulcet delivery the news for a generation of San Franciscans,” Laufer said by email. “Anyone listening knew immediately how important his reportage was to our audience and our times.” David Anthony McQueen was born July 4, 1943, and raised on a dryland farm in the Texas Panhandle. His dad, Paul McQueen, spent Dave’s early childhood in prison for robbery, and Dave was raised by his mother, Leta, and his grandparents.
“It’s a country song, brother,” said Tilson, a Sunday afternoon radio host at KPFA in Berkeley. “It had prison, mama and farms.”
The country song became a blues song after Paul McQueen got out of prison and dragged his wife and son around from town to town searching for work in the oil fields. Wherever they went, Dave found refuge in public libraries and kept to himself until the family landed in Port Arthur, a refinery town on the Gulf Coast of Texas. There he fell in with a group of pre-hippie postBeats that included Janis Joplin.
After graduating from high school in 1961, McQueen married artist Patty Skaff, and a group of four, including Joplin, took off in a big sedan that they parked in an alley in New Orleans. As recounted in “Janis: Her Life and Music,” by Holly George-Warren, they took turns sleeping in the car and made $10 last as long as the honeymoon did.
McQueen worked alternately at small Texas radio stations as a DJ and as a longshoreman until he followed Joplin’s path to San Francisco, in the late 1960s.
His first job was on the docks at the Port of Richmond and his second job was at KSAN, the renowned underground station known as “Jive 95” for its spot on the FM dial. Compared with the other programming, McQueen was mostly straight about delivering the news but
wasn’t averse to editorializing.
“He started talking about the war in Vietnam from a totally different perspective than I’d ever heard,” said Nancy Stevens, an anti-war activist who tuned in McQueen after moving west from Cincinnati and fell into the orbit of KSAN. “You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing it,” she said. Stevens was among a group of women who started an underground paper in Berkeley called Broadside and called McQueen to try to get on his show. He invited her for an interview and then invited her to his birthday party at his home on Delaware Street in Berkeley. By then he was divorced from Skaff and raising two kids. Stevens had a young son. They formed a blended family and later married.
Stevens said she was volunteering at KPFA in Berkeley when the first ransom tape regarding kidnapped Hearst arrived from the SLA in 1974. She leaked it to McQueen who announced it over KSAN, which had a much broader reach than KPFA. A subsequent ransom tape came directly to KSAN after being left at a drop site.
“That was probably the craziest time in the history of broadcasting,” McQueen said in an interview for an upcoming documentary film about the glory days of freeform FM radio. “That whole business with the SLA was surreal because we were used to dealing with politics stated in a rational manner. These people were completely crazy.”
Soon both the FBI and Berkeley police were watching the house and the kids had to be sent to live with grandparents. Threats were made on McQueen’s life, and he started carrying a gun for protection. Another McQueen innovation was “The Watergate Follies,” a fake news segment he
Dave McQueen later announced at smooth jazz station KKSF.
co-wrote and co-anchored on KSAN, with a cast of on-air hosts voicing the skits. Program director Bonnie Simmons played Rhonda, a caricature of a young girl who asked her dad to explain the hearings.
“The thing about Dave was not only his encyclopedic grasp of what was going on locally and internationally in the news, but that he was this wonderfully kind gentlemanly Texan with a tremendous sense of humor,” Simmons said.
“The news department
Dave built was extraordinary. I would have put it up against any department anywhere. The stories they broke were just one after the other.” she said.
Kenny Wardell, senior producer of the film “Something in the Air,” which will include an interview with McQueen, called him “the consummate professional who delivered the news of the day to the counterculture listenership.”
Evans, one of McQueen’s former colleagues, recalled that when the planes hit the towers on 9/11, he and
McQueen were on the air at KKSF, a smooth jazz station. They cut the jazz and delivered the news for three hours straight without interruption, with McQueen utilizing his knowledge of geopolitics and Islam to provide instant context.
“It was the most alive I’ve ever felt on the air,” Evans said.
McQueen was inducted into the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame in 2010. He was introduced at the ceremony by fellow newsman Bill Schechner, who took five minutes just to list his stations and accomplishments. McQueen’s acceptance speech lasted 45 seconds.
“If you are a DJ, 45 seconds is the most that you can do and keep people’s attention,” Tilson said. “He could consolidate a paragraph into one sentence, and it did the job.”
Tilson survives him, as do his son, Ron McQueen of Walnut Creek, daughter, Juliet McQueen of San Diego, a brother, Steve McQueen of Nederland, Texas, and a sister, Jean McQueen of Bayfield, Texas.