Terry and the Pirates: Twelve Days Old (June 24, 1973)

On June 24, 1973, KSAN put Terry and the Pirates on the air from the Record Plant in Sausalito. Tom Donahue hosted the broadcast. The band had played its first show twelve days earlier.

That first lineup brought Terry Dolan together with John Cipollina, Greg Douglass, James "Hutch" Hutchinson, and David Weber. Dolan played rhythm guitar and sang. Cipollina and Douglass both played guitar. Hutchinson played bass and Weber played drums. It was not a reunion or a veteran act reassembling. It was a new Bay Area band getting its first broadcast while the shape of the group was still visible.

Cipollina arrived with a history the room already knew. He left Quicksilver Messenger Service in October 1970 after friction with Dino Valenti. He formed Copperhead the following year. Columbia released the Copperhead debut in 1973, but label support collapsed when Clive Davis was fired on May 29, 1973.

The June 24 broadcast falls inside that narrow interval. Copperhead had not formally ended, but the machinery around it had changed. Cipollina was working without the certainty of a label campaign or an established new vehicle. Terry and the Pirates offered a smaller unit, built around Dolan's songs and a pair of guitars that did not need to explain where they had been.

Hutchinson and Weber made the Copperhead connection plain. Both were still active in Cipollina's earlier group when they joined the Pirates, and both were present when the band first played out on June 12. The personnel did not arrive from nowhere. It crossed the Bay Area's working circuit in real time.

Copperhead would close the Record Plant's 72-Hour Concert marathon one week after this broadcast, on July 1, 1973. Two bands, overlapping members, the same studio, seven days apart.

KSAN's place in that process matters. The station was not preserving a later reputation. It was presenting a band before that reputation existed.

Twelve days is barely enough time for a new band to learn where a song opens, who takes the turn, or how long the ending should run. Yet Terry and the Pirates were already in the Record Plant, with Cipollina's guitar on the air and the Copperhead rhythm section intact behind him.

The full broadcast survives. It circulates on the Internet Archive and on YouTube, hosted by Donahue, complete. An edited re-broadcast version also circulates, along with audience-source fragments.

Later versions of the Pirates would change. The group carried on through different lineups and different rooms. This broadcast catches the first configuration before those later histories settled around it.