Saving the Jive 95: How the KSAN Tapes Survived

Most of what radio broadcasts is gone forever. It airs once and dissolves into the air. The KSAN live broadcasts from the Record Plant should have vanished the same way. They didn't, and the reason is people who refused to throw the tapes out.

This archive stands on their work. Before I cataloged a single broadcast, others had saved the recordings that made cataloging possible. The least I can do is tell you where they came from.

The key to the tape library

The saving started at the source. In 1973 Tom Donahue ran KSAN, and the station kept a library of live-music tapes. One afternoon he handed weekend DJ Kenny Wardell the key and an idea. They'd build a weekend special from the best live sets and call it “Live Jive.”

Wardell pulled together twenty-four hours of broadcasts, twelve for Saturday and twelve for Sunday. He and fellow DJs Ben Fong-Torres and Bobby Cole aired them that weekend. Then Wardell did the thing that mattered most. He kept a copy of the master tapes in his garage.

They sat there for forty years. When he finally pulled them out for a listen, they sounded incredible. He had them digitized, and the result became the “Live Jive” album. The profits went to the California Historical Radio Society and its Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame. A garage rescue became a public record.

The collectors who wouldn't quit

Wardell wasn't alone. The KSAN tapes survived in pieces, scattered across the collections of people who taped the broadcasts off the air or saved the station masters.

Norman Davis runs jive95.com, a tribute site built from his own half-vast collection of airchecks and recordings. He digitized most of his KSAN tapes and keeps asking anyone with more to come forward. His standing invitation is simple. Bring the tapes in before they crumble, so a generation that never heard free-form radio can know what it was. The Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame inducted him as a pioneer for exactly this work.

The Bay Area Radio Museum does the institutional version of the same job. It holds remastered KSAN audio, some of it digitized from private collections like the one Richard Links preserved. Collector trees on forums like Guitars101 do the grassroots version, passing lossless transfers hand to hand so no single failure loses a show.

Why the tapes were fragile

Understand what these recordings are and the rescue looks like a miracle. They're FM broadcasts captured on cassette and reel, formats that decay with every passing year. Magnetic tape sheds its coating. Cassettes jam and snap. A master left in a hot garage can warp into silence.

Fifty years is a long time for plastic and oxide to hold a signal. Many KSAN broadcasts didn't make it. The ones that did survived by luck and by stubbornness, usually because one person decided a tape was worth keeping when nobody was paying them to keep it.

Where this archive fits

My work picks up where theirs leaves off. The collectors saved the audio. I track down every broadcast, confirm the date and the venue, rank the sources, and gather the verified shows in one place. The recordings are theirs. The catalog is the new part.

That's the whole purpose of this site. The Record Plant at 2200 Bridgeway made these broadcasts possible, and the people above kept them alive. I'm building the map that connects them, so the next person looking for a 1973 KSAN show finds it in minutes instead of years.

Start with the KSAN Live Broadcasts. Every show I could verify is there, with audio where it survives.