The story of groundbreaking indie label 415 Records is told in a new book by journalist and author Bill Kopp, Disturbing the Peace: 415 Records and the Rise of New Wave, due out this spring from HoZac Books. The label founded by Howie Klein released era-defining singles, EPs, and albums, and influenced other labels that followed.
In the late ’70s and early to mid ’80s, San Francisco was a creative incubator, bringing forth all manner of new music acts. Ground zero for the scene was the Mabuhay Gardens, home to huge barrels of popcorn, once-a-week spaghetti nights, colorful emcee Dirk Dirksen, and punk/new wave bands from all over the Bay Area. Concert booker and renegade radio DJ Howie Klein joined with Chris Knab, owner of the local Aquarius Records, to launch a record label in support of that scene.
Measured in strictly commercial terms, 415 Records was at best a modest success. But then, for Klein and Knab, financial gain was never the primary goal. Ask Klein about his objectives, and he’ll tell you: “F-U-N,” he’ll say. “It was all about fun.”
But 415 Records would have a lasting impact, one that extended far beyond the minor chart action that a few of the label’s artists achieved. Klein and his cohorts established new ways of doing business in the music industry, and were at the forefront of a resurgence of independent labels.
Disturbing the Peace is Bill Kopp’s chronicle of the groundbreaking independent record label founded by Howie and Chris, featuring the stories of Romeo Void (“Never Say Never,” “A Girl in Trouble”), Red Rockers (“China,” “Shades of 45”), Translator (“Everywhere That I’m Not”), Wire Train (“Chamber of Hellos,” “Skills of Summer”), Roky Erickson (“If You Have Ghosts,” “I Walked with a Zombie”), The Nuns, Pearl Harbor and the Explosions, and nearly two dozen other bands.
Featuring a foreword from Joel Selvin (Hollywood Eden) and based on Kopp’s nearly 100 interviews with the artists, industry execs, producers, friends, rivals, onlookers, journalists and hangers-on, Disturbing the Peace also features hundreds of photos and memorabilia from the archives of those who were there.
With a background in marketing and advertising, Bill Kopp got his professional start writing for Trouser Press. After a stint as Editor-in-Chief for a national music magazine, Bill launched the online zine Musoscribe in 2009, and has published new content every business day since then (and every single day since 2018). The interviews, essays, and reviews on Musoscribe reflect Bill’s keen interest in American musical forms, most notably rock, jazz, and soul. His work features a special emphasis on reissues and vinyl. Bill’s work also appears in many other outlets both online and in print. He also researches and authors liner notes for album reissues — more than 30 to date — and co-produced a reissue of jazz legend Julian “Cannonball” Adderley’s final album. His first book, Reinventing Pink Floyd, was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2018, and in paperback in 2019. Disturbing the Peace is his second book.
To give you a taste of this exciting new book, Glide is excited to offer an exclusive excerpt of the book. The below excerpt is chapter three of Disturbing the Peace: 415 Records and the Rise of New Wave…
In the mid 1970s, KSAN (“The Jive 95”) was the Bay Area’s pioneering alternative music radio station. Started by Tom Donahue, KSAN was a groundbreaking free-form FM station. “The deejays knew about my store, and they’d shop there,” says Chris Knab, owner of Aquarius Records. One regular Aquarius patron was KSAN’s overnight deejay Norman Davis. Already in his mid- 50s, Davis made a point of keeping up with new and emerging music.
One day in July 1977, Davis showed up at Aquarius. Knab recalls his pitch. “Chris, can I talk to you a minute? I know that there’s another scene going on with music – this punk stuff – and we’re not playing any of that on the station. You’re selling this stuff in your store. How would you like to come onto my show on a Friday night and co-host from 1:00 to 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning?”
Knab was initially skeptical. “I don’t know anything about radio,” he told Davis. “I’ve never been a deejay. But if I don’t have to run the board, I’ll do it.” For the first couple of shows, Davis and Knab played records that Knab had received from England and (to a lesser extent) from local San Francisco bands. But Knab didn’t have a lot of confidence in his skills as a tastemaker. “I was a retail guy,” he explains. “I judged what was good by my customers requesting things, or buying the stuff they put on consignment.”
So after two or three installments of the late-night program, Knab suggested to Davis that they bring some serious talent on board. “My customer friend, Howie Klein, is really the guy who knows all the rumors and all the signings and who’s coming to town,” he told Davis. “He would know about who the cool bands are.”
Knab suggested that Klein could even have his own section of the program, “Howie’s News and Views.” That spot could focus on the latest rumors, updates on label signings, upcoming club dates and the like. Davis agreed. “Howie got on board after the third show,” Knab says. “And he stayed forever until the show ended.”
Branding themselves The Outcastes, the team of Norman, Chris (billed as “Cosmo Topper”) and Howie played lots of cassette tapes sent to them by unsigned bands. KSAN’s free-form format allowed them great latitude. “We started getting a ton of demo tapes, and Howie and I would go through them and say, ‘Wow. This is sort of cool. Why don’t we play this?’” Knab recalls. “If it met our criteria of punk – or ‘new wave,’ that wonderful phrase used for non-punk bands like Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe – we’d play it. And things started to pick up.”
Frequent Aquarius customer and The Outcastes listener Eric Boucher (aka Jello Biafra) says that many local bands took notice, and made sure the radio hosts got tapes of their music. “Everybody tried to get plays,” he says, noting fondly that Klein and Knab “did have to have a high tolerance for lo-fi practice room recordings.”
Even beyond The Outcastes, the station was widely admired. “KSAN had a really, really good reputation as a progressive FM radio station, if not the most progressive station in the whole country,” Biafra says, “by broadcasting and championing up and coming bands.” The radio show – and Howie’s columns in local papers like BAM, sometimes using aliases like “Jack Basher,” recalls Jello Biafra – would begin to exert some influence regarding which bands scored prized gigs in the city’s music venues.
Howie emphasizes the support that KSAN staffers gave him. “Richard Gossett – the most popular deejay on the radio – and Beverley Wilshire and program director Bonnie Simmons totally embraced us,” he says. “They and several other people at KSAN helped us in every way possible.”
But the unconventional nature of KSAN wasn’t destined to last. “They were going under a big change from being free-form to being more commercial,” Knab recalls. “So Norman Davis got fired.” Sean Donahue, son of founder Tom Donahue, took over as host.
“All my comrades at KSAN had already either quit or been fired,” Howie recalls. “I was the last person left. I had mouthed off in the Bay Guardian about KSAN sucking, so the new program director called me in and said that I was fired: ‘Your program doesn’t really go with what we’re doing anymore.’” Klein asked him if had ever actually listened to his show; he said no. “So I said, ‘Well, why don’t you listen to the show, and get back to me after you hear it and tell me what doesn’t go.” The program director agreed. Howie delivers the inevitable punch line. “Two weeks later, he called me in and said, ‘I heard your show. You’re fired.’”
After losing his job at KSAN, Norman Davis went to KSJO-FM in nearby San Jose, and not long after getting settled there, he rang up Chris and Howie. “Why don’t you guys come down here on Sunday nights and do what you do?” he suggested. Klein and Knab agreed. Meanwhile, things were also happening elsewhere to fill the void left by the demise of the free-form KSAN.
Launched in 1963, KUSF was a Jesuit-owned, student-run, non-commercial FM station at the University of San Francisco. Denise Sullivan was a USF student with a keen interest in the new music. As she recalls, “there was all this airtime – overnight and into the day – that was not being filled. The FCC told us, ‘You have to use your airtime or lose your license.’” So the station’s general manager asked the students if they could come up with some new programming. “Yeah, we can handle that,” he was told. Along with some news and foreign-language programming, KUSF started playing punk and new wave.
Sullivan emphasizes how significant KUSF’s new programming was for the Bay Area. “Now we had the attention of this community of listeners – the small and somewhat marginalized community of punk rock freaks – who now have a radio station of their own that is broadcasting their music.” She notes that before KUSF, Howie and Chris’ programs were the region’s only radio outlet for the new music. And the void left by the absence of KSAN “left us to just do whatever we wanted,” she says. “And what we wanted to do was a mix of old, first wave, punk rock, and the new local stuff that was coming out of here.”
It wasn’t long before Howie Klein was broadcasting once a week on KUSF as well, though he says the station’s transition to the new format wasn’t universally embraced. “There were some people there who were wedded to the old format and just wanted to play, I don’t know, the Doobie Brothers and Journey. That kind of a changeover is always very, very difficult.”
Based on nearly 100 interviews with the artists, industry execs, producers, friends, rivals, onlookers, journalists and hangers-on, Disturbing the Peace: 415 Records and the Rise of New Wave is published by HoZac Books. Bill Kopp is also the author of Reinventing Pink Floyd: From Syd Barrett to The Dark Side of the Moon.
