Ashford Rocky Mountain Obit

[ From: "Bill Ashford, legendary DJ of Colorado free-form radio," By Rebecca Jones, Rocky Mountain News, December 26, 2008 ]


Bill Ashford, a Colorado pioneer in the underground "free-form radio" genre best remembered for his years as a disc jockey at Boulder's KRNW and Denver's KMYR and KFML, died Dec. 10 in Ocala, Fla., his home since 1993. He was 66.





At the time of his death, Mr. Ashford was... the producer and programmer of The Rock Garden Show, a free-form rock Internet radio station.

Mr. Ashford spent his life in broadcasting, starting with getting his own radio show at age 14. But it was at the fondly remembered KFML that Mr. Ashford found legendary status, at least among early 1970s Colorado listeners.

"This was progressive radio, with an open-ended, free-form approach to programming, low- key and genuinely hip disc jockeys playing album cuts regardless of length or sales statistics," said longtime Denver music critic and author G. Brown. "And Bill was the hippest of them all.

"He had encyclopedic knowledge. He could take you somewhere with a set he would craft. He perfected the art of the segue, going from one key to another. It was a rhythmic thing, crafting these sets based on his knowledge of the music. It was the halcyon days of radio."

"He was dedicated to what he did," said Thom Trunnell, now a Denver deliveryman, and the onetime program director for KFML. "He believed it was important, as we all did. He had a way of knowing who was doing what, how to present it.

"He had a lot of connections and knew how to get information about bands and performers sooner than the rest of us did. He was a musician's disc jockey."

Born Dec. 5, 1942, in Fletcher, N.C., Mr. Ashford's first album was a Bix Beiderbecke 78, a Christmas gift from his father. It was to be the first of many.

"Duke Ellington once said there were two kinds of music: good and bad," said Trunnell. "We tried to present what was good. And Bill really had an ear for that."

Over the course of his career, Mr. Ashford worked at radio stations in Denver and Boulder; Fayetteville, N.C.; San Francisco; Austin, Texas; Lake Tahoe, Calif.; Indianapolis; Grand Rapids, Mich; Colorado Springs; and Ocala.

He was also a songwriter. He co-wrote Floods of South Dakota with his then-wife, singer Judy Roderick. Years later, Tim & Mollie O'Brien recorded a version that in 1992 was nominated for a Grammy.

"He was always all about the music," said Gail Ashford, his wife of 31 years. "Because he was a songwriter, he was always coming up with a good tune, a good lyric.

"As I clean the house now, I'm finding all these scribbled notes everywhere. He would get up in the middle of the night and put song sets together because he would have them in his head. He'd be dreaming about this stuff. It was like living with an artist who painted with music.

"To me, Bill will always live on in a good lyric well written, a beautiful melody well sung and a screeching guitar riff."

Last summer, Brown tracked down several old Denver DJs, including Mr. Ashford, for a special tribute to the Summer of '67 on Denver's now-defunct KCUV.

"He had a four-hour stint on the show," Brown said. "We got so many calls from people who remembered him. To reconnect like that was really a joy for me."

Mr. Ashford is survived by his wife, Gail Ashford, of Ocala; four daughters, Mary Ashford Rohrich, of Steele, N.D., Holly Ashford, of Tallahassee, Fla., Hannah Ashford, of Tampa, Fla., and Erin Ashford, of Tallahassee; a stepbrother, Roger Ashford, of Charlotte, N.C.; his stepmother, Margaret Ashford, of Newberry, S.C.; five grandchildren and one great- grandchild.

BILL ASHFORD (1942-2008)

Legendary freeform programmer Bill Ashford has passed on to that control room in the sky -- where there are no cue burns, records and CD's don't skip, and the new music endless...



There's a fair amount of information about Bill at this site. Please use the Google search bar above the "Free form Radio" masthead to search within this site. An external search will also bring stuff up, but most all of it is linked here.

Notable links include:

Bill's Ocala Obit

Ashford Rocky Mountain Obit

Larry Miller, KMPX

Pissing Contest

Little bit of a pissing contest going on between Michael Walker, author of "Laurel Canyon" and KMPX/KSAN alumnus Ben Fong-Torres about L.A. (Laurel Canyon) vs. San Francisco during the Summer of Love (1967). Goes like this, Walker starting out:

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WALKER: Fallout from my New York Times Op-Ed piece about about the relative merits of San Francisco and Los Angeles during the Summer of Love continues.
The latest, as reported by San Francisco journalist and rock historian Ben Fong-Torres in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle...

FONG-TORRES: Michael Walker, author of the excellent social history “Laurel Canyon,” recently wrote an essay for the New York Times, “(Don’t Go Back to) San Francisco,” which The Chronicle also published.
It should’ve been printed in green ink because Walker was so envious of the attention given this city as ground zero of the Summer of Love 40 years ago. “As a lasting cultural artifact,” he wrote, “San Francisco’s Summer of Love can’t hold a stick of incense to the rafter-shaking sounds coming out that same year from a Los Angeles neighborhood 370 miles south, above the Sunset Strip.”
He refers, of course, to the title of his book, and to the amazing array of talent that lived or hung out in the canyon and produced such seminal hits as “California Dreamin’,” “For What It’s Worth” and even that wear-flowers-in-your-hair number.
Well! Edward Bear, for one, was incensed (pun intended). The former KMPX and KSAN DJ, e-mailed the article to friends, drawing this sage comment from Dusty Street, who worked with Bear: “I beg to note that (free-form) radio was started in San Francisco, where these bands got the airplay they needed to become successful, and it was Tom Donahue (at KMPX) who brought FM rock to L.A., after it had been established in S.F.”
Despite the rivalry between the cities, there was cross-pollination between San Francisco and Los Angeles that informed the music and culture of both.

WALKER: Nevertheless, as Laurel Canynonite Frank Zappa recalled:

ZAPPA: San Francisco in the mid-’60s was very chauvinistic and ethnocentric. To the Friscoid’s way of thinking, everything that came from THEIR town was really important Art, and anything from anyplace else (especially L.A.) was dogshit. Rolling Stone magazine helped promote this fiction, nationwide.

WALKER: Zappa also noted that “no matter how ‘peace-love’ the San Francisco bands might try to make themselves, they eventually had to come south to evil ol’ Hollywood to get a record deal.”

WALKER: In the end, more great records came out of L.A. that summer and beyond. As Chicago Sun-Times rock critic Jim DeRogatis noted in his retrospective of the Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow, which contained the band’s signature hits “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love”:

WALKER: The fact is, with a few notable exceptions like the sophomore album by the Jefferson Airplane, there wasn’t a lot of great rock made in the City by the Bay at the height of the psychedelic era.

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Let me weigh-in a bit, here:

1) Freeform Radio started with Bob Fass at WBAI-FM, New York in 1965. I consider him to be "The Father of Freeform Radio."

2) The first commercial station to play the new music that was coming out but wasn't being played on almost every station was WOR-FM, New York, beginning in Summer 1966. WOR-FM was not "freeform" in format, however.

3) Tom Donahue was the first one to format a commercial FM radio station, KMPX-FM, beginning in April, 1967, in San Francisco. I consider him "The Father of Commercial Freeform Radio."

4) Tom Donahue took programmatic control of KPPC-FM, Pasadena (L.A.) in November 1967, bringing Freeform Radio to Los Angeles for the first time.


As for the music, I guess it depends on your tastes. But, if you were into psychedelia, there is no question that San Francisco was the epicenter.

Dusty Street

Travus T. Hipp shouted out some good news about Dusty Street. You can listen to this day's newscast, along with word about Dusty at:

TTH: Dusty Street