KMEN

John Peel worked at KMEN, a radio station in San Bernardino, California, from February 1966 until early 1967. Like most US pop music stations of the time, it followed a Top 40, chart-based format and employed a small team of disc-jockeys who hosted daily three-hour shows. Peel, working under the name John Ravencroft, was the station's breakfast DJ, with a daily show between 6 a.m and 9 a.m.; he also presented a weekend show featuring the current British charts (which, he later claimed, he manipulated to include favourite records of his own - although KMEN chart listings available online provide no evidence of this).

As in his future positions on Radio London and BBC Radio One, he was keen to show himself to be part of the station's "team" of DJs, while asserting his individuality by promoting music he approved of - which, on KMEN, included early singles by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band as well as British groups like The Yardbirds and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. It was during his time in San Bernardino that he discovered The Misunderstood, who hailed from the neighbouring town of Riverside.

In 1966 the hippy counter-culture was emerging in California, and Peel took to it enthusiastically, living in a communal arrangement with his first wife Shirley and a group of friends, smoking marijuana and listening to the new music of bands like Love, the Doors and Buffalo Springfield - both on record and live, at the clubs along Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. His lifestyle began to influence his radio work; recalling his California times in 1970 he told Melody Maker's Michael Watts of the strain he had felt at having to present a fast-paced breakfast show after an evening's dope-smoking. With his colleague Johnny Darin he suggested to KMEN's programme director that the station's chart format could be adapted to include more album tracks and B-sides. Their proposal was rejected but soon afterwards a similar idea was successfully implemented by San Francisco DJ Tom Donahue and subsequently copied by many American FM rock stations.

Southern California was less welcoming to the new youth culture than San Francisco. Los Angeles and its environs were far more conservative than the traditionally tolerant cities of San Francisco and Berkeley. Whereas the defining images of San Francisco come from the free concerts in Golden Gate Park, Los Angeles, already troubled by race riots, became notorious for the violence of the Sunset Strip riots of 1966, in which police attempted to clear the Strip of young people who were said by residents and businessmen to be having a negative effect on the area. (The events inspired the Buffalo Springfield's song "For What It's Worth") The LA police gained an uneviable reputation for violence and intolerance; in one of his IT columns Peel called them "neo-Nazi".

In small-town San Bernardino, Peel himself came under suspicion as an Englishman who displayed hippyish tendencies. A local sheriff pursued him and he was accused of drug use and of having sex with under-age girls (the Californian "groupies" of the time were often very young). Under pressure from these allegations, Peel decided to return to the UK - an abrupt end to his US career.
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