Imagine life without free radio.  If you lived in America before 1967, that was reality… there were no free radio stations until a group of misfit artist visionaries high on LSD decided to recreate their psychedelic record parties onto the airwaves.  In this episode, RV talks to her mom’s pal, Raechel Donahue - the pioneering woman who trained and employed the first women in America to be radio engineers and DJs and turned free acid rock radio a reality called KMPX (precursor to KSAN).  Raechel Donahue, DJ, filmmaker, voiceover actor, wife and widow of Big Daddy Tom Donahue, tells us about San Francisco beatnik life before it morphed into hippies. Stories about her adventures bellydancing, go-go dancing, modeling for a gay Holocaust refugee who invented the thong bikini and how horse racing, LSD and Tourette’s syndrome led to the birth of rock radio in America and the greedy corporate overlords who tried to squish them.

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Part 2 of a deep dive into Radiate episodes 4, 5 and 6 with RV and Dr. Maria Mangini, PHD, co-founder of the Women’s Visionary Council, nurse practitioner and member of the Hog Farm Commune.  Be a psychedelic fly on the wall as Dr. M tells RV the story of the Wild West Festival, an epic failure of a music

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Part 1 of a deep dive into Radiate episodes 4, 5 and 6 with RV and Dr. Maria Mangini, PHD, co-founder of the Women’s Visionary Council and member of the Hog Farm Commune.  Listeners get to be a psychedelic fly on the wall as RV and Dr. M discuss the Grateful Dead’s origins, the downfall of the Quicksilver, the history of women in radio aka KMPX’s chick engineers plus an insider’s story of San Francisco’s epic failure of a music festival that was supposed to be the West Coast counterpoint to Woodstock and much more.

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In a very intimate bonus episode to the Radiate story, RV’s mom shares what she calls “the gritty stuff”, revealing never-before-heard, shocking revelations about her marriage to mid-century modern jeweler/drug dealer to the Jazz greats, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis…  Plus a teenage bullrider, a thief named Crazy Sal, murder and more.  Pull up a pot bale seat at the Anonymous Artist’s table where in the 1960's, the inner circle of the counterculture drank coffee and rolled joints as they created the art, music and culture that caught the attention of the entire world.... Peace, love and rock'n'roll came from somewhere and RV's mom spills the beans on just exactly what was happening at that somewhere: the groundfloor of the San Francisco counterculture.

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A deep dive into Radiate Eps 1, 2, 3 with RV and Dr. Maria Mangini, PHD, co-founder of the Women’s Visionary Council and member of the Hog Farm Commune.  In an intimate After-the-Episode Chat, RV and Dr. M. discuss the Hippie Family Tree, the Haight Ashbury, The Diggers, hippie kids, outlaws, rock stars, Margo St. James, Carol Doda, the Domino Club,  San Francisco’s laws around nudity onstage and dancing, plus the SF politics that led to the downfall of the SF counterculture, race relations during SF’s  Summer of Love and  the Nazi scientist responsible for the largest nuclear meltdown in America – still contaminating the mountains north of Los Angeles, CA...

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In behind-the scenes convos with her former pot-smuggler parents, Rainbow Valentine takes a walk down counterculture memory lane with stories about beat poets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti & Alan Ginsberg, obscenity trials and banned books plus dining with smugglers, counterculture chemists, an airplane full of LSD VIPS, the history of Marin County, California’s sushi and an unsolved murder in the high end restaurant world of 1980’s San Francisco.

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In a new branch of Psychedelic Women, Rainbow Valentine presents Smuggler Family Album, conversations with her counterculture smuggler friends and family.  In this episode RV’s parents (from the podcast Disorganized Crime) tell us about Juanita, a shit-talking restaurateur/brothel owner with a wild west heart of gold who ran her infamous restaurant from her bed; plus stories about the people and places of RV’s childhood in Sausalito and Mill Valley, California in the 70’s and 80’s, where it was estimated that 50% of the population were drug smugglers.  

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In the final non-bonus episode of RV's mom's story, Psychedelic wisdom galore is dropped as Kathy Mason Lerner dishes more trippy stories from her decade on the groundfloor of the world-famous San Francisco counterculture between 1960 – 1970.  True stories about the Beatles, Joan Baez, the CIA, the Charlatans, Stoneground, Altamont, the Avalon, the Jefferson Airplane, Howard Hesseman, a trip-to-Hawaii-gone-awry with the Quicksilver Messenger Service, the ongoing battle of good and evil and downfall of the scene; plus, how psychedelics, Big Sur and a VW bus full of redwood led to the birth of host/creator, Rainbow Valentine.

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On June 12th, 1943, Susi Ramstein became the very first woman on planet earth to take LSD and she took the tram home (while tripping).  To commemorate Susie Ramstein’s tenacity, the world’s leading women-centric psychedelic organization, the Women’s Visionary Council, launched a new psychedelic holiday: Tram Day!   In this episode (which drops on Tram Day) Rainbow Valentine talks to psychedelic historian, Dr. Maria Mangini, PHD and Swiss psychedelic researcher, Susanne Seiler, who uncovered the fascinating history of the Psychedelic Eve aka Susi Ramstein.  Discover and celebrate the courage represented by Tram Day by listening to true stories about Albert Hoffman, ergotomine tartrate, Nazis, Sandoz Labs, Novartis Labs, Swiss aristocracy and the very first woman on planet earth to take LSD.

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The late 1960’s in San Francisco unfold and it’s tumultuous. In 1967 the Summer of Love brought 100,000 wannabe hippie teenagers to the City hoping to join RV’s mom’s friend group and the scene starts to fall apart. 

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