A little radio station broadcasting Bay Area music legends like Jerry Garcia and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott from a ranch shed in the West Marin hills has left the airwaves.
KDAN 91.5 FM’s motto was once “broadcasting to more bivalves and sheep than people.” The 10-watt station with a reach extending only as far as Marshall to Tomales Bay — by comparison, KQED has 110,000 watts — and call letters named for the late Mill Valley folk icon and Charlatans drummer Dan Hicks , was taken over by local sound engineer Jeff Cotton back in 2020, who hoped to give it a second chance.
The station had been nothing but static for a number of years, and its FCC license was set to expire until the former concert promoter who once worked for Bill Graham and now runs the nonprofit Open Sky Radio Corp decided to resurrect it for $5,000, the Marin Independent Journal previously reported . At the time, Cotton described it as “a fool’s errand” but something he had to do — Open Sky oversees a handful of other stations in far-flung corners of California, Oregon and Nevada that wouldn’t otherwise have their own radio.
He was also drawn to the history of the site, situated on the east shore of Tomales Bay and atop the San Andreas Fault . KDAN broadcasted from the same 1914 radio tower where the Marconi Pacific Rim receiving station first disseminated news, weather and other maritime information to passing ships as far away as Hawaii more than a century ago. The antenna for the station was supported by 300-foot-tall pressed steel towers, and the concrete pads that anchored them are still there today, along with a portrait of Guglielmo Marconi — credited as an inventor of the wireless telegraph that later became known as radio — which Cotton kept on a shelf in the shed.
It helped that Marcia Barinaga, the owner of the ranch and a fan of KDAN, was willing to lease the space for the station to Cotton for free. KDAN developed a “loyal following” of a few hundred listeners, but as the years went by, the operating costs became insurmountable, the Point Reyes Light reported on Wednesday. Cotton tried to find a new owner, one who could keep the bootstrap, noncommercial mission of the station alive, but efforts to find any legitimate takers were futile. KDAN will disappear from the FCC’s books in June, and it could be a decade before a new filing window opens, allowing another station to take its place, per the Point Reyes Light…