In 1967, the Moody Blues were struggling. The band from Birmingham, England, had changed its line-up after moderate success as an R&B act, but with the advent of rock’s psychedelic era, they could not find a new winning sound. They were about to be dropped by their record label, Decca Records, and worse, they owed the label money.
Decca offered to let them pay off their debt if the band would agree to record Dvorak’s New World Symphony to show off the label’s new recording technology. The band, however, had another idea. Unbeknownst to Decca, they went into the studio to record something entirely different: their newest songs were infused with symphonic orchestrations and spoken word embellishments. The label eventually agreed to release the resulting classical fusion rock album and Days of Future Past enjoyed moderate success reaching #27 on the British charts.
Five years later, as if by some miracle, their song off that album, “Nights in White Satin”, hit #2 on the US Billboard charts. Days of Future Past is now considered integral to the birth of the concept album and helped launch “art rock”. Along with the likes of Pink Floyd, YES, King Crimson, Genesis and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, the Moody Blues became part of the pantheon of early progressive rock.
American radio coverage plucked this influential masterpiece out of the obscurity of British pop and placed it years later on the top of the US and global charts. It wasn’t the kind of radio music that most Americans tuned in to at that time to hear popular music: commercial top 40 AM radio. Instead, it was a radio format that barely existed when the Moody Blues’ album was originally released in Britain but would eventually play a huge role in ensuring that rock as an art form would reach its zenith in the 1970s.
I bought a worn copy of Days of Future Past at a flea market in Tacoma not long ago. The owner recounted how he first became familiar with the Moody Blues. He lived in San Francisco in his younger days and the local FM station would play “Nights in White Satin” every night to close out their broadcasting. (Likely, the show was “Nightsounds” that aired at the time on KPFA-FM in Berkeley). It dawned on me the role early FM played in bringing modern rock masterpieces to the forefront of America’s attention.
Imagine it’s the early 1970s and you’re a young music lover living the dream in a small Bay area apartment, listening to “underground rock” on your local independent FM station. As the station signs off in the middle of the night you hear a song like “Nights in White Satin”. You realize that rock is heading in a direction never imagined and that you must learn more about the cutting-edge bands that are not heard on the commercial airways and instead only played to a select few stations in the wee morning hours. This was the magic of early FM radio.
This is but one example where American underground radio pulled a groundbreaking sound out of the ash heap of Western popular song and made it an “instant” classic. Mainstream radio at the time was not ready for music like this and was not inclined to play it to their listening audience. If it had remained the only game in town, rock would have lost a hugely influential band as a consequence.
While popular music, in general, was evolving at a feverish pace in the mid-to-late 1960s, rock, in particular, was undergoing remarkable advancements. Beginning with the Beatle’s magnum opus, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, the floodgates opened, and a no-rules approach ruled. Musicians heard freedom and entered the studio emboldened to create their own masterworks. They were questioning all the existing parameters: songs became longer, more varied, involved, complex, and adventurous.
For just a flavor of the groundbreaking sounds emerging during these seminal years at the turn of the decade, here are some examples and their year of release: Steve Miller Band’s debut (1968), the Band’s debut (“Music from the Big Pink”) (1968); Led Zeppelin’s debut (1969), the Who Tommy (1969), Grateful Dead Live/Dead (1969), King Crimson In the Court of the Crimson King (1969), Chicago Transit Authority’s debut (1969), Black Sabbath’s debut (1970), Eric Clapton’s debut solo album (1970); the Allman Brothers Band Idlewild South (1970), Elton John Madman Across the Water (1971), Traffic The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys (1971), Rod Stewart Every Picture Tells a Story (1971), Jethro Tull Aqualung (1971); YES’ Fragile (1971) the Rolling Stones Exile on Mainstreet (1972), David Bowie Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust (1972); Queen’s debut (1973), and Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon (1973), to name but a few.
There was something in the air, no doubt at this point in rock’s development, but little opportunity for the musical transformation to be heard on the actual airwaves. Popular musical broadcasting at the time was still ruled by AM radio. Its Top 40 format had been the norm for decades and relied exclusively on innocuous pop singles coming in at three minutes or under so as not to slow the steady interruption of jarring commercials. Playing the same limited roster of corporate-sanctioned hits using strict playlists in heavy rotation, schmaltzy deejays added a circus barker vibe to the mix to complete the superficial cacophony. Everything was high energy and low substance. There was little give available for airing long, thoughtful conceptual pieces by bands seeking to reinvent the genre. At this critical juncture, with mainstream radio unwilling to accept the new venturesome format, rock’s impact on the culture was effectively stymied.
Without radio play, major emerging acts were left to grind it out on a concert circuit that was in pretty sad shape for visionary bands trying to win over the coveted US market. Relatively small venues dotted the wide expanse of the continent. Bands that could have filled sports arenas with better exposure were playing venues like The Boston Tea Party which was opened in 1967 in an old church in Boston Mass. It was the first rock dance hall on the East Coast, pre-dating Manhattan’s Fillmore East. Being one of the few reliable venues of any size in the States, during one month alone in May 1969, their stage featured the Who, Led Zepplin, Jeff Beck, and the Velvet Underground, yet the hall held only 400 patrons.
It is impossible to effectively promote an album, especially ground-breaking stuff, one gig at a time in front of a few hundred random patrons. Revolutions are slow to spread by word of mouth alone. They need access to a mass medium or they risk dying on the vine. Take the Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther would have just been another Catholic priest with a list of unread grievances nailed on his church door if it wasn’t for the invention of the Gutenberg printing press. Its use in replicating his teachings meant that they spread like wildfire across 16th-century Europe.
Sure, there was Woodstock in 1969 featuring the finest modern acts at the top of their game, but unless you were there at that dairy farm in upstate New York, you missed the concert. Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 film featuring the concert released the following year brought the soundtrack to more ears but movies back then, especially documentaries, had a brief run in theaters and then disappeared. There were no videos or streaming to spread the word continuously. That was still radio’s job at the time, and it was failing.
The music industry apparently had no plan for how to effectively broadcast what was emerging in popular music. The conduit from artist to listener was almost non-existent. All that influential art was backing up in the clogged pipes of AM radio’s narrow plumbing.
Classic rock’s Gutenberg press, the medium that finally launched rock’s reformation, ended up being progressive, freeform, underground FM radio. However, there was no guarantee in the late 1960s that such a thing would ever come to pass. One might imagine FM rock was driven by the economic demands of an art form that was rapidly becoming more sophisticated and needed a new platform for mass promotion of this important next evolutionary step in music. In truth, the birth of FM album rock was more of a happy accident than a practical response to the recording industry’s dire need for a new medium.
Since its emergence in the 1920s and prior to the arrival of the internet, radio was the main platform for broadcasting audio entertainment. Radio has always had two main frequencies or “bands” on the dial. The AM (aka amplitude modulation) frequency was the first type of radio transmission to be widely used for broadcasting and was still king at this moment in music history. FM (frequency modulation) was the alternative radio band and, as such, was a backwater frequency in the late 1960s: considered highbrow radio with no pizazz or charisma where peddlers of classical music and educational programming went to die. Since nothing popular was going on there, and nothing could be sold there, the FM band was viewed as a radio morgue. Most cars sold then weren’t even equipped with radios with FM bands.
In hindsight, it is clear that AM radio’s days were numbered by the close of the decade. It’s not just that AM radio and its commercial interests saw fit to reject where rock music was heading; a big part of AM’s listenership was poised to abandon the radio format anyway. The culture of AM radio had become a turn-off to the college-age crowd. They had spent their younger years enjoying AM’s slick sound-alike deejays holding court with their overbearing patter but had grown weary of its plastic personality and obnoxious ads polluting the atmosphere.
A generation that had cut its teeth on the Beatles’ early works that had fit nicely into the brash AM radio culture was now maturing along with their musical heroes and wanted something more subtle and authentic. They yearned for a format more reflective of the gravitas of the times with the pall of Vietnam in the air. Still, there was no conscious effort by the broadcasting industry to explore alternatives to AM radio or its culture. It turns out that an apparently inconsequential policy shift by the government began an unintentional revolution in radio.
The Federal Trade Commission, the agency that governs the airways, discreetly decided in the mid-1960s that AM’s quiet younger brother, FM, was ready to stand on its own. The FTC issued an edict that barred duplicative programming on FM stations in large cities. This meant that major broadcasters, many who owned profitable AM and unprofitable FM stations, could no longer play identical programming on both frequencies out of convenience.
As the decade advanced, without this allowance, broadcasters realized that developing unique programming for the FM band just wasn’t worth it financially. Eventually, word got out that FM stations, many of which were already dying a slow commercial death with little or no ad revenue, were desperate for no-cost programming content. Huge swaths of FM time slots opened up as commercially dead air, economically infeasible and ripe for the picking. Evening shifts were the hardest to staff with legit on-air talent. Whenever the parents are away the kids come out to play, especially at night, and that’s what happened in this instance. Night programming on FM became a free-for-all. The call went out for anyone interested in filling the abyss of the broadcasting doldrums. College-age amateur music enthusiasts with a decidedly non-commercial bent slowly began to raid the empty studios and play whatever turned them on.
In this way, the advent of underground freeform radio across America was completely organic and unplanned. For a generation that hungered for media that was meaningful, rich, and authentic, this emerging brand of FM radio was like a cool glass of water. The record industry had yet to creatively control and monetize the musical groups churning out groundbreaking art during this turning point, so they simply released the new sounds to see what would stick with the buyers. As a result, the shelves at these early FM rock stations were sagging with heretofore unheard musical genius.
Nature abhors a vacuum, especially when there was so much good music waiting to be appreciated. All the fledgling deejays needed to do was pick a newly released album, remove it from its sleeve, and drop the needle, and rock’s new sound flowed into the ears of a ready and growing audience. All over the US, new FM stations in major markets were popping up like mushrooms in the night, a clarion call to a generation to tune out the noise of ugly radio and get hip to the revolution.
The new FM deejays were the antithesis of the voices clamoring on AM radio. With no experience behind a microphone but a passion for music of substance, they spoke in unassuming conversational tones, building an intimate relationship with the listeners over time. Their selections were personally curated which means they played whatever the hell they liked at the moment. Since FM had never proven capable of attracting advertising there was no commercial concern driving the programming: no station director or program manager restricting the playlist to only those deemed certifiable hits. Your local voice on the air was no longer a corporate shill but a trusted friend with whom you shared a bond in your mutual commitment to music that rang true in your collective ear. Like an older brother showing you his personal stash, the new FM deejay could be relied upon to turn you on to the cream of his album collection.
It’s true that some of the important new bands emerging at this time were begrudged a few minutes on the AM hit parade but only if they were willing to release shortened versions of their standout works. However, not all the groups that were contributing important musical offerings were lucky enough or willing to do so. Of the early supergroups, instead of hearing only their few bankable hits on FM, listeners were afforded deep cuts of obscure numbers where the groups often showed their more adventurous chops.
In the beginning, rock was not the exclusive feature on underground FM; eclectic was the watchword, with folk, blues, gospel, funk, R&B, soul, raga, jazz, experimental, and comedy – all being afforded rare radio exposure. Instead of staccato shots of pop ephemeral, the FM format let its listeners reel in the splendor of contemporary music in all its idioms. The random freeform episodes on air that seemed to go on forever, without rhyme or reason, mirrored the drug culture of the times; a soundtrack for the night shift that seemed to have slipped its moorings, untethered to the familiar. A generation was hearing a universe of music that was transportive and worldly in its depth.
It wasn’t only the content and culture of this nascent frequency that made it suddenly attractive to a significant and growing block of listeners. Superior audio was another plus, with FM stations being uniquely capable of broadcasting in stereo. This left AM broadcasts with a compressed sound quality by comparison. This had been fine during much of the 1960s but as the next decade emerged, sophistication – in musical recordings and the gear it was played on – was becoming more refined in leaps and bounds. High-fidelity technology was becoming affordable, with many young listeners investing in new and better stereo equipment at home and in their cars.
Over time, album-oriented rock really hit a nerve with the growing audience, and the “AOR” format came into the FM radio vernacular. Novices in cramped quarters with zero organization quietly began mining for nuggets of great new rock that would help struggling bands see the light of mass listenership. The more these stations aired the new face of rock, the more their audiences appreciated the honesty in their selections, and this grew into demographics that could spell real success for bands that would become hugely important trailblazers.
Bruce Springsteen realized early in his career he “was not bound for top 40”, and recalled in his 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, meeting a deejay at WMMR, Philadelphia’s local FM station: “He watched us play to thirty people, approached us and said, ‘I love your band’. That night we heard Greetings from Asbury Park being spun to music-loving insomniacs as we drove out of town in our tour bus. Eventually I got to know every deejay from every major rock city in America. The relationships were personal. You hung out and knew their cities. They introduced you at shows. Back when we were ‘almost famous,’ these men and woman provided much love and valuable support and a well-needed home for us and our music.” (Springsteen Born to Run Pg. 197).
One of his early gigs in Boston playing to a small crowd was aired live on the local FM pioneer station, WBCN. The exposure created a buzz in town and led to Springsteen getting a booking at a much larger venue opening for Bonnie Raitt at the Harvard Square Theater. This was the legendary show that rock critic John Landau famously remarked in his column the next day, “I saw Rock & Roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen”. (Landau. The Real Paper 9 May 1974). The episode was credited by Springsteen for keeping him in the good graces of Columbia records so he could go on to record another album which would be Born to Run.
Springsteen was not alone in benefiting from FM’s benevolence. FM helped solidify Elton John’s career in its early stages as well by broadcasting a live studio performance on the air at New York’s WABC in November 1970. FM radio during this critical period was the only place in the rock universe where you could hear what the future had to offer.
It’s clear then that this symbiotic relationship between early FM radio and what would become known as classic rock was by all accounts a happy marriage but certainly not an arranged one. It begs the question: what would have happened to rock’s crucial evolution if not for the vagaries of AM radio’s poor relation? What if, for example, that underground station in San Francisco had never been around to rediscover “Nights in White Satin” years after it had peaked in the UK? The impact of FM stations on rock as an art form cannot be overstated. FM shined a light in the darkness. After early rock classics of the future were passed over by the thin attention span afforded by the AM Top 40 format, FM came to the rescue just in the nick of time. Without the awareness and appreciation built up by these new FM stations, the art form would have suffered greatly.
Eventually, the music industry caught up with the new face of radio that was finally being aired to a growing flock of young adults. Indeed, record companies were some of the first advertisers to see the commercial value of FM radio. At some point in the 1970s listenership to FM stations exceeded that of AM stations in North America and the tables were turned as AM began its slow descent into musical irrelevance.
The boomers became hooked like never before on rock and their discretionary spending followed. Once promoters mastered crowd control the arena owners grew dependent on the income they earned catering to rock concerts while their sports teams were out of town. Live performance technology grew exponentially. Rock became a spectacular spectacle – a modern circus – with complex amplification, stage design, light shows, pyrotechnics, and whatever else blew their fans’ minds and kept them coming back for more. Every week a major act rolled into town on a seemingly never-ending “world tour” to promote what was on FM’s boundless megaphone. Tickets were cheap, but even if you couldn’t afford them, there were widely popular live albums from nearly every major act to remind you of what you were missing at the show. Supermarket-style discount record store chains such as Tower Records and Sam Goody’s offered shoppers deep stock and a guaranteed opportunity to pick up anything they heard on the air or at the show. Millions of fans were on a feeding frenzy of FM rock in their cars, at their jobs, on their home stereo, at live concerts, and at record stores in a lifestyle marked by a constant cycle of music consumption and appreciation. It was the golden era of classic rock and made the recording industry bigger than it ever imagined.
All this because a few amateur enthusiasts decided to raid the public airways and bring life to a stillborn radio frequency. Ironically, those FM pioneers were originally intent on bringing a vast array of authentic music to wider audiences with no commercial purpose in mind. Ultimately, they paved the way for modern corporate rock with its monolithic dearth of options as freeform progressive radio shifted to a more restrictive hit-oriented format. Now, so-called classic rock stations today have become a sad, never-ending loop of a few select examples of what was once a wide-open range of talent. (Pray tell, how many times does one need to hear Eric Clapton’s “Layla” ?) This is is exactly what FM pioneers were fighting against.
Nevertheless, during a critical time as the tumultuous 1960s eased into the ’70s, musicians who wanted to explore new worlds of rock were given a platform by advocates who wanted to explore radio’s terra incognita. They served each other well in their mutual quest, and the world of music and how we hear it was forever changed for the better.
Works Cited
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[uncredited]. “Critic Declares Springsteen the Future of Rock and Roll”. Mass Moments (Mass Humanities Project) 9 May 1974.
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Wikipedia. “Album-oriented Rock“.
Wikipedia. Days of Future Passed album.