Colorado Media Newsroom
May 19th, 2022, 10:52 AM
From Radio Insight:
https://radioinsight.com/wp-content/images/1970/05/plj70s-200x200.png (https://radioinsight.com/blogs/225536/the-kid-who-did-not-rock/)https://radioinsight.com/wp-content/images/1970/05/plj70s-200x200.pngOne of the things I came to realize over years of studying music preference and listeners’ radio history is that there was one particular commonality of timing. Sometime in the mid-’70s, kids who had thus far grown up with AM Top 40 made the switch to FM Album Rock radio. Often they were about age 12. Often it was around 1974. In that most polarizing of years, not only was the rock that crossed over (Wings, Elton, Skynyrd, Bad Company) an advertisement for rock radio, but so was the pop music, if you didn’t like “Seasons in the Sun.”
I was 12 years old in 1974. I did not make the switch to AOR radio. I was the kid who did not rock.
For one thing, the music I had grown up on in Washington, D.C., was R&B. By 12, I was living in places without a local R&B station. The R&B that did cross over early on WFIL Philadelphia during the day and CKLW Detroit at night was enough to keep me tethered to Top 40, no matter how much Paul Anka or John Denver they played.
Also, I had just discovered CKLW, which, just ahead of that seismic change in AM’s fortunes, was at its maximum influence on the American charts. CKLW played Grand Funk and Bachman-Turner Overdrive (months ahead of the U.S. in early 1974), but it also played “The Payback” by James Brown. I never really liked “Seasons,” but I did like discovering it months before it became a hit everywhere else.
Also, 1974 was the year that I discovered American Top 40. As a chart fan already, I’m not sure why it took me four years, but once I stumbled across it on WPGC Washington, D.C., chart singles took on extra currency for me. On August 9, 1974, Country crossover “Rub It In” by Billy “Crash” Craddock wasn’t a song I loved or hated, but it was “the No. 25 song in the land,” and I was excited to hear it because my regular stations didn’t play it.*
After reading the first version of this article, WMMR Philadelphia PD Bill Weston made an excellent point–I didn’t have older brothers who might have played AOR music for me. It’s also possible that in the awkwardness of sixth grade, I just wasn’t in the appropriate clique. And yet, it took a while to feel like any of my classmates had completely abandoned pop music. There were still enough cars with AM radio only. In 1975, even with the musical transition already in place among America’s youth, my classmates somehow knew “How Long” by Ace and “Magic” by Pilot, because they had R-rated 13-year-old-boy lyrics for both of them.
By that time in 1975-76, I had moved and some of the teachers listened to WBCN Boston. I did enjoy WBCN in that era. In part, it was because it played R&B, something that still happened on many AORs at that point, but WBCN went further than Stevie Wonder. WBCN was the first place I heard KC & the Sunshine Band and “Disco Lady.” The other songs I associate with WBCN are opposites — “Tangled Up In Blue” by Bob Dylan, which certainly felt like its song of the year, if it had one, and “King of the Nighttime World” by Kiss.
But even WBCN was upstaged for me in 1975 by the original WROR, then running the automated Drake/Chenault oldies. WROR was the station where I taught myself rock ‘n’ roll history. It was also the station where I won my first contest. Ironically, the prize was an FM converter, which in turn allowed one of my teachers to stop playing top 40 WRKO and start playing WBCN on field trips.
A few years later I moved again, eventually back to Washington, D.C., and I had access to the R&B station of my childhood, WOL again. I had also picked up some country-music magazines in a guidance counselor’s office, which made me want to hear the songs I was reading about. Country was a fascinating glimpse in the adult world for a teenager, and WMZQ had just signed on with a particularly accessible blend of the format.*
By the end of high school, I had friends who listened to ‘70s singer-songwriters, meaning that I finally heard Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” and finally knew her for something more than “Court and Spark.” I had discovered punk and new wave, mostly through record store clerks. In my Quaker high-school, there were jocks who listened to WWDC (DC101); there were also a lot of Deadheads. Neither influenced my tastes at the time, but the latter were particularly friendly, because I could tell them how Shakedown Street was doing on the charts.*
Until 1976 or so, I knew primarily the rock that crossed over — hit singles, not album cuts, even big ones. I knew “Black Dog” and “D’yer Maker” as hit singles. It might have been as late as 1976 that I became aware of “Stairway to Heaven” and the place it held in the pantheon for so many. Around that time, I started to buy albums and/or hear the big ones playing in their entirety in record stores. I was also hunting through radio-station slush piles by 1976, but it was mostly the unhip non-rock stuff that nobody else wanted.
Recently, somebody in the Twitter thread that listens to and comments on SiriusXM’s Saturday afternoon*AT40 reruns marveled at the spring ’75 countdown in which the No. 1 album was Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti,*but the top single was B.J. Thomas, “(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song.” I wasn’t the person buying either of those, but there was plenty of AC-leaning pop from that era that I did like. One of the things that’s clear from the AT40*thread is that most kids of the ’70s have their AC favorites, too.
After an adolescence of listening to everything but Rock radio, WRIF Detroit was unavoidable at the University of Michigan, even though I most remember waiting to hear WJLB and WCHB play this “Rapper’s Delight” record that I’d read about. The next year, WLLZ, Detroit’s New Wheels, became phenomenal. But WGPR, then WJLB, then WDRQ, were phenomenal, too. In Detroit, Rock, R&B, and even AC stations could be the station of the moment, and sometimes it was the same friends switching from one to the other. Plus, those years included the worst of the pop doldrums, and Detroit didn’t always have a true Top 40 station during that time.
By 1979, I finally knew what was on Rock radio as well as I knew other formats, especially since Top 40 was so influenced by AOR. By then, it was largely corporate rock, heavily melodic, even when it rocked, and more of interest to me. My Radio & Records editor Ken Barnes once accused me of not liking rock. When I told him what rock I liked he quipped, “I was wrong. You just have bad taste.” But it was that era of Classic Rock that drove the creation of Bob- and Jack-FM and drives today’s Classic Hits formats.
In general, my pop-leaning musical tastes served me well throughout my career. Meanwhile,*I filled in a lot of the holes when I was Oldies/Classic Rock editor of R&R and could hear ’70s rock cherry-picked, the same way Oldies had been when I listened to WROR. There were still holes. There was a lunch where my wife and Guy Zapoleon marveled that I didn’t recognize “Too High” by Stevie Wonder. Eventually, once I started to do music research for a living, it became clear though that not every cut on Innervisions had endured equally, no matter how many people owned it at the time.*
What else did I miss? Not so many enduring hits, as it turns out, in part because the secondary ’70s are fading as Classic Rock radio pushes forward. Of the 100 most-played Classic Rock songs, there are three that I know I learned many years later (“Paranoid,” “La Grange,” and “Simple Man”). I didn’t know “American Girl” (song No. 101 this week) in 1976, but I’m given how Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers built gradually even at rock radio, I’m guessing many people learned it after he became a bigger star.
A few months ago, when I reprinted an oral history of WMMS Cleveland, I came across this 1976 (seemingly fall) composite aircheck. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJHlNEnhu1g) Although spread over several DJs during the course of a day and not a continuous monitor, the songs heard were:
Andy Fairweather-Low, “La Booga Rooga”
Al Green, “Take Me to the River”
Southside Johnny & Asbury Jukes, “Fannie Mae”*
Eagles, “Already Gone”
Todd Rundgren, “Love of the Common Man”
George Harrison, “What Is Life” (starting a new segment)
Southside Johnny & Asbury Jukes, “You Mean So Much to Me”
Flash Cadillac & the Continental Kids, “Standin’ on the Corner”
Boz Scaggs, “What Can I Say”
Southside Johnny & Asbury Jukes, “It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Motion” (on yet another segment)
Humble Pie, “Hallelujah I Love Her So”
Allman Brothers Band, “Dimples”
Dr. Feelgood, “Back in the Night”
Tubes, “Mondo Bondage” (another new segment)
Michael Stanley Band, “One Good Reason”
Because both stations were famously eclectic, WMMS reminded me more of WBCN than the “kickass” AOR that had calcified by the time I began hearing AOR regularly. I knew two songs from that Southside Johnny album, and neither were the ones on the aircheck. This monitor seems to me like the boundless variety I associate with indie rock now, but I’d be curious if there’s a reader who remembers every song on that list as a radio record the way I remember everything on American Top 40.*
Then I came across a tape of WPLJ New York in June ’77.* A few years earlier, when I’d first encountered WPLJ, it was playing “California Girls” by the Beach Boys. In those days before I understood format distinction, WPLJ wasn’t the polar opposite to sister WABC, but seemed more like an alternate universe version, which is perhaps why I didn’t make the change. On a 1975 aircheck, it’s playing the Beach Boys again, along with “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” by the Hollies, and “Back Stabbers” by the O’Jays.
Here’s WPLJ in 1977:
Doors, “L.A. Woman”
Climax Blues Band, “Couldn’t Get It Right”
America, “Amber Cascades”
George Harrison, “Crackerbox Palace,”
Steely Dan, “Reelin’ in the Years”
Pablo Cruise, “What’cha Gonna Do”
Heart, “Magic Man”
Steve Miller Band, “Space Cowboy”
Jefferson Starship, “Miracles”
Fleetwood Mac, “You Make Lovin’ Fun”
Chicago, “Harry Truman”
WPLJ was its own animal–already so pop-leaning that making the switch to Top 40 in 1983 wasn’t so out of character. But as AOR mainstreamed in the late ’70s, many stations probably sounded more like WPLJ than WMMR. In a time when AOR’s growth was further driven by the Eagles, Billy Joel, and Fleetwood Mac, you come to realize how much of its music is now remembered as “AM Gold.” A lot of the Saturday #AT40 thread listeners remember those songs fondly, even as they declare “fortunately, I had moved to FM by now.” Because a lot of the hits that “drove people to FM,” were really the songs waiting for them when they got there.
more (https://radioinsight.com/blogs/225536/the-kid-who-did-not-rock/)
https://radioinsight.com/wp-content/images/1970/05/plj70s-200x200.png (https://radioinsight.com/blogs/225536/the-kid-who-did-not-rock/)https://radioinsight.com/wp-content/images/1970/05/plj70s-200x200.pngOne of the things I came to realize over years of studying music preference and listeners’ radio history is that there was one particular commonality of timing. Sometime in the mid-’70s, kids who had thus far grown up with AM Top 40 made the switch to FM Album Rock radio. Often they were about age 12. Often it was around 1974. In that most polarizing of years, not only was the rock that crossed over (Wings, Elton, Skynyrd, Bad Company) an advertisement for rock radio, but so was the pop music, if you didn’t like “Seasons in the Sun.”
I was 12 years old in 1974. I did not make the switch to AOR radio. I was the kid who did not rock.
For one thing, the music I had grown up on in Washington, D.C., was R&B. By 12, I was living in places without a local R&B station. The R&B that did cross over early on WFIL Philadelphia during the day and CKLW Detroit at night was enough to keep me tethered to Top 40, no matter how much Paul Anka or John Denver they played.
Also, I had just discovered CKLW, which, just ahead of that seismic change in AM’s fortunes, was at its maximum influence on the American charts. CKLW played Grand Funk and Bachman-Turner Overdrive (months ahead of the U.S. in early 1974), but it also played “The Payback” by James Brown. I never really liked “Seasons,” but I did like discovering it months before it became a hit everywhere else.
Also, 1974 was the year that I discovered American Top 40. As a chart fan already, I’m not sure why it took me four years, but once I stumbled across it on WPGC Washington, D.C., chart singles took on extra currency for me. On August 9, 1974, Country crossover “Rub It In” by Billy “Crash” Craddock wasn’t a song I loved or hated, but it was “the No. 25 song in the land,” and I was excited to hear it because my regular stations didn’t play it.*
After reading the first version of this article, WMMR Philadelphia PD Bill Weston made an excellent point–I didn’t have older brothers who might have played AOR music for me. It’s also possible that in the awkwardness of sixth grade, I just wasn’t in the appropriate clique. And yet, it took a while to feel like any of my classmates had completely abandoned pop music. There were still enough cars with AM radio only. In 1975, even with the musical transition already in place among America’s youth, my classmates somehow knew “How Long” by Ace and “Magic” by Pilot, because they had R-rated 13-year-old-boy lyrics for both of them.
By that time in 1975-76, I had moved and some of the teachers listened to WBCN Boston. I did enjoy WBCN in that era. In part, it was because it played R&B, something that still happened on many AORs at that point, but WBCN went further than Stevie Wonder. WBCN was the first place I heard KC & the Sunshine Band and “Disco Lady.” The other songs I associate with WBCN are opposites — “Tangled Up In Blue” by Bob Dylan, which certainly felt like its song of the year, if it had one, and “King of the Nighttime World” by Kiss.
But even WBCN was upstaged for me in 1975 by the original WROR, then running the automated Drake/Chenault oldies. WROR was the station where I taught myself rock ‘n’ roll history. It was also the station where I won my first contest. Ironically, the prize was an FM converter, which in turn allowed one of my teachers to stop playing top 40 WRKO and start playing WBCN on field trips.
A few years later I moved again, eventually back to Washington, D.C., and I had access to the R&B station of my childhood, WOL again. I had also picked up some country-music magazines in a guidance counselor’s office, which made me want to hear the songs I was reading about. Country was a fascinating glimpse in the adult world for a teenager, and WMZQ had just signed on with a particularly accessible blend of the format.*
By the end of high school, I had friends who listened to ‘70s singer-songwriters, meaning that I finally heard Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” and finally knew her for something more than “Court and Spark.” I had discovered punk and new wave, mostly through record store clerks. In my Quaker high-school, there were jocks who listened to WWDC (DC101); there were also a lot of Deadheads. Neither influenced my tastes at the time, but the latter were particularly friendly, because I could tell them how Shakedown Street was doing on the charts.*
Until 1976 or so, I knew primarily the rock that crossed over — hit singles, not album cuts, even big ones. I knew “Black Dog” and “D’yer Maker” as hit singles. It might have been as late as 1976 that I became aware of “Stairway to Heaven” and the place it held in the pantheon for so many. Around that time, I started to buy albums and/or hear the big ones playing in their entirety in record stores. I was also hunting through radio-station slush piles by 1976, but it was mostly the unhip non-rock stuff that nobody else wanted.
Recently, somebody in the Twitter thread that listens to and comments on SiriusXM’s Saturday afternoon*AT40 reruns marveled at the spring ’75 countdown in which the No. 1 album was Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti,*but the top single was B.J. Thomas, “(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song.” I wasn’t the person buying either of those, but there was plenty of AC-leaning pop from that era that I did like. One of the things that’s clear from the AT40*thread is that most kids of the ’70s have their AC favorites, too.
After an adolescence of listening to everything but Rock radio, WRIF Detroit was unavoidable at the University of Michigan, even though I most remember waiting to hear WJLB and WCHB play this “Rapper’s Delight” record that I’d read about. The next year, WLLZ, Detroit’s New Wheels, became phenomenal. But WGPR, then WJLB, then WDRQ, were phenomenal, too. In Detroit, Rock, R&B, and even AC stations could be the station of the moment, and sometimes it was the same friends switching from one to the other. Plus, those years included the worst of the pop doldrums, and Detroit didn’t always have a true Top 40 station during that time.
By 1979, I finally knew what was on Rock radio as well as I knew other formats, especially since Top 40 was so influenced by AOR. By then, it was largely corporate rock, heavily melodic, even when it rocked, and more of interest to me. My Radio & Records editor Ken Barnes once accused me of not liking rock. When I told him what rock I liked he quipped, “I was wrong. You just have bad taste.” But it was that era of Classic Rock that drove the creation of Bob- and Jack-FM and drives today’s Classic Hits formats.
In general, my pop-leaning musical tastes served me well throughout my career. Meanwhile,*I filled in a lot of the holes when I was Oldies/Classic Rock editor of R&R and could hear ’70s rock cherry-picked, the same way Oldies had been when I listened to WROR. There were still holes. There was a lunch where my wife and Guy Zapoleon marveled that I didn’t recognize “Too High” by Stevie Wonder. Eventually, once I started to do music research for a living, it became clear though that not every cut on Innervisions had endured equally, no matter how many people owned it at the time.*
What else did I miss? Not so many enduring hits, as it turns out, in part because the secondary ’70s are fading as Classic Rock radio pushes forward. Of the 100 most-played Classic Rock songs, there are three that I know I learned many years later (“Paranoid,” “La Grange,” and “Simple Man”). I didn’t know “American Girl” (song No. 101 this week) in 1976, but I’m given how Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers built gradually even at rock radio, I’m guessing many people learned it after he became a bigger star.
A few months ago, when I reprinted an oral history of WMMS Cleveland, I came across this 1976 (seemingly fall) composite aircheck. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJHlNEnhu1g) Although spread over several DJs during the course of a day and not a continuous monitor, the songs heard were:
Andy Fairweather-Low, “La Booga Rooga”
Al Green, “Take Me to the River”
Southside Johnny & Asbury Jukes, “Fannie Mae”*
Eagles, “Already Gone”
Todd Rundgren, “Love of the Common Man”
George Harrison, “What Is Life” (starting a new segment)
Southside Johnny & Asbury Jukes, “You Mean So Much to Me”
Flash Cadillac & the Continental Kids, “Standin’ on the Corner”
Boz Scaggs, “What Can I Say”
Southside Johnny & Asbury Jukes, “It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Motion” (on yet another segment)
Humble Pie, “Hallelujah I Love Her So”
Allman Brothers Band, “Dimples”
Dr. Feelgood, “Back in the Night”
Tubes, “Mondo Bondage” (another new segment)
Michael Stanley Band, “One Good Reason”
Because both stations were famously eclectic, WMMS reminded me more of WBCN than the “kickass” AOR that had calcified by the time I began hearing AOR regularly. I knew two songs from that Southside Johnny album, and neither were the ones on the aircheck. This monitor seems to me like the boundless variety I associate with indie rock now, but I’d be curious if there’s a reader who remembers every song on that list as a radio record the way I remember everything on American Top 40.*
Then I came across a tape of WPLJ New York in June ’77.* A few years earlier, when I’d first encountered WPLJ, it was playing “California Girls” by the Beach Boys. In those days before I understood format distinction, WPLJ wasn’t the polar opposite to sister WABC, but seemed more like an alternate universe version, which is perhaps why I didn’t make the change. On a 1975 aircheck, it’s playing the Beach Boys again, along with “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” by the Hollies, and “Back Stabbers” by the O’Jays.
Here’s WPLJ in 1977:
Doors, “L.A. Woman”
Climax Blues Band, “Couldn’t Get It Right”
America, “Amber Cascades”
George Harrison, “Crackerbox Palace,”
Steely Dan, “Reelin’ in the Years”
Pablo Cruise, “What’cha Gonna Do”
Heart, “Magic Man”
Steve Miller Band, “Space Cowboy”
Jefferson Starship, “Miracles”
Fleetwood Mac, “You Make Lovin’ Fun”
Chicago, “Harry Truman”
WPLJ was its own animal–already so pop-leaning that making the switch to Top 40 in 1983 wasn’t so out of character. But as AOR mainstreamed in the late ’70s, many stations probably sounded more like WPLJ than WMMR. In a time when AOR’s growth was further driven by the Eagles, Billy Joel, and Fleetwood Mac, you come to realize how much of its music is now remembered as “AM Gold.” A lot of the Saturday #AT40 thread listeners remember those songs fondly, even as they declare “fortunately, I had moved to FM by now.” Because a lot of the hits that “drove people to FM,” were really the songs waiting for them when they got there.
more (https://radioinsight.com/blogs/225536/the-kid-who-did-not-rock/)