What did Oldies radio look like in the 50s/60s/70s?

When was the term "easy listening" started to be used to describe instrumental music of the past decades?
I'm not sure if "easy listening" was a popular term back then.

 

What did they play all night?

 

It was a locally owned station back then-they played a lot of stuff you don't hear anymore. Now it's a Hot 100 station!

 

I actually first really listened to "oldies" radio back in 1971 on XPRS out of Los Angeles...I can still remember discovering songs and artists that I still love today. I really dug Bo Diddley and pretty much all the 50's R&B I heard on the station. One song that totally got me into "garage bands" was "Psychotic Reaction" by the Count Five. In those days the 50s seemed like ancient history and even the mid sixties seemed kind of remote (that's how things are when you're really young!)

Another station I heard in the late 70s was an "automated" station (no live DJ's) called KHYL...this was a terrific station for a while (until they changed formats). They played songs by the Merry Go Round, the Vejtables, and lots of unusual stuff from the mid-late 60s...then abruptly changed formats and played a mix of disco and what I call "homogenized oldies"...run of the mill stuff that I'd heard dozens of times before. It always seems that the really good stations don't last too long and wind up changing formats for the worse.

 

In those days (the 70s) rock music was a lot younger and to teenagers born in the 50s the music from around the time we were born seemed ancient history.

 

And it's funny because most 50s rock musicians were only in their 30s when the 70s began. They were still young themselves.

 

Absolutely...and many of them were still making excellent records. I remember I was stunned at how great the Everly Brothers records were from the late 60s (I didn't hear them until the 90s)
but they didn't get much airplay because they were pegged as an "oldies" act.

 

In the UK the BBC had no idea what the youth wanted in the early 60s we still had Worker's Playtime and big band spectaculars. Our only hope was the fading in and out of Radio Luxembourg.
Then came the pirates, ships parked off the coast out of limits. whole album sides American bands we had not heard of. The BBC tried to correct this with Radio 1. Never fully getting it right, until John Peal.
What the BBC did get right was modern Classical, the Third Program through the 50s and 60s was playing music live as it was composed.
Finger hovering over the button on my tiny Akai reel to reel not knowing if they had started or just tuning up, great times.

 

Anyone mention there was more dynamic range?

 

It did out here. Back in the 60s, XERB was the oldies station out here broadcasting from Mexico and easily heard all over the west coast. This is where Wolfman Jack came from. Mainly they played R&B and DooWop from the early 50s.

This was pretty much it until KRTH started up in the early 70s.

 

Don't think there was oldies radio in the time frame you give. We would occasionally have Oldie Goldies on the local Popular music or Rock stations.

 

I got it. I got it. I got it. Can we move on now ?

 

Yeah. Friday nights on ABC were pure magic back then. And don't forget "In Concert", which came on most ABC affiliates Friday nights after local news.

As far as "oldies" radio, it seems to me that most of the music I heard on radio (AM, of course) was a combination of Top 40, phone requests, and the DJs just playing whatever they wanted to play, many of which were older songs not in the Top 40 anymore, but still worthy of airplay. I don't remember many stations that were dedicated to playing strictly older music until the '80s or so.

 

They're not gonna let you live that one down. Lol

 

I remember in the early '60s as a kid listening to my little 6 transistor radio in Riverside, CA to stations like KMEN and KFXM in San Bernardino, and KRLA and KFWB (and later KHJ) from LA. In general they would play mostly the top hits of the day, but at intervals they'd announce and play an oldie or two. In the early '60s the oldies they played were mostly from the '50s, songs that were usually only 5-10 years old! I think it was KMEN or KFXM that just before playing an oldie it would be announced in a taped intro/announcement as another "rebound sound!".

Then in the late '60s oldies when played would include songs from the early '60s as well as '50s. As each decade passed 'oldies' started to include ever more recent songs. Now pop stations call songs from the '80s into the '90s 'oldies', and good luck waiting to hear some genuine oldies from the '50s and '60s, because you probably won't.

 

Wiki says Billboard columnist Claude Hill coined the phrase in 1965 to describe NYC's WPIX-FM format,and,this sounds about right. Maybe a phrase not used so much by the listeners,but this kind of shorthand was oft-used by Hill describing the business side of radio.
Grown ups had a few choices to hear their kind of music. In the '60s,there was still a lot of known artists producing new non-rock music-Columbia, alone ,had a stable which included Mitch Miller,Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gorme,Ray Conniff,Andy Williams and lots more. These artists had airplay on stations like WIP-AM in Philly,WNEW-AM in NYC and drew pretty good ratings as well as advertisers hawking family cars,banks,sit down restaurants,beer,airline travel and other commodities(many stations were owned at one time by department stores)-stuff your average 16 year old was not a factor in purchasing. People often forget that radio,like other commercial media,was in the business of selling first and entertaining second. There was some 1940s material,but the emphasis was on new recordings,even if the material came from the Great American Songbook. Softer versions of chart hits(Honey,the Bobby Goldsboro song) and Broadway(Sunrise,Sunset from Fiddler on the Roof).
Another outlet for grown ups was the "beautiful music" format-largely instrumental tracks,a la Muzak,virtually unidentifiable unless you were a Command Records geek or hoarded Mantovani records. Think the Charmaine scene in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. This stuff played in doctor offices,work areas that offended no one and on more than a few Magnavox stereo consoles,as these early stereo FM stations. Here,the dial rarely changed so quiet toned ads were pretty cheap but got a considerable audience of folks who couldn't escape.

 

Yeah, I remember the top 40 DJs in my region (circa 1968-1971) would frequently play songs from years earlier in the middle of the latest hits. Some real obscure stuff too. One time in 1971 I heard a song that blew me away, it turned out to be an "oldie" from way back in 1966...it was "Funny How Love Can Be" by Danny Hutton. It took me years to find out who the artist was on that...often they wouldn't name check the artist or song title. Ah, the pre-internet , pre-Google era!

 

You have to add the 60's contemporary artists such as Esquivel and Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. It seems to me that the music the public used to hear on the radio in the 50's and the 60's were more eclectic and musical compared to today's radio broadcast.

 

I moved to Victorville (California) in San Bernardino in late 1966 at age 10 and grew up hearing KFXM and KMEN...both awesome top-40 stations! For some reason KFXM DJs loved to play "Just Like Romeo and Juliet" by the Reflections damn near every day.

 

The term in the early 1960s was "middle of the road," I think.

 

Krautrock and Free Jazz.

 

Ditto, that's what I came to say. Watch "American Graffiti" if you want to hear XERB, that's what they were listening to in the movie. Also, I don't know if it's true but we used to hear that it was supposedly an illegal radio station because it was so powerful. I think it was based in Tijuana and it blasted all the way up the California coast.

 

Honestly, I can live very nicely without ever hearing any Doo Wop..but I really miss their wealth of 60's stuff...as well as one particular DJ who was brilliant in the "factoid" department and had one of the greatest voices for hit-radio ever, in my opinion...Bob Shannon.

 

Myke I think as a widespread phenomenon, Oldies as a full-time format began around 80 or 81. I worked for an FM Top 40 station in the early 80s, the AM sister station in the building had just launched an Oldies format and it was a pretty novel thing at the time. It was also around that time that the Classic Rock format was born. There were stations around the U.S. that were Oldies stations, but around the mid 80s or so just about EVERY city had an Oldies station (now referred to as Classic Hits because, you know, "old" has such a negative marketing connotation.)