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

It wasn't just instrumental music, it was just about anything that didn't fall into "that racket the kids were listening to". As rock and roll began to squeeze everything else out of the top 100, some term was needed to represent it. Billboard called it Adult Contemporary when they added that chart in the early 60s to differentiate from the Hot 100, radio was a bit friendlier with Easy Listening. Record stores ended up with Easy Listening sections as well.
But even then they weren't oldies stations, although they might play something and call it an "oldie". There was still a demographic out there for non-rock and roll. My parents and their friends had to listen to something other than that "damn noise you call music!!"

 

I remember XERB from the late 1960s, but I never regarded it as an "oldies" station, I heard a lot of then-current music on it with a mix of older stuff.

 

"The best of the '20s, '30s, and today!"

 

That's right. Nationwide, especially the vast heartland, American Graffiti was a huge success, the big bang of musical nostalgia.

Most people born since the 1969 Woodstock festival don't realize how radical it was to have Sha Na Na on the bill. That style of music was historic, obsolete, comic, meriting ridicule. Then a month later the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival was held with a mix of 50s and 60s acts, including a Beatle who straddled both decades.

Heartland radio was slower to specialize in nostalgia.

 

Interesting. I never heard any current music on XERB back in the 60s. I had a friend that was a few years older than me, who listened to nothing but it back in the day. Strangely, I hadn't seen him in years but had lunch with him the other day.

Btw, I still listen to that station as it is now XEPRS 1090 which broadcasts the Padre games.

 

Seeing Sha-Na-Na at Woodstock is the primary reason I got into oldies. I also saw them in 1970 at SDSC (before it was SDSU) and bought their album. That lead me to seek out the originals, which ultimately opened the flood gates for me.

Btw, these were not the songs that were played on XERB. Those were mainly older non top 40 hits form the early 50s while Sha-Na-Na played mainstream hits from the second half of the 50s.

 

Oldies radio was around in the 60s. I listened to a station that played the regular top 40 during the week and on weekends played oldies. The station advertised that they were doing oldies and called it something like moldy oldies but I can't remember exactly what the terms used were. The oldies were r&r era songs mostly pre-Beatles era with much more doo-wop than you ever hear today. Anything over a couple years old was treated as an oldie. Anything that had been in the top 100 in previous years could be heard and many semi-hits were featured. Back then whole catalogs of 45 releases were played instead of the top 2 or 3 hits by an artist. Like Del Shannon, today you'll here "Runaway" and maybe a couple others but back then you might hear any 45 he released and often the more obscure sides were heard. It seemed like the DJs picked what they wanted to play.

This was local radio which is what is needed today. There has been a return to this in a way with some of the internet stations and that's what I like. I do miss cranking the radio in a car and being surprised by what is played next. There is something about a Beach Boys song being followed by the Coasters, then Roy Orbison, maybe the Troggs, then the Honeycombs, a bit of Motown, Gene Vincent, Elvis, Petula Clark, Ray Charles, the Clovers, Pat Boone, Connie Francis, Jan & Dean, etc, etc, etc. Radio can be great. It used to be and still can be sometimes.

I do like oldies stations but also enjoy stations that play a lot of different things I've never heard, both new and old. I'm greedy and want to hear everything, jazz, rock, mor, country, blues, things that don't even have a name. Radio is important.

 

Do you remember when XERB was 250 KW? They used to fight it out with Seattle's 50 KW KING here in Oregon at night, when they went down to 150 KW it was somewhat better. I was told by some San Diego residents that you could get it on your dental fillings.

 

Yes, you are right but not completely. It is hard to find 40s & 50s music on Internet but you can listen them from various oldies radio apps which plays only oldies music.

 

"Honey Radio" WHND-AM 560 / WHNE-FM 94.7 Detroit was playing all-oldies as early as 1974, starting with the Drake-Chenault "Classic Gold" automation system, switching to live jocks a few years later.

 

Didn't exist before the 70s. I know because I used to listen to one of the very first as a kid.

 

In Adult music formats then, there was your vocal/instrumental mix with old and soft contemporary music called a MOR (Middle Of the Road) format. These stations also emphasized full service local news and weather, carried the moderate type of commercial inventory for family type products. Beautiful Music formats were until the early 1980's mainly heavily instrumental oriented using a mixture of custom recordings made for beautiful station syndication (as new commercial label beautiful instrumental output was getting fewer) and commercial instrumental orchestral recordings a la Mantovani, Living Strings, 101 Strings and similar. Muzak was piped into business via tape and FM subcarrier, but with beautiful music you had several major syndicators who supplied beautiful formats for FM automated use or live assist use, like Bonneville, IGM (International Good Music), KalaMusic, SRP (Schulke Radio Programming), Peters Productions and similar. These formats tended to have short or no news, friendly announcers with minimal interruptions, and softly voiced commercials. Both catered to the 35-50 plus adult demographic then. These formats gave way to the Adult Contemporary formats with younger leaning audiences, more vocals and also gradually became soft pop/rock type sound intensive later on.

Bear in mind that beautiful music formats flourished due to the FCC requirement in the day that FM stations could only simulcast the AM sister station a limited amount of hours. Beautiful music was chosen since the early FM tape automation equipment could not segue between selections very fast and that didn't change until Drake/Chenault came up with the pre-roll concept with the control tones inserted ahead of the program. Plus, the broadcast turntables of the day suitable for FM Stereo duty could not cue fast enough for a Top 40/Rock styled operation and meet the vertical rumble standards demanded of FM Stereo operations. The slower pace of MOR/Beautiful Music formats worked well with the available FM stereo equipment for playback. And slower cueing wasn't an issue with this type of operation.

 

Actually their playlist was more extensive than that. WFYR (which was automated) defined an "oldie" as anything from the fifties up to the year before. So you could be listening in 1976, and they'd be playing an Elton John song from 1975.

Also...and I may have said this before, but oldies radio was a new concept then, so there was a ton of records WFYR played that wouldn't be in the typical rotation now: Dave Brubeck's "Take Five," Ernie's "Rubber Duckie," Sammy Davis, Jr.'s "What Kind Of Fool Am I," the Pastel Six's "Cinnamon Cinder," Cymarron's "Rings," Patti Drew's "Tell Him," B.B. King's "Paying The Cost To Be The Boss," Jimmy Reed's "Shame Shame Shame," Charley Pride's "Kiss An Angel Good Morning." From the 80s onward, the typical "consultant" would have given all of these songs the thumbs-down, but there they were on FYR, right alongside the Ronettes, Elvis, Four Seasons, Beatles, Stones. They might have only played the song once, but they played it.

 

I was born in 1951 and probably really got into listening to music on the radio when I was around 7 or 8. As far as I can remember, the stations that I listened to had young(er) listeners as their target audience. There were some carry over artists like Sinatra but the stations seemed to be more interested on playing music by the new acts that the "kids" were listening to. In the 60s, radio stations would occasionally play a "Golden Oldie" as an addition to their regular programming.
If I remember correctly, WCBS-FM in NY was the first dedicated "Oldies" station that I'm aware of.

 

Growing up when I did (in the 70s), it never felt right using the term "oldies" to describe anything prior to the fifties.

I know that if it's from the forties on back, it's surely "old," but "oldies" is such a rock-era term that it doesn't feel right using it to describe Benny Goodman.

As far as the 90s being old, that decade doesn't seem different to me because nothing much has changed. Might be a different story to an eleven-year-old.

 

Resurrecting this old thread, as I saw that so many people mentioned WCBS (New York). I posted this same clip a few years ago in another thread, but felt that it deserved to be re-posted in this thread. When WCBS flipped back to oldies from their silly, short-lived "Jack" format, the WCBS production people put together some of the best "radio production" that I've EVER heard.

If you want your ears to relive 1964 thru the beginning of the '80's, then skip ahead to around the 11:35 mark of the following u-tube clip and enjoy ...

 

I listened to Wolfman Jack on Baja California's XPRS-AM in 1971/1972 when I could get it all the way up in Northern California. He played nothing but '50s and pre-Beatles '60s RNB and Doowop and smatterings of rock 'n roll. A lot like Art Laboe's Oldies But Goodies series.

Later on in '72, I listened to an FM station out of Sacramento (forgot the call letters) that played 'good time rock 'n roll' -- heavy on British Invasion, popsike, later 60s heavy hits and then contemporary stuff that fit in with the playlist vibe. It was almost an oldies station, but not quite...you could hear something like the following:

Hollies King Midas In Reverse
Jonathan Edwards Sunshine Go Away
Status Quo Pictures Of Matchstick Men
CCR Bad Moon Rising
Jonathan King Everyone's Gone To The Moon
Kink All Of The Day And All Of The Night
Donovan Hurdy Gurdy Man
Beach Boys Good Vibrations
Steppenwolf Magic Carpet Ride
Rolling Stones Ruby Tuesday
Sweet Little Willy
Ten Years After I'd Love To Change The World
Troggs Wild Thing

Man I loved that station.

 

Clap For The Wolfman ...

 

Jojo Kincaid is from the '80's, (KKLQ, San Diego), but he is still fun to watch in action, as he is so damn good!

 

Glad this thread got resurrected. There are a few references in here that jogged my memory.

I grew up in the southern part of New Jersey, not far from Philadelphia. I was too young to have caught the first wave of oldies radio in the lat 60s-70s, but there was a lot of quality programming of that ilk in my neck of the woods in the 80s.

I was 12 when WFIL-AM got brought back to life and was a regular listener over the next 3-4 years. They played a lot of hits, sure, but not just the obvious Beatles/Motown/etc you hear today. Lots of things that maybe just scraped the Top 40, as well as regional things like Let’s Get Lost On a Country Road by the Kit Kats, which is virtually unknown outside the Philly area but was a monster hit in town. At one point in ’85 the station had among its on-air talent both Humble Harve (from KHJ in L.A. back in the day) and east coast legend Jocko Henderson. Also, I remember Jerry Blavat broadcasting his dance parties from the Jersey shore, playing all sorts of fantastic R&B and doo wop records. Talk about a musical education!

Also around that time, one of the local FM stations begun carrying Dick Bartley’s Solid Gold Saturday Night, which I quickly became obsessed with. He would do spotlights on bands like Tommy James & the Shondells and Paul Revere and the Raiders which led me to seek out their 45s and albums. Tremendous show; his current one is a shell of what he was doing in the 80s.

The AOR stations also had some great specialty shows. WMMR was the home of Michael Tearson’s Psychedelic Psupper on Sunday nights, which was appointment listening for me, as was T. Morgan’s 3-hour 60s-70s show on WYSP. T. would go from the Monkees to Moby Grape to Seatrain to lord knows what without blinking. Overnights during the week, Rick Allen did a totally outtasight show on YSP called the Ricky Mess. 5 – 6 a.m. he did what he called “the 5 o’clock compromise” wherein he played things that adhered more to the station’s playlist, but the proceeding 3 hours were this now-incomprehensible grab bag of Captain Beefheart, Screamin Jay Hawkins, Long John Baldry, Autosalvage, Del Amitri (! He was WAY into their first album which sounds nothing like the rest of their output) etc. I keep hoping I’ll run into someone who has a much of this stuff on tape so I can hear it again! (I did a bunch of taping myself, my folks claim to have thrown that stuff away but I prefer to believe the box is among all of the stuff they HAVE hoarded over the years, ha.)

 

Check out the KSAN (FM, San Francisco) website Jive95.com for a tour of what a great 70's fm station was like.
They even have a Live Show archive. Complete live shows from broadcasts back in the day. Great stuff!!

 

JoJo Kincaid is still in radio. He works the afternoon drivetime on WXJZ ("WOW-100.9 FM") in Gainesville, Florida. He's truly one of the last great DJs - fun to listen to.

 

I agree regarding JoJo, but as a currently out of work radio personality, I truly believe that there could be a LOT more of us, if the higher ups at these cookie-cutter radio establishments today (Yes, I'm talking about you "iheartradio"), would allow their personalities to be just that, "personalities", instead of worrying that the soccer moms across the country just get their daily repetition of Taylor Swift and Bruno Mars and a chance to win $1,000 dollars each hour, during A.M. and P.M. drive! I was never anywhere near as good as JoJo, but I was never given that much freedom to even attempt it.

 

There was one station that at certain hours would play the easy listening 40's, 50's stuff, but that is all I remember as a kid.
The first actual "oldies" station I recall played 50's, 60's and pre disco 70's.

 

And don't forget the late great Dick Vaughn and Moribund Music of the 70's on KPFK!!!