Your thoughts upon hearing FM radio for the first time?

Oh ok. i moved away in 1980, wasn't there to see if they made the transition over to FM.

later
-1

 

ABCFM used to have a show called Rockturnal that played two hours of Rock music per week. Triple R started broadcasting in mono but soon switched to stereo. PBS broadcast in stereo from their inception but their signal was so weak unless you lived in St Kilda or Prahran you had to hold the ariel.

 

Exactly. The possibilities seemed endless. This was long before the suits of San Antonio decided that listeners
only had the capacity to listen to 150 songs!

 

Real underground radio broadcast from the basement of the Pasadena Presbyterian Church - KPPC-FM In 1967, the Pasadena Presbyterian Church sold KPPC-AM-FM to Crosby-Avery Broadcasting for $310,000. The church had been attempting to sell the radio stations for a year; station manager Edgar Pierce said the church found commercial radio incompatible with the noncommercial nature of its other efforts.[2] Crosby-Avery was owned by Leon Crosby, a general manager of San Francisco's KMPX, a station that had just gone to a full-time freeform progressive rock format, and Lewis Avery, former partner in a national ad sales firm. With KMPX soaring to success but KPPC, with its middle-of-the-road format, ailing, Crosby and Avery brought in the architects of KMPX, Tom and Raechel Donahue, to turn around their new station in Southern California.[3]

Hosts included B. Mitchel Reed, Steven Segal (a.k.a. "The Obscene Steven Clean;" not related to the similarly named actor), Susan Carter (a.k.a. "Outrageous Nevada"), Barbara Birdfeather,[4] Jeff Gonzer (a.k.a. "Bonzo" Gonzer), Tom Donahue, Program Director (2014 Rock Radio Hall of Fame inductee) and DJ Les Carter, novelty music historian Dr. Demento, Charles Laquidara, Ted Alvy (a.k.a. "Cosmos Topper"), Elliot Mintz (whose late-night Sunday show played everything from Baba Ram Dass lectures to listener-created recordings), blues archivist Johnny Otis, comedy troupes The Credibility Gap (featuring Harry Shearer, Richard Beebe, David L. Lander, Michael McKean), and The Firesign Theatre. Station promos were sung by the a cappella singing group The Persuasions. Other staff members included: Don Hall, Larry Woodside, DJ and production wizard Zachary Zenor, Joe Rogers (a.k.a. Mississippi Fats), Sam Kopper, Steve Fasching (a.k.a. "Stereo Steve"), the Pierce Family, and Ron Johnson (a.k.a. "Dr. Sound"). The following year, after a few bounced paychecks, dress code regulations, and other rules changes, The Donahues and the disc jockeys at both KMPX and KPPC walked out on the stations in what was called by some at the time as "The Great Hippie Strike." The former KMPX and KPPC staffers were later hired at Metromedia-owned KSAN in San Francisco and KMET in Los Angeles. KPPC hired new staffers and kept the freeform format, though the station floundered for several years following the strike.

After spending a night in jail peaking and tripping on acid(it's a long story), Steve, Juice and I went there (I had a friend DJing) and spent the whole morning on the studio floor smoking hash.

 

Enlightened!! Some really freaky stuff but totally enraptured. It was about 67-68 when I accidentally discovered FM via Memphis and St Louis. We had local FM but they were nothing what I was hearing from the big cities. Never heard of Sun Ra before FM; Crimson; Miles Bitches Brew, Pink Floyd, Cream, and other unworldly cosmic treats. My 1st encounter with the blues, from BB, Muddy, John Lee, Howlin , Robert Johnson,Son House and so on was from FM. I think the absolutely first FM treat were the album versions of Time Has Come Again by the ChamberBros and Inna Gadda vida
(wtf!). Nothing like firing one up around 1am and drifting outward to parts unknown ( as long as the signal held out). Those were the times. Sorely missed

 

My first contact with "stereo" was via an inexpensive Motorola portable record player with detachable wing speakers. I happily played my stereo Tijuana Brass albums and rejoiced in the idea of separated sound. At that time, our house only had one FM radio in it, an old console TV that had an AM-FM tuner - mono only. On the few occasions that I played with that FM radio, all I heard was a lot of beautiful music, classical music, and simulcasts of the AM stations. This was the early to mid-60s.

I visited the house of a buddy and his parents had purchased a bigger, better console TV and it had an FM stereo radio. Though I knew that there was such a thing as FM-stereo, my mind kind of predicted that it would be a kind of wishy-washy separation, kind of indefinite. Once I listened to this FM stereo in the console, I was quite wrong. The sound was clearly defined and totally separated, making for a delightful experience. I brought my jubilance home to my parents, and for a present, they purchased for me am FM stereo radio. This was a Sears job. Three same-sized boxes with hanging holes on the back, so it could be hung on a wall. The tuner was the middle part and the two speakers hung on either side. We mounted this up in my bedroom.

Finding stereo stations became the order of the day. In Philly, we had a pretty good abundance of stations broadcasting in stereo. There was just one that played anything resembling current pop music at that time. It was the CBS-owned FM station, WCAU-FM, and they were airing a program called "The Young Sound". It was a syndicated format that ran on a lot of CBS-FM stations across the country. It was a mix of instrumentals of popular songs of the day interspersed with vocal hits - nothing too heavy - so you might hear a Mamas & Papas softer song, a Beatles softer song, and some of my favorite from the A&M label like Herb Alpert & Sergio Mendes. This was a station that still offered news at the top of the hour, so every hour, they played a "Young Sound" theme. I loved tuning in near the top of the hour and would have loved to have a recording of my own of that theme. At midnight, they played a longer version of the theme, and what my ears heard as they identified it was, "...our Young Sound theme is music by Tony Hatch." So, asking a record store clerk about it drew blanks all around. It was many years later that I realized the announcer was saying, "Our Young Sound theme is 'Music' by Tony Hatch." The song was called, "Music".



Later that same year, the big AM station in Philly, WFIL, launched a more pop sound on its FM. That station had been a variety of classical, beautiful music, show tunes, and other stuff. With the success of WFIL, Famous 56 and its big Top 40 explosion, the owners decided to do a lighter version on FM. They would emphasize stereo sound, and played more popular-type music than CBS-FM had been doing. This WFIL-FM caught my ear, and I'd found an FM home, and really enjoyed listening to the pop hits of the day in stereo. It made me want to buy a lot more albums so I could spin some of these tracks at home.

These were the days when FM stations made an effort to sound as good as they could, and very often, they sounded better than what my crappy turntables of the day were capable of. The big push by these stations at the time was to get FM radios into cars. They knew that a lot of radio listening was in cars, and most budget cars only came with AM radios. This station promoted sales of FM converters so that listeners could hear their new favorites as they commuted. I bought two of them, even though they were only mono.

As often happens, stations that start soft tend to get harder as they attempt to up the ratings. I ultimately ended up working at that radio station. It had changed owners, changed call letters, and begun its morphing to a progressive rock format by the time I worked there.

 

I remember thinking .. " wow! ..frequency modulation - does it get any better than this !? "


ah, but seriously .. stereo ! .. AND, no more static overfill whilst driving the car under the viaducts. But what intrigued me most I suppose was the free form station programming in the early days.
Hosts playing entire album-sides interrupted by dialogue or adverts, very eclectic , underground, subversive music .. the excitement of tuning-in was similar, I imagine, to the thrill UK radio listeners felt when they tapped the dial late at night and pulled-in Radio Caroline's off-shore station for a taste of what they couldn't get on staid BBC broadcasts of the day.

 

Here's a funny story. I'm a big UFO fan. I hate the word underrated, but I feel that if the push from Chrysalis/EMI/whoever had been bigger/better back then, they could have been much larger. Anyway, many years ago I was listening to and enjoying a few of their deeper tracks, and I thought: there are a bazillion FM stations across the world. If FM stations play a variety of music from all bands, then somewhere in the world right now, this song is being played, and someone else is enjoying it at the same time that I am. But then I got older and realized that rock stations only play the same boring/tired hits over and over and over ... again. Sigh.

 

WNEW, The Night Bird, Dennis Elsas, Scott Muni... and there were some good stations in Bridgeport CT as well - WPKN and WSHU (now an NPR station)

My friend had just set up his new stereo system and one of those DJs on WNEW, into a Jethro Tull binge, played My God from Aqualung. I remember being blown away when the electric guitar and bass came in at the 2nd verse. The power!Must have been 1972 or thereabouts

PS - That’s what was so good about FM radio back then - The DJs were able to get creative, no formula, especially late night

 

This is a nostalgic trip through my childhood which now I realize was held together by a web of new music played over the FM radio waves of a new radio station in Beaver Falls, PA (WBVP - FM at 106.7 mHz). Before I had the AM mother station tuned in for the “Morning March” ritual of preschool encouragement to face the day. Now at night I had a completely opposite view of the world. The first time I heard “In A Gadda Da Vida” in its entirety was over the FM radio through a set my grandfather provided as he was a Sylvania television and radio repairman. It was 1968.