DO YOU REMEMBER ROCK ‘N’ ROLL OLDIES RADIO?

THE FORMATIVE YEARS PART V

Previously on The Formative Years…

I took some old records off Mom & Dad’s shelf
Talked ’bout ’70s disco, sci-fi and my nerdy little self
Superheroes, cartoons, and my older bro
Now let’s get into rock ‘n’ roll oldies radio*

In TFY Pt. II I spoke of how 1950s nostalgia influenced 1970s culture and how rising creatives at the time channelled romanticized memories of youth into their adult endeavors. Today, I’ll set aside the broader social implications of the revival phenomenon in order to focus on how early experiences with rock oldies radio affected my musical sensibilities going forward.

*Sincerest apologies to Bob Seger (please don’t sue).

Time, RELATIVity, and ROCK OLDIES

I’d understand if anyone coming of age today mistakenly concluded that Bob Seger was being self-referential when he sang about “Old Time Rock and Roll.” The song is almost 43 years old! That’s just craziness! What’s more, Seger’s classic arrived a mere 24 years after the commonly recognized year-zero for rock and roll (1954). That’s hardly “old,” right? Too young to have witnessed rock’s birth, but old enough to remember the rock and roll revival, I can’t deny that these numbers are weighing on me…

In 2021, several of the albums responsible for exploding alternative rock into the pop mainstream turned 30!! How is that even possible? When those records came out I was 19, working two jobs, and fumbling through my first year of college. More surreal still, my favorite “contemporary” artists -the Shins – released their debut 21 years ago!!! What…? Is that right? Sure, I didn’t discover them right away, but it still feels like the album just came out. Does this mean that the song “New Slang” is…classic rock? Am I that old now??? Yes.  Yes I am (sigh).

As the decades pile up and lead us ever further away from rock’s beginnings, notions of what qualifies as “classics” and/or “oldies” becomes ever more relative.

Will You Remember Jerry Lee?

Do you “remember when rock was young?” Do you like to swallow bitter pills Well! Try on this mad truth for size… The classic tunes that were initially leveraged to draw the “silent generation” and baby boomers to ’70s rock oldies radio are now in the range of 70 years-old!

It’s crazy, I know, but that’s not all! In time, as those generations thinned, slumping ratings forced programmers to find a new “mature” demographic to exploit: mine. Consequently, as oldies playlists lean ever more on ’70s and ’80s music to hook Gen-Xers, the true rock classics are getting squeezed out. ’60s acts still get some play, but songs that pre-date the British Invasion are rarely heard. At this rate, by the time Gen-Z ages up, all early rockers not named Elvis or the Beatles will have been phased out of public consciousness altogether.

Things change. It happens. But how can it be that “Detroit Rock City” has zero standard radio outlets reserved for rock’s foundational artists? Where are Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and Little Richard? Why do we have to rely on streaming and (gasp!) the purchase of physical media to hear Roy Orbison, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Everly Brothers?  It’s absolutely absurd!  It’s a travesty! This will not do! Curse the callously calculating winds of commerce! The kids need to know their musical heritage (whether they want to or not).

 “Will you remember Jerry Lee, John Lennon, T. Rex and OI Moulty?
It’s the end, the end of the 70’s. It’s the end, the end of the century”

Joey Ramone from THE RAMONES’ “DO YOU REMEMBER ROCK ‘N’ ROLL RADIO?”

Overpowered BY funk (and rockabilly and britpop and…)

Sooooo… Rock and roll and me.
Ugggghhhhh, where do I even start?
Outlining my indoctrination would be so much easier if I could posit rock as a single, distinct genre rather than a wild convergence of early 20th century (mostly) American music traditions. Here goes nothing.

In the beginning there was only total nothingness…
Then, in the late 1940s and ’50s,* pop, blues, jazz, boogie woogie, folk, country, black gospel, etc. all variously merged into one another and split again into the earliest rock forms – r&b, doo wop, rockabilly, girl groups, skiffle, etc., etc. In turn, as ’50s acts infiltrated the pop landscape, mutually influenced each other, and evolved, rock’s next waves brought astounding flurries of development – enter ’60s soul, the British Invasion, surf, folk rock, funk, psychedelic, prog, etc., etc., etc., etc

Was I preternaturally possessed or did I come by my affinity for pop media due to constant reenforcement? A little of both would be my guess. Either way, because 1970s media streams kept all twentieth century entertainment streams alive, I was exposed to all of these forms as a young boy. With innocent ears both awed and overpowered, I sat passively in place and soaked it all in.

* Ok, so I skipped ahead a little…

Reconstructing ’70s ROck OLDIES Radio

Prior to the rise of album-oriented rock radio in the late-1960s, stereo sound was something of a novelty. In fact, with the exception of classical works, most albums were only pressed for mono (single-speaker output). Many common consumer radios weren’t even equipped to receive an FM signal. Therefore, before 1960, the AM dial was the go-to place to hear the biggest hits of “today and yesterday.”

I was still in diapers when rock oldies radio hit Detroit in 1974, so my memories are understandably sketchy. To that point, I offer many thanks to older family members, friends, and my favorite rabbit hole of information – the internet. My attempts to reconstruct the ’70s southeastern Michigan radio scene would have been impossible without them.

Honey (Radio) That’s What I Want

“All Oldies” Honey Radio WHND AM 560 was established in 1974, was simulcast on FM 94.7 until ’76, and went off the air in ’94. Beyond these facts and a general consensus that playlists initially culled from the early rock and roll era, c. 1955-’63, that’s about as concrete as my info gets. I’ll have to fill the gaps with my spotty memory and creative use of the all-powerful interweb…

First, regarding Honey Radio’s scope of programming, my memories aren’t matching-up with the online consensus. Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” (1954*) is probably the earliest song I remember hearing on WHND, so the front end of the estimate fits well enough. The back end of that figure, however, is another story…

Ok, maybe Honey Radio didn’t originally play anything cut after 1963, but song selections unquestionably pushed into the mid-late ’60s by the time my brother and I started listening in the mid-late ’70s; “Turn Turn Turn” (’65), “Incense and Peppermints” (’67), “Mrs. Robinson” (’68), “Sugar Sugar” (’69), and “Tears of a Clown” (’70) are all tracks we clearly recall hearing. Corroborating our recollections, I found multiple AM 560 audio captures on YouTube from 1979 that feature tracks that post-date the British Invasion, including at least one song from as late as ’71.

*One of innumerable tunes considered to be the first ‘true’ rock song.

Let’s make a rock oldies mixtape

My brother used to hang out in our room for hours on-end listening to Honey Radio. In those times of solitude, when not meticulously piecing together plastic model kits, he was making mix tapes; captured from an AM-only, hand-held transistor radio to an old-school portable cassette recorder.* 9-years his junior, I was usually off wreaking havoc elsewhere in the house during these periods, but often popped-in for fun garage-flavored novelties (“Surfin’ Bird“; “Wild Thing“), bubblegum confections (“Sugar Shack“), early rockers (“I’m Walkin‘”; “Summertime Blues“), and anything that featured electric organ (“Runaway“; “House of the Rising Sun“; “Light My Fire“; “She’s Not There“). I loved the Beatles, Beach Boys, and Monkees, but hold this thought… I’ll be delving deeply into ’60s rock in a later post.

* A hobby I also adopted as a teen with the acquisition of my first radio/tape deck. (Melodramatic tones) See brother…Youuu made me this wayyyyy (smile).

You Can’t Always Play what You Want

I can’t say if Honey Radio playlists were incomparably comprehensive, but they definitely covered a lot of bases. Hour-by-hour and day- by-day, loyal listeners were treated to the work of legends. Featured artists included those who bridged r&b, country, folk, and pop to rock (Elvis; Ray Charles; Johnny Cash; Bob Dylan; Beatles; Beach Boys; Rolling Stones); soul pioneers (Sam Cooke; Jackie Wilson; James Brown); British rock institutions (The Who; The Kinks); glamorous girl groups (The Supremes; Martha & The Vandellas); squeaky-clean teen idols (Frankie Avalon; Ricky Nelson); scruffy harbingers of the counter-culture (Jefferson Airplane); jangle pop progenitors (The Byrds; The Hollies); one-hit wonders (“Get a Job”; “Earth Angel”; “Tequila”; “Wipe Out”), and much, much more.

Of course, no matter how diverse WHND’s selections were, they couldn’t play everything. A line had to be drawn somewhere. So, venturing a guess, it makes sense that they excluded songs that were too “uncommercial” for the normals. Following through, this is likely why late-’60s artists who would have been deemed too heavy (Led Zeppelin), arty (Velvet Underground), atonal (The Stooges) and/or weird (The Mothers of Invention) were all left to the purview of early AOR FM radio and word-of-mouth. Is this true? All I can confirm is that I personally didn’t hear any of this stuff until high school or later.

The Big 8

By all accounts, CKLW AM 800 out of Windsor, Canada was one of the premier popular music stations in North American during the late 20th century.

In the late ’60s, AM 800 – already a well-established top-40 station – tried a different approach. Taking the nickname “The Big 8,” CKLW adapted a “Boss Radio“-styled programming scheme whereby an army of tastemaking DJs relentlessly ranted over-top of songs in order to squeeze a maximum number of heavily rotated records and commercial jingles into each hour. I’ve always found the guileless, endless prattling of disc jockeys to be a terrible distraction, but what do I know? The audience loved it (shiver).

Anyway, “The Big 8” nicely compensated for the intrusions by playing a wide variety of hits from the present and not so distant past. Most notably, with consideration for the sizable African-American audiences* within their massive broadcast range, efforts were made to showcase popular r&b/soul/funk/disco. A lot of Detroit stations played Motown, of course, but CKLW helped to bring “black” musics into my sphere. Mom was a fan dating back to her youth in Pennsylvania, you see. So, thanks, in no small part, to her car-radio preferences, I was exposed to “Little” Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, Mary Wells, the Temptations, the Four Tops, and many, many more.

* Windsor is located directly across the Detroit river from Hitsville U.S.A.

Canadian Radio roll Teleology

In the early 1970’s, the Big 8 was reputedly impacted by new Canadian broadcast regulations that mandated 30-50% representation of homegrown talent on national outlets.

Theoretically, this action should have meant serious exposure for important northern talents like Joni Mitchell, the Band, and Leonard Cohen. However, if the lengthy caps available on YouTube are a fair representation of CKLW’s programming, I can’t validate the theory. Volumes of contemporary fare and healthy doses of ’60s rock, r&b, and pop (“Nobody But Me“; “Cool Jerk; “Everyday People“; “Happy Together“) presented as advertised, but Canuck artists were few and far between. Sure, I knew of Anne Murray and Gordon Lightfoot* because they were successful crossover artists in the U.S. But, I wouldn’t grow in familiarity with most others until my late teens and beyond.

* Sounds like a buddy comedy cop movie, eh?

the great voice of the Great Lakes

Recycling a childhood reminiscence shared previously in TFY Pt. I, mornings in my parent’s house were once “defined by the smell of coffee brewing in the kitchen, industrial size boxes of Cheerios,” and the amiable, comforting tones of “The Voice of Detroit,” J.P. McCarthy on “The Great Voice of the Great Lakes” AM 760 WJR. As such, no conversation about how I came to love music – any music – can be complete without mentioning WJR.

Relating to the subject matter at hand, AM 760 wasn’t a music station per se… Rather, anchored by a deep stable of mild-mannered yet colorful on-air personalities,* it was more a rich stew of news, weather, traffic, sports, public interest segments, regional commentary, conversational interviews with local and national public figures, reflection, listener call-ins, humor, and, yes, music.

When music was in the mix, programming generally favored “mature” forms. Shows like Patterns in Music, Afternoon Music Hall, McCarthy’s weekday morning show, and others offered classical numbers, big bands, and standards from the Great American Songbook (Eg. Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, Lowe, Rogers, and Mancini) recorded by pop institutions like Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Ella Fitzgerald.

Ok, ok. WJR absolutely wasn’t a “hip” station. But their lengthy slate of variety shows did, indeed, occasionally edge into ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s light rock and rock-adjacent MOR territory.

Tell me MOR, Tell me MOR

WJR’s ventures into modern music tended toward the MOR–Brill Building–adult contemporary end of the pop-rock-soul spectrum. However ambivalent my little self was regarding songs heard while bouncing around within earshot of the kitchen radio, warm, if fuzzy, impressions emerge while stripping back forty-plus years of repression…

Of the ’50s and ’60s material AM 760 likely featured, I recall early soft rock balladeers (Connie Francis; Paul Anka; Bobby Darrin), singer-songwriters (Neil Sedaka; Neil Diamond; Harry Nilsson; John Denver), trumpet player/brass band leader Herb Alpert, and pop folkies (Simon & Garfunkel; Judy Collins; The Stone Poneys). Tracks by Burt Bacharach/Hal David collaborators Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield, Jackie DeShannon, and B.J. Thomas turned up often. …As did the booming voice of Tom Jones, the theatrical pop of Petula Clark, and the soaring vocal harmonies of the Beach Boys, Mamas and the Papas, the Seekers, and 5th Dimension. Last, but not least, I remember that they played lighter-side Beatles tracks, most often in Muzak arrangements. 

Maybe I’m being too casually all-inclusive with my definition of “rock oldies” here. Rock forms were so integral to the language of pop music during my childhood it’s all the same to me. Ultimately, the point is, however I fault on precise details, tons of ’50s and ’60s tunes reached my young, impressionable ears via AM radio in the 1970s.

Black and White

In retrospect, what I appreciate best about rock oldies radio in the ’70s is how well all the music fit together despite the radical evolution of rock forms between ’54-’70. Sure, because 1950s nostalgia primarily targeted white audiences (another guess), racial imbalance was inevitable. It was a far cry, however, from the cascade of pasty-complected hard (Boston; Journey; Styx) and soft (Fleetwood Mac; Carpenters; Barry Manilow) corporate acts that dominated AOR and adult contemporary rock radio by the late ’70s. Black acts were represented and their influence was impossible to miss.

Get Together

On rock oldies radio, royalty reigned together, regardless of race (“The King” Elvis Presley; “The Queen” Aretha Franklin). They harmonized (Platters’ “The Great Pretender”; Beach Boys “Don’t Worry Baby”), charmed (Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream”; Supremes’ “Baby Love”), clowned (Coasters’ “Charlie Brown”; Bobby Darin’s “Splish Splash”), loved (Ronnettes’ “Be My Baby”; Buddy Holly’s “Everyday”), and lost (Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”; Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely”).

Because of Honey Radio, I attended figurative piano duels between “The Architect” (Little Richard) and “The Killer” (Jerry Lee Lewis). I listened to “The Father’s” (Chuck Berry) original versions of “Rock and Roll Music” and “Roll Over Beethoven” spin next to the Beatles’ early British Invasion covers. I heard late ’50s girl group The Shirelles’ sing in parallel with ’60s blue-eyed soul follower Dusty Springfield.

Virtually all British Invasion bands reflected the ascendency of rock’s African-American founding fathers and mothers. Some acts (Beatles; Herman’s Hermits; Dave Clark Five) interpreted r&b styles while also exhibiting trace influences of native skiffle music and mainstream pop songwriting tradition. Others (Yardbirds; the Who; Rolling Stones) demonstrated an affinity for heavy blues via hard-hitting, deep grooving “maximum r&b.”

Integrating the oldies

The best example of how “white” and “black” musics intermingled in the ’50s and ’60s may be the preponderance of racially integrated acts that emerged during this period. Anyone not hiding under a rock for the last fifty years surely knows the The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Feel-good soul-meisters Sly and the Family Stone and The Foundations have been permanent residents on oldies radio for years. Blue-eyed soul group Three Dog Night had many hits in the late ’60s and early ’70s. But what about Stax’s grooving de-facto house band Booker T. & the MG’s and Pittsburgh doo wop ensemble The Del Vikings? Do you remember psychedelic garage-folk quintet Love and the innovative jazz-rock fusion group Blood, Sweat & Tears? …The Chambers Brothers? …Paul Butterfield Blues Band?

Still crazy integrated after all these years

Distinguished from all other acts by large, polyethnic lineups, San Francisco rock collective Santana (“Evil Ways”) still embodies the integration concept as thoroughly as I imagine is possible. Founded in the mid-’60s by guitar virtuoso Carlos Santana, the group drew harsh early reviews for their “pretentious” fusions of psychedelic rock, latin forms, blues, and freeform jazz, but nevertheless won over the album rock crowd; quickly eclipsing all shades thrown by the paid cynics with their appearance at Woodstock. Today, all these years later, their widely revered 1969 debut stands as a testament to the great things we can accomplish when the boundaries that compartmentalize music and society are ignored.