Two radios, one year
In the United States, the radio dial of 1967 was divided. The AM band was home to fast, tightly programmed Top 40 stations built around the hit single. On FM, which had long been a quiet band of classical music and duplicated AM programmes, a small number of stations began playing long album tracks and a looser mixture of rock, blues and folk. Both approaches thrived in 1967, but they offered very different ideas about what pop music was for. British pirate stations and the BBC’s response are covered elsewhere; this article is about America.
AM Top 40: the hit machine
Top 40 radio dated from the 1950s, when station owners found that repeating a short list of current hits attracted listeners. By the mid-1960s the format had become highly refined: a short playlist, rapid patter from the disc jockeys, jingles, contests, news and weather in compact form, and records of around three minutes.
WABC in New York was a leading example. Programmed with a very tight list and a brand-name approach, it reached a large audience across the East Coast at night, when its signal travelled far. Disc jockeys such as Bruce Morrow, known as “Cousin Brucie”, became celebrities. Stations like this could break a record nationally, so a label’s promotion staff cared a great deal about their playlists.
The format shaped the music itself. Singles that wanted airplay had to be short and had to catch attention in the first seconds. When the Doors debut album included a track of more than seven minutes, “Light My Fire”, the single version was cut to roughly three minutes for AM radio, and it rose to number one in the summer of 1967. The same logic helped sixties soul: Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” was a major pop hit on the same stations that played the Monkees television band and the Beatles.
The rise of album-oriented FM
FM offered better sound quality, with stereo and less noise than AM, but it had few listeners. A change in regulation helped. The Federal Communications Commission had decided that FM stations in larger cities should not simply repeat their AM sister stations’ programmes, and that rule took effect around the start of 1967. Owners suddenly had hours of airtime to fill, cheaply, and some were willing to try something new.
Several stations experimented. In San Francisco, the disc jockey Tom Donahue, previously a Top 40 figure, began a freeform programme on KMPX in early 1967. He played whole album sides, chose records himself, spoke in a relaxed voice and mixed rock with folk, blues and other styles. The station became part of the local counterculture, closely tied to the Summer of Love and the San Francisco Sound of bands such as the Jefferson Airplane, whose album Surrealistic Pillow appeared that year. Other stations in New York and elsewhere tried comparable formats later in 1967 and 1968, usually with more structure than KMPX.
Why albums needed their own radio
This was not an accident of taste. The year’s biggest records, from Sgt. Pepper to the Doors and Jefferson Airplane, were conceived as albums, with long tracks and sequencing. Top 40 radio could play only a single or two from a record, which left most of the work unheard. FM gave a place for the rest, and in turn, a listener who had heard an album on the radio might buy the whole record.
The underground press covered these stations and promoted them, and they gave the new rock audience a sense of community. Advertisers were initially unsure about the new audience, but the stations’ commercial potential eventually became clear.
What did not change
The split should not be exaggerated. In 1967 the vast majority of listeners still heard music on AM, particularly in cars and on portable transistor radios. FM receivers were not yet in every home or vehicle. The new FM programming was a small, experimental alternative, though an influential one, and the commercial format later called album-oriented rock grew out of it, in a more cautious and tightly managed form than its founders had intended.
KMPX itself was affected by labour disputes within a year, and Donahue and many of the staff moved to another San Francisco station in 1968. That history is outside 1967, but it shows how quickly the idealism of the early FM experiments collided with commercial reality.
A lasting divide
The pattern set in 1967 remained for decades: AM, and later pop-oriented FM, for hits; separate FM formats for album-minded rock fans. The distinction between the single and the album, already visible in the way records were made, now had its equivalent on the dial.