ABSTRACT
One of the most crucial transition points in the mid-1960s emergence of rock was the flowering of new, free-form FM radio. AM radio, and its tightly controlled Top 40 singles format, had been the driving force in popular music since the mid-1950s, but as the AM frequencies became increasingly crowded in the early 1960s, the Federal Communications Commission put a halt to AM license applications and began to encourage expansion of the previously underused FM dial. With its possibilities for stereo reception (something missing from the monaural AM), FM offered a natural fit for the high fidelity recordings of the new rock groups. Even more than that, the loose organizational structures of many of the small FM stations offered an opportunity for pioneering disc jockeys like Tom Donahue (1928-1975) to rebel against the market-driven restrictions of Top 40 and instead play the music of their choice. As Donahue explains in his piece for Rolling Stone, his approach as program director at KMPX San Francisco was sympathetic to a new generation of musicians like the Beatles and Bob Dylan, for whom the album rather than the single had become a major artistic statement. In addition, free-form became a welcome home to groups like the Grateful Dead, whose songs often far surpassed the three-minute mark favored by Top 40 radio. Donahue’s depiction of AM as a “rotting corpse” would indeed turn out to be prophetic, as the success of FM rock rendered AM music stations virtually obsolete by the end of the 1970s. To what extent does the free-form ethos still prevail in radio programming today?
