How The Suits At The FCC Set The Stage For The Rise Of Alternative FM Rock Radio

Among my many childhood memories are listening to my mother's kitchen radio tuned to the music popular with adults of the early 60s. True, those artists included some giants such as Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, and Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass, but unfortunately, I also had to listen to The Ray Coniff Singers and The Singing Nun.

Then, in February 1964 The Beatles arrived in New York to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show. It wasn't love at first sight, but my conversion came about swiftly and completely. From then on music superseded baseball as a childhood obsession.

The Beatles led me to listen to Philadelphia's only radio station that played rock & roll, top 40 WIBG (WIBBAGE), radio 99 on the AM dial. Later, I moved on to the more modern, faster-paced WFIL, Famous 56, who usurped WIBG's throne. For those of us living in the northern Philadelphia suburbs we could also listen to the king of all the top 40 stations, New York City's WABC, Musicradio 77, whose signal was actually stronger than WIBG's at night. After dark, I also remember tuning in to WCFL in Chicago and CKLW in Windsor, Ontario.

All top 40 stations all had one thing in common: very limited playlists. Nevertheless, they were not without their merits. I was exposed to genres and artists I never knew existed. In the Spring of 1965 - thanks to Wibbage - I was exposed to R&B music for the first time. I had never heard anything before that sounded like Motown, Stax, or Ray Charles. I remember hearing my first Beach Boys song, "Help Me Rhonda." WIBG is where I first heard country music. While the genres played on these stations varied wildly the listener would only hear the same forty songs over, and over, and over again. WABC even played the number one song every hour!

Broadcasters just didn't seem to care about FM radio. It had been languishing in obscurity for twenty years despite its superior clarity and static free, stereo sound. With FM you could even listen to the radio during a thunderstorm or while driving under an overpass.

Per the website Radio Survivor, in the summer of 1965 the bureaucrats at the FCC actually did America a favor. They ruled that any FM radio station that was owned and operated by an AM outlet would no longer be allowed to simulcast its sister station's programming for more than 50% of the broadcast day if the cities they served had a population of over 100,000. This meant many FM stations all over America had to come up with a lot of new programming. The stage was now set for the advent of FM rock radio.

Just as The Beatles' arrival on these shores totally changed the music I listened to, the new FM programming broadened my horizons even more. "Underground" or "alternative" radio stations were able to experiment and feature records the AM stations would never think of playing. WIP, 610 AM in Philadelphia - formerly an adult music station in the 60s and 70s that is now a sports radio juggernaut that eventually moved its frequency to FM - had an affiliate that eventually became WMMR, one of the pioneering FM, alternative rock stations in America.

In 1967, a disc jockey named Dave Herman had a weekday, evening show on WMMR called The Marconi Experiment. His broadcast aired from 7 PM until Midnight and he only played records that AM radio wouldn't touch. FM sold fewer commercials so there was a lot more room for the disc jockeys - many of whom were allowed to program their own shows - to stretch out with all kinds of musical experimentation. One night Herman played all of Iron Butterfly's "In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida" with its famous guitar riff and drum solo. It clocked in at 17:05. Pink Floyd's "A Saucerful of Secrets," at 11:57, was another track I remember Herman spinning. I heard Frank Zappa and Jimmy Hendrix for the first time along with Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Retaurant Masacree," another sidelong LP track. None of these records were likely to be played on AM.

By 1972 GM, Ford, and Chrysler were equipping their cars with FM radios as standard equipment. This enabled FM outlets to annually increase their audience, and by 1978 they began winning the ratings wars.

Today FM remains a viable listening option. According to this report from Nielsen, in January of 2025 radio listening has increased by 16% during weekday drive times and on weekends by up to 14%. So, it appears that terrestrial radio is not going the way of pitchers batting in baseball as quickly as many people believe.

Today, most of my music radio listening comes from online stations. I'm a member of the Jazz Groove, Accuradio and LiveOne (formerly Slacker Radio). As for FM, the only music station I listen to is obviously influenced by those early alternative formats, non-commercial WXPN, but my tastes - and I'm sure those of a whole lot of other young listeners who grew up during the late 60s and 70s - were strongly shaped by what we heard on FM during its rise to prominence.

So many people had their musical lives broadened by exposure to FM's wide ranging musical offerings that I believe the 1965 FCC ruling is one of the defining moments in the history of rock & roll and popular music.