A Short History of Hip Music

Introducing the Old Hippie Genre

    I’m going to tell you about a new musical genre, Old Hippie Music, but first you need to know its history. “Jennie said when she was just five years old there was nothing happenin’ at all…Then one fine mornin’ she puts on a New York station…she don’t believe what she heard at all/she started shaking’ to that fine, fine music/ You know her life was saved by rock ’n’ roll.” That’s what the Velvet Underground wrote about the birth of rock ’n’ roll.

    Fifteen years later, the three chords and an attitude of that first rock wave had grown textually rich and musically complex. And it happened at a time when radio itself was shifting from the Top 40 AM mix to something new and better, FM.

    FM came into its own in the ‘60s when the Federal Communications Commission ruled that AM stations in larger cities “could not duplicate their AM programming on FM more than 50 percent of the time.” This led station managers “to split off their FM programming entirely,” according to a Mother Jones story published in the ‘70s.

    This new medium was naturally looking for content and on the West Coast they found it. Dylan, the Dead, the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane were all breaking into the massive consciousness of the Baby Boomers who were then coming of age en masse. AM wasn't playing them. “When folk rock, psychedelic music and complicated British rock emerged in the mid ‘60s, Top 40 AM stations refused to play it. This new music found its medium on FM radio.”

    According to ‘Rise and Fall of FM Rock’ published in Mother Jones magazine in May 1976, “It was November 1967 when San Francisco DJ Big Daddy Tom Donahue, the founder of FM rock, delivered the epitaph to AM Top 40 radio….Now, less than a decade later, Donahue’s own creation, ‘free form revolutionary radio’ has been laid to rest, as well.”

    “The radio format Donahue conceived would play stereo rock with a minimum of commercials and be introduced by low-key disc jockey’s speaking in a normal tone of voice.” “The commitment of the DJs to this music combined with the audio superiority of FM made FM the ideal vehicle for sophisticated rock music.”

    Radio executives at Metromedia, a radio and TV conglomerate, “realized that Donahue was on to something, and in October 1967, Metromedia changed the format of WNEW, their New York FM, to progressive rock.” From there it went national very quickly. “DJs on the new progressive FM stations had near total freedom to play whatever they wanted.” Speaking for myself, my life was changed (again) by rock ’n’ roll.

    Mother Jones tells a story about how explosively popular this new free form radio was. At Boston’s WBCN DJ John Brodey played Blind Faith’s “Do What You Like” which has a long drum solo by Ginger Baker. The co-owner of the station called Brodey and bitched, “Nobody wants to listen to a drum solo on a Sunday afternoon.” And in true hippie fashion this led the DJ who followed Brodey, Charles Laquidara, “who was tripping on mescaline at the time” to play every drum solo he could find. The response was fast and furious. “WBCN listeners were ecstatic and jammed the switchboard for hours afterward with congratulatory messages.”

    WBCN’s website says the British rock group Police credited the station’s program director ‘Oedipus’ with launching their success in the United Stated “by being the first to play “Roxanne.” One time while hitching back from Montreal, I caught a ride. with a guy who had been a disc jockey on WBCN but was heading to Detroit to start work at WABX. I may have been the first person to call him an “Air Ace,” the name the ABX DJs called themselves.

    WABX in Detroit, not to be confused with WABX in Evansville, Indiana which began broadcasting in the 1990s, was “a widely influential freeform/progressive rock radio station.” ‘The station that glows in the dark' went dark in 1988. I blame it on the bean counters.

    By about 1970 music, in general, was broken down into categories called ‘formats’ by beancounters, lawyers and corporate types. It was the death of the golden age of FM radio. You can see the results of that parsing when you look at a satellite radio feed, tons of categories just for rock, classic rock, progressive rock, folk rock, alternative rock, punk rock, puke rock, hair rock, hard rock, heavy metal and more, just enough to make a music lover scream, ‘Let me outta here!’

    One category they missed, however, is Old Hippie Music. And because of that, the tradition lives on. (Thanks Uncle Pat.) Old Hippie FM radio stations back in the day were rebellious, and since they were new then they didn’t call themselves ‘Old Hippie’. Old Hippie Music is the music of those same hip folks who listened to stations like KPCC in Pasadena, WBCN in Boston, or my favorite, WABX in Detroit, but are now themselves old and somewhat gnarly, speaking for myself that is.

    What killed FM rock? It was a victim of its own success. “Overall, FM ad revenues climbed from $40 million in 1967 to about $260 million in 1975… FM rock had suddenly become big business, underground no longer.” “Ironically, success put limitations on both DJs and music.” According to Mother Jones, “Competition from FM stations that play Top 40 singles, or a highly commercial mixture of singles and album cuts, is squeezing the creativity from progressive FM rockers. Other factors besides competition are at play: Corporate ownership, censorship, and the out-of-hand financial success of the medium.”

    So with that as history here’s what’s now, the Old Hippie Show. I started listening a few years ago and it instantly became my favorite radio show. Trump was president and the Whitewater Valley where I live is Trump country. After being tickled pink to find my own music being played every Monday on WECI 91.5 FM I was flushed with fever and a little fearful for the DJ. I mean just about every week he plays The Insurrection Song which slaps the MAGA marauders right in the facade. It was a little like that line in the song ‘Killing Me Softly’, “I felt he found my letters and read each one out loud,” but instead of letters it was like he’d found my genre and was playing it out loud.

     It took me two years or more before I realized that this was a genre Uncle Pat was working up.  Sometimes when I get these minor epiphanies and I pitch them to whomsoever the pitchee might be, it falls flat. The spirit is gone. It’s like when you get an idea as you’re getting off on reefer. The idea is gargantuan, multifaceted and whole and the best you can do is draw a straight line through it, missing all the spectacle that made it spectacular. But when I mentioned it to Uncle Pat the second time, he said, “I think you’re on to something there.”

    In my world, encouragement like that is rare. So the first thing I did was nothing. Good ideas need to incubate. Meanwhile Uncle Pat probably thought I had flaked out and forgot it altogether. I like to smoke pot when I listen to his show and he understands that and the possible effects of such rampant hedonism.

    So what kind of music is this new genre comprised of? I thought you’d never ask. If I were doing the show it would be a format much like WABX of old and I would call myself an Air Ace, and Uncle Pat admitted that when he started he thought it would be like that, album rock from the classical period. But as he researched songs for his weekly playlist he discovered there was a lot more than the past. There was and is a continuous stream of ever expanding singer/song writers, people I’d never heard of even though they were as old as me and older. My trouble was, I gave up on the genre, not on music, but on the possibility of it ever talking to me so intimately again. Man am I happy I was wrong.

    There’s so much more to say but this has already gone past 1,400 words and I know your time and attention span may be challenged by now so I’ll just say, you’ll be hearing more about the birth of Old Hippie Music in future Acorn Archives, but if you want to hear the real thing and make up your own mind, listen to WECI 91.5 FM radio-free Richmond, on Mondays from 4-6 pm (summer hours). Over the next year or so we will be filling out this by now spectral form. I see a podcast in my future which you will be able to access right here. And yes, world, you are welcome.

:…And remember, if you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.”