I was a little kid when the Beatles hit in 1964. I was just as gobsmacked as the teenaged girls were, even though I was an elementary school kid at the time. I have always thought that British bands were generally BETTER than American bands. I guess it was all the culture they soaked up from being surrounded by history and Shakespeare and all that.
They played a huge variety of songs on AM Top 40 radio as we called it. Motown and soul and surf, and the late 50s stuff was played too, like Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. Then in the early seventies, FM radio and stereo came along and it sounded better. They still played a huge variety of music. Late at night they'd play entire sides and entire albums. You could only record 20 minutes on one side of an album. That blew everyone's minds because we were all used to the three-minute single. As Pete Townshend says in the documentary "The Kids Are Alright", "All singles must be 2 minutes fifty, or else you get hauled before the Committee." Certain stations that played lots of acid rock, like Cream, or Vanilla Fudge, or Deep Purple, for example, were considered "stoner stations".
And there were people who put out extended jams (In a Gadda da Vida,Light My Fire) and live albums that got played late at night (Frampton Comes Alive--a double) and people listened through headphones through the magic of FM radio and STEREO! Eventually the limits were pushed as far as five and six minute singles. I believe the most famous example was Bo Rhap, and Brian May said that if EMI didn't like a 6 minute single, they could go fuck themselves, in so many words (this is in an interview he did with Rick Wakeman that is on YouTube).
In the 80s, boring electronic stuff came out, and also intelligent electronic stuff(King Crimson, Bryan Ferry), and I pretty much quit listening to rock stations after the late 80s, unless it was new stuff by old artists.
In Houston there was a commercial classical FM station called KLEF. They signed on at 6 a.m. with Fanfare for the Common Man, by Aaron Copland, and signed off at midnight. Later they went out of business and the University of Houston public radio station went from being "Jazz 88" to "KUHF 88.7 Houston's Classic Choice", and changed their format to classical. Now they have two stations, one for music and one for news.
In San Antonio in the 70s there was a classical station called KMFM. Their offices were on the second floor of North Star Mall. The office was a three room walk through like a shotgun house, and the transmitter was in the back room with the antenna going straight up through the roof. The DJ's mother owned the station and she prerecorded all the announcements and he spun the records. And sprayed water on them with a spray bottle while they were playing. His name was Harry and he lived in a stone house with 3 foot thick walls off of McCullough on the North Side. He had a serious vinyl collection, for obvious reasons.
; Paul Revere and the Raiders ("Kicks"
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