I just watched this for the first time in about 20 years, and it made me sentimental for the pre-Clear Channel era, when radio stations actually had personalities (rather than shock jocks) and played a wide mix of contemporary music (rather than a narrow format fitting a small demographic).
Ah yes, the good old days.
That's what I love about seeing FM everytime. When FM and AM radio was about human personality and playing music for the hell of it not for the "masses or money". The closest thing to that open format is listening to either podcasts of induviduals on the net, public radio, or college radio.
Yes, radio did rock.
I agree with both the original poster and Costasurf. Too bad nowadays more radio stations aren't like this. Hopefully a dvd re-release is happening this year! I myself work at a college radio station and it's great because it's an alternative to the garbage that clutters the airwaves nowadays.
shareThe sad thing is, if you play music for the hell of it - then and now - you'll get fired. Just like what happened Doc Holliday.
share[deleted]
I remember the British Invasion on AM radio; well the Beatles, anyway. "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" played alongside songs like "Winchester Cathedral". In the late 70's and early 80's this type of mix was "MOR" or "Middle Of The Road". FM was "AOR" meaning "Album Oriented Rock".
"Think about it. If you were observing this planet,would you make contact?"
I loathe Clear Channel and the other big corporate radio owners, but with very few exceptions, I don't think radio was ever all that great, not even FM. Maybe New York or Chicago or other large markets had some good radio, but it wasn't for nothing that the Ramones decried the state of radio over thirty years ago ("Remember Rock and Roll Radio"). To be clear, though, I hate radio worse today than thirty years ago. To say it's too corporate is to say something as obvious as the nose on your face.
Sometimes I feel nostalgic for the days when I was a kid growing up in a fairly large city (between 150-200k people). Part of that nostalgia is based in the days listening to FM radio and hearing good music for the first time--Cream, Led Zeppelin, Hendrix, etc. But a lot of stations today play the same "classic" rock as I heard back then, in the '70s. The music seemed radical then (compared to bubblegum and, later, disco), but to think that it was really *great* radio seems, to me, false. If you want to hear Cream et al. on the radio, look around, it's there, but I don't necessarily call that great radio. (Great radio, for me, would be a cut by Deerhoof, then one by the Adverts, then one by The Hold Steady, then an obscure Al Green number, and so on.) Late at night we would hear the more radical stuff--Captain Beefhart and the like--but the rest of the day was far from commercial-free or anything like it.
As for this film, FM, it's pretty lame and badly dated. It's kind of fun to see Linda Ronstadt (I'm reminded of why I was in love with her back then!), and I love the stab a fairly mainstream movie took at the military, which wanted to advertise on the station (what ever happened to that very sane sensibility!?), but the characters are all mostly very bland, and the rich guy saving the day at the end is 1) incredibly unlikely (99%, I'd day), 2) contradictory to the fakey populism of the movie and 3) ultimately a conservative sellout. I rated the thing a five, but I was feeling charitable.
3 live Linda Ronstadt songs! That alone makes this film worthwhile. Actually I thought this was a rather enjoyable movie,in a nostalgic way. 7/10
shareI broke in to radio in 78,at a 100k AOR station in southeast Texas. Those were some great times. But, there was very little money, bad hours,owners who everything from total burnouts with more money than brains, to very bad people who could and would do anything to get their point across. I had two friends who worked at KUFO in Galveston, they were called in to see the owner who put a large caliber pistola on his desk, and asked for their resignations, be cause he was changing formats. One station I worked for was owned by a very rich hippy, who had real powder jones. He could be a little irrational at times. The up side to that place was 0n the all-night shift, I would play Zappa, Firesign, whole sides of Floyd albums, King Crimson. I know it sounds like nothing today, but back you had to have a 3rd class FCC liscense. They were serious about profanity on the airwaves, but at 3 in the morning life was good. Several years later I did a part-time show at a station that had gone to CDs. They have good points and bad, you could do alot more creative shows with an LP. Anyway, dear friends thanks for listning.
shareKSAN in the seventies was the best. I'd get up and do my paper route and then come home to listen to Terry McGovern and his am shift. I'd hear bands that I'd never heard of and commercials for hippy businesses like headshops in San Francisco. It was like I was tuning into a completely different universe. It was fantastic. I remained loyal to KSAN through my early college years when they were playing punk and new wave with great, late night voices such as Richard Gossett busting out the latest single from The Clash or Joy Division. It was a good time until Jim Gabbard bought the station and turned it into MOR and later Country. Part of my youth died when that happened. Music today is terrific, bands like Feist and The Editors are really good, but back then the joy of discovery was much more potent and stations like KSAN fed my need to find new sounds breaking like waves on the horizon of my burgeoning self-awareness.
FM only slightly captures the flavor of the period. The DJ's back then were really rough around the edges and sloppy, not the sanitized caricatures put forth in this well meaning yet flaccid homage to that brief, yet charming sound check in time.
This movie really was the precursor to the fall of Am radio and the raise of FM as the main source of broadcasting. Prior to this you have national AM radio stations and tiny local FM stations and no one thought FM could compete against the power of a wide range national AM audience. But two things helped change that, stereo and local control. But as these station became more popular they lost their control and began to be little more than an AM station on FM.
"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." -Douglas Noel Adams
Hi - Thanks for all the memories! I have "FM" playing on VHS right now (I had never seen it) and since I went to college when the film came out it brings back many personal memories of that era. I grew up outside Detroit, and can well recall staying up late listening to WWWW or WABX, which seemed pretty subversive for me at the time since I was only a seventh grader. I can still recall hearing the LP "In The Court Of The Crimson King" played in full on one of those stations - but it would take me another 20 years or more to rediscover that and realize what an incredible album it truly is.
Sure, "FM" is not a great film (and it is hard not to compare it to the TV show "WKRP In Cincinnati") but for anyone 50ish I think it is kind of fun.
- TWR
Los Angeles
Primairily what I've always been good at is starting up new radio stations and getting them going on some kind of path to success. Having grown up with great radio stations like WLS, Chicago, WQSR, Sarasota, WOWO, Fort Wayne and XTRA-FM in San Diego around to help set example of how radio programming should appeal, I parlay those great memories into the infrastructure of the stations I've programmed so as to reflect that overall spirit as best as I can.
Seeing FM in the theater back in '77 was fun and it was intriguing that the sets and props in that movie were very realistic and true to form, unlike many, many TV shows and movies whose props of radio studios are so obviously fake.
FM had an incredible cast and I admit back then I got a brief crush on Eileen Brennan, The rest of the cast was great and made for an overall very entertaining and funny movie.
The optical Dolby Stereo soundtrack gave cutting-edge technology that a movie like FM deserved and that made for a nice and complimenting enhancement to the show. FM was shown in my town on the biggest (60 Ft wide) screen back then in its initial release and that was a treat.
Could FM be remade today? Yes most likely. That is if the movie is a story about a station back in radio's music-oriented heyday of the early 70s. I can imagine a story about WWWW or WQSR would definitely rock and yet be very eye-opening to alot of programmers and station managers out there who would welcome insight on how a station could garner listener appeal and be legendary as the stations I and previous posters in this thread have mentioned.
mrweets, I laughed when I read your post. It sounds a lot like my experience. I currently volunteer for a community station with block programming. I'm the "Vintage Vinyl" guy, playing lost tracks and album tracks from 60's and 70's artists. I also double as one of the folk guys.
The great thing about community radio is that, because everybody knows they're not getting paid (heck, I'm just happy if the salami eating host before me wipes off the mic), people are here for one of two reasons: because they love radio or because they love music.
We still have an extensive vinyl library and have not yet made the switch to full on digital.
Currently, I'm looking to create an internet station that will feature not only the "vintage vinyl" I'm playing now, but will also feature indie and unsigned artists, and artists on small label.
WQSR was legendary. Not only did it play an amazingly vast and varied library of music, but it did it in (SQ matrix I think?) QUAD.
I have very fond memories of that station.
"Holy Bananas, it's a girl's leg!"
[deleted]
Clear Channel clearly sucks, but I think while we all pine for the "open" formats of the 1970s, how open were they, really, considering how narrow the music base to choose from was?
Even as late as 1978, there wasn't a ton of music out there that could be considered for "open" unless you really counted playing Tammy Wynette, Herbie Hancock and the Ramones back to back as "open" and not just schizophrenic mishmashes of anything, including comedy & spoken word.
At the time you had a couple of Ramones records, but were they a joke or a band? An Elvis Costello record, and a Clash record and a handful of now-forgotten and mostly British New Wave acts that never gained a ton of traction or were "too British".
Frank Zappa was "experimental" although most of his music is inaccessible and either you "get it" or you don't. Todd Rundgren was the same way. In a certain sense, the music had to be "musical" and not just some noise a hippie told me was cool, which is why both of these artists have legions of dedicated fans in the 40s and 50s but most people in their 20s don't care at all.
Lou Reed had a hit with "Walk on the Wild Side" but his breakthrough band the Velvet Underground was mostly ignored and forgotten until resurrected by the alternative/college rock renaissance of the mid-late 80s. The same was true of Big Star & Alex Chilton, who is now considered such a hero he was in the NY Times Sunday Magazine retrospective of people who died in the past year.
My guess is that the formats were less "open" and more about playing something other than the hits from established artists -- ie, playing "When the Levee Breaks" during morning rush hour vs. only ever playing "Stairway to Heaven".
Very good points, Mobocracy, and I mostly agree.
I remember reading a lot more about artists like Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Residents than I ever heard them on FM. When I did, it would be mostly Sunday nights at 11 during an "experimental hour" or some other catchall program for music that didn't fit into the normal formats.
As for Todd Rundgren and Led Zeppelin, I did hear more of them than the hits (though, frankly, there was way too much "Stairway to Heaven" and continues to be).
I guess there are always going to be artists that are considered too avant-garde or experimental for the airwaves, but I still think the FM stations I heard in the '70s and early '80s presented a much broader sampling of various artists and styles than anything I've heard since. Certainly the Internet has filled that void for a lot of folks, but I still depend on FM radio to hear new sounds (and older sounds that are new to me).