Unfortunately this format has all but vanished. It's become obsolete. Offhand, I can't think of any American station running this format, although a couple may exist in small markets. The only ones that I can think of today are in Canada. Big market CFZM and small market CFOS. And even those two aren't exactly Chicken Rock....but at at best close cousins.
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What Stations Would You Describe As "Chicken Rock" In The 60s And 70s?
- Thread starter Schroedingers Cat
- Start date
@DavidEduardo got this right six months ago.
"Chicken Rock" was a derisive term used for stations that tried to position themselves in between Top 40 and MOR. In L.A., that would have included KFWB after Crowell-Collier sold it to Group W in 1967 and until the flip to all-news in March of 1968 and KGBS from 1969 to 1974.
By that point, though, the term "Adult Contemporary" was in use...and in those days (prior to Jhani Kaye redefining it with the "Continuous Soft Hits" format he pioneered at KOST in 1982), it was whatever the Top 40 stations were playing, minus the six or seven hardest songs.
AC PDs filled that gap differently, or not at all. Some played softer songs that had no chance of being on Top 40 to flesh out their playlists to 30 or 40 songs. Some (me among them) went early on songs we thought would end up in the Top 40 anyway---beating the Top 40 stations to their own music and hastening the burnout once they were on them. And some (KFMB in San Diego was a good example), simply played a 22-24 song current list.
The other factor musically was a deeper oldies library than most Top 40s would go for. In the 70s, the bulk of Gold on a Top 40 was 3-5 years old. ACs in the 70s would start their Gold libraries either with the British Invasion (1964) or Elvis (1956).
And, as David notes, elements of Top 40 formatics (jingles, spot clusters, talk contained over intros, promotions) were a hallmark of the AC format, along with jocks who, in many cases, had done Top 40 and knew how to relax just enough to be more conversational without being too wordy.
"Chicken Rock" was a derisive term used for stations that tried to position themselves in between Top 40 and MOR. In L.A., that would have included KFWB after Crowell-Collier sold it to Group W in 1967 and until the flip to all-news in March of 1968 and KGBS from 1969 to 1974.
By that point, though, the term "Adult Contemporary" was in use...and in those days (prior to Jhani Kaye redefining it with the "Continuous Soft Hits" format he pioneered at KOST in 1982), it was whatever the Top 40 stations were playing, minus the six or seven hardest songs.
AC PDs filled that gap differently, or not at all. Some played softer songs that had no chance of being on Top 40 to flesh out their playlists to 30 or 40 songs. Some (me among them) went early on songs we thought would end up in the Top 40 anyway---beating the Top 40 stations to their own music and hastening the burnout once they were on them. And some (KFMB in San Diego was a good example), simply played a 22-24 song current list.
The other factor musically was a deeper oldies library than most Top 40s would go for. In the 70s, the bulk of Gold on a Top 40 was 3-5 years old. ACs in the 70s would start their Gold libraries either with the British Invasion (1964) or Elvis (1956).
And, as David notes, elements of Top 40 formatics (jingles, spot clusters, talk contained over intros, promotions) were a hallmark of the AC format, along with jocks who, in many cases, had done Top 40 and knew how to relax just enough to be more conversational without being too wordy.
Never heard WIND, I'd agree with you on WOWO but with WBZ it kind of depends on the era. In their top 40 days (up til the late 60s) they were as much of a rocker as any top 40...looking at some of their old surveys on the ARSA site shows them playing the Electric Prunes, Jimi Hendrix and the Doors in 1967. Sunday evenings they had a show called Subway that was progressive rock, and album cuts were a regular part of their playlist. They did tend to shy away from all but the whitist soul/R&B, but then again Boston was never a big R&B town. What made them sound old was the presentation. Very full-service and adult-leaning. I don't think any of their airstaff back then was under 30, so when WRKO came on the scene with a Drake format the writing was on the wall.
Yeah, chicken rock would describe what they eventually settled into by the early 70s, with talk at night.
Yeah, those AORs were pretty condescending towards both top 40 and AC. The irony here is, at least to my ears they sounded just as phony and pretentious as any top 40 screamer. The whole "we're hipper than you are" thing wore thin fast. Maybe it was cool if you were a stoner, but I never was.
The other thing is, to this day, the hippie Underground, Free Form, Progressive, etc. listeners still think they are better than the AM station listeners, even when Top 40 moved to FM in the 1970s. The Album Artists didn't even want to show up on the Top 30. The newer Whitburn Singles Book finally list both all the B sides and the non Hot 100 Album Tracks, though still incomplete for many artists that weren't known as AOR artists, even though many were very good. I agree that there were many "FM Snobs", and when they were PDs, they resisted good Top 40 material in favor of the known AOR artists, even on AM Top 40s.
As far as avoiding heavier R & B, that's why so many people listened to John R/John Richbourg on WLAC at Night, to hear more of a variety of rarer R & B.
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This depends entirely on the time period you're talking about. By the very late 60s and well into the 1970s, a lot of Top 40 records started on FM album stations and crossed over. We had a long-running conversation almost two years ago about why some people would consider Carly Simon a Classic Rock artist. The whole thread is worth reading, but here's a key point:
As is this:
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WOWO played almost all the top 40 going back to the late 50s, and their 1967 chart would pretty much mirror WBZs. Here's a 1967 chart from ARSA: WOWO 1190 Fort Wayne Survey 1967-08-12. WOWO did try to mellow out in 1968, to disastrous ratings results, being bested by upstart top 40 WLYV (where Mike Joseph got his programming start). In the 70s, WOWO rocked harder than top 40 WMEE at times (WLYV had gone country). WOWO was always the home of the Little Red Barn, Dinner on the Farm, news, weather, sports, etc. In the early 70s, they hired younger jocks like Chris Roberts, Ron Gregory and Carol Ford.
KBIL 1140, a daytime 500 watter in Liberty, MO in the Kansas City Metro signed on in February 1967. While they began as 'Town & Country' meaning a country tune every quarter hour, they quickly became what I called AC years later. They did not play the soul music that wasn't Motown and they laid off the rock like Cream, Hendrix and such. Most of the playlist was things like For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield, The Horse by Cliff Noble & Co. and Simon & Garfunkel. When it was a hit, they played Pleasant Valley Sunday by the Monkees. The station used jingles with more conversational jocks. It was just top 40 enough for me and easy enough for my parents to tolerate (they were MOR listeners but their station evolved to virtually no crooners), KBIL played zero crooners and oldies were a couple of times an hour and not more than about 5 years old. Now that I know, I am guessing they played a couple of recurrents an hour. Begin a start-up, I doubt they had much of a base library for oldies. Needless to say, competing with higher power 24/7 AMs, they never had a chance even though they could be heard through the Kansas City Metro.
Believe it or not, the Kansas City Star's TV editor at the time, Joyce Wagner, wrote a feature article about KBIL in the Star's TV magazine of February 26, 1967. The headline was: New Liberty Station Features Mod Country Sound. Wagner quoted station manager Don Douglas' description of the format:
Wagner then explains the Motown and bluegrass references. She went to provide her own characterization of the station's sound:
After several ownership changes, it became Black-oriented KCXL with studios on East 63rd Street near the Brookside area. It tried to compete with KPRS, but KPRS was firmly entrenched with its FM signal. KCXL went off the air in March 1992; it was revived by the present owner, who bought it from the Small Business Administration in 1993 and got it back on the air in 1994.
As KFIX, an FM signal was added around 1978. That FM later became album-rocker KSAS "106 1/2" with the AM station becoming KLDY, featuring oldies. Then the stations were split, with the AM becoming KCXL, and the FM going through numerous iterations of its own, eventually becoming today's WDAF-FM.
One of the tenets of early Top 40 radio was to completely kill songs once they dropped down. It was not until decades later that this philosophy gave way to greatly softening the rotation and creating a category of "recurrents".
Here is an article: (Note that it says "returned after a rest")
The first mention of the term "recurrent" in "R&R" was in the late 70's, and it referred to country.
I'm sorry I missed it - still busy protecting critical infrastructure that year - so I'll just briefly say that my recollections of St. Louis radio of the time definitely include songs that moved from, say, progressive rocker incarnate K-SHE to KSLQ, though that's a bit skewed because, by 1977, KSLQ was playing album cuts and toning down its "Super Q" image, which rather quickly had become dated. The process was similar in Kansas City, though delayed by a couple of years, with KBEQ abandoning Top 40 altogether for a year (though forgetting to change the audio processing!) in 1980 before easing back into CHR. Very little traffic moved in the other direction.
Having worked the format during it's dying days in the early 1980's it trended to be female oriented. In a market where the advertising decision makers were local, it was sales friendly to folks targeting female shoppers.
IMHO once the 80/90 FM stations and FM receivers in automobiles happened "narrow casting" carved up the audience. Chicken Rock stations morphed into AC, (if FM) or AMs usually went to Full Service AC on their way to New Talk or another spoken word format. Of course when Clear Chanel (and friends) were trying to buy every radio station in the US a lot of stations got flipped into one of their cooker cutter formats but that's another discussion.
IMHO once the 80/90 FM stations and FM receivers in automobiles happened "narrow casting" carved up the audience. Chicken Rock stations morphed into AC, (if FM) or AMs usually went to Full Service AC on their way to New Talk or another spoken word format. Of course when Clear Chanel (and friends) were trying to buy every radio station in the US a lot of stations got flipped into one of their cooker cutter formats but that's another discussion.
Docket 80-90 was crafted using distance separation requirements, instead of the system used for NCE-FM, which is contour based. For this reason, there are relatively few that were, at least originally, not in the middle of nowhere, or extreme rimshots at best. While some have finagled through various means to "move in" to cover larger cities, and even upgrade Class, this has turned out to be very capricious, with obscure filings and case "law", to prevent some really good ones from happening . This has greatly reduced the impact on other stations already in the market, much to the delight of the NAB, and competitors who filed Petitions to Deny. Most of the outlying rimshots bring up the rear in market ratings performance, and are niche formats like you said.
Many years ago, the FCC should have made rules like Canada and Mexico have, to more easily facilitate moving existing AM stations to FM, instead of the haphazard loss of decent AM facilities that are now Silent, on extremely reduced facilities, or Deleted. Three come to mind immediately, WFNI (WIBC) 1070, KDWN 720, and KAAY 1090. 250 watt translators for AM stations are just a stopgap solution.
Many years ago, the FCC should have made rules like Canada and Mexico have, to more easily facilitate moving existing AM stations to FM, instead of the haphazard loss of decent AM facilities that are now Silent, on extremely reduced facilities, or Deleted. Three come to mind immediately, WFNI (WIBC) 1070, KDWN 720, and KAAY 1090. 250 watt translators for AM stations are just a stopgap solution.
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The Atlanta market is another story. If you look at the COLs not counting the Marietta 101.5 and Smyrna 94.1 which "moved in pre 1975" there were only y viable FM signals. The move post 1975 move ins 97.1, 106.7, 104.1 104.7, 101.5 and 95.5 have had major impact should not be considered niche lagging rimshots.
Should be 6 viable commercial FM signals
KBIL was playing a song or two an hour that dated about 6 to 15 months old and off the charts in late 1968/early 1969. It may have been requests or it may have been that they had recently switched from Country back to Chicken Rock, if you will. What I termed oldies were less than 5 years old and I know they played 2 an hour of these in the first half of 1969 with about a 2 to 2.5 hour rotation on the hottest songs. Aside from the furniture store in Liberty that owned the station then (and sponsored every newscast), I barely heard a commercial.
But the biggest change made by Docket 80-90 was the reaction to "Bonita Springs" where a Class A, trying to upgrade, lost its license because major upgrades opened the door to cross filings. So 80-90 eliminated that, and allowed many hundreds of FMs to upgrade or move transmitter sites... often nearer a bigger city or right into that city.
Lots of little markets got way too many stations. Lake City, FL, added 3 commercial FMs to the two AMs and two FMs it was supporting rather well in 1990. Within a couple of years, nobody made any money and all local services were cut back on all stations.
But look at markets like Austin, where the "viable" AM count doubled.
Nearly every market that was not a major Northeastern one got added stations... from Houston to Phoenix (8 or 9 solid rimshots) to Little Rock to Birmingham and Tallahassee.
In smaller markets, those translators cover better than a former Class IV AM, and usually are superior to most higher band daytimers and lots of lower power stations above 1200.
For example, WIBC had extreme nulls in the population growth areas of Indianapolis, and Emmis was considering moving it to a full FM. Yet with translators, it has nearly as high ratings as it did as AM only.
Similarly, KAAY had a great night signal in Springfield, IL, but not on the east and west sides of Little Rock. And KDWN really needed only 5 kw or less to cover Vegas on 720 but they jumped in with the clear channel breakdown and wasted watts for decades.
I agree that thousands of 1 kW AM stations would be better off with a 1 kW ERP/100 meter HAAT FMs. 250 watts in sufficient in the smallest markets. I do not think that 60 dBu on FM is a viable signal in larger cities. I think 70 dBu is necessary. Many new communities considered for First Local Service are ridiculously small, and many only need 60 dBu for their few square blocks of development with no buildings higher than two stories, and very little structural obstruction. If these exceedingly small COLs were only required to have 60 dBu over them, they might be able to move to serve larger populations with 70 dBu. I think the so called Rural Radio Initiative would be best served with LPFMs and up to 1 kW ERP/100 meter HAAT Commercial FMs, which exceeds the original 1 kW/250 feet/76 meter Class As.
I thought FM A's were limited to 3 kw (later 6kw) at 300 ft. and only on certain channels like 94.3 pre (1980?). How far back was the 1kw / 250 feet Class As and were they only on certain channels too?
It's in the worldradiohistory link below, from 1960. It changed to 3000 watts/300 feet HAAT in 1964. They were on Class A reserved Channels. There were 20. They're listed in those rules. A 250 watt translator has to be at 348 meters/1142 feet HAAT to have the same distance to the 60 dBu contour as a 3 kW/100 meter HAAT Class A. You have to have a TV transmitter tower, very tall building, or at least a ski hill type vertical drop to get that high of a HAAT. Those tend to be only in certain areas. Many are also at reduced power and use DAs. Plus there is a lot more interference from FM stations, which do not protect translators, unless by chance, to the 60 dBu contour.
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