Prelude to a playlist 3/17/11

I got a bit carried away while working on an introduction to this week's show, so rather than to make you scroll down to get to the first song once it gets posted I'm putting up that lengthy intro here.

In the spring of 1967 my dad, a career military man, got the word that he was being transferred to a base in Weisbaden, Germany. After a relatively short time he was able to secure housing for the rest of the family, and that summer we took a long plane flight (in a military transport craft with no windows and seats that make a bus seem comfortable by comparison) to Europe.
At the time I thought it was the worst thing that could happen. After all, I was just about to enter high school and there was a lot of exciting stuff (including a new semi-underground FM rock radio station) just starting to happen in Denver, where we had spent the last seven years. Still, it wasn't like I had a choice in the matter, so I learned to adapt as best as I could to being in a country with no English speaking radio stations except AFN (American Forces Network) Frankfurt, which was a monstrously powerful AM station that was formatted much like a modern NPR station. The 150 Kw transmitter (three times the legal limit for stations in the US) could be heard throughout northern Europe.
As it was summer break and I was in a new "town" (actually a tiny housing area consisting of eight former Panzer troop barracks), I spent a lot of time with a Grundig portable AM/FM/shortwave receiver that my dad had bought at the Base Exchange when he first arrived. My first discovery was that FM (at that time and place) was useless. It seemed like every station I could get was either playing classical or beer hall music. Undeterred, I checked out AM radio and soon discovered AFN, which just happened to be playing its daily top 40 show the first time I tuned in. I soon learned, however, that the daily top 40 show on AFN only ran for one hour Monday through Friday, with a special edition of Casey Kasem's weekly countdown (custom made for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service) of the previous week's charts running on Saturday mornings.
Then I hit gold. Way over near the end of the dial there was something called Radio Luxembourg. At the time all I knew about Luxembourg was that it was a tiny country near the Netherlands, part of what was known as the Benelux region (yes, I actually paid attention in social studies class...sometimes). What I couldn't figure out was why such a small place had on obviously powerful AM radio station that (with some fading in and out) I could pick up easily in Mainz-Kastel (the village that our Panzer barracks was officially within). Even more astounding was the fact that the station was broadcasting in English! And they were playing US-style top 40 radio, complete with bumpers, jingles, drop-ins, commercials, and, most importantly, screaming top 40 DJs (AFN announcers at the time were expected to conform to standards set in the 1940s by NBC)! As I was to learn later, the reason for Radio Luxembourg being the way it was had a lot to do with British radio laws, with a little history thrown in.
Unlike in the US, where commercial radio had dominated the airwaves almost from the beginning of the age of broadcasting, radio in the UK was a government monopoly, with the BBC being the only licenced radio entity in the realm. In the wake of the first wave of US rock 'n' roll in the 1950s a new form of popular music had developed in Britain in the early 60s. Combining elements of rock 'n' roll with blues and R&B and something uniquely British known as "skiffle," this new British rock would fuel a record industry that was second only to the US in profits. The staunchly conservative BBC, however, was having nothing to do with anything as vulgar as rock music. To meet the obvious need for a radio service analagous to US top 40 radio a handful of underground radio stations began broadcasting from ships stationed off the coast of England, just outside the three mile limit. Unlike the "underground" FM stations in the US in the late 60s (which were legally licensed and thus were underground only in cultural and economic terms), these "pirate" radio stations did their best to emulate American top 40 radio, even to the point of hiring American DJs in some cases. The primary problem with these stations is that, since they were broadcasting from ships at sea, they did not have the wattage available to terrestrial based stations. During daytime operation this was not a major issue, as AM signals generally hold up well in daytime within a certain radius of the transmitter, even at low power. At night, however, there is a lot more interference from distant signals on the AM band and low power stations often get pushed back to within a few hundred yards of the transmitter. Since the pirate stations were all operating outside the three mile limit, this made operating after dark a waste of time. Enter Radio Luxembourg.
Radio Luxembourg had been around since the 1930s, but had been taken over first by Nazi Germany and then by the US military during World War II. Once again under civilian control after the war the powerful transmitter began broadcasting programs in English as an alternative to the BBC monopoly in the UK. When it became apparent that there was a market for a top 40 station that could reach the young English listeners at night, Radio Luxembourg rose to the occassion, crankin' out the hits from sunset to around 3AM nightly, becoming a dominant force in the British music industry in the process.
For the entire three years I spent in Germany, Radio Luxembourg was where I heard most of the hit records of the time first. They were not exactly the same hit records, however, that were being played on top 40 stations in the US (or on AFN for that matter). Although most of the big name bands of the 60s had hits on both sides of the ocean, there were some that found their success limited to their home territory. (For instance, I don't ever remember hearing anything by the Cowsills on Radio Luxembourg. On the other hand, has anyone in the US heard of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tish?) There were even cases of British bands doing better in the US than at home (Herman's Hermits, anyone?) and at least one example of an American band doing better on the British charts (Love). The first few times I heard Marrakesh Express I mistakenly thought it must be by a British act, since it shot right up to Radio Luxembourg's #1 spot in record time, yet was never heard on AFN. One of the oddest things for me was to hear a song that I had never heard before announced as a "golden oldie", which leads us to our first song of the night.

(To be continued...)

Well, OK, one small hint then. The first song of the night is a Kinks tune that did not get a lot of US airplay (peaking at #73) when it was released in 1966, but was in heavy rotation on Radio Luxembourg, where it went to the #5 spot.