No one can say precisely when FM 100 started to become a Very Big Deal. But it was sometime in the spring of 1971, the day when Jon Scott played the Jimi Hendrix version of “The Star Spangled Banner,” the one made famous in the Woodstock movie. That was also the day everything hit the fan at 1960 Union, where the station shared space with WMC-TV Channel 5 and AM 60.
Scott was 20-something and working the mid-day shift. The phones started ringing almost as soon as the first 20 seconds of Hendrix’ Anthem had gone out over the air. The engineer at the WMC transmitter heard it and picked up the phone. The normal routine was that the playing of the National Anthem was the signal that the broadcast day was over. The engineer was puzzled because it was the middle of the day. Another call came from an advertiser, unhappy. He heard blasphemy and called FM 100’s general manager, Dean Osmundson. Scott’s memory is that, pretty quickly, the GM was at the studio door.
“Take. That. Needle. Off. That. Record,” Osmundson said, emphatically.
“So what am I supposed to do?” Scott asked.
“Play The Monkees,” the GM said.
Scott put on “Hey Hey We’re The Monkees.”
For several days, FM 100 played strictly Top 40 hits. For four years the jocks had been experimenting with a mix of hits, oldies, and album cuts. The station had found a core of young listeners but it hadn’t exactly taken off with advertisers. And many veterans of Memphis radio thought the experiment was wrong-headed. At the time, the FM band was dominated by “easy listening” stations. In a 1984 interview Dean Osmundson recalled being told “you can’t play rock-and-roll on an FM station.”
A few days later, a small crowd of sign-carrying protesters showed up in front of 1960 Union Avenue, asking where the real music went. It’s still a mystery how they got themselves organized, in those days before the internet. The GM looked hard at the ratings and made two fateful decisions. He told the young jocks, “Play what you want,” and he moved Jon Scott to the seven-to-midnight shift.
“When people think about that FM 100, what they’re really remembering is Jon Scott’s show,” says Mike Powell, who was the original program director. Powell credits Scott, along with Osmundson, the visionary GM, for giving FM 100 power well beyond its place: a startup rock station in a medium-sized market in the middle of the country.
Last month, on Sunday, May 7th, the DJ's who were there at the beginning held a kind of 50th class reunion at Lafayette’s Music Room in Midtown. They huddled over drinks with friends and fans and talked about grandkids and retirement and took a lot of cell phone pictures. Keith Sykes, Reba Russell, Susan Marshall, and Larry Raspberry rocked the crowd with some of the more than 800 known songs with the word “Memphis’ in the lyrics. And they remembered the days when every new album from The Beatles, The Stones, Joplin, Hendrix, and The Who was groundbreaking. And a time when it felt like everybody important was in their 20s.
Jon Scott remembered the time he did an hour-long interview with David Bowie, by phone from Bowie’s London home. And the time Memphis musician Don Nix showed up at the back door for an interview, having just returned from Bangladesh. With him was Beatles’ collaborator and artist Klaus Voorman, along with George Harrison’s father.
Some of the originals who have passed on were remembered that Sunday: David Day (David Gingold) and Ron Michaels. “People remember you because you were a part of their lives,” Michaels once explained, “and it never hurts that you get to say your name 20 times an hour over the radio.”
Mike Powell was at Lafayette’s, as were Greg Hamilton, Carter Davis, Leon Griffin, Clarence Johnson, Steve Conley, Gary Phillips — all FM 100 DJs from the early days, and Mitch McCracken, who started on the air in 1970. He remembers calling the program director “two or three times a week,” until finally he was offered one shift, on Saturday afternoons. “The right place at the right time,” he says. He had just graduated from Frayser High School. Soon he was on the “graveyard shift,” right after Jon Scott. Scott would go home and listen to McCracken’s show and critique it. Scott became his mentor. Today they’re still friends. The jocks could play just about anything except songs condoning drug use and songs containing the FCC’s forbidden “seven words.”
“Total freedom,” McCracken says. “Almost.”
At the party at Lafayette’s, McCracken finally met in person some of those who had been listening, out there in the dark, all those years ago. “It was pure radio heaven.”
To kick off the station, FM 100 sponsored a dance. “This girl came up to me and said, ‘Are you anybody?’” DJ Dick Byrd recalls. “Can I have your autograph?’ It’s the only autograph I ever signed in my career.”
The station was an experiment, at first, and since there wasn’t a whole lot of money involved there weren’t a lot of rules. The jocks got together with musicians and promoters and produced live on-the-air concerts, originating from the original Lafayette’s Music Hall and Ardent Studios, with ZZ Top, Billy Joel, and Kiss, before most people even knew who those artists were.
“We said what we wanted to say and played what we wanted to play,” says Scott. “We became more loose, and I mean loose.”
Where AM radio stations at the time were playing two-and-a-half-minute singles, the FM 100 jocks were pulling long cuts from albums, such as “Light My Fire” (The Doors, seven minutes and seven seconds), “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” (Iron Butterly, just over 17 minutes), and “Alice’s Restaurant,” (Arlo Guthrie, 18 minutes and 15 seconds). And as the jocks today admit, they would sometimes put on the long version, check their watches, and adjourn to the station’s boiler room or to the roof. And they still laugh at how funny-smelling smoke would waft through the hallways.
By early 1967, former WMC Action News 5 weatherman Dave Brown had already been a disc jockey at WHBQ-AM for more than two years. He too had heard that “you don’t play rock-and-roll on FM,” and at first his station didn’t pay much attention to the upstart across town. After a couple of months, Brown and his peers decided “we’d better watch out.”
In the mid-1960s radio in Memphis (and all across America) was dominated by AM stations. WDIA, a near monolith with African-American listeners, was the most powerful station in the market. WHBQ and WMPS were both playing some version of the Top 40, so they split the white pop audience. At launch, the new guys at FM 100 were no immediate threat to the established powers. But the new FM station benefited from both timing and technology.
The actual frequency itself was not new; WMC-FM had become the city’s first station on that band on May 22, 1947. For its first 20 years, WMC-FM remained an “easy listening” station, featuring Frank Sinatra, Patti Page, and Montovani for an older demographic. But it was something of a sleeping giant.
Here’s the timing part: In 1962 the Federal Communication Commission (largely to protect the status quo) declared that new FM stations could only broadcast with 100,000 watts of power. Some were granted as little as 50 watts. But since WMC-FM had gone on the air with more than 300,000 watts — 15 years before the 1962 regulation — its listeners could tune in to Sinatra from a hundred miles away. Or, just as easily, to Jimi Hendrix.
And here’s the technology part: While AM radio could broadcast at much greater distances, it was about to become a static-filled stepchild. By the early 1970s, more people had more sophisticated FM stereo radios in their cars, along with cassette players. At the same time popular music, post-Woodstock, was undergoing a seismic shift. Albums were in, while singles were on the way out.
But the biggest change of all was in the audience. The Baby Boomers, the biggest American generation yet, were becoming young adults, getting jobs, and seizing economic power along with control of the culture.
Dean Osmundson was ready to take advantage of all that good luck. After looking at the model of a free-form FM station in San Francisco and another in New York, he decided to take his station in a totally new direction. “I think I’m gonna rock it!” he said, as several people recalled at the reunion. Osmundson passed away in 2014.
On February 6, 1967, the top of the Billboard Top 40 chart looked like this: “I’m A Believer” by the Monkees, “Georgy Girl” by The Seekers, and “Kind of a Drag” by The Buckinghams, along with “Snoopy vs. The Red Baron” by The Royal Guardsmen and “The Beat Goes On” by Sonny and Cher. Pretty bland stuff.
What FM 100 tried came to be called by a lot of names, including Album Rock or Progressive Rock. FM 100 drew from a much broader playlist, the Billboard Top 100. And the jocks dropped in oldies along with album cuts, not just the hits.
“It was music that no one was playing or hearing on the radio,” says Mike Powell, one of the original cast. “It was the only place to hear albums on the air.”
Greg Hamilton thinks the magic of FM 100 was that “we reflected what was going on in the community. We were a young people’s station. We were leading, a little bit. We didn’t say, ‘This is a hit.’ We said, ‘Listen to it.’”
The jocks played what the audience wanted to hear, and the mix was eclectic: The FourTops, King Crimson, Booker T and the MGs, The Doors, Sam and Dave.
Switching Jon Scott to nights had a sudden and surprising impact. The Memphis Press-Scimitar (the afternoon newspaper at the time) noted the station’s ratings had shot up 300 percent, its audience up 200 percent, making the station at least competitive with WDIA. And quickly, the national rock music industry found, in Memphis, a “breaking ground,” where new acts could be heard. FM 100 was instrumental in the early success of artists like David Bowie, ZZ Top, Jethro Tull, Yes, and Wishbone Ash.
“We started playing bands before anybody else in America would, most of the time,” recalls Scott. “If bands got played on FM 100, they would sell records. David Bowie loved Memphis; the English musicians loved Memphis.”
“Jon Scott had a loyal army,” says Leon Griffin, who eventually took over Scott’s time slot. “It took the night-time [slot] to really reach the people who didn’t watch TV, people who listened to the music.”
In a way, FM 100 was modeled on the work of another Memphis radio pioneer, Dewey Phillips. After all, it was Phillips, on July 7, 1954, who played Elvis’ seminal first record, “That’s Alright Mama” 14 times in a row. Dewey played what he, and his audience, liked.
As word of the FM 100 reunion got around Memphis, social media lit up. Among the hundreds of tweets:
“We got up early to hear the sign-on and heard “Sock It To Me Baby” (the first song played).
“I learned to play guitar listening to those DJs.”
“The earliest Kiss bootleg [recording] was from live FM 100 broadcast at Lafayette’s.”
“My dad and uncle are now on a mass email memory lane trip about it.”
The city’s longest-tenured DJ, Ron Olson, started at FM 100 in 1974, left for a while, and then came back in 1983. To him, radio, with its request lines and faceless voices, was the original social media. He explains it all in a sentence: “It’s where you got your news, your information, your music.”
Olson fell in love with radio as a kid, lying in bed at night, listening to the AM jocks (“from St. Louis to San Antonio”) on a transistor radio. “Always the music,” he recalls. “To be able to introduce somebody to great music they haven’t heard has always been the coolest thing.”
Over the weekend of the party, Jon Scott and Mike Powell (who now live in Los Angeles and Tampa, respectively) got a tour of 1960 Union during the weekend of the party. The area were FM 100 was located is boarded up now. Sold to new owners in 2006, it was moved across town to its current location on Mt. Moriah?
Progressive Rock in Memphis lasted until the end of the 1970s. There was more money to be made in mainstream music, and FM 100 followed the money.
But the original FM 100 has a legacy. “They invented album rock-and-roll on the local FM dial. FM 100 brought FM into the modern age,” says Dave Brown.
There is a lesson in this: We should pursue our passions. Ron Olson was a radio gypsy, moving through college radio stations at UT Martin, then Southwestern (now Rhodes), then Memphis State to a a tiny country station where he was paid $1.25 an hour, and then, finally, to FM 100. He’s thankful, and what he sees as his good fortune still seems to mystify him. “Doing something you really wanted to do and have been able to do? And really like doing? And to still be doing it?”
As much fun as it must have been, being a disc jockey in those days was not great money. “I doubt if I ever made more than a hundred dollars a week,” Scott says. He eventually left radio to become a record promotion man. Today he is given credit for breaking a number of superstar artists, including John Mellencamp and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
He had dropped out of Memphis State in favor of Keegan’s School of Broadcasting downtown. He found his first job in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. When he saw an ad in the paper for the FM 100 startup, he walked in the door and said, “I want this job.” He had known all along there was never going to be anything, for him, but radio.
“When I was a kid, my mom would call into the request line at this funky little country station,” Scott recalls. “I don’t even remember the call letters. She would ask them to ‘play something for Louise Slankard and my five brothers.’ And when they would play that song, she would smile. Right then I knew I wanted to be a DJ. I would do anything to make my mom smile.”
George Larrimore grew up in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, and now lives in Memphis. He worked for WMC from 1979 to 1983, and then worked for many years in Los Angeles with Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight. He is co-founder and executive producer of PropagandaTV, a digital television channel featuring historical films that were used for that purpose.
