Sorry Ish, I've been meaning to reply to this post for a while now, but haven't had the time to type up a full response.

Being pretty knowledgable about the rise of FM radio in America during the late 60s and early 70s, I can tell you that the situation with pop/rock radio in the UK was very different. For one thing, in the late '50s and early '60s we didn't have any dedicated pop music radio stations in the way that you did in the U.S. This was down to the fact that all radio broadcasting in the UK at that time was provided by the government owned BBC. In fact, there wasn't a single (legal) commercial radio station in the UK until 1973!

In the late '50s and early '60s, like most of grown up society and the political establishment, the BBC considered pop music to be trivial rubbish for silly teeny-boppers who were too young – or stupid – to know any better. As a result, the BBC Light Programme (which was the radio channel that provided light entertainment and music to the UK) saw fit to offer young listeners just a measly few hours of pop music broadcasting a week.

Chief among the BBC's pre-1967 pop radio shows was the hugely influential Saturday Club (known for the first year of its existence as Saturday Skiffle Club), which ran from 1957 until 1969.




This show, which was only two hours long, was hosted by DJ Brian Matthews and was simply not to be missed if you were between the ages of 10 and 25. It's almost impossible to overstate the importance of this show among young British pop fans of the era. For many years, this two hour radio show was the only pop music that could be heard on British radio!*

DJ Brian Matthews and the Beatles preparing for a live broadcast.


Of course, all that changed with the arrival of "the pirates"!

In March 1964, Radio Caroline began broadcasting a dedicated menu of pop, rock and soul music, presented by hip, young DJs in a freewheeling, anarchic manner that was heavily influenced by American radio stations and completely at odds with the stuffy, clipped tones of the BBC's radio programming. The station emanated from a ship anchored some miles off of the Suffolk coast and set itself up in direct competition to the BBC's radio monopoly. Although Radio Caroline was branded a "pirate radio station" by the media and the establishment, it should be noted that, actually, they weren't breaking the law at the time because the ship was anchored far enough from the shore to be just outside of British waters.

The Radio Caroline ship, circa 1967.



In late 1964, a second pirate station named Radio London began broadcasting a similar selection of hip new sounds from the North Sea, four miles off the coast of Essex. Both Radio London and Radio Caroline became immediately successful with the youth of the day, who would tune in via hand-held transistor radios in parks, at coffee bars, outside youth clubs and under their bedsheets at night. The demand for this round the clock pop music programming was so great that over the next three years a further eight pirate radio stations sprang up in the waters around the UK, broadcasting from ships or disused sea forts to an estimated audience of over 15 million people.

While it's true that the UK "pirates" took most of their cues from the quick-fire pop programming of American AM radio stations, some of the pirate DJs also began playing longer album cuts in the manner of the U.S. FM radio stations. Indeed, by 1966 and 1967 there were whole programs – like John Peel's "The Perfumed Garden" show on Radio London, for example – that were dedicated to playing the latest far-out, psychedelic sounds from Britain and America.

DJ John Peel, circa 1967.



Naturally, the BBC and the British government were outraged by the popularity of these pirate stations and, as a result, Harold Wilson's Labour government passed the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act in 1967 (I can't remember the exact month, sorry – you'll have to Google it), which effectively outlawed the pirates overnight and ending their dominance of the pop music airwaves.

However, the popularity of these pirate stations hadn't gone unnoticed and, in September 1967, the BBC launched its first dedicated pop and rock music station, Radio 1. Many of the most popular DJs from Radio Caroline and Radio London, including such household names as Tony Blackburn, Kenny Everett, and John Peel, were offered jobs at Radio 1, in a move designed to entice fans of the pirates to tune in to the BBC's new pop channel. The strategy worked and BBC Radio 1 has been the UK's most popular pop, rock and dance music station for five decades now.




There is, of course, a lot more to the story of pop music radio in the UK during the '60s, but hopefully that will give you a "bare bones" overview of what happened.


* = Between 1965 and 1967, Matthews also hosted a second pop music program on Sunday mornings called Easy Beat.

Recently I started watching a series on the Power 106 LA youtube channel that examines the samples used in classic hip-hop records. Originally this was a topic I thought could make an interesting discussion but once I saw this thread I felt I could just post the topic here.  The first episode I watched was Discover The Samples Used On Dr. Dre's 'The Chronic'. I found it pretty entertaining and I'm often fascinated by the progression of music over time and how the various genres relate to each other.  I went on to watch...
Discover Classic Samples Used On The Notorious B.I.G. 'Ready To Die'
Discover Classic Samples Used On Nas 'illmatic'
2Pac - All Eyez On Me - 20 Year Celebration
Celebrating The 23rd Anniv. of Wu-Tang Clan's '36 Chambers'. 
All of which are some of my all time favorite albums from that era.  There are dozens of similar episodes I plan to sit through once I find the time.  I'm wondering if this is a subject that interests anyone else.

Glad to see you corrected yourself, regarding Monterey Pop being the first multi-day rock festival, Ish, and mentioned the little known Magic Mountain Music Festival. I read the first part of your post about Monterey Pop late last night before I went to sleep and thought to myself, "I'll have to correct him tomorrow."

Regarding your list of acts that were invited to Monterey, but couldn't appear, the Beach Boys initially accepted and were billed as the headline act that would close the show on early advertisements for the festival. However, for whatever reason -- Brian Wilson's fragile mental health, concerns over their music's suitability at such a "far out" festival, Carl Wilson's battles with the authorities over the Vietnam draft, the on-going litigation between the band and their record company, or the fact that they'd abandoned their long-awaited masterpiece, SMiLE -- the band pulled out. The prevailing opinion among much of the hip music press (and even some of the artists at the festival) was that the band were running scared from the new, progressive sounds on display at the festival and, as a result, they were quickly deemed "yesterday's news", as far as the brave new world of counter-culture rock was concerned.

Really, the Beach Boys' non-appearance at Monterey Pop was the final nail in the group's coffin and they would struggle commercially for the rest of the '60s and well into the '70s in America. However, in England and Europe, although they never again reached the commercial heights of 1965 and 1966, they remained a pretty popular group until the dawn of the '70s.

Not really. Pet Sounds was a "relative flop" in the U.S., where it peaked at #10 on the Billboard charts, which, while it might sound good, was actually the lowest chart position for a Beach Boys' studio album since 1963. It also failed to garner a Gold sales certification, as most of the band's preceding albums had. Brian Wilson himself was bitterly disappointed with the album's chart performance and singer Mike Love took to mockingly calling it "Brian's ego music" in response to its lack of commercial success.

Of course, it was still a big seller by most band's standards, but by the Beach Boys' standards, it was definitely something of a misfire commercially. It would take the success of the "Good Vibrations" single in late '66 -- which was the band's biggest selling single of all time -- to return the Beach Boys to the level of their pre-Pet Sounds success.




Oh, no arguments there. The album was a groundbreaking masterpiece and those "in the know" definitely perceived it as such at the time. However, to the wider record buying public, the Beach Boys were still mostly regarded as a "fun in the sun", surf music band. Pet Sounds was simply far too mature and complex for most of the band's audience to appreciate in 1966. Back then, the Beach Boys were just not perceived by young music fans as being at the vanguard of progressive pop/rock music, in the same way that the Beatles, the Stones, Donovan or the Byrds were -- even though, actually, they really were. It was simply a question of perception though.

The British pop fans understood Pet Sounds much better than their American counterparts though, taking the album to the #2 spot on the charts (it was the Beach Boys highest charting album of the '60s in the UK), after which it hung around in the Top 10 for months.




Oh, I'm well aware of how amazing SMiLE is or could've been. I have that mammoth 6-disc, 2-LP box set that came out in 2011. But I've been collecting bootleg's of those sessions for much, much longer than that -- since the start of the '90s, in fact (I currently have 18 SMiLE bootleg CDs or LPs in my collection). I also own three books about the album and even have a t-shirt of the album cover art. I am definitely, 100% "on the bus" when it comes to the 'cult of SMiLE', don't you worry about that!




Or maybe not. It's wonderful to speculate, of course, but, as incredible as the music on SMiLE was, we have to acknowledge the possibility that it could've been an even worse sales disaster than Pet Sounds. As much as Pet Sounds was a huge jump forward from the music on Summer Days (and Summer Nights) creatively speaking, SMiLE was a dive into a whole other level of psychedelic experimentation than what audiences had heard on Pet Sounds. If the core of the Beach Boys' U.S. audience struggled to comprehend Pet Sounds, what would they have made of SMiLE?!

Who knows though, maybe the huge success of "Good Vibration" would've meant that there was, in fact, a huge, mainstream audience waiting to eagerly receive SMiLE. Or maybe most pop listeners (i.e. those not listening to the more progressive bands of the era) would've considered it just too darn weird!

Let's face it, the SMiLE replacement album, Smiley Smile, did a lot worse than Pet Sounds commercially, despite having "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes and Villains" bolted on to it to keep it afloat. Of course, that's a little unfair because the homemade, under-produced Smiley Smile was worlds away from the quasi-symphonic grandeur of what Brian intended with SMiLE. Still, I personally think that it is far from certain that SMiLE would've been a huge success, had it been released in its finished form in January 1967, as was originally intended. It may simply have been ignored by most of the band's pop audience.

Ultimately, we'll never know.

Yeah, and I think that was one of the (many) problems for Brian, when it came to SMiLE. He simply had too many ideas and his paranoia was steadily eating away at his ability to sort out the good ones from the excellent.

Plus, the "modular" approach to composing and recording that he'd used on "Good Vibrations" was extremely labour intensive, what with the limited studio technology available to him in 1966. It had taken him 6 months to piece together "Good Vibrations" and that was just one song! With a whole album's worth of similarly modular material -- all composed and recorded in tiny little scraps that then needed to be spliced together -- the work load alone (never mind any artistic considerations) must've been incredibly daunting. Insurmountably so, as it turned out.




Good point. I think that I have an easier time of believing that SMiLE might've represented the start of a new phase of the Beach Boys' career, in which they carved out a new audience among the more progressive, rock underground, than I do buying into the notion that the teeny-boppers would've taken songs like "Vega-Tables", "Cabin Essence", "Wind Chimes" or "Surf's Up" to their hearts. On the other hand though, even the band's name was hopelessly passé by 1967. I mean, "The Beach Boys" just really sounds like a late '50s or early '60s band name, in a way that Jefferson Airplane, the Velvet Underground, the Lovin' Spoonful or even the Rolling Stones and the Beatles just don't.




Who knows, indeed.

I like Surf's Up a lot too, there are some wonderful songs on that record, like "Feel Flows", "Long Promised Road", "Disney Girls" and the utterly bizarre, but beautiful, "A Day in the Life of a Tree". However, the version of the title track on that album, with Carl Wilson, singing the lead, isn't a patch on the SMiLE era version of the song, with Brian singing lead (although they both use the exact same backing track).

I also have a real soft spot for 1968's Friends, which I think is a very underrated Beach Boys album. Later albums like Wild Honey, 20/20, Sunflower and Holland also have their moments, amid quite a lot of filler. But for my money, that run of albums that the Beach Boys produced between 1962's Surfin' Safari and 1967's Smiley Smile is the real meat of the matter -- especially Beach Boys Today, Summer Days (and Summer Nights), Pet Sounds, and the unreleased SMiLE.

My former brother-in-law recalls being in fistfights as a child in 1964 over the relative merits of the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five.