When
the music changes, so does the dance...
On a January night in Houston,
Texas in 1972, a young boy discovered the other half of the radio. Moving the dial just right of center
he heard a familiar sound – Boogie Woogie Rock and Roll. He listened to song after song from the same artist, no
commercials, no DJ, and then no music – dead air. He waited and waited then suddenly a loud vinyl-meets-needle sound
scratched across his room and a newly enlightened
radio personality was heard to say, “Whoa, *cough* this is… KLOL… Mother’s Family Radio…
it’s twelve thirty three…here’s some more of Deep
Purple’s Machine Head.” As the next song began it came clear they were actually going to play this
entire album. He fell asleep that night to Space Truckin’, Yes' Fragile and Zeppelin's IV.
The next morning at Sharpstown Jr. High he
understood what those bumper stickers on the binders were all about. He was thirteen. He wore Levi’s 505 super bells,
Dingo boots and a C.P.O. jacket. That day he danced a new dance.
When there's a buck involved...
When the
AM station owners came into possession of a FM license they didn't quite know what to do wit
h it. They had been fighting the FCC to allow them to simply rebroadcast the AM feed on the FM frequency, but to no avail.
Record companies would routinely send in albums to stations and when the AM Program Director deemed it not Top 40
the FM station got them. The first Houston FM station playing this new Album Oriented format was KAUM.
Before all this the station manger’s responsibility was to stay on the air. Keep the dirty
words to a minimum and say the call-letters every thirty minutes. But now they had to keep the ratings up, keep the advertisers
happy – more, more, more. So they employed the AM model with play lists, rotational matrices, news and weather. It worked.
They made tons of cash. Gone were the albums, gone were the black artists, and gone were the cool DJ's. But if it was
after midnight it was pretty wide open. In the mid- to late- seventies popular music exploded into many directions. There
was Disco, Country, 
Punk, Progressive Rock, New Wave and Glam. The radio stations didn’t know what to do so they pushed the AM model further
into the Top 40 Rock genre. 97 Rock came and took many loyal KLOL listeners away. Outlaw Radio was the last effort to save
Rock in Houston. KLOL would glom on to anything that sounded like Old School. Why do you think Billy Squire had a career?