WMMR

W M M R FM Radio
93.3

Philadelphia PA

 Summer, 1968

I started listening to rock’n roll right after I was introduced to the Beatles in 1964.  When I was 10 my grandparents gave me the Rubber Soul album for Christmas. When I was 11 I got my first transistor radio and I walked around with that thing pressed against my ear all day long. I love my little radio. So, I’ve been an audiophile for 50 years now.

Listen to the Beatles for the first time was a memorable moment in my life. But so was listening to WMMR Radio. It was in the summer and I was at my friend’s house. It was after dinner and we were in the kitchen. The radio was on and the music was so different from everything I was hearing on AM radio.   There was almost underground feel to what I was hearing. None of these artists were being played on AM radio. They weren’t in Casey Kasum’s Top 40 countdown.

They were so mysterious to me: The Doors, Steppenwolf, Steeleye Dan, Laura Nyro, Janis Ian, Creedence Clearwater Revival. They were just some of the artist coming through the radio waves. Joan Baez sang about civil rights. Other songs were lewd and sexually suggestive. I heard the first inklings of dissent against the Vietnam war. Fortunate Son was a protest song that challenged my blind allegiance to the government’s position on the war.

I remember Kathy’s mother came into the kitchen and we quickly turned down the volume as if we had been caught listening to illicit music.  There was a hardness and an anger and a purpose to this new music.  I found it to be alluring but a little too edgy for me at the time. But it wasn’t long before these artists eventually became mainstream.

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