[Ghoulish Delight]

I heard two seemingly conflicting perspectives from NPR on this, though if one thinks about it they probably are less conflicting than simply geographically determined.

In the first, which was simply the musings of David Dye, host of NPR's "All Songs Considered", he mentioned that he's been asked how amazing it must have been to have heard Sgt. Pepper's on the radio when it was new. His take was that he didn't really hear it on the radio. FM barely existed, and no one really knew what to do with this whole "album" concept thing. The Beatles didn't release any of the tracks as singles. So stations weren't playing it. For him, it was all about the actual album, hearing at a friend's house for the first time.

The second, a broader piece aired on All Things Considered (yes, those are 2 separate NPR programs), was from the New York perspective. Mr. Dye didn't mention where he was in the US in 1967, but judging from his experience, probably not in a major city. While FM was indeed new and undeveloped, it was starting to take hold. With the FCC mandating that media companies no longer simply simulcast their AM programming on whatever FM band they owned, they were at kind of a loss as to what to do with the frequencies. They didn't see much profit in it, so a lot of them just kinda stuck a DJ on there and said, "Do what you want." These were the DJs that played it, often the whole album. So from the perspective of this story, it was all about the influence of radio and the influence of the album on radio.

Neither story was particularly insightful, but taken together I thought they made for an interesting study.