Remember when FM radio...

...was great? Like WXRT in Chicago? Or KQRS in Minneapolis? I do. (Try telling that to someone under the age of, say, thirty.) 

I'm reminded of this by an obituary in the New York Times of a guy named Pete Fornatale (my emphasis): 

Pete Fornatale, a disc jockey who helped usher in a musical alternative to Top 40 AM radio in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, presenting progressive rock and long album tracks that AM stations wouldn’t touch and helping to give WNEW a major presence on the still-young FM dial, died on Thursday in Manhattan. 

 FM radio had been around for a while but did not come of age until the 1960s, when, amid the whirlwind of a growing counterculture, the federal government mandated that FM stations carry different programming from that of their sister AM bands. Enterprising D.J.’s grasped the chance to play longer, fresher, rarer music and give voice to the roiling political and social issues of the day. 

Mr. Fornatale was at the forefront of the FM revolution, along with WNEW-FM colleagues like Scott Muni, Rosko, Vin Scelsa, Dennis Elsas, Jonathan Schwartz and Alison Steele (who called herself “the Nightbird”). They played long versions of songs, and sometimes entire albums, and talked to their audiences in a conversational tone very different from the hard-sell approach of their AM counterparts. 

Now once-great stations like XRT play bland, consultant-approved playlists -- when they play music at all -- squeezed between lots and lots of ads and mindless chatter. What's left? Satellite radio; although I'm noticing that more and more stations are adding D. J.'s. And that's a shame. 

I'm with Frank Zappa: Shut and play!