Big Rock Radio: What was the ‘King Buscuit Flower Hour’?
The golden age of radio brought music to the farms, to the mountains, to those living under a rock.
They brought The Beatles to the masses, and in turn, created the idea of the pop star. The music industry would not have become the cash cow we know today had it not been for the radio, and the rock FM show ‘King Biscuit Flower Hour’ brought rock concerts to everyone’s living room.
The concept of live recordings hadn’t much scraped the surface of stereo by the early 1970s. No artist was doing live albums yet, nor were concerts showing on television, “and you couldn’t hear a whole concert because nobody recorded it”, the show’s first host recalled. Bill Minkin remained with King Biscuit from its inception in 1973 until the mid-90s, about a decade before the radio’s surrender to the streaming revolution. He’s the mastermind behind the radio’s name, which he borrowed from the popular blues radio show ‘King Biscuit Time’.
The premise of the show was simple: not everyone gets to go to a gig, so the radio will make up for that gap and record whole concerts for their listeners. In addition to promoting up-and-coming artists that are too little known for airtime, their show was also dedicated to interviews with musicians, big or small. This was a novel rebellion from a market that had become set in its ways: “What happened to radio then happened to music,” Minkin told Ultimate Classic Rock in 2016, “It was very popular, but it was controlled. You couldn’t break artists so easily anymore”.
Before being approached by a friend from his college days to start the radio, Minkin had been a disc jockey at New York’s WPLJ radio station when it broadcast an Elton John show live in November 1970. The response garnered spun a whole album to life (John’s 11-17-70), proving that live radio shows were very much in demand. Minkin said that soon after that show, “I had just quit. I got to the point where it was getting stifling. I couldn’t deal with it”.
And the rest is history, with a show that swept names like Emerson, Lake & Palmer, David Crosby, Steve Miller, The Who, and even Pink Floyd up with them. “The first King Biscuit show was Bruce Springsteen at Max’s Kansas City…Bruce was just a new guy. They really didn’t know much about him. It was really underground,” Minkin recalled.
The show’s first sponsors were Columbia Records and Pioneer High Fidelity, who promoted it through listening parties at electronics stores. They’d bring pizza and sell stereos to kids who would sit in and listen for an hour, earning the show its first listeners, but it didn’t take long for it to get big.
Minkin explained, “All the record companies, when they saw the numbers we were putting up and the reaction and the artists who were making live albums out of our show, then everybody wanted to get on our show.”
Of course, there soon began points of conflict between the radio’s hosts: what kind of acts they’d take on when there was too much airtime to fill, what direction the show was taking, and how to keep it growing. Eventually, “They kept getting demands to do the same old shows over and over again. That’s what I think gave birth to new wave and punk. You could not get new groups, especially New Wave stuff, on FM radio,” he mused.
So punk killed the radio star, and money stopped flowing in. Minkin also attributed a lack of innovation to its unravelling, as the same artists were getting coverage but without inclusion of their newer, more experimental work. Yet many known artists have released entire albums because King Buscuit had recorded their live work, meaning that it’s one of the few radio shows that will stand the test of time after video killed the radio.
