PORTLAND, Maine — When WBLM radio began broadcasting on March 1, 1973, it had a weirdly split musical personality. During the day it played what was known as beautiful music or elevator music—think creamy vocals backed up by bland, string-filled instrumentals—and at night it made a head-spinning switch to progressive rock 'n' roll.
“It’s crazy,” WBLM morning DJ Herb Ivy said of the dual format. “But it was the early days of FM rock radio, so it was really kind of an experiment at the time.”
A few years later BLM ditched the elevator music and went to pure rock 'n' roll, a format that has evolved but hasn’t dramatically changed over five decades.
“What we have seen recently is some of the early '90s music starting to be played,” said Ivy, who’s known on the air as "The Captain." “That first Nirvana record is over 30 years old now. So if you were 20 when ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came out, now you’re 50. And you still want to hear that."
Plenty of Mainers have been listening to BLM—affectionately known as the Blimp--for 10, 20, 30 years and more. On the 50th anniversary, a listener called the morning show to share a little history.
“I drove by the house I grew up in the other day, and I saw the [1980s] WBLM blimp decal on the window,” he said. “I ought to stop and beat on the door and say, ‘Hey, if you guys ever take that window out, I want it.’”
After 50 years of the Beatles, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Doors, Heart, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Springsteen and countless others, classic rock still resonates with people in a visceral way. It’s hard to explain its longevity, but there’s no denying it.
“Almost everyone—I’m getting goose bumps—everyone that I talk to on the phone, they have a song they connect with,” BLM morning DJ Celeste Baranyi said. “It reminds them of somebody they loved that’s passed, or something like that, or a memory they have. And I think that’s what it is.”
It’s a genuine milestone when a radio station marks 50 years with a sound that remains so true to what it had in the beginning. At BLM, the birthday festivities will be going on for a while.
“It needs more than one day, I think, to celebrate” Ivy said. “But that March 1, 1973, it was a lightning bolt.”