His claim to pop history fame came in the 1960s and early '70s when his syndicated FM shows, most notably the show called Silhouettes, which was broadcast across the U.S. (and in Vietnam) between 1966 and 1968, reached a wide-ranging audience.
Positioning himself as a sort of "hip preacher" between Christianity on one hand and the emerging "Flower Power" generation on the other, Rydgren interspersed progressive and psychedelic rock tracks with his thoughts on spirituality, philosophy, and the changing times, all in a deep, sincere, and affecting baritone.
The WABC-FM Love Format Team: Brother John Rydgren, Bob Lewis and Howard Smith.Heading into the Summer of Love, Rydgren was the crafty head of the TV, Radio and Film Department of the American Lutheran Church. Years before the words "Jesus" and "Freak" became joined at the rib, the straight-looking Rydgren created a daily radio show called Silhouette in which he became the reassuring, resonant-voiced Hippy for God. Rydgren wrote, announced and programmed Silhouette, taking his musical and cultural cues from The Electric Prunes, Herb Alpert and the cover of Time (Is God Dead?), with a vocal delivery that was straight out of the Tom Donahue, Scott Muni, Ken Nordine school of breathy baritone radio seduction. Silhouette dropped all the counter-cultural code words of the day into a heady mix of Peace, Love, Sex, Drugs, Jesus. and groovy fuzzy guitars.
 | ||
 |  |
|
Rydgren's Silhouette segments are stunning. Here are all 19 of them: Music to Watch Girls By, Hippy Version of the 23rd Psalm, Rinky Dink, An Offering In Music, Disadvantage of Life, Hippy Version of Creation, Search it Out, Plea of a Lonely Girl, Butterfly, The Happening, Groovin On A Saturday Night, Dark Side of the Flower, The Lord is My Shepherd, The Oil Painting, Here Lies The Church, Move Out In Style, A Simple Stroll, The Noise, and A Beautiful Girl
New York's WABC-FM picked up Silhouette on a daily basis after the FCC forced them to stop using their FM station to re-transmit WABC-AM, their Top 40 powerhouse. Faced with an immediate need for a new format, ABC signed on to Rydgren's Psychedelic Christian format, at least for part of the day.
The FCC rule in question - the non-duplication rule - sent stations all over the country scrambling for formats at a time when youth counterculture ruled the zeitgeist. Yes, the same rule that created the Psychedelic Christian format also gave birth to the commercial freeform radio movement in the US.
ABC quickly dropped Silhouette from its lineup, and flailed around for three more years before finally changing the station's call letters to WPLJ in 1970 and finding their calling as one of New York's eminent Album Oriented Rock stations throughout the 70's.
But Rydgren and the American Lutheran Church aggressively syndicated the show beyond New York, and in that effort, they issued a double LP in 1967 called New Life Radio Spots and Cantata, which distilled Rydgren's swinging message of redemption into bite size bits for other radio stations to play. If they liked the Silhouette segments on the New Life LPs, they could pick up the whole show, as American Armed Forces Radio did in 1968. The 2-LP set was issued to radio stations only, but the segments were later reissued a few years ago on a single LP called Silhouette Segments. That reissue wisely omitted the LP-length Cantata, which was along the lines of The Electric Prunes Mass In F Minor.
In 1982, John suffered a debilitating stroke while on the air, which left him with a form of dyslexia, forcing him to relearn reading and speaking from the third-grade level. With therapy he rejoined KRTH in 1986. John passed away on December 26, 1988. He was 56.
