New year. New life. New book …Happy New Year!
It’s no secret … I’m a closet DJ. Seriously, I hide in the closet, grab a shoe and hold it up like a microphone, and in my deepest “DJ” voice … “This is BFYP-FM broadcasting live from San Diego at the edge of the ocean!” LOL
Well, OK, I don’t really sit in the closet, and the shoe-thing would be kinda smelly, but I have been playing on the radio this year already. Where best to promote the first “surprise” book in the new Blast from Your Past ™ series? Why am I surprised? Because it isn’t the first book planned to roll off the press.
My original idea was to interview a bunch of pioneering Rock & Roll Radio DJs (I did–41 to be exact) and a couple of band members (again, 3 came forward) and surround their personal stories with history, trivia, and fun in the first of the series: Blast from Your Past! Rock & Roll Radio DJs who ROCKED Your World! 1954-1979.
Ah, but life always seems to have its own agenda, while you’re making plans. Juggling work (you know, that thing that sorta pays the bills) and family, and trying to write what amounts to 44 magazine articles in one book is taking a reeeally long time.
I also discovered that the first five years of my timeline, 1954-1959, is truly fascinating and forms the foundation to what was to come in the next two decades. So … taadaa! I give you …
Blast from Your Past! Rock & Roll Radio DJs: the First Five Years 1954-1959, on sale now. In 130 pages I’ve set the stage for the 25-year saga. The first five years chronicle the imminent demise of radio as television took over the world, and revels in the outcome when the new upstart music genre infiltrated the airwaves.
Rock & Roll rescued radio. There. It’s declared. And near as I can tell, it’s true. Just when television had radio on the ropes (think Marlon Brando movie On the Waterfront), Bill Haley and His Comets had the young’uns dancing in the aisles of the new movie, Blackboard Jungle, with “Rock Around the Clock.” Soon after, Elvis began swinging his yummy hips, and the rest is history.
BFYP … the First Five Years is a fun trip down Memory Lane for those of us who were there, and I hope, entertaining history for young’uns interested in music, radio, or what their grandparents might have been doing at their age. What a difference a few decades make!
Rockin’ on … LR
