Word: djs
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...scene from Tokyo to Toronto. To be part of it, call (86-10) 6416-5615. Too tame? Pop around another corner to Club Vogue, on Gongti Dong Lu, where the state-of-the-art sound system has channeled the dubby deckwork of some of the world's leading DJs. The club is a favorite among visiting out-of-town celebrities. Subdued souls should pick a weekday night, when Vogue offers a passable dinner menu and live jazz at a volume that permits conversation. To reserve, call...
...Well, I'm from Philadelphia. I grew up in the '50s. We had some of the happenin'est DJs anywhere. And Dick Clark lived in my town...
...everything was OK. He was prematurely middle-aged; it made sense that his show's title and theme song (Charles Alexandrine's "Bandstand Boogie," as played by Les Elgart) evoked an earlier, less dangerous musical era. He didn't talk with eccentric urgency, like so many of the radio DJs of the time - his only coinages were "IFIC" (from "Flavor-ific," to describe Beechnut Gum, sponsor of a Saturday night show he hosted for a few years) and "gesachtstehagen" (then, and now, undecipherable to me). You could say that Clark was to rock 'n roll what Pat Boone...
...record stores each week. Like the shift from network radio to the rise of independent stations, Top 40 happened quickly, between 1955 and '57. It soon became so codified that by 1959 a comedy duo, Arbogast and Ross, could produce a canny satire of the format, complete with frothing DJs, helicopter traffic reports, gag commercials aimed at teens who feel excluded because they don't have zits ("Pimple-On! Adds blotches and blemishes to the clearest of skin!") and, amid all the aural clutter, an occasional song. It would last about four seconds before the DJ ramped up his rant...
...left town for a few years in the glare of the payola scandal. He returned in '62, but by then the station had both congealed and softened; the format was strangling the jock's freedom to go nuts. As Wibbage turned to cabbage, other DJs at smaller stations caught kids' attentive ears. At WCAM in Camden, across the Delaware River from Philly, Kal Rudman spun the widest playlist in the tri-state area and gave records away. (I still have a 45 that came in the mail from Kal: "Guybo" by Eddie Cochran's band, the Kelly Four...