Word: jockeys
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Bruce Bradley, the unlikely disc jockey, the polished performer, is one side of WBZ, then Dick Summer is certainly the other. Bradley, for all his sensitivity about being a disc jockey, comes out sounding like the closest thing WBZ has to a big beat New York City deejay. Dick Summer, who loves rock 'n' roll unabashedly and for the same reasons his listeners do, is probably one of the most low-key people in the business. Summer looks the part more than Bradley does. He came into the studio after 10, dressed in a sweater and sport shirt, carrying...
...thin, blond and balding. He has the disconcerting ability to talk in a completely calm and normal voice for the duration of a record, then hold up a hand in warning, switch on his mike, talk with raised pitch and volume for half a minute in perfect disc jockey jargon, put a new record on, turn off the mike, and ask, "Now what were we talking about?" When I marveled at his completely transformed on-the-air personality, he said a little defensively, "It beats working...
There is much that is defensive and self-conscious about this man, who on "What's My Line?" could probably never convince the panel that he has been a disc jockey since he was 17 and yet who broadcasts WBZ's most upbeat and teenage-oriented program. He rarely uses a word of slang off the air, never calls his music "rock 'n' roll" (it is always "pop music"), and emphasizes that "99 per cent of my friends have nothing to do with the business. You have to get away. You can't be on the air 24 hours...
...rarely talks in superlatives about songs or performers, but his conversation is full of obscure rock 'n' roll lore and comments on the state of the art. A disc jockey has a strange leader-follower relationship with his audience, since he feels an obligation to play the music that his listeners tuned in to hear (WBZ disc jockeys choose songs from two lists, the "A" list of hits and near-hits, and the "B" list of new songs that the stations music committee, composed of management and the disc jockeys on a rotating basis, has selected from the more than...
...leadership side of a disc jockey's role, to be successful, requires intuition sharpened by practice. Bradley recalls with a slightly pained laugh that the music committee "threw 'She Loves You' in the waste basket" in June, 1963 -- missing the chance to get on the Beatles' bandwagon five months before they revolutionized rock 'n' roll in America. On the credit side, he remembers that the station kept playing "You've Lost that Loving Feeling" for over a month before it started to sell, an unprecedented show of confidence for a song in the Boston area, "one of the fastest paced...