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(More customer reviews)Ben Fong Torres' love and admiration for the early days of Top 40 radio shows through in this book. He has crafted a wonderful history of how Top 40 began, features on numerous radio personalities (among them Tom Donahue, B Mitch Reed, Robert W Morgan, The Real Don Steele, Alan Freed, Dick Biondi, the list goes on and on). And the CD included with the book featuring airchecks of some of these amazing personalities is wild. Hearing DJ's like Gary Owens, B Mitch Reed, Casey Kasem or Tom Donahue in their early days is a hoot.
If the book has a West Coast slant on personalities, perhaps that's only because Torres grew up in the Bay Area. However, he does not give short shrift to anyone. He also goes into great detail about the people who helped create this format: Chuck Blore of "Color Radio" fame, Bill Drake and Ron Jacobs of "Boss Radio" fame, Gordon McLendon and Tod Storz, among others. It's ironic in a way that Torres' claim to fame came later as first a journalist for Rolling Stone and as a DJ on KSAN in San Francisco (one of those "underground" FM stations that loved to poke fun at the Top 40 stations).
The book traces the beginnings, development, and "growing pains" of this format. How at one time it was hip, then became "square" when the underground FM stations hit the airwaves, and how it now seems to have emerged again. And funny how the underground stations developed as a kind of "antidote" to very restrictive Top 40 formats, just as the Top 40 stations developed as something different to the standard fare of that time.
Amazing stories abound in this book, and being an ex DJ myself I could relate to them. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I agree with another reviewer that this book is must reading for any past or present DJ, or any student of the media.
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This lively blast from the past peels back the many layers of the Top 40 phenomenon: the DJs, fans, singles, jingles, dedications, contests, requests and more. The book features interviews with such renowned radio personalities and programmers as Casey Kasem, Dick Clark, Wolfman Jack, "Cousin Brucie" Morrow, Gary Owens and many others, and includes an exclusive CD with "airchecks" - rare recordings from 16 legendary DJs on actual Top 40 broadcasts - so that readers can hear the crazed, creative and compelling voices that made Top 40 so memorable. Also includes lots of fantastic black-and-white photos to help readers put faces to the voices they know so well, a bibliography and index, and a special Top of the Pops section featuring the Number One records of Top 40 radio from 1957 through 1997 as calculated by the staff of Gavin.
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