Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor
Radio Jockeys in the United States have occupied a special place in our communities.
Operating at once as a community voice that is as familiar as a family friend; a trusted news source and sometimes community therapist. But the primary role that American radio jockeys fulfilled was that of cultural gatekeepers that judged first whether new music was good enough to reach their listeners ears.
The list of legendary radio jockeys is long: Alan “Moondog” Freed, Petey “The Voice of DC” Greene, Bruce Morrow, Wolfman Jack, “Big Daddy Tom” Donahue and Howard Stern, to name a few. Film biopics have been done a few of these while others have become a fictional presence in film and television. But one name that is not often mentioned but should is that of Dick Biondi.
Biondi’s rebel style and outrageous personality hooked in a growing number of young listeners. He called himself the “World’s Ugliest D.J” giving himself such titles as “The Screamer,” “The Big Spaghetti Slurper” – and his most famous: “The Wild I’tralian!”
Biondi was one of the first jockeys to play rock ’n’ roll music on his show. He shined a spotlight on artists who eventually become music icons.
Film director Pamela Enzweiler-Pulice is looking to bring the radio jockey’s life to the silver screen by way. To do so, Enzweiler-Pulice launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $30,000 by March 19. The campaign has garnered $9,170 so far.
She is a longtime fan of Biondi. It was Biondi’s fortitude, vision and wildly fun style that inspired her, she recently told Random Lengths News. At the age of 12 year, she listened to Biondi’s first broadcast from WLS Chicago on May 2, 1960.
“He came screaming into Chicago, shaking up the establishment and turning the town on its ear,” she said.
It was that day the station changed format from the Prairie Farm Report to The Bright New Sound — a newly formed program designed for America’s youth.
“Right then I knew Dick Biondi was my guy,” Enzweiler-Pulice said.
Biondi worked with and promoted many of the greats, including early rockabilly icons Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and pop icons like Frankie Valli, Bobby Rydell, Fabian, Paul Anka and his good friend, Bobby Darin.
He was also responsible for exposing the then emerging surf rock bands of the 1960s like the Beach Boys recording of Surfer Girl. Biondi was the first to play it on the air. Biondi was in the recording studio when the Rolling Stones recorded Satisfaction and was there to introduce them at the Hollywood Bowl.
And, perhaps his most notable but commonly forgotten promotion was that he was the first deejay to play The Beatles on American radio in 1963. And when the British band’s first American release of Please Please Me (on Chicago’s Vee Jay Records) failed to reach top charting in Chicago, Biondi brought them to Los Angeles and continued to play The Beatles’ recordings on the air.
Biondi is credited with being the first to play the Beatles’ From Me to You at KRLA, thereby increasing the band’s popularity and chart position. It was a year later that Biondi, along with Bob Eubanks introduced the Beatles at The Hollywood Bowl after their performance of their No. 1 hit, I Want to Hold Your Hand on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Some consider him not only a hit maker but a “man of faith” in varying forms — never giving up on the music — or on the young listeners.
Want to see the Dick Biondi documentary to come to the silver screen?
Donate to the Kickstarter campaign at http://tinyurl.com/Dick-Biondi.