This volume captures the radio scene during the 1970s and 1980s, chronicling how a small FM rock station, WMMS, became the top-rated station in Northeast Ohio and made Cleveland one of the most important radio markets in the world. It includes interviews with radio legends.

Who would have known that a young friendship and a passion for winning contests on the radio would turn into a life-long successful career. Perry Stone quickly rose to fame early in his radio broadcasting career, but the life of glamour he pictured was far from the truth of being a popular shock jock. Follow Perry's career and life in the cut-throat radio industry spanning a total of over forty years and meet some of Perry's most memorable fans, opponents, celebrities, and rock and roll stars! You've never seen a behind the scenes look of the disc jockey and radio universe quite like this! About the Author Perry Stone is a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University with a BA in communications and over forty years’ experience across the nation in the radio and broadcasting industry. He has a wife and two grown children and is currently the host of a LIVE streamed and listener viewed interactive show every afternoon on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Twitch. He has a unique knowledge of every logo and team uniform change in sports, from Baseball to Football and Hockey. Stone is also featured in a chapter of the 2012 book, There’s Nothing Louder Than Dead Air.

I'm not sure how this happened, I was never inspired to write a book, but I sure do enjoy telling stories. So I wrote a few of them down. My first radio job was at the third FM station in the country to switch to a rock format. I'm going to tell you about my 1974 interview with The Doors Jim Morrison. Who died in Paris in 1971. Or my vacation on the road with Skynyrd. One of the most challenging things about writing this book was reliving the story of how a serial rapist trapped, beat, and raped my girlfriend. You will read about what happened to her, how she dealt with it, and how it affected her life and mine. I also detail how my magazine, Radio Magazine, was embezzled by Stax Records and Union Planters Bank, how I helped the Attorney General at the time, Hugh Stanton, in his investigation into the bank and one of its officials. Radio Daze takes a lighthearted look at some serious issues. It also gives you an inside look at the other side of the radio microphone and what it was like to be a disc jockey in the seventies. Radio was fun then. The DJs got free albums, concert tickets, movies, and meals, much different from today's radio.

If you drive into any American city with the car stereo blasting, you’ll undoubtedly find radio stations representing R&B/hip-hop, country, Top 40, adult contemporary, rock, and Latin, each playing hit after hit within that musical format. American music has created an array of rival mainstreams, complete with charts in multiple categories. Love it or hate it, the world that radio made has steered popular music and provided the soundtrack of American life for more than half a century. In Top 40 Democracy, Eric Weisbard studies the evolution of this multicentered pop landscape, along the way telling the stories of the Isley Brothers, Dolly Parton, A&M Records, and Elton John, among others. He sheds new light on the upheavals in the music industry over the past fifteen years and their implications for the audiences the industry has shaped. Weisbard focuses in particular on formats—constructed mainstreams designed to appeal to distinct populations—showing how taste became intertwined with class, race, gender, and region. While many historians and music critics have criticized the segmentation of pop radio, Weisbard finds that the creation of multiple formats allowed different subgroups to attain a kind of separate majority status—for example, even in its most mainstream form, the R&B of the Isley Brothers helped to create a sphere where black identity was nourished. Music formats became the one reliable place where different groups of Americans could listen to modern life unfold from their distinct perspectives. The centers of pop, it turns out, were as complicated, diverse, and surprising as the cultural margins. Weisbard’s stimulating book is a tour de force, shaking up our ideas about the mainstream music industry in order to tease out the cultural importance of all performers and songs.

There is a long-standing relationship between broadcasting and sports, and nowhere is this more evident than in the marriage of baseball and radio: a slow sport perfectly suited to the word-painting of broadcasters. This work covers the development of the baseball broadcasting industry from the first telegraph reports of games in progress, the influence of early pioneers at Pittsburgh's KDKA and Chicago's WGN, including the first World Series broadcast, the launch of the Telstar Satellite, the Carlton Fisk homerun in the 1975 World Series, which changed how baseball is broadcast, through the latest computer graphics, HD television, and the Internet.

The definitive story of the pioneering rock radio station that galvanized a city and a generation

The cocreator of the Washington Post’s “Made by History” blog reveals how the rise of conservative talk radio gave us a Republican Party incapable of governing and paved the way for Donald Trump. America’s long road to the Trump presidency began on August 1, 1988, when, desperate for content to save AM radio, top media executives stumbled on a new format that would turn the political world upside down. They little imagined that in the coming years their brainchild would polarize the country and make it nearly impossible to govern. Rush Limbaugh, an enormously talented former disc jockey—opinionated, brash, and unapologetically conservative—pioneered a pathbreaking infotainment program that captured the hearts of an audience no media executive knew existed. Limbaugh’s listeners yearned for a champion to punch back against those maligning their values. Within a decade, this format would grow from fifty-nine stations to over one thousand, keeping millions of Americans company as they commuted, worked, and shouted back at their radios. The concept pioneered by Limbaugh was quickly copied by cable news and digital media. Radio hosts form a deep bond with their audience, which gives them enormous political power. Unlike elected representatives, however, they must entertain their audience or watch their ratings fall. Talk radio boosted the Republican agenda in the 1990s, but two decades later, escalation in the battle for the airwaves pushed hosts toward ever more conservative, outrageous, and hyperbolic content. Donald Trump borrowed conservative radio hosts’ playbook and gave Republican base voters the kind of pugnacious candidate they had been demanding for decades. By 2016, a political force no one intended to create had completely transformed American politics.

This very readable book will get you all fired up about small-town life in the 1950s! Flaunting a Dave Barry brand of humor, dozens of period photos, 50 unique drawings, 31 stand-alone stories, and often a literary level of writing, it rides the reader on a metaphorical Whizzer motorbike journey through life, from days of innocence through forsaken virtue. Along the way, village fires are both personal tragedies and popular roadside attractions. Actual events and historical personages mist over like foggy mornings. How much of each account is fact, how much is fiction? The author asks the reader to decide--and offers help with two different beginnings and endings! Everything in this book is, of course, absolutely, positively true. Sort of.

Soulful and with the sweetest taboo voice, STARR is an exceptional songbird, born to sing. A star rising in the Philadelphia music scene, she is always fresh with new lyrics as the microphone fits comfortably in her, coffee brown hands. Full lips part to expose her pearly whites as, her voice releases influences of Jazz, Soul, Gospel, R&B, Hip - Hop and Neo Soul. Rofiki, STARRS manager and Rastafarian boyfriend of ten years, has been away for a few weeks in New York City, supposedly putting together a new deal for her. But upon his return, STARR discovers that Sneaky Rofiki believes, her style and genre of music isnt what the music industry seeks. Unknown to her, he is investing, his interest on a new artist, a new freaky, a new Kandi Gyal. Bluesy with the bluest eyes, a U.S. Marine returning from war and the new owner of a coffee shop. Where he notices the intense discussion that left STARR ready to battle. He comes to the rescue or is she just in time to save him? The beat goes on with BearLove, the bad-est and wicked-est drummer internationally that inspires, STARR to sing and groove to new tunes.