History Wire

Much has been made of how such 1950s rock stars as Elvis Presley transformed America by attracting “crossover” audiences—African-Americans drawn to the same music listened to by white teenagers. But Elvis would have been dead in the water without radio, which played over and over again the latest releases from Sam Phillips’s Sun Records and dozens of other new labels.

Until then, the postwar generation was poised to give radio a hasty burial so it could get back to watching television, a medium expected to bulldoze all other media in its way. But TV had never met a twenty-something from Omaha named Todd Storz, who helped invent the Top-40 concept. Americans then and now love lists and obsessed over whether their favorite new hit by Brenda Lee or Chuck Berry had moved this week into the top 10.

Storz mortgaged body and soul in 1949 to buy a tiny Nebraska radio station from the local newspaper. There, he sold commercial spots for $1 each—“a dollar a holler.” The rest is history, as Murray the K, Wolfman Jack and Alan Freed became household names, with their radio shows beamed from coast to coast to a frenzied teenage audience. While chronicling the Golden Age of Rock and Roll, author Marc Fisher fast forwards to the modern age of the Shock Jock, introducing America to the likes of Howard Stern and Don Imus. For anyone in his of her middle years, Fisher’s book is evocative to the max.

By Steve Goddard

http://www.historywire.com/2007/02/book_alert_some.html

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