Billboard magazine raved over the book. Reviewer Claude Hall wrote: "The book is must reading for everyone in radio. Record Promotion men and those men who've been closely associated with radio over the years will find the book fascinating too." Passman has been quoted in probably hundreds of other music industry books. He even appears in the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
What's most interesting is that the author, Arnold Passman, isn't even a radio man. He was a staff writer for playboy and Scanlaris magazine. He's also been a freelance writer and a publicist. I wish I knew more about him, but from the text I'd assume he was a rock fan. The book has been lightly criticized for ignoring country radio and soul, to focus on rock n roll but for a book covering multiple decades I think it's as comprehensive as can be expected. The Deejays has come back into print this year in a digital edition with a new afterward by Passman.
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Thank you for mentioning me in your blurb about "The Deejays" by Arnold Passman.
ReplyDeleteClaude Hall
www.claudehallonline.com
jose baby,
ReplyDeletewhere you? lotta grazie for your nice essay on the deejays. i have other writings, including a play about the 1st black dj, jack l. cooper, chicago. if you care to further identify, which i'd like, the afterword in the deejays on kindle, it is entitled "How We Ha Hate To Get Up in the Morning," the 80 year history of powerful wake up radio, through 2005, which was my primary interest in the deejays--the comic. i'll be glad to e-mail stuff, send me your e-mail address.
hasta anonya, lotta grazie, balmy salaami, let's do hunch, ornette is our safety net & break a legacy,
Arnoldo Passman is unique as his Inner Berkeley Owl Totem and was the magus that greeted me when I got there about a quarter century of hot activism after him. He has since, like his East Bay neighbor Ishmael Reed been hard at play writing experimental stuff for stage or the radio arts. Unlike Ishmael Reed, Arnoldo hasn't had the energy to get these high concepts and cracklin' dialogue of a Satyr-i-CON scabrous nature, often to do with bid-net as usual in our Security State down upon the boards of even a neighborhood theater. Not there are many of those as even the East Bay has gone the way of San Francisco and many Bay Area towns all the way down to Silicon Valley TOO BIG TO FAIL\JAIL and most of U.S. suffering through our 50 years of quantified national Wage Stag-NATION and Food Stamp Nation being TOO PO' to rent or even be tolerated sleeping in a car on the high speculative value of most Bay Area towns and strip malls.
ReplyDeleteHealth and balance to all who read and pass on word of THE DEEJAYS: How the Tribal Chieftains Got to Where They're At... I've seen high school age kids on mass transit buses and TriMet Light Rail up here in PoTown, Ore area reading and toting this 1971 book of media insight and seer-worthy prophecy of Vo-De-Ville at the End Times...
Or New Beginning Times as Arnoldo Passman and his sources for this well-researched book are like Pynchon's novels of the era, layered with paranoia and fueled by Public Interest activism that soaks up all the creativity that counter-cultures produce in what appears to be an open system. The Big Predator of Entropy (2nd Law of Thermodynamics, Chapter F, Verse ma) stalks Arnoldo's purveyors of captivating hot air, yet that is the meta tension of da whole wide woyld and da universes and black holes tween here and there. Da Steam Engine Gwine Round Da Bend....
Health and balance here as we enter Year 3 of Pandemic Perhaps In Perpetuity Throughout the Known Universe,
along with all those epic wars and conflicts our mytho-poetics recorded and we preserve and ritualistically enact as self-fulfilling prophecy. Up yer silk Mother Trickster Spider, Turtle Island will thrive when U.S. mere mortals may no longer survive.
Keep on doing!
Love ya Arnoldo like the Love That Radiates Around
(c)Marc Jonson aka Mark Johnson
Tio Mitchito
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters, Song Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of Atonement Seekers)
Media Discussion List\Looksee