Dick Biondi, an exuberant, fast-talking Top 40 radio persona, nicknamed “the Screamer,” who within the early Sixties grew to become certainly one of Chicago’s hottest disc jockeys and, because of the energy of his station’s sign, was heard properly past the town, died on June 26 in Chicago. He was 90.
His dying was confirmed by Pamela Enzweiler-Pulice, the director of a forthcoming documentary, “The Voice That Rocked America: The Dick Biondi Story.”
Mr. Biondi was a yeller, although not a shock jock, at WLS-AM, which had simply modified its format to rock ‘n’ roll when he was employed for the late night shift in 1960 for $378 every week (about $3,900 in right now’s {dollars}). The station’s attain into 38 states and Canada offered Mr. Biondi with a platform that made him a serious media persona as rock music’s reputation surged.
Mr. Biondi, who was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1998, rapidly established himself as a Chicago star. He known as himself “the Wild I-tralian”; hosted report hops and charity occasions; and recorded a novelty track, “On Top of a Pizza,” a parody of “On Top of Old Smoky” that in 1961 grew to become a neighborhood hit.
“Nobody came close to his personality,” Ms. Enzweiler-Pulice stated in a cellphone interview. “He was wild, outrageous, goofy and uplifting. He was like a big kid — he was one of us. He spoke our language.”
In 1961, The Gavin Report, an business publication, named him the Top 40 disc jockey of the yr. His night rankings ultimately rose to the best in Chicago radio.
Despite “operating in the shadowland of the night-time disk jockey, where the glare of national publicity and the adulation of the fan magazines seldom penetrates,” Roger Ebert, the longer term movie critic, wrote in late 1961 in The Daily Illini, the coed newspaper of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “Biondi has managed in the past two years to become one of the most famous men in the Midwest.”
The Chicago Tribune has reported over time that Biondi’s present attracted as a lot as a 60 p.c share of all listeners within the Chicago market. In 1962, The Tribune stated that almost all of his native viewers consisted of youngsters.
Ms. Enzweiler-Pulice was certainly one of Mr. Biondi’s younger followers. She began a Biondi fan membership and wrote a e-newsletter. She was 13 when she met him for the primary time at a shopping mall, the place tons of of individuals watched him arrive in a helicopter.
“Wherever he went,” she stated, “fans mobbed him.”
WLS grew to become a essential a part of the hit-making machine for report firms, and Mr. Biondi was a major participant in that equation. He was particularly vital to the Four Seasons, whose label, Vee-Jay, was primarily based in Chicago.
Another group that was on Vee-Jay, a minimum of for some time, was the Beatles. And it’s attainable that when Mr. Biondi performed their Vee-Jay single “Please Please Me” in early 1963, it was the primary time a Beatles track had been heard on a station within the United States, stated Mark Lewisohn, whose guide “Tune In” (2013) is the primary of a projected trilogy known as “The Beatles: All These Years.”
But Mr. Biondi’s time at WLS resulted in 1963 after solely three years. He was fired when he complained in regards to the quantity of commercials on his present in contrast with that of a competitor, Dick Kemp, referred to as “the Wild Child,” on a rival station. Mr. Biondi stated that his carping angered the gross sales supervisor; in a single confrontation on the studio, Mr. Biondi, armed with a letter opener, needed to be restrained by two engineers.
This was, Mr. Biondi stated, certainly one of 25 occasions he was dismissed from varied jobs over the course of his profession.
Soon after his dismissal, Herb Lyon, a gossip columnist in The Tribune, reported: “Ex WLS Dee Jay Dick Biondi, still the youngster’s hero, trotting ’round town, pushing his own new album, ‘Biondi Talks to Teenagers,’ a real twist.”
Richard Orlando Biondi was born on Sept. 13, 1932, in Endicott, N.Y., close to Binghamton, to Michael and Rose Biondi. He first carried out on radio when he was 8, and, as he stood outdoors a studio in Auburn, N.Y., the announcer he was watching requested him to return inside and skim a business for a ladies’s clothes retailer.
That began his love affair with radio. As an adolescent he labored as a gofer at a station in Binghamton, the place one of many announcers tutored him on his diction. In 1950, after graduating from highschool, he obtained a job in Corning, N.Y., as a sportscaster.
For the subsequent decade he labored at stations in Alexandria, La. (the place he performed R&B and known as highschool soccer video games); York, Pa.; Youngstown, Ohio; and Buffalo.
He hosted a report hop in 1957 starring Jerry Lee Lewis, who was on the apex of his fiery fame however was upstaged on the occasion by the actor Michael Landon, who talked his means by his single “Gimme a Little Kiss (Will Ya, Huh?).”
“The girls went nuts,” Mr. Biondi stated in an interview on the tv present “Chicago Tonight” in 2003. “You know how good-looking he was.”
Mr. Biondi grew a beard, which he dyed from week to week to match the official colours of the excessive colleges the place he frequently hosted report hops. He sat on a flagpole for 3 days and nights on a listener’s dare.
And he stated he met Elvis Presley backstage in Cleveland and persuaded him to autograph the white shirt he was sporting; Mr. Biondi then wore it to a hop, the place followers shredded it so badly that he needed to go to a hospital emergency room to deal with his badly scratched again.
After leaving Chicago in 1963, Mr. Biondi spent the subsequent half-century bouncing round. He moved to KRLA in Los Angeles in 1963; hosted a nationally syndicated present on Mutual Radio from 1964 till it was canceled in 1965; after which returned to KRLA, the place in 1965 he and his fellow D.J.s, together with Bob Eubanks and Casey Kasem, launched the Beatles on the Hollywood Bowl. He got here again to Chicago in 1967, at WCFL.
“You know, the day I left Chicago, I started wanting to come back to it,” he advised The Tribune in 1967. “It’s the only place I’ve ever been that’s made an impression on me.”
But in 1972 he left for a station in Cincinnati. He later moved on to Boston and North Myrtle Beach, S.C., earlier than coming again to Chicago for good in 1983, most importantly because the host of a present at a brand new oldies station, WJMK-FM, for 21 years. He returned to WLS (this time on the FM dial) from 2006 till the station ended its affiliation with him in 2018.
His survivors embody his spouse, Maribeth Biondi, and his sister, Geraldine Wallace.
Many of Mr. Biondi’s encounters with rock luminaries remained vivid a long time later.
For instance, he recalled that after Michael Landon, who was then starring within the movie “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” wowed the group of a number of hundred followers in 1957, Jerry Lee Lewis went onstage for his second set and carried out 14 songs.
“He goes crazy in the second show,” Mr. Biondi stated. “He walks off and here’s Michael Landon. He says, ‘OK, pretty boy, top me this time.’”
Source: www.nytimes.com