There`s a wiseguy in every crowd.
”Hey, Biondi-are you still alive?” yells a fellow who`s had a few too many.
”My grandma used to listen to you on the radio. She said you were hot.”
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Another wiseguy chimes in:
”Say, Biondi-you must be as old as dirt.”
So, does Dick Biondi-who has been a rock `n` roll deejay since before there was rock `n` roll-get mad? Does he mind being called an old man in front of a roomful of aging yuppies, all dancing to dusty Buddy Holly records?
Are you kidding? The man is in rock `n` roll heaven.
”Hey-you with the beer gut,” shouts Biondi, his voice rattling the speakers the way it always did on WLS and WCFL during his heyday in the `60s and early `70s. ”Thanks for remembering the name. I love `ya.”
There is no stopping Dick Biondi. Neither the passage of time nor the taunts of hecklers nor any other impediment can prevent him from playing rock `n` roll records and delivering corny jokes, usually at a decibel level exceeding what the human ear was meant to withstand.
Biondi has been knocked down more times than Leon Spinks, yet he keeps coming back for more. He has been at the top, the king of Chicago rock at WLS and WCFL; and he has been at the bottom, toiling from 1973 to `83 at a two-bit radio station in Myrtle Beach, S.C., for ”$97 and some cents a week.”
Right now, he`s somewhere in between, spinning oldies from 6 to 10 p.m. weeknights and 2 to 6 p.m. Saturdays at WJMK (104 FM). When he isn`t yelling into a microphone at the radio station, he`s yelling into one at innumerable record hops and reunions, where he`s hired to bring back the good old days.
Nobody does it better.
”How many of you folks go back with me to WLS and `CFL?” he shouts, and he`s probably not half-surprised when the entire room starts screaming its response.
”How many of you went to bed every night with the radio at your pillow and my voice in your ear?” he teases, as the women in the crowd begin to squeal.
No wonder. To anyone who grew up in Chicago-or anywhere else in the 40-odd states that picked up the WLS and WCFL signals-Biondi was it. He was hot five years before superjock Larry Lujack even went to work at WLS (in 1965). He was a seasoned pro when `80s crassmeisters such as Steve Dahl and Garry Meier were barely out of diapers.
He has seen it all.
”But out of every place I`ve been,” says Biondi, back behind the mike at the WJMK studios on North Michigan Avenue, ”the years at `LS (1960-63) and `CFL (1967-73) were the ultimate high.
”The electricity was there, and, frankly, we (deejays) barely realized it. Most people who were around at the time, though, tell me it kicked in immediately.”
Indeed it did, beginning May 2, 1960, when a pack of new deejays
(including Biondi, Jim Dunbar, Mort Crowley and Bob Hale) were hired at WLS and proceeded to turn the city on its ear.
This was the era, one must remember, when the airwaves were dominated by the honeyed sounds of Patti Page, Pat Boone and Tennessee Ernie Ford. Then along came Biondi-who quickly earned a nickname as ”the Screamer”-to spin the hormonally charged music of Little Richard, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and the like.
At first, not everyone was pleased.
”I`ll never forget my first night on `LS,” recalls Biondi. ”The next morning at an `LS executive meeting, one of the managers said, `What the hell have we got on the air from 9 to midnight? Let`s get rid of this nut.`
”To this day, I`m not sure why they didn`t fire me on the spot. Much of America, you see, wasn`t ready for my kind of music.”
America`s youngsters, however, were. Within weeks of Biondi`s arrival, Chicago-area kids began crowding the WLS lobby, hoping for a glimpse of the Screamer. When Biondi appeared at a Thillens Stadium benefit for an asthma hospital in 1961, he had to stay ”in the ticket cage with cops, because the kids were getting at me. They were literally ripping clothes off me. What a high.”
Certainly anyone who listened to Biondi loved him or hated him.
”One day, I get off work at midnight, walk into the elevator to go downstairs, and when the elevator door opens, there`s a gun pointed in my face,” recalls Biondi.
”The guy holding the gun is clearly drunk, and he`s got the building`s security guard facing the wall.
”So then the guy with the gun says to me, `I`m sick and tired of hearing you insult the Yankees.` I had always been putting down the Yankees because I never could stand New York.
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”So the guy continues: `I`m going to blow your head off.` ”
The police showed up in time, but Biondi has been greeted with similar degrees of warmth for about as long as he has been behind a microphone.
The man probably has too much energy for his own good. Seated at the controls in the WJMK studio on a recent Saturday afternoon, he`s
simultaneously yelling into the mike, jamming tapes into tape players, fielding questions from an interviewer and answering a flood of phone calls
(the switchboard is lit up like an overloaded amplifier).
Amid the chaos, he recalls-almost with pride-the various ways he got in trouble during his brief but stormy tenure at WLS.
”One day, a manager at `LS puts out this memo that staffers cannot accept any Christmas gift worth more than $25,” he recalls.
”I was really ticked off about that. So then this record company sends the deejays these huge, beautiful steaks, each worth about $27.
”So late on a Friday night, I went into the manager`s office, put the steaks on his desk with a note saying, `These were over $25.`
”Can you imagine what his office smelled like Monday morning?
”I loved it.”
The manager didn`t.
And when Biondi got into a brawl with a WLS executive in 1963 over another matter, that was the end.
”There are all kinds of stories of why I got fired from WLS,” says Biondi. ”I did not tell a dirty joke, even though everybody says I did.
”What really happened was that I had been fighting with management over all the commercials they were making me play.
”So one day, I came in to the station to prepare for my Sunday night show, and as I walked down the hall, one of the sales guys said something real nasty to me, like, `Fine fellow Italian you are, trying to get rid of the commercials.`
”But I just kept walking, because I knew that with my temper, something was going to happen.
”So he followed me into the control room and kept taunting me.
”And finally I said, `If you don`t leave, I`m going to. . .`
”He started to say something, so I went after him. We wound up on the floor, and they had to separate us.
”Then the general manager (Gene Taylor) walked in and said, `Go home Biondi, and don`t come in tonight.`
”Well, he was trying to tell me to go home and cool off, but I took it as being fired and said, `That`s it.`
”And that`s really the gospel of what happened-it was a sad day for me.” (Taylor, who`s now an executive at KKAR radio in Omaha, says, ”I can`t remember precisely what the disagreement was about, but there was a confrontation and Biondi`s account of what happened is correct. We`ve been on friendly terms since.”)
For the next four years, Biondi bounced around the country. His odyssey included a couple of stopovers at KRLA in Los Angeles, where, as part of a promotion, he spent 10 days in a cage with a chimp. ”The idea was for me to stay locked in the cage with the monkey and a typewriter until the chimp typed out the station`s call letters,” Biondi recalls.
Yet even if Biondi`s career was as volatile as his temper, not for a minute did he lose faith in the music.
”When I was in L.A., I introduced the Beatles live in concert twice, and I introduced the Stones, too.
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”Introducing the Stones at the Hollywood Bowl was one of the most fascinating things that happened to me. The concert was at night, but the flashbulbs made it seem like daylight.
”When I introduced the Beatles to L.A., they had to bring these guys in and out in an armored truck. Which is not to say that everybody liked these Brits coming over here. Late in 1963, I started playing the Beatles on KRLA, and I would get calls saying, `Get that crap off the air and play some Beach Boys.` ”
By the time Biondi returned to Chicago in `67, rock `n` roll was all over the radio dial, and revolution was in the streets.
”Those were frightening times,” says Biondi, who is not easily frightened, ”what with the `68 Democratic convention, the clashes in Lincoln Park, the assassinations, the riots. We had bomb scares at the station practically every other day.
”Being a rock `n` roll deejay, I felt sort of stuck in the middle. I was playing things by Cream, the Beatles, the Stones, all of that music of the young generation. But I really felt sorry for the policemen, who were getting human waste thrown at them.
”Yet when it came down to it, my audience was the rebels, and I was a rebel, so, ultimately, I felt I was exactly where I should be.”
By 1973, Biondi was fired from WCFL, this time by a program director who didn`t like his abrasive style. And a few months after that, he was on the street again, bounced from his job at a Cincinnati station.
Biondi had had enough of the rock `n` roll life. He flat-out quit radio.