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Author Topic: Influential KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer talks about being taken off the air  (Read 817 times)

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Influential KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer talks about being taken off the air

By Peter Larsen | plarsen@scng.com | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: May 26, 2017 at 5:18 pm | UPDATED: May 26, 2017 at 10:22 pm

When Rodney Bingenheimer made his debut as a DJ on KROQ/106.7 FM in the summer of 1976, playing the music he loved no matter how offbeat or obscure, he opened every show with his unofficial theme song, “This Could Be The Night” by the Modern Folk Quartet.

“Because every time I went there I thought this could be my last show,” Bingenheimer, 69, explained on Friday. “I played really way out music, all kinds of weird songs. Things from England. Of course a lot of local bands. So I always thought this could be the night.”

And for 41 years it never was that night – until now.

Earlier this week, Bingenheimer says KROQ management called him to a meeting where he was told his long-running show, “Rodney on the ROQ,” was over. His farewell broadcast will air from 12 a.m. to 3 a.m. on Monday, June 5.

“They said they were going through a lot of changes, a lot of cutbacks, and they’ve got new management people coming in,” Bingenheimer said. “I didn’t leave the show on my own, but they were very good to me the whole time I was there.”

But while he’s much too humble to ever say, or even think it, it’s really KROQ, its listeners and the scores of bands that Bingenheimer discovered over four decades on the air that owe him a heartfelt thanks for all that he’s contributed.

“I would say Rodney Bingenheimer has probably made more bands famous than any other DJ in America,” said Chris Carter, host of the long-running “Breakfast With The Beatles” program which airs Monday through Friday on the Beatles Channel on Sirius satellite radio. “A combination of his good ears, and the amount of time he’s been on the radio.

“The Ramones and Blondie, you can go right down the line,” Carter says. “If you talk to the Bangles they’ll tell you, ‘Oh, Rodney, well, we sent him our cassette …’ . Duran Duran, they were big all over the world but in America no one was playing these guys.”

Carter knows this first-hand, of course, because Bingenheimer also discovered Dramarama, the alternative rock group Carter co-founded, and was the first to play its iconic “Anything, Anything (I’ll Give You),” the 1985 single KROQ still plays religiously to this day.

“He’s the reason I have a career,” Carter says. “We were just a band from New Jersey who put an import record out on New Rose records in France,” he says. “And because we had Edie Sedgwick on the cover Rodney made the purchase at Poo-Bah Records in Pasadena and started playing ‘Anything, Anything.'”

He came to KROQ after a career that included stints as a music columnist for Go! magazine in the late ’60s, a few years as a Los Angeles field rep for Mercury Records, through which he met and embarked on a life-long friendship with David Bowie, and as the operator of an influential club, Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco, which in the early and mid-’70s introduced L.A. to the glitter and glam rock sounds coming out of England at the time.

“I’ll never forget how for such a small guy he had a big persona, a lot of presence,” said Cherie Currie, lead singer in the Runaways, the mid-’70s band of teenage girls that Bingenheimer championed. “He would walk through his very small club and everyone would notice him. I was 14 or 15 and I’d see him – I was in awe.”

And when the Runaways’ debut arrived in the same summer that Bingenheimer started his KROQ show?

“He was instrumental in helping the Runaways,” Currie said. “Because he played our music on the radio before anybody did.”

Bingenheimer said he simply played the songs he loved, no matter if it was a brand-new song by a then-unknown band such as Blondie, Cheap Trick, Joan Jett or the Ramones – all of whom Bingenheimer notes thanked him during their inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – or some older but obscure number he remembered from the ’60s, like “Surfer’s Holiday” by actress Annette Funicello or “Dirty Water” by the Standells.

“He was playing not just punk and new wave music,” said music historian Harvey Kubernik,  whose new book, “1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love,” places interviews with Bingenheimer alongside everyone from Leonard Cohen and Johnny Cash to Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and Ray Manzarek of the Doors. “He played regional music and he was very accessible to the musicians and the people of this town.”

Kubernik first met Bingenheimer on the set of “The Monkees” television series when they were both still teens in 1966 – Bingenheimer had a small part on the show, Kubernik’s mother worked on the lot. He’s known him ever since and says his departure from Southern California radio will be a huge loss, even though in recent years KROQ had shifted his show to the hard-to-catch weekly slot of midnight to 3 a.m. Mondays.

“I feel about him like I did with the departure of Art Laboe from our local radio,” Kubernik said. “These people aren’t just fixtures on our local radios, they become sonic guides.”

And unlike many music lovers he always stayed fresh, dialed into into groups such as the Regrettes or the Atomics, two new discoveries he says he’s playing a lot lately.

Isis Queen, the singer in the punkish hard rock band Barb Wire Dolls, says she and her band mates were still in their homeland of Greece in 2010 when they stumbled onto “The Mayor Of Sunset Strip” – the 2004 documentary about Bingenheimer that Chris Carter produced – and thought how wonderful it would be to be one of Rodney’s discoveries. Soon after, the band began getting airplay on his show.

“We just had a demo out, a six-song EP, and he started playing our music immediately,” Queen said Friday from Cheltenham, England, where the band is wrapping up a tour before it embarks on the Vans Warped Tour across the United States this summer.

Bingenheimer said he hasn’t played Barb Wire Dolls lately – “They did some naughty stuff,” he says cryptically – but Queen says she is a fan nonetheless.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen now that he’s not going to be on the air,” she said. “He literally is the reason why good music is out in the world today.”

KROQ released a statement Friday thanking Bingenheimer for all his service. “We will forever be grateful for the indelible mark that ‘Rodney on the ROQ’ has left on this station, our listeners, and the alt-rock music scene,” said Kevin Weatherly, the station’s program director. “Rodney helped shape KROQ into the great station it is today and we wish him nothing but great success in the future.”

Bingenheimer said he’s sad to be leaving the station and touched by the outpouring of support he’s received since he announced his departure on his Facebook on Thursday evening. And he’s already lined up a manager and is starting to talk with people about what kind of outlet he might find next to continue his show in one form or another.

“There are some good projects that I can’t really talk about yet, but there might be some good things coming,” he said. One that he can talk about, though, is an upcoming Christmas album, “Santa’s Got A GTO: Rodney on the ROQ’s Favorite Christmas Songs, Vol. 2,” which will feature contributions from bands such as the Donnas and the Dollyrots.

And whatever the future holds, he said he’ll be happy to keep playing cool music for music lovers – preferably on Sunday.

“I remember when I first started my show they said, ‘What day would you like to do your show on?'” Bingenheimer said. “I’d say, “I’d like to do it on a Sunday, because Sundays are always so boring.’ I always wanted Sunday to get over and start the week, so I hope to stay on a Sunday.”

 

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