My dad grew up in Pittsburgh in the '50s, and he used to sing Four Seasons songs on the stoop. He made me listen to Cousin Brucie - the guy who broke the Four Seasons on the radio. So I knew all of their songs, but I didn't know they were all by the ...
My mom was a folk singer and Celtic harpist. My dad was in a barbershop quartet and my great grandma was an opera singer. As I grew up, I discovered pop music and Top 40 radio, but it was in the '90s, so music was very different then - it was really ...
I have known Tavis Smiley since the 1980s, when we both worked at the same radio station in Los Angeles. He is smart, and he is a gentleman who has accorded me great respect both on and off the air.
I'm not saying that what the radio plays isn't good. My issue is with what they don't play. You can play Jay-Z, but why don't you play Jurassic 5? You can play Nas and Nelly, but why don't you play J-Live? I want to open up the door to how it was bac...
You look at what One Direction has done and just say, 'That is just lucky;' it is not. It is happening because they are talented boys, good looking lads; and yes, their songs might not be the typical songs that lots of radios want to play, but they a...
The film itself involves a New York City radio storyteller, Gabriel Noone, who strikes up a friendship with one of his fans, an abused 14-year-old teenager who is suffering from AIDS, who does not have much longer to live.
The fear of the never-ending onslaught of gizmos and gadgets is nothing new. The radio, the telephone, Facebook - each of these inventions changed the world. Each of them scared the heck out of an older generation. And each of them was invented by pe...
In radio I had one, maybe two people who cared about getting it done. I'd really be a loser if I forgot where I came from. So I show them the love. And how hard is it really to be interested in someone's life?
The Beatles were in a different stratosphere, a different planet to the rest of us. All I know is when I heard 'Love Me Do' on the radio, I remember walking down the street and knowing my life was going to be completely different now the Beatles were...
It's a really unfair world because life is, where I am; all day long we listen to American music. So I don't see why the radios in the U.S. cannot even put aside one hour a day just to play music that is not American.
When a movie opened - if you lived in New York, you would see it at Radio City Music Hall where it would play a couple of weeks, and then you moved on to the next movie. Now you can see it the rest of your life - it's going to be on Netflix and DVD.
I think L.A. radio is learning from the Bay. The Bay is a very classic place. Mac Mall, C-Bo, all that stuff, they love their artists, they're old school up there. My first big concert was playing in the Bay; I played the Fillmore.
When I was a kid, I'd practise Chopin on piano - and I love Chopin! He's my dawg! Then I'd go out on the stoop and blast the radio. I'm from New York, the concrete jungle. Hip-hop influenced me from day one.
To write a love song that might be able to make it on the radio, that is something that is terrifying to me. But I can definitely write a song about that chair over there. That I can do, but to sit and write a pop song out of the clear blue sky, that...
I'm always struck by the kids who turn up in New York and LA, and places in between. Chicago. Wanting to do theater, wanting to do independent film. Wanting to break into television or radio.
I don't want to hear songs about how sunshiny things are. I don't like songs that feel like radio candy... I like the ones that make you think, laugh or cry - they pull some kind of emotion out of you.
I really like the old stuff that I cut my musical teeth on, and I loved it when the industry was just like that, without really a genre. Today, country radio's more aimed at a demographic than a genre. It just softens everything.
I grew up on a farm, and we didn't have cable and only limited radio stations, so I wasn't inundated with culture the way people in other parts of the country were. But I was really interested in it.
Lately, I've been doing a lot of tuning in and impatiently tuning out. As a longtime fan of talk radio, I don't think this bodes well for the long-term broad appeal of the medium.
To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.
There are things that I won't do on the radio. I mean, the next logical question is, what won't you do. I say, well, you know, you've got to find out when you're on the air.
