Dick Biondi, Fast-Talking Star of Top 40 Radio, Dies at 90

Dick Biondi, an exuberant, fast-talking Top 40 radio character, nicknamed “the Screamer,” who within the early Sixties turned considered one of Chicago’s hottest disc jockeys and, because of the power of his station’s sign, was heard effectively past town, died on June 26 in Chicago. He was 90.

His demise 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 per week (about $3,900 in as we speak’s {dollars}). The station’s attain into 38 states and Canada offered Mr. Biondi with a platform that made him a significant media character as rock music’s reputation surged.

Mr. Biondi, who was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1998, shortly 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 turned a neighborhood hit.

“Nobody came close to his personality,” Ms. Enzweiler-Pulice mentioned 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 trade publication, named him the Top 40 disc jockey of the yr. His night scores finally rose to the very 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 scholar 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 through the years 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 mentioned that the majority of his native viewers consisted of youngsters.

Ms. Enzweiler-Pulice was considered 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 lots of of individuals watched him arrive in a helicopter.

“Wherever he went,” she mentioned, “fans mobbed him.”

WLS turned a essential a part of the hit-making machine for report corporations, and Mr. Biondi was a big participant in that equation. He was particularly essential 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 potential 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, mentioned Mark Lewisohn, whose e-book “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 concerning 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 mentioned 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 mentioned, considered one of 25 instances 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 industrial for a ladies’s clothes retailer.

That began his love affair with radio. As a youngster 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 acquired 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 approach by way of his single “Gimme a Little Kiss (Will Ya, Huh?).”

“The girls went nuts,” Mr. Biondi mentioned 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 faculties the place he often hosted report hops. He sat on a flagpole for 3 days and nights on a listener’s dare.

And he mentioned 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 informed 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 embrace 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 gang 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 mentioned. “He walks off and here’s Michael Landon. He says, ‘OK, pretty boy, top me this time.’”