Customer Reviews

Cousin Brucie: My Life in Rock 'N' Roll Radio

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As a New Yorker, I grew up with Cousin Brucie on the airwaves. I would flip back & forth from WABC to WMCA's Good Guys. WABC had Dan Ingram & the Cousin. The Good Guys had Harry Harrison, Dandy Dan Daniels, Gary Stevens, Billy Mitchell Reed (BMR) and eventually Frankie Crocker. Over at the other end of the dial, 1010 WINS, there was Murray the K and Mad Daddy. Decades before Rap & Hip Hop, Mad Daddy would do his entire show in rhyming heroic couplets. It was a world of submarine-race watchers, sure shots, long shots, and hits. These are the people who broke the Beatles back in 1963 (Christmas week) and had minute-by-minute news of Beatlemania as the Fab Four hit New York. Over at WINS, Murray the K was playing songs by an unknown band he predicted a great future for - "they have hair that make the Beatles look like crew cuts." That band was the Rolling Stones. Cousin Brucie's book brings it all back to me - the radio and personalities that made me fall in love with rock & roll. Even a couple of years ago, I would still tune in to hear Cousin Brucie on WCBS-FM, the official "oldies" station. Then, one day, all the Dee Jays were fired. The call letters were changed. And something named JACK took over. No Dee Jays. No need for people. Just a playlist & commercials. Sad, isn't it? Read this book & remember how it used to be. Or fantasize about radio & what it could be. Despite the Top 40 format and the 3-minute 45 RPM limit, these early pioneers broke barriers, launched legendary groups, took chances. Could you imagine how exciting it was when the Good Guys played 5 minute long "Like A Rolling Stone"? Probably not.

I was looking for this one....

Cousin Brucie the legendary man of radio did it again.

Nobody knows about Rock and Doo Wop better than Cousin Brucie.

I am a fan of his and I love his radio show. What a guy!

This book is a treasure.

Get your copy, Maria, Suzie, Yvonne and all of you.

A fascinating description of what went on at the highest levels of rock n roll radio in the 50s, 60s & & 70s. Payola, women, partys like you can only imagine. A must read for anyone who loves that music genre.

This is a good and decent book from the standpoint and perspective of the times. It's for those yearning about the earlier days of rock radio.

His chief competition was of course, Gary Stevens of WMCA - who regularly beat Bruce Morrow in the ratings, especially in New York City.

In most pop history - it's the station that does in fact, make the DJ. I can site numerous examples - and Bruce Morrow was no exception. When he left WABC in 1974, so did his ratings. His legend comes from his WABC years.

Gary West - [...] and [...] - the web's week-by-week news and pop source.

If you are into the Doo wop era music and would love to read the stories on the groups and the sounds and the styles of the late '50's to early 60's on cars and other nostalgic memories, this is the book for you.

"Cousin Brucie" was one of the iconic disk jockeys who helped make rock 'n roll what it was. The first two-thirds of this memoir, in which he describes how a middle-class Jewish kid from Brooklyn made it in showbiz and how he connected with his teen-age audiences in a world long gone by, are evocative. But when Brucie tries to explain what went wrong with the rock era, his social commentary is so lame and cliched as to be almost laughable. The Beatles = good. The Ramones, disco, punk, acid rock, even the Rolling Stones = bad. The Vietnam War radicalized a generation. We have seen this before. Perhaps it was new and fresh when Brucie wrote it in the late eighties, but our perspective has changed and grown since then.