Rock 'n' roll guru celebrates 25 years
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Joel Najman, longtime radio personality and host of "My Place" on Vermont Public Radio, works in a studio in Colchester recently. Najman is hosting a sock hop at Barre's Old Labor Hall tonight. Jeb Wallace-Brodeur/Times Argus |
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By Mel Huff Times Argus Staff - Published: June 30, 2007
COLCHESTER — When Joel Najman was growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s, a group of Italian-Americans who called themselves Dion and the Belmonts — they took their name from Belmont Avenue — used to sing doo-wop music and their own versions of rhythm and blues songs on street corners.
"On a hot summer's afternoon it would be hard to find a subway well where a bunch of guys hadn't gathered to get the right echo off the tile-lined wells of the subway entrance," Najman remembers. Suddenly, Dion and the Belmonts had a big hit record, "Teenager in Love," and they become "the heroes of the neighborhood."
It was the first time, Najman says, that music was written for teenagers, "and in many cases, by teenagers themselves." Radio spread the evolving American art form and, Najman says, "I absolutely loved the music I heard on the radio."
He has been sharing that love for 25 years on "My Place," his Saturday night show on Vermont Public Radio.
As listeners know, Najman not only plays rock 'n' roll songs from the '50s and '60s, but he serves as a remarkable rock 'n' roll Wikipedia of musical history, filling the airwaves with the curious twists of fate and fortune that befell the stars and also-rans of the era. He might tell listeners about Phil Spector, who would become an influential record producer, getting four people together in 1958 to pitch in $10 each to record a song he had written. A 16-year-old girl sang the lead, "To Know Him is to Love Him." Spector wrote the song from the epitaph on his father's tombstone. His father had committed suicide.
Today, Vermont Public Radio will honor Najman and celebrate the 25th anniversary of "My Place" by inviting friends of the program and their families to a '50s-style sock hop at the Old Labor Hall in Barre.It's a working night for Najman, sort of — he'll be the DJ as well as honoree. He's bringing 14 boxes of CDs with him and asks people who are coming to send their requests in advance to myplace@vpr.net. Admission is a donation to the Vermont Foodbank. There will be contests and prizes and free food — the Boston Derby Dames are serving McKenzie hot dogs. The party begins at 7 p.m., preceded by Lindy Hop lessons at 6. Guests are invited to slick back their ducktails, put on their poodle skirts and dance.
Although "My Place" is identified with Najman, he didn't originate the show. It was started in the early days of VPR by David Field, who broadcast it from the station's original studio in Windsor. When Field developed health problems, Najman began substituting for him, working out of a small white frame building in Fort Ethan Allen, then VPR's satellite station in the Burlington area.
"I would walk in — it was on Friday night back then — and some fellow carrying an armload of folk music albums would be walking out the door as I walked in with my stack of 45s. It was kind of like a glorified college format," Najman says. In time, Field became too ill to do the program, and 25 years ago this summer, Najman took it over.
At the time, Najman already had a well-established career in commercial radio — he was "the morning personality" on WJOY in South Burlington. For several years, he hosted "My Place" without pay. "I'm so glad to VPR for giving me a chance to explore these stories," he explains. "Music had been my hobby all my life. I read all the trade magazines, got to meet a number of people in the industry." For a brief time as a boy he aspired "to do things in the music industry," but he acknowledges, "I don't really have a musical talent." Instead he showed a talent for telling musical stories.
In the same way that other fans become walking encyclopedias of sports stats, Najman has developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the music he loves. His authority has grown partly by accretion: Even before he was a teenager, he was immersing himself in the minutia of artists, songs and producers. When he started working in commercial radio, he listened to all the promos, the flops as well as the hits, building up a storehouse of information about artists' careers. For some shows he does exhaustive preparation, augmenting his knowledge with research in university archives and at the Library of Congress. When Frankie Lane died, it took Najman two months to finish the show celebrating the artist's life because he was looking for the very first recording that Lane made — in 1944. "Incubating" ideas and researching shows can take years, Najman says.
Najman's physical presence accords with his aural persona. He's soft-spoken, perhaps shy; the expression in his blue eyes is benign. He is tall and walks with a somewhat shambling gait, the result of a skiing accident this winter. His white beard, once Santa-Claus length, has been trimmed.
Despite his quiet aura, Najman acknowledges that he is driven by a passion to tell the story of the music that "became a force in the mainstream among the young people who suddenly could produce it themselves.
"Inexpensive recordings made in small studios could become bigger hits than anything recorded in the Capitol Towers. They spoke so directly to American youth at the time that I was young," Najman says. "But it was a business, and to explore how that business evolved, and how the little guy suddenly became as big as the big guy, is the passion that has driven me."
Najman is in his early 60s, and his passions show no signs of abating. "If they let me go another 25 years, I have ideas for more ("My Place") programs," he says. And he would like to do news for VPR – he loves covering breaking stories like train wrecks.
Najman's family left the Bronx for Westchester, and Najman went to high school in East Chester and then attended Middlebury College because he was interested in languages. But he decided to major in psychology; then he completed the work for a Ph.D. in experimental psychology at the University of Vermont. By that time, however, he had burned out, so he never defended his thesis or got his degree. But the quality of his work can be inferred from the fact that in 1976, an article that he and two colleagues wrote appeared in the prestigious research journal "Nature." He says he later realized he was clinically depressed; depression has followed him all his life.
Meanwhile, Najman had been working part time for radio stations throughout college and graduate school. He hosted one of his first programs, "Country Jamboree," in the early '60s while he was at Middlebury. "The farm families loved it," he says. When he left UVM, he decided to "cool (his) jets" by immersing himself full time in radio.
That began a lifelong love affair with radio as well as music. He worked at an alphabet soup of stations as formats changed and owners tried out new formulas. He served as program director for WJOY and was news director for WDEV in Waterbury. In 1999 he won Associated Press awards with his colleagues for Best One-Day News Effort and Best Enterprise Reporting. In 2004, he was inducted into the Vermont Broadcasters' Hall of Fame.
His passion embraces both news and rock 'n' roll.
When rock 'n' roll began to make an impact, the first reaction of the mainstream radio stations was to have white singers do "cover" versions of rhythm and blues hits, Najman says. "It was still very early in the civil rights movement, and black music was usually recorded in more primitive conditions, had rougher edges and none of the 'schooledness' that the mainstream pop music had. But it also had a soul and appeal and an honesty.
"It was so authentic and genuine that a lot of white kids listened to the music on the radio."
Najman was one. He would hear the original versions of songs on the black stations and then hear the same song performed by white artists. "That was the fascination," he says. "There was usually a good story behind the song."
"Race never crossed my mind," he says. "Apparently I wasn't alone, because this music was absorbed and relabeled 'rock 'n roll.'" The "honesty and simplicity" of early rock that stood in sharp contrast to the "syrupy, sweet mainstream popular music" of the 1950s, like "How Much is That Doggy in the Window." "What makes the music so compelling is that it so honest and straightforward and unadorned," he says.
Beyond having enduring appeal, Najman notes that early rock 'n' roll also documents a major transformation in American culture. "There's no way of disassociating the music with what was happening in our country at the time," he declares. "I look at the acceptance of Motown music by white America on college campuses as coinciding with the great advances in civil rights," he says.
So what does Najman think of the music that young people listen to today? "I don't make judgments," he says, an equivocal hesitation in his voice. When he listened to rock 'n' roll as a boy, his father used to say, "You call that music?" Now, when his daughter listens to hip hop, he observes, "I hear my father's voice coming out of my mouth."
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