Dwight Douglas has captured the essence of the radio disc jockey, and in so doing, has also captured the peak era of mass media, or at least commercial radio’s place in that pantheon. True Radio Confessions provides an accurate depiction of the young men and women who decided to forsake conventional living in favor of a life devoted to the medium, and the music.
Douglas adeptly uses a fictional protagonist whose personal story is compelling enough to propel the reader through the halcyon years of radio’s outsized cultural influence. Along the way, you’ll learn the intricacies of both the technology and the business of radio, and you’ll get a fair portrait of the wild personalities that populated the industry both in front of and behind the mic.
Coming of age at a time when television and films documented adult life, music radio provided the soundtrack to the then-biggest generation in the history of the world, the now reviled Baby Boomers. Pre-internet, multichannel cable systems, and individual devices for playing music, radio galvanized an entire generation, and this terrifically inside look at the people who made it work belongs on the history shelves as much as it does on the fiction shelves.
Read it and learn what it was to be an air-conditioned gypsy, with the shallow roots of wanderlust, and the desire to chase the dream nationwide.
The salad days of radio are gone, but this book serves as witness to their glory.