Richard Blade

I thought his memoir by Richard Blade (K-ROQ DJ) was good but not for the reasons you might expect. I’ve listened to Richard on the radio for years during the KROQ years. He left the station after his hours were minimized. He has since gone on to Sirius Radio and also does a 93.1 Jack FM Flashback Lunch which was his innovation. This replaced the Jack FM Jonesy’s Jukebox show. Blade still appears at 80s band concerts to intro the bands and handle any venue screw-ups which still happen (often). Blade’s book is very much his own creation for better and for worse. Blade was never like the other KROQ DJs and but nonetheless fit in with the wide array of talent and music the station had to choose from. He tended to promote his favorite bands and seemed to describe some bands superficially which was strange since Blade knew a lot about music promotion and the band members themselves. In the book he often says that Depeche Mode was his favorite band but that never came across in the 80s. He does give a more accurate list of his favorites in a later chapter of the book. Blade does have some good anecdotes about Depeche Mode which you won’t find anywhere else.
This is where I liked him best: 1. He blasts politician Zev Yaroslavsky as a pompous idiot. Yaroslavsky was an idiot for trying to intimidate Blade over an issue with Cedar Sinai hospital. The hospital broke HIPAA laws by divulging patient info over the phone regarding the suicide attempt by Depeche Mode singer Gahan.
2. He says that KROQ trashed their fan base by switching to grunge music with a change in station format.
3. He helped train some search and rescue teams as Master Scuba diver.
4. He lists all the names of the old KROQ DJs which had slipped my own memory.
At the end of the 80s KROQ went to a grunge format which was horrible because everybody loves 80s music and grunge is now extinct except for maybe three songs that get played once every few months. I personally still don’t ever listen to KROQ. A little too much description of past sexual prowess for me, but he says he needed to be honest about everything so he included these escapades. Blades describes how he became a US citizen.
No index, B&W photos, bad editing. Blade’s Autobiography is still worth reading just for the coverage of the 80s KROQ era.… (altro)