Dick Biondi, an exuberant, fast-talking Top 40 radio personality, nicknamed \u201cthe Screamer,\u201d who in the early 1960s became one of Chicago\u2019s most popular disc jockeys and, thanks to the strength of his station\u2019s signal, was heard well beyond the city, died on June 26 in Chicago. He was 90.<\/p>\n
His death was confirmed by Pamela Enzweiler-Pulice, the director of a forthcoming documentary, \u201cThe Voice That Rocked America: The Dick Biondi Story.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Biondi was a yeller, though not a shock jock, at WLS-AM, which had just changed its format to rock \u2018n\u2019 roll when he was hired for the late evening shift in 1960 for $378 a week (about $3,900 in today\u2019s dollars). The station\u2019s reach into 38 states and Canada provided Mr. Biondi with a platform that made him a major media personality as rock music\u2019s popularity surged.<\/p>\n
Mr. Biondi, who was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1998, quickly established himself as a Chicago star. He called himself \u201cthe Wild I-tralian\u201d; hosted record hops and charity events; and recorded a novelty song, \u201cOn Top of a Pizza,\u201d a parody of \u201cOn Top of Old Smoky\u201d that in 1961 became a local hit.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody came close to his personality,\u201d Ms. Enzweiler-Pulice said in a phone interview. \u201cHe was wild, outrageous, goofy and uplifting. He was like a big kid \u2014 he was one of us. He spoke our language.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1961, The Gavin Report, an industry publication, named him the Top 40 disc jockey of the year. His evening ratings eventually rose to the highest in Chicago radio.<\/p>\n
Despite \u201coperating in the shadowland of the night-time disk jockey, where the glare of national publicity and the adulation of the fan magazines seldom penetrates,\u201d Roger Ebert, the future film critic, wrote in late 1961 in The Daily Illini, the student newspaper of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, \u201cBiondi has managed in the past two years to become one of the most famous men in the Midwest.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Chicago Tribune has reported over the years that Biondi\u2019s show attracted as much as a 60 percent share of all listeners in the Chicago market. In 1962, The Tribune said that most of his local audience consisted of teenagers.<\/p>\n
Ms. Enzweiler-Pulice was one of Mr. Biondi\u2019s young fans. She started a Biondi fan club and wrote a newsletter. She was 13 when she met him for the first time at a shopping center, where hundreds of people watched him arrive in a helicopter.<\/p>\n
\u201cWherever he went,\u201d she said, \u201cfans mobbed him.\u201d<\/p>\n
WLS became a critical part of the hit-making machine for record companies, and Mr. Biondi was a significant player in that equation. He was especially important to the Four Seasons, whose label, Vee-Jay, was based in Chicago.<\/p>\n
Another group that was on Vee-Jay, at least for a while, was the Beatles. And it is possible that when Mr. Biondi played their Vee-Jay single \u201cPlease Please Me\u201d in early 1963, it was the first time a Beatles song had been heard on a station in the United States, said Mark Lewisohn, whose book \u201cTune In\u201d (2013) is the first of a projected trilogy called \u201cThe Beatles: All These Years.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Mr. Biondi\u2019s time at WLS ended in 1963 after only three years. He was fired when he complained about the amount of commercials on his show compared with that of a competitor, Dick Kemp, known as \u201cthe Wild Child,\u201d on a rival station. Mr. Biondi said that his carping angered the sales manager; in one confrontation at the studio, Mr. Biondi, armed with a letter opener, had to be restrained by two engineers.<\/p>\n
This was, Mr. Biondi said, one of 25 times he was dismissed from various jobs over the course of his career.<\/p>\n
Soon after his dismissal, Herb Lyon, a gossip columnist in The Tribune, reported: \u201cEx WLS Dee Jay Dick Biondi, still the youngster\u2019s hero, trotting \u2019round town, pushing his own new album, \u2018Biondi Talks to Teenagers,\u2019 a real twist.\u201d<\/p>\n
Richard Orlando Biondi was born on Sept. 13, 1932, in Endicott, N.Y., near Binghamton, to Michael and Rose Biondi. He first performed on radio when he was 8, and, as he stood outside a studio in Auburn, N.Y., the announcer he was watching asked him to come inside and read a commercial for a women\u2019s clothing store.<\/p>\n
That started his love affair with radio. As a teenager he worked as a gofer at a station in Binghamton, where one of the announcers tutored him on his diction. In 1950, after graduating from high school, he got a job in Corning, N.Y., as a sportscaster.<\/p>\n
For the next decade he worked at stations in Alexandria, La. (where he played R&B and called high school football games); York, Pa.; Youngstown, Ohio; and Buffalo.<\/p>\n
He hosted a record hop in 1957 starring Jerry Lee Lewis, who was at the apex of his fiery fame but was upstaged at the event by the actor Michael Landon, who talked his way through his single \u201cGimme a Little Kiss (Will Ya, Huh?).\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe girls went nuts,\u201d Mr. Biondi said in an interview on the television show \u201cChicago Tonight\u201d in 2003. \u201cYou know how good-looking he was.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Biondi grew a beard, which he dyed from week to week to match the official colors of the high schools where he regularly hosted record hops. He sat on a flagpole for three days and nights on a listener\u2019s dare.<\/p>\n
And he said he met Elvis Presley backstage in Cleveland and persuaded him to autograph the white shirt he was wearing; Mr. Biondi then wore it to a hop, where fans shredded it so badly that he had to go to a hospital emergency room to treat his badly scratched back.<\/p>\n
After leaving Chicago in 1963, Mr. Biondi spent the next half-century bouncing around. He moved to KRLA in Los Angeles in 1963; hosted a nationally syndicated show on Mutual Radio from 1964 until it was canceled in 1965; and then returned to KRLA, where in 1965 he and his fellow D.J.s, including Bob Eubanks and Casey Kasem, introduced the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. He came back to Chicago in 1967, at WCFL.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, the day I left Chicago, I started wanting to come back to it,\u201d he told The Tribune in 1967. \u201cIt\u2019s the only place I\u2019ve ever been that\u2019s made an impression on me.\u201d<\/p>\n
But in 1972 he left for a station in Cincinnati. He later moved on to Boston and North Myrtle Beach, S.C., before coming back to Chicago for good in 1983, most significantly as the host of a show at a new oldies station, WJMK-FM, for 21 years. He returned to WLS (this time on the FM dial) from 2006 until the station ended its association with him in 2018.<\/p>\n
His survivors include his wife, Maribeth Biondi, and his sister, Geraldine Wallace.<\/p>\n
Many of Mr. Biondi\u2019s encounters with rock luminaries remained vivid decades later.<\/p>\n
For example, he recalled that after Michael Landon, who was then starring in the film \u201cI Was a Teenage Werewolf,\u201d wowed the crowd of several hundred fans in 1957, Jerry Lee Lewis went onstage for his second set and performed 14 songs.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe goes crazy in the second show,\u201d Mr. Biondi said. \u201cHe walks off and here\u2019s Michael Landon. He says, \u2018OK, pretty boy, top me this time.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n