The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame called the other day…

…An archivist was asking about the Bill Huie feature I used fairly regularly on my Celebration Rock radio show. She was looking for an interview with Billy Preston and somehow found her way to me (and my home phone number!). Billy Preston is being inducted this year (2021) and one of Huie’s “stringers” had interviewed Preston decades ago. Could I send that interview to the Hall of Fame? Now, finding the exact program among the scores I have transferred to CD might have been impossible, but I happened to have heard that very Celebration Rock show recently. Still, it took several CDs at “fast forward” to find the interview. But I did, and the archivist was thrilled. When I asked how she found me, she said, “I’m an archivist; that’s what I do.”

Here’s that particular program with the Bill Huie feature at the end of the hour.

But first some clarification:

“Celebration Rock” was the title of my long-running syndicated radio program which started locally in Richmond, Va. in 1968, airing until 1990 (or so). I note the dates since it turns out that there are other “celebration rocks” these days. There’s apparently a band, a podcast, and maybe another radio show? In fact, when I moved back to my home town area, a local station had a program called The Celebration Rock Cafe. (I’m not sure it was broadcast by the same station that had carried my own syndicated program decades ago; I wondered at the time if that’s where their program title came from.)

I’m writing this for the benefit of any blog readers who now have stumbled upon these writings for the first time. Since no one can copyright a title, I take it as a kind of compliment that what I came up with so long ago wasn’t a half-bad idea, and that it lives on in other formats. I’d love to know if the “Celebration Rock” name pre-dates my use of it. OK…I know none of this matters to anyone but me, but there it is.

And there is the blog I started with WordPress back in 2008. It’s where I meant to lodge some of the archived “Celebration Rock” radio shows. Instead, I added the “premium” content to this blog. Darn. All this leads up to why this radio program is here, not there.

The program embedded here was aired in the summer of 1980, with hit songs and album cuts arranged into a theme centering on streets, roads, paths, and faith journeys. The program was recorded in the studios of WRVQ (Q94) in Richmond, Va., probably in the middle of the night. The audio tape was transferred to CD, and then saved in an MP3 file. (My sensibilities have been refined over the years and I apologize in advance for an unfortunate scripted reference to “a drunk in the gutter” off Broadway.)

There’s some fun music here from George Benson, the Bee Gees, Wet Willie, and England Dan and John Ford Coley, among many others. There’s also some music that is not so “fun.,” notably a dramatic Harry Chapin song. Plus the Billy Preston feature.

Celebration Rock: “Street Scenes” – July 1980