Product Review

During the late 1940s and early '50s, the rise of television sent seismic shocks through American culture and business, threatening to eclipse its broadcast predecessor, radio. But even as RCA chief Robert Sarnoff declared the radio dead, a cultural cusp energized the airwaves. The post-war baby boom entered its adolescence, while rhythm & blues and country music were filtered into an emerging rock & roll sensibility. How radio's fortunes were reversed, then compromised, and the underlying social forces the music and its audience reflected provide the drama for this intelligently produced 1968 Canadian-American cable documentary.

Rock 'n' Roll Invaders reaches beyond the familiar radio stars of rock legend, like Alan "Moondog" Freed and eternal teen Dick Clark, to examine the more seminal contributions of pioneering Southern DJ's who exposed a racially mixed audience to black blues and R&B. The 97-minute profile shows radio's synergy with the nascent rock record business, the sexual and racial "threats" posed by the music and the medium, and how early DJ's were compromised by business interests, culminating in the payola scandals of the late '50s. In the process, the true freedom enjoyed by early rock evangelists like Freed was circumscribed by tighter programming controls--the advent of Top 40 radio, which gradually minimized regional and local differences, while giving rise to "personality" radio and raucous new permutations like Wolfman Jack. Some minor factual inaccuracies and visual anachronisms aside, the account is both absorbing and well researched. --Sam Sutherland