.jpg)
Home 
Arts & Culture All Arts & Culture Searching for Bruce Meyerowitz
Arts & Culture All Arts & Culture Searching for Bruce Meyerowitz | Searching for Bruce Meyerowitz |
|
|
| Written by Ashley Bagan | |||||
| Monday, 07 April 2008 | |||||
Top 40 Radio Icon Cousin Brucie is Jewish. So What? Cousin Brucie with John Lennon. Courtesy the Cousin Brucie Archives. Born Bruce Meyerowitz, Morrow has been spinning sixties hits at the biggest rock stations since the tracks were fresh. After helping popularize the Beatles in the sixties and seventies at WABC and WINS, two of New York’s Top 40 powerhouses, Morrow kept the sound alive at WCBS, an Oldies station. Now he hosts two weekly shows on Sirius, the satellite radio provider. Cousin Brucie was the king of WABC when Top 40 radio was at its mid-century peak. The freeform stations that lurked on the FM side of the dial had yet to lure away the teenage listener base with their hip, politically conscious content. During the mid-to-late sixties, Brucie was the biggest game in town, serving as rambunctious curator to WABC’s short playlist of two minute, inoffensive pop tunes. In his autobiography Cousin Brucie: My Life in Rock ‘N’ Roll Radio (Beech Tree Books, 1987), Morrow writes, “Mom and Dad might hate the ‘noise’ we played, but they knew their kids were basically safe with us.” Cousin Brucie’s personal mythology begins in a Brooklyn as wholesome as the songs he broadcast. The childhood he describes is pure urban kitsch, full of stoopball games and transistor radios, and stripped of any distinct ethnic markings. Yes, he was Jewish, but only incidentally. He’s much more eager to talk of the Irish and Italian kids he mixed with on the block. In his professional life, too, Brucie doesn’t recognize a Jewish influence. Never mind that his rock radio hero Alan Freed was the son of a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, or that his archrival Murray the K was also a member of the tribe. Brucie is emphatically “American,” in the most general sense of the word. That’s Cousin Brucie. So, who is Bruce Morrow? New Voices spoke with the 73-year-old DJ over the telephone. He was at his home in Manhattan. In Cousin Brucie: My Life in Rock ‘N’ Roll Radio, you write, “Brooklyn gave me the tension that produced the energy of my on-air style.” What do you mean by this? Growing up in the streets of Brooklyn, you get an amazing native energy. We were outdoors all the time. In those days we didn’t have electronic games, we couldn’t go on our computers. We played stickball, stoopball, hit the penny. So I always said, it had to be the air and the water that made Brooklyn so very, very special. In Brooklyn, you have very special people. What was your Jewish background like? My grandparent’s parents were born in Poland and Vienna. My parents were born in New York City. I was a typical Brooklyn kid. Brooklyn was a mixed community. We had Christian kids, Italian, Irish, black kids, and it was kind of nice to have diversity. Our schools were reasonably diverse. Not as much as they should have been in those days, but reasonably diverse. We realized that we were much more Americanized than my grandparents. They were still kind of foreign to me. We were really American Jews. Europe was not even in our vocabulary. We didn’t know anything about it. We were brought up to be Americans and to love the nation and to honor and respect what was going on here. When did you create the Cousin Brucie persona? WINS is where cousin Brucie was born. A little lady came up to me one night. She was in trouble, and you know people seem to gravitate toward a radio station when they are alone because they feel like we’re friends. So she got up to see me and she asked me, “Do you believe we are all related?” And I said, “Yes ma'am.” And she said, “Well cousin, lend me fifty cents. I'm broke and I can’t get home.” I gave her the money and she said, “Thanks, cousin.” And she left. And that’s where Cousin Brucie was born. I knew right away that was my shtick. Cousin Brucie was born because of that little old lady asking for fifty cents. By the way, she never paid me back. Is it important for an audience to feel like they have a personal relationship like that with the DJ? Radio is the most sensitive and personal of all mass media. We are in showers with people, we are in bed with people, we are in cars, we shop with people, we get dressed, and we take baths with people. We are with people all the time. We are right in their ear. The new generation has become too much for me. They are closing themselves off to the world. When I see somebody with an iPod…and by the way, there is nothing wrong with iPods and MP3s and whatever else is going to be coming up in the future, as long as they leave their hearing open so that they can hear what’s going on in the world. There is nothing wrong with closing yourself off and escaping for a couple moments, but escaping for twenty-four hours with an iPod up your nose and in your ear is not the way to do it. Radio is alive. It’s human beings talking to human beings. An iPod is a bunch of transistors and gadgets that just lets you close yourself off. That’s fine as long as you open up once in a while. At WINS, and later at WABC, were you identified as a Jewish radio personality? No, no. When you’re on radio, you’re not Jewish, you’re not Christian. I always love to tell people that I'm Jewish if it's called for, but if it's not called for I don’t raise flags. I’m an American and I am a radio personality and I belong to everybody. Black, white, red, yellow—it doesn’t matter to me, as long as they're nice. I don’t look toward being Jewish as being what helped me make it. I think what helped me make it was my neighborhood, which had a lot of Jewish people in it, and a lot of Italians and Irish. I think that diversity is really what built my character. Jews played a big part in certain areas of the music industry in the sixties and seventies. Did this play a role in the development of your career? Well, there were a lot of Jewish people writing songs, but in my business, no. Radio station owners were not necessarily Jewish. Of the major personalities, there were a couple of Jewish guys, but most of them were not Jewish. But the songwriters were Jewish? Yeah, a lot of them. Because, let’s face facts, it was a New York thing. A lot of them came from New York and the surrounding areas and there was a good shot that they would be Jewish. In your autobiography, you write about how radio hosts should be perceived by the public as friends and neighbors, and not as unreachable stars. I still believe this, but this is not practiced much anymore. Radio became more of a business. The actual warmth disappeared. People started reading cards [on the air], and it got boring. There are a handful of us left who still practice being up-front in radio. When I’m on the air, my audience feels they’ve got a friend, a friend representing them, a friend talking to them, making them feel like, “Hey, at least something is steady here.” You know, in our world today we need more traditions. I am a tradition. Cousin Brucie maintains a tradition of warmth.
Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.12 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved. |
|||||
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|