Dick Biondi, an ebullient, fast-talking Top 40 radio personality nicknamed “the Screamer,” who became one of Chicago’s most popular disc jockeys in the early 1960s and was heard far beyond the city thanks to the power of his station’s signal, died June 26 in Chicago. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by Pamela Enzweiler-Pulice, the director of an upcoming documentary, “The Voice That Rocked America: The Dick Biondi Story.”
Mr. Biondi was a screamer, but not a shock jock, at WLS-AM, which had just changed format to rock and roll when he was hired in 1960 for the late night shift at $378 a week (about $3,900 in today’s dollars). The station’s reach in 38 states and Canada provided Mr. Biondi with a platform that made him a major media personality as the popularity of rock music skyrocketed.
Inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1998, Mr. Biondi quickly established himself as a Chicago star. He called himself “the Wild I-tralian”; host of record hops and charity events; and recorded a new song, “On Top of a Pizza”, a parody of “On Top of Old Smoky” which became a local hit in 1961.
“No one came close to his personality,” Ms. Enzweiler-Pulice said in a telephone interview. “He was wild, outrageous, goofy and uplifting. He was like a big kid – he was one of us. He spoke our language.”
In 1961, The Gavin Report, a trade publication, named him the Top 40 Disc Jockey of the Year. His nightly ratings eventually rose to the highest on radio in Chicago.
Despite “operating in the shadowland of the late-night disc jockey, where the glare of national publicity and the admiration of the fan magazines seldom penetrate,” Roger Ebert, the future film critic, wrote in late 1961 in The Daily Illini, the student newspaper of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “Biondi has succeeded in the past two years in becoming one of the most famous men in the Midwest.”
The Chicago Tribune has reported over the years that Biondi’s show attracted as much as 60 percent of all listeners in the Chicago market. In 1962, The Tribune said that most of its local audience was teenagers.
Mrs. Enzweiler-Pulice was one of Mr. Biondi’s young fans. She founded a Biondi fan club and wrote a newsletter. She was 13 when she first met him in a mall, where hundreds of people saw him arrive in a helicopter.
“Everywhere he went,” she said, “fans were mobbing him.”
WLS became a critical part of the record company hit machine, and Mr. Biondi was instrumental in that equation. He was especially important to the Four Seasons, whose label, Vee-Jay, was based in Chicago.
Another group that was on Vee-Jay, at least for a while, was the Beatles. And it’s possible that when Mr. Biondi played their Vee-Jay single “Please Please Me” in early 1963, it was the first time a Beatles song had been played on a station in the United States, said Mark Lewisohn, whose book “Tune In” (2013) is the first of a planned trilogy called “The Beatles: All These Years.”
But Mr. Biondi’s time with WLS ended in 1963 after just three years. He was fired when he complained about the number of commercials on his show compared to that of a competitor, Dick Kemp, known as “the Wild Child,” on a rival station. Mr. Biondi said his nagging angered the sales manager; in a confrontation in the studio, Mr. Biondi, armed with a letter opener, had to be restrained by two engineers.
This was, Mr Biondi said, one of 25 times he was fired from various jobs over the course of his career.
Shortly after his firing, Herb Lyon, a gossip columnist in The Tribune reported, “Ex WLS Dee Jay Dick Biondi, still the youngster’s hero, trotting around town, his own new album, ‘Biondi Talks to Teenagers,’ a real twist.”
Richard Orlando Biondi was born on September 13, 1932 in Endicott, NY, near Binghamton, to Michael and Rose Biondi. He first performed on radio when he was 8, and while standing outside a studio in Auburn, NY, the announcer he was watching asked him to come in and read a commercial for a women’s clothing store.
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 in his elocution. In 1950, after graduating from high school, he got a job in Corning, NY, as a sports reporter.
For the next decade he worked at stations in Alexandria, La. (where he played R&B and called high school football games); York, Pennsylvania; Youngstown, Ohio; and buffalo.
In 1957, he hosted a record hop starring Jerry Lee Lewis, who was at the height of his fiery fame, only to be surpassed at the event by the actor Michael Landon, who made his way through his single “Gimme a Little Kiss (Will Ya, Huh?)”.
“The girls went crazy,” Mr. Biondi said in an interview on the “Chicago Tonight” television program in 2003. “You know how handsome he was.”
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 at a listener’s challenge.
And he said he met Elvis Presley backstage in Cleveland and persuaded him to autograph the white shirt he was wearing; Mr. Biondi then carried it to a hop, where fans shredded it so badly he had to go to a hospital emergency room to treat his badly scratched back.
After leaving Chicago in 1963, Mr. Biondi spent the next half century bouncing. 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 he and his fellow DJs, including Bob Eubanks and Casey Kasem, introduced the Beatles to the Hollywood Bowl in 1965. He came back to Chicago in 1967, at WCFL.
“You know, the day I left Chicago, I started wanting to come back to it,” he told The Tribune in 1967. “It’s the only place I’ve ever been that has impressed me.”
But in 1972 he left for a station in Cincinnati. He later moved to Boston and North Myrtle Beach, SC, before returning to Chicago for good in 1983, mostly hosting a show on 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 partnership with him in 2018.
His survivors are his wife, Maribeth Biondi, and his sister, Geraldine Wallace.
Many of Mr. Biondi’s encounters with rock stars remained vivid decades later.
For example, he recalled that after Michael Landon, who then starred in the movie “I Was a Teenage Werewolf”, stunned the crowd of several hundred fans in 1957, Jerry Lee Lewis went on stage for his second set and sang 14 songs.
“He goes crazy in the second show,” Mr. Biondi said. “He walks away and here’s Michael Landon. He says, ‘Okay, handsome boy, surpass me this time.’”
