Executive Summary

 

    Rock Around the World Radio Show and Magazine-

The time for the syndication of Rock Around the World’s Library of original interviews, performances and shows has arrived. As much as any other media production made during the mid–70’s, this comprehensive library of shows reflects the openness and giving spirit of artists that is unattainable today in the high-pressure world of big-time corporate music. In the tradition of blues, jazz, and folk, rock rose as if a force of nature, captured here with enthusiasm and clarity, the indigenous, music rises out of the streets and onto the radio where cultural icons with the magnitude of Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and Paul McCartney share the Rock Around the World forum with upstart superstars and local bands. Where else but in Rock Around the World shows does one find a live concert of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour with Dylan and an intimate interview with David Bowie?

 

The two hundred plus shows in the Rock Around the World collection represent nor only the highest-octane nostalgia available of the seminal years of rock’s greatest artists but also embody and memorialize the spirit of commitment to the music which was shared by performers and audience alike. What was temporarily closed during the eighties and half of the nineties can be opened again by experiencing the static joy of listening to a show which wholeheartedly embraced the music and the artist without any outside agenda. soft drink or beer to sell a pure delight indeed.

 

The shows fully represent a critical time when music sang the eclectic electric without the synthesized, over-compressed processed blandness of so much of popular music today. This is music with the force of social conviction behind it made by people who consistently draw from the well spring of their talents with their hearts. Such music resonates with not only people who grew up in England or America in the sixties and seventies. Many on the forefront of popular music today in the U. S. and U.K and around the world.

 

With the shrinking of the world through the acceleration of information and media transfer, the record of the roots of popular culture as represented by the Rock Around the World Show becomes more interesting and valuable. The original shows were made at the point where a culture we jumped into the future never to be able to return completely to the comfortable isolation of pockets of local insulation and identity. Where today would a local band like Andy Pratt gather a national audience? If there is a weakness to the programs. it is an obscurity of this sort. On the other hand, this very weakness is in a sense also Rock Around the World’s virtue by communicating strength through a willing vulnerability. The willingness to provide a national forum to relative unknowns, for “the sake of music” is all but absent today, and we are worse off for it. The rest of the world and especially the developing nations realize this and are more than eager to consume what we shed in haste, while the appeal of home-grown local music, wherever it is from, resurfaces and grows.

 

Rock Around the World provides an important link to the past which is a relationship which has been leveraged and expanded into the present via the Internet where the show receives thousands of hits a week. While maintaining a forum for fans and performers, it continues to present the fresh, insightful music promotions which distinguish the early shows.

 

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