![]() That guest-star ante would very quickly be upped in the weeks to follow, as Episode Two of The Electric Ballroom welcomed a radio-ready rocker with connoisseur’s cred and a Monmouth County connection - Don “Buck Dharma” Roeser, who took the Blue Öyster Cult into the hitmaking stratosphere with “Don’t Fear the Reaper” and “Burning For You.” The one and only Joey Ramone joined Roth as on-air interviewee a couple of weeks after that - following which The Little Show That Could scored a quantum-leap coup when John Entwistle, charter member of The Who, stepped out of the rarefied realm of rock history to trade stories (and promote a solo record) with the savvy but still-starstruck host. ![]() It’s whatever’s cool we don’t bother with playlists…so the format is that there is no format!”Īll in a night’s work for an endeavor that represented “a baptism of fire” for its host back in the late 1990s a project in which “we did everything wrong the first night…and for our first guest, we had a vampire. ![]() “This event is going to be run pretty tightly and quickly,” observes Roth of the live show contrasting the onstage action with the Sunday-sauce studio affair that, after all these years, “follows no format…we could have (legendary Dolemite star) Rudy Ray Moore one week, and one of the Sex Pistols the next. ![]() As such, it’s a showcase for Roth, his own band Frankenstein 3000, and some of his favorite regional or international acts - a chance to take stock, before sprinting ahead to the next waltz on the dance card. Scheduled to get underway at 7 pm, the multi-band blast is a presentation of Pat Schiavino’s Asbury Underground brand, one that represents an expansion of the twice yearly free festival of storefront music and art (returning in January with an edition keyed to Light of Day 2019, about which more to come in this space) into the realm of special concert events. The vehicle for Roth’s supercharged passions was The Electric Ballroom, a weekly blast of words and wax that marked its twentieth year on the air (Sunday nights on 95.9 WRAT-FM out of Lake Como) this past October - and that celebrates the milestone with a special Anniversary Party next Sunday, December 30 a ringing out of the fast-fading year that finds its brick-and-mortar Ballroom inside the all-purpose auditorium of downtown Asbury’s House of Independents. And so, the aspiring rock star and record mogul Keith Roth became a man on a self-appointed mission a calling to elucidate, illuminate and educate his new neighbors as to the rich legacy of rock and roll music’s most frantically fertile period - that beyond-the-Beatles/ way-after-Woodstock moment when classic tour-gods traversed the skies in custom jets and landed luxury automobiles in hotel pools when the glittering stars of “glam” gleefully pushed at every pop-culture boundary of gender roles and sexual identity when the music’s gigantic tent simultaneously housed symphonically inclined artistes, meat-and-potatoes traditionalists, and those lords and ladies of mischief who wanted nothing more than to see that big top come crashing down. “And when I moved to New Jersey, I kind of assumed that everybody knew who the MC5 was!”Īs it turned out, not everyone in the suburban Jersey milieu could automatically name the band who did “Kick Out the Jams” on demand. “I grew up in the Bronx…I mean, the first album I bought with my own money was The Dictators Go Girl Crazy,” says the 52-year old resident of Tinton Falls, in reference to the 1975 masterpiece of cheerfully offensive outer-boroughs wrestle-punk slobrock. “You would read CREEM Magazine, you would see what your classmates and your older brother had in their collection…and every Friday, you went to the local Korvettes store, where they had a punk rock wall in their record department!” “The thing about those years before the internet, is that it was so much more fun seeking out the info instead of finding it online,” observes Keith Roth of the crucial interlude that straddled the heyday of the arena-rock goliaths, and the rise of the scrappy punk bands who dared to topple the big guys to earth. Published in The Coaster, Asbury Park NJ, December 20 2018
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