Veteran PD Larry Berger Dead
• Allan Sniffen, the keeper of the long-running New York Radio Message Board is reporting the death of Larry Berger, former longtime PD of WPLJ/New York. “I don’t have any details other than it was apparently sudden,” Sniffen posted.
As Sniffen notes, Berger programmed WPLJ from 1974 until 1988, guiding the station through its AOR era as “New York’s Best Rock” and into its Top 40 days as “Power 95.” Earlier in his radio career — 1966, to be exact — after graduating from Rutgers University with a degree in Journalism, Berger was named Music Director at WWRL-AM/New York, followed two years later by his inaugural PD stint at WALL-AM 1340/Middletown, NY. In 1973 he was recruited as the PD of ABC’s WRIF/Detroit — a gig that lasted all of a year before he earned the big transfer to WPLJ in September of 1974. After leaving WPLJ in 1988, Berger moved to San Francisco, where he programmed KIOI and KSOL. Sniffen noted, “Larry was truly a radio thinker who understood the ebbs and flows of individual radio stations as well as the industry as a whole. We’ll miss him.”
Bob Buchmann, OM/afternoon co-host at KGB/San Diego, cut his radio teeth in New York and was greatly influenced by Berger’s programming philosophy. In a Facebook post, Buchmann noted, “In our college days, our station PD Steven Goldstein modeled our start-up using many of the principles Larry was using at PLJ (and also those used by Denis McNamara at WLIR). When I graduated and took control of WBAB/Long Island, Larry’s work was what we most closely monitored in designing the station. Twenty years later, when I had the dream job to create [WAXQ] Q104.3, we used a ‘best of’ formula: take the best of Larry’s work, mix it with the best of what WNEW-FM used to be, sprinkle in the best of suburban rock radio, mix in our own ideas, and that would become the Q104 special sauce.”
As Buchmann told RAMP, “Larry Berger’s influence on New York rock radio was — and still is — monumental. Larry at WPLJ and Scott Muni at WNEW-FM set the foundation that New York rock radio was built on. What has been built on top of it has changed with the times, but it still remains the foundation.”
• To get some additional insight into Berger’s long and successful career, may we suggest you take some time and read his 2013 interview with MrPopCulture.com.
