Blink and someone else disappears
I felt terribly out of touch (well, that's a normal enough feeling for me, but sometimes its bite's a little sharper) to find out only tonight that Philadelphia radio fixture Ed Sciaky (pronounced "SHOCK-ee") died back on January 29th.
Deeply into the music, he was one of those people who never thought of himself as being the attraction, concentrating always on pushing what he felt deserved an audience's attention. He'd fallen farther into the background for me in recent years as he ended up being most closely connected with hosting a Sunday with Springsteen program. (Bruce Springsteen was one of the acts he helped promote decades ago, giving Bruce and the E-Street Band airtime back when they were unknowns.) I've never been a Springsteen fan, so this latterday spotlight was something I paid attention to only to the extent of knowing what to avoid on a Sunday night.
Though his status from the era of progressive radio allowed him to maintain much of that autonomy into the 1980s, he largely became just another DJ for most broadcast purposes by the middle 1980s, as corporate pressures plowed under the last vestiges of independent musical taste.
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