The LA Times has written a great article about our own "Big Daddy" Bill Gardner!
Here is an excerpt and a link to the full article. And be sure to catch Bill every Saturday from 2 - 4 PM!
Bill Gardner spun classic R&B on the L.A. airwaves for four decades. Then came the coronavirus
Photo: Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times Article By RJ SMITH
APRIL 27, 2020
Bill Gardner has been broadcasting in Los Angeles for 36 years. But these days, when his KPFK-FM (90.7) show “Rhapsody in Black” comes on at 2 p.m. on Saturdays, Gardner is listening to it on the radio like anybody else. “It’s… a little surreal,” he chuckles. “I don’t know what they’re going to play, and so I just sit back and listen.”
With the COVID-19 pandemic leaving him and his wife, Paulette, under house arrest, and no makeshift studio in his Norwalk home from which he can broadcast, “Rhapsody in Black,” like the rest of his life, is on pause. While Gardner sits quarantined, an engineer at the station pulls out a “Best of Bill” CD and slaps it on the air. Since his weekly show explores the charts for a given year of rhythm and blues history, there’s a timelessness built in. 1955 is still 1955. But Gardner’s fans wonder, given the need to keep the city locked down tight, and given the precautions an 81-year-old needs to take, when or if Gardner will once more come into their homes live and direct.
“He’s a great guy, I love him a lot,” says Billy Vera, a musician, bandleader and onetime radio institution in town himself. “Bill doesn’t have one of those ‘professional’ voices or presentations, and that works in his favor. What’s great about him is he’s authentic — he lived the music. He really grew up at that time the records were being made.
“And he’s such a gentleman. He’s not one of those jive characters that a lot of jocks tried to be — there’s a genuineness about him that’s really affecting.”......
