The American disc jockey Art Laboe, who has died aged 97, may have been the first person to recognise that a rock’n’roll song could enjoy a life beyond its few weeks in the charts. In 1959 he popularised the phrase “oldies but goodies” by using it as the title for an album he had compiled, consisting of hits, all barely a year or two old, by such artists as the Penguins, Etta James, the Five Satins and the Teen Queens. It sold well enough to become the first of 15 volumes in a series released on his own Original Sound label, establishing a template for others to follow.
Laboe had been broadcasting jazz and swing music on radio stations in California since the 1940s. He switched easily to rock’n’roll on its appearance in the middle of the subsequent decade and became identified with the new music by its young audience, who thronged to watch him doing his show live from a drive-in hamburger joint on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard. He was still broadcasting well into his 90s, and taped his last show on the day before his death.
His other great distinction was the creation of a series of concerts at the El Monte Legion Stadium, a venue built as a sports centre for schools. Laboe knew that Los Angeles’s city fathers, unnerved by the arrival of rock’n’roll and by the prospect of black, white and Hispanic teenagers mingling together in large numbers, had banned public dances for under-18s. The town of El Monte, however, was outside the LA city limits and subject to no such restriction.
Beginning in 1955, and for the next six years, Laboe presented dances at the 3,000-capacity stadium, featuring such hit artists as Jackie Wilson, Ritchie Valens, Sam Cooke and Ricky Nelson, as well as the doo-wop groups particularly beloved by the young Chicanos and Chicanas among his multiracial audience. While not entirely free from the kind of trouble feared by the LA board of education, Laboe’s dances flourished and were fondly remembered long after they had ceased and the hall had been demolished.
He was born Arthur Egnoian in a suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah, to Armenian parents, Hosanna (nee Kezerian) and John Egnoian, who were Mormons. When they divorced, Art went to live with an older sister in South Central Los Angeles, where he attended George Washington high school. At the age of 13, he assembled radio equipment in his bedroom and began broadcasting. He served in the US Navy during the second world war, and it was while stationed in San Francisco Bay that he was given a slot on KSAN, a local radio station.
Back in Los Angeles, and with a new name, he broadcast on the KPOP station from Scrivner’s drive-in, welcoming stars who dropped by to plug their latest 45 and soon establishing a reputation not just for playing the coolest records but for reading out dedications sent in by his listeners across the state, including young inmates of California’s penitentiaries. He might have been of their parents’ generation, but he gave them a voice and a message board.
A typical dedication, recalled by the Los Angeles Times, was from a young man to the girlfriend whose affections he had recently lost: “Her name is Ana Ivette Vasquez and I want to let her know that I’m really sorry for doing her wrong, for all the tears she dropped and pain I put her through. I want to dedicate this song from deep down in my heart.” The next platter on the turntable might have been an emotional doo-wop classic such as the Paradons’ Diamonds and Pearls or the Penguins’ Earth Angel (Will You Be Mine).
The growing size and diversity of the crowds gathering around the drive-in led to police harassment and persuaded Laboe to look for a site for larger gatherings. Admission to the dances in El Monte cost a couple of dollars, and the disc jockey would sometimes slip a coin or two to a teenager short of the price of a ticket.
Like his contemporary Alan Freed, who popularised the term “rock’n’roll” in his broadcasts from Cleveland and New York, Laboe sometimes took a joint composition credit (as Arthur Egnoian) for tunes created by others, such as the instrumental hits Teen Beat by Sandy Nelson and Bongo Rock by Preston Epps, both released in 1959 on his Original Sound label. Unlike Freed, however, Laboe was never caught up in the wave of payola scandals as the 50s drew to a close.
In 1963 the Penguins’ lead singer, Cleve Duncan, recorded Memories of El Monte, a fondly evocative doo-wop pastiche written by Frank Zappa and Ray Collins, who would later found the Mothers of Invention. With the arrival of the Beatles, however, the music he loved went briefly out of fashion before being revived via TV shows such as Happy Days and the films American Graffiti and Back to the Future.
Long a resident of the Hollywood Hills, he died in Palm Springs, from where in recent years he presented The Art Laboe Connection, syndicated from a local station to others across California and neighbouring states. His loyal audiences included the Mexican-American community of East Los Angeles, who remembered with affection the way his shows had encouraged a breakdown of the barriers between races.
He was twice married and divorced, and two sons predeceased him.
• Art Laboe (Arthur Egnoian), disc jockey, born 7 August 1925; died 7 October 2022
