THE INTERVIEW: DAVID BIEBER

This legendary radio Promotions Director was the man behind the curtain during the nineteen seventies and eighties glory days of Boston's stalwart FM radio station, WBCN. As megacorporations began pacmaning up terrestrial properties across the nation, he found refuge around the corner from his former Boylston Street haunts at the offices of Phoenix Media/Communications, the publisher of the weekly alt-newspaper, The Boston Phoenix and sister outlet, WFNX. In early twenty thirteen, owner Stephen Mindich held an impromptu press conference announcing his intention of boarding up the windows of his Phoenix empire. While it came as a shock to some, others saw it coming - he had already flipped 'FNX back in twenty twelve. It left Bieber standing at a fork in the road. He is the proud owner of an impressive forty-plus year resume in the entertainment business but these are strange days indeed. Little did he know, he was just handed the greatest gift in his storied career.

THE INTERVIEW

On Billbord Magazine:

Billboard Hot 100 Interview with David Bieber

Recorded August 2, 2026. Edited for clarity and length.

MOTHERLODETV: On August 4, 1958, Billboard published the Hot 100 for the first time. Where were you when it began?

DAVID: I was in Cleveland. My bar mitzvah had been in June, so I was probably wishing I could spend my bar mitzvah money. I was mowing lawns and pulling weeds.

MOTHERLODETV: When did you become aware of Billboard?

DAVID: I discovered it less than five years later. Even before I was thirteen, I was fanatical about collecting the weekly Top 40—and sometimes Top 50—surveys issued by the AM radio stations.

WHK in Cleveland had something called the WHK Tune-Dex. Their tagline was “Color Radio,” and they played fifty songs. I developed my own methodology, using checks and circles to mark which songs I thought would become hits, which were “hit-bound” and which were falling off the chart.

I made my own observations about why they were playing more Black acts and all kinds of other things. But I never realized there was a music industry.

When I was seventeen, I was still shopping for records and hoovering up radio-station surveys. I found them around University Heights and at Record Rendezvous in downtown Cleveland—shout-out to Leo Mintz.

One day, I wandered over to East Ninth Street, where there was a newsstand that sold magazines and out-of-town newspapers. They carried exotic publications you normally wouldn’t find on a drugstore magazine rack.

That was where I discovered Billboard.

It was probably May of 1963. I was so excited to take the magazine home and show my parents that there was something substantive connected to music: the business of music as well as the fun of listening to it. It really was a life-changer.

Comic books were a dime and magazines were a quarter, but I think Billboard was fifty cents. A subscription was about fifteen dollars a year, and I couldn’t afford it on what I made mowing lawns and pulling weeds.

That autumn, I entered Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The first thing I did was check whether the library subscribed to Billboard. It didn’t, so I asked the librarian to subscribe.

One of the first issues contained a small announcement that Billboard was launching a campus-correspondent division. They wanted people to write about musical events presented at colleges and universities. I had always enjoyed writing, so I contacted Gerry Platt, who headed the division.

And I got the gig.

Within two weeks, a jazz package featuring Cannonball Adderley and Nancy Wilson came to Miami University. I had never written for a professional publication or formally interviewed anybody. I certainly didn’t have any music-industry connections.

With my campus-correspondent press pass, I contacted the student activities board and told them I was working for Billboard. The possibility of national coverage was more than they expected from presenting the show. Cannonball Adderley and Nancy Wilson became the first concert I covered.

Within several months, I was being tossed into the deep end without a life preserver, interviewing everyone from Dick Gregory to classical pianist Rudolf Serkin.

There was nothing more thrilling than taking a copy of Billboard home and showing my parents that I had received national recognition for my writing.

I also received a complimentary subscription and advance notice of the Hot 100. They would close the chart by Tuesday, and by Thursday I’d receive the listing. If prediction markets had existed then, I probably could have predicted what was going to be in the Top 10.

I think I was paid ten or fifteen dollars per article. They sent complimentary albums, too, and their annual edition for student activities gave me an opportunity to write longer feature pieces rather than only short reviews.

Discovering Billboard showed me that the charts were part of something larger than the subjective decisions of a local radio station. A station could move records up and down its survey, but you didn’t know why something was becoming a hit or why another record disappeared after three weeks. You didn’t realize that promotion people were working the stations.

The Billboard chart gave you the publisher, the songwriters and other information. You could see how many weeks a song had been on the chart, where it had been the previous week and whether it had earned a star or a bullet.

MOTHERLODETV: “Number One with a Bullet.”

DAVID: Exactly. Songs printed in red rather than black indicated significant upward momentum.

MOTHERLODETV: There was heat on it.

DAVID: Yeah. There were heaters.

Then there was the “Bubbling Under” chart. You could see records that hadn’t cracked the Hot 100 but were percolating immediately beneath it. Maybe one station in Pittsburgh or St. Louis was giving a song heavy airplay. It could even be a local act.

That’s the thing about the Hot 100: it showed different kinds of music existing together before radio became heavily divided into separate formats. You had rock and roll, R&B, pop singers, instrumentals and remnants of the earlier popular-music world all sharing the chart. You could see the transition happening.

The Hot 100 gave the public a way to follow popular music, but it also revealed the industry behind it. There were publishers, songwriters, labels, producers, promotion people, radio stations and record stores. A song didn’t simply appear on the radio by magic.

For me, discovering Billboard was discovering that all of that existed. Before then, I was collecting charts and trying to understand the movement. I knew one song was rising and another was falling, but I didn’t know what was happening behind those changes.

Billboard showed me the machinery.

MOTHERLODETV: So the Cleveland kid marking up the WHK Tune-Dex eventually found the national version.

DAVID: Exactly. And only a few months after discovering it, I was writing for it.

The money and free albums were nice, but the real validation was seeing my byline in a national publication and taking it home to my parents. I could show them that my interest in records wasn’t simply a teenage obsession. There was a business. There was journalism. There was a whole world attached to it.

MOTHERLODETV: And it launched everything that came afterward.

DAVID: In its own way, yes. It was one of those doors.

On The Kent State shootings:

I had already graduated but I had just visited about a month earlier. Everything happened not far from where I spent most of my time on campus near the School of Journalism. Kent State was not known as a hotbed for radicalized students. You realize later that when you got the Guardsmen outside of their uniforms, they were 22 year-olds killing 22 year-olds coupled with the fact that this was a representation of middle-America. There were black students murdered in a University south of us that were ignored. It was a tidal wave moment that forces this dramatic awareness that the bullets were real and that death was real and it could have been us. The shootings at Kent State had real stopping power. The students weren’t anarchists from Greenwich Village. Kent State wasn’t Berkeley or Columbia. There was an everyman quality to it. It made you think, it could have been me.