KROQ

Into the doldrums that many believe the music industry suffered in the 1970s, the punk movement injected new life. But its rawness rubbed radio the wrong way, and most commercial stations either resisted it or awkwardly mixed it in. It took programmers such as Rick Carroll (who once worked for Top 40 pioneer Bill Drake) to make this new music work on the radio. On KROQ in Los Angeles, beginning in 1979, Carroll programmed “Rock...