Friday, October 28, 2016

New York radio personality Carol Miller

Carol Miller is a legend of the fast-disappearing institution known as New York rock radio.


In the late seventies and early eighties, Carol Miller's smooth, sultry voice drew many teenage boys in the greater New York City area to WPLJ-FM, one of the Big Apple's most popular rock stations, as one of its most popular DJs.  She played all the records of all the great rockers of the day - the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Neil Young - and she even got to meet some of them!  You can read all about it in her 2012 memoir "Up All Night."


In 1983, however, WPLJ-FM dropped its rock format and became a  Top 40 station, which it remains today.  No one could have known it then, but that was the beginning of the end.  Although Carol Miller moved to New York's other rock station, WNEW-FM, the cultural trends toward pop and, later, rap were evident, and rock radio, like rock itself, started to decline.  Nowhere was that decline felt more acutely then New York.  Ms. Miller would stay at WNEW-FM until that station dropped its rock format in 1999.  Since then, two other New York rock stations have gone off the air - one after only three years in existence - but one "classic" rock station holds on . . . WAXQ-FM.

Who's one of WAXQ's most popular DJs?  Carol Miller. :-) 


Carol Miller has not only survived changing musical tastes, she's also survived breast cancer, which she's had to deal with more than once.  As a native New Yorker, she's not one to give up.

Here are some other facts you may not know about Carol Miller:

In addition to her DJ work, she did reports on music on "Entertainment Tonight" back in the eighties.

She has a law degree from Hofstra University, but she discovered her calling at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a DJ on the campus radio station.  One of the first songs she played on that station was Jethro Tull's "A New Day Yesterday." 

She was married for a time to MTV host Mark Goodman, a Philadelphia native who, by coincidence, had been a DJ on Philadelphia's rock station WMMR-FM - which, thankfully, is still a rock station.

2 comments:

janitox said...

exelent.

Steve said...

janitox: Thanks! Two updates, though; WPLJ changed to a Christian format in the summer of 2019, and Carol Miller can also be heard on Sirius XM satellite radio.