Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeart Radio and welcome back to Coast to Coast George nor with you, Harvey Kopernick back with us. Noted author of many books, including Canyon of Dreams, The Magic and the Music of Laurel Canyon, and Turn Up the Radio, Rock, Pop and Roll in Los Angeles, Harvey is very active in the music, documentary and TV film world. In twenty twenty, he served as consultant on the Laurel Canyon A Place in Time. I think about Laurel Canyon every time I'm
on a Harvey thinking about you. Welcome back. Always a pleasure to do your program. Thank you have you been. I've been doing great. We miss you at the Greek Restaurant, but you're still with us all the time. I'll be back in a few weeks for my winter days in La so I'm looking forward to that. We'll get together out there. How did you get involved in such incredible interest in the music field, You know, I don't think
about it. I don't even know if it's I think it was Deepak Chopra who claimed the term sincro destiny. Part of it is I've had regional access to music. I mean, you know, going to high school and West Hollywood, being born literally overlooking the Hollywood one oh one Freeway. I'm from Hollywood. I'm a native of Los Angeles. So the music and the bands have always been in front of me since like nineteen fifty six or nineteen fifty eight.
And like you, I'm a child of AM radio and we you and I grew up in a world and I still think I think it's it's still relevant now. We didn't have labels, we didn't have these genres, we didn't have these different camps. We are. We are all coming out of this kind of tribal society like music almost as real egon, and we just heard the music. We didn't know it was rhythm and blues or country western.
And where you grew up with Casey Kyson just jockeys in Detroit, you could hear Marty Robbins next to the current or new music of Motown and it just stuck
in our DNA, all of us, including your listeners. And now it's so multigenerational, and rock and roll is forty fifty sixty years old, and Alice's being so well documented because of the platforms of downloading and streaming and of course music documentaries, and are there are people like me who are who are assuming these librarian custodian positions simply because we have been reporters for half a century and we're not Wikipedia children. We were there at the birth witnesses,
my friend witnesses. I've grown my appreciation and someone like Bob Dylan and Frank Sinatra has grown in my later years, but not when they were their stars at the at their peak. Why is that? Why is it? Why did it take me so long, Harvey to appreciate them? Part of it is the cycle of life. You hear it when you're five or ten, or twenty or twenty five.
Before you realize it you're forty five or fifty, and then you start hearing these recordings in the dental office and an elevator at somebody's house, or your kid or your grandkid is bringing you, you know, some something on an iPod to hear strangers in the night, and you remember when it came out in nineteen sixty six, when you heard it, and and it's it's it's so embedded in our souls that we all have this collective appreciation because the music also, I mean, it's so overrated to go, oh,
it's the soundtrack of our lives, but it's it's not just the soundtrack of our lives. It's a reminder of our life. And as we get older and we live in such a terrifying society at times we want the comfort, you know, of some of this music, which was if it wasn't soothing, it kind of was a guidepost. It was kind of a compass for our own sonic explorations,
and it just sticks with us absolutely. And I also remember hard my mother playing records in those days over and over again, and that's how I learned how to sing by the way I sing at our live events, and I learned how to sing by listening to my
mother's records. Well, it's about vinyl. I mean, you have somebody like Taylor Swift right now who's accomplished a pretty interesting we'll call it a reap tail accomplishment where her most recent product, the vinyl, has outsold like the CD format, I mean, and there has been a renaissance in vinyl and Menorah Records. And part of the reason for the vinyl, you know, explosion, part of it is traced to maybe
National Record Store Day. But the mastering engineer, Bill Inglot, and I have discussed this and he pointed out to me and reminded me listening to a record vinyl is a very almost romantic experience because you're one to one with the unit. You are stationary. It's not transportive where you're in your car or you're having earbuds or something. You are trapped in a room in a stereo system or a home entertainment center and you're just stuck right there.
Are You either absorb it or you run away from it, but you start picking up these nuances when you are one to one with the delivery mode coming at you. There's something about putting the knee alarm on a record and watching its spin around that's really neat. Yes, I agree in it. That's not to you know, newter the other delivery modes, but there is just something because we all remember, I mean, one of the reasons I'm still
in this game what I do. I still get excited when I get a vinyl album or a CD and I break the plastic or I use my fingernails to do this slip to pull out the vinyl there. I've never lost that feeling of discovery. And I think my fans, my readers, my you know, global brand that's out there as these books are published in China and Russia and England.
People know that it's something that propels me and makes me dig deeper as an investigative writer and also somebody who's has a cinematic approach to writing, simply because I'm a child of Hollywood. And I remember our record player in the living room of our house back in the Detroit area was like a piece of furniture. I mean the thing was like seven feet long, and of course the record was inside the record player and you just lifted up and do your thing. But I mean it
was a beautiful piece of furniture. Harvey, Well, this is something Barry Gordy Junior and I discussed. I interviewed him at his mansion in nineteen ninety five when his autobiography came out, and I know how important motown music is to your life. Yeah, And I said, I said, mister Gordy, I just want to know. I'm not asking you see grits of songwriting or distribution or production. And I said, I said, what is the key to the music of motown and he said, well, it's all about the hooks
at the beginning of the records. You've got to hook them real early. And I said, okay, But I said, what about the consumer And he said the consumer He said, young man, you gotta love that record. You've got to put out something where they love it and have to own it. They just can't like it. And I think that is probably translates to anybody who's on the charts or selling. And he knew because he had owned a record store that the record player was your best friend.
At times you could turn to that record player for discovery, for salvation, for inspiration, but it also became something where everybody bonded together because who could afford to buy records every day or every week. Finding that seventy nine cents for a single when you're a babysitter or something, it was tough. And remember, you and I grew up in a world where there were only three channels or three networks.
There was no cable television and by the way, FM rock radio doesn't really start till late nineteen sixty six, so we are listening to Top thirty or Top forty AM radio where a lot of the playlists were the same, and so we have this commonality and this bond and this link that is like cybal you know, it's just it's beyond tribal. It's almost like a piece of jewelry
that we wear that's invisible. Berry Gordon's ninety three years old. Now, what are the odds when I get back to Los Angeles having you and him in the studio for a couple hours. Well, let me tell you something. And at the end of January, Barry Gordy Junior and William Smokey Robinson Smokey was on our show. By the way, I was, well, the reason I'm telling you this, they're both going to be honored in Los Angeles as the Music Cares People of the Year. And I think Barry's being a little
bit more visible these days. I haven't talked to him in a while. I've seen him in a couple events, and I mean, listen, when I interviewed him his brother Robert Gordy, who ran the publishing division for Motown, they filmed me for the Motown Museum in Detroit. I mean, I could retire after that one, you know. And Barry, but with the Hitsville documentary, that just came out, and twenty years ago the Funk Brothers, the Fanning in the Shadow of Motown documentary came out. Motown Music Is For.
They're expanding more than ever, and I'll put out the smoke signal of all hook you up. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern, and go to Coast to Coast am dot com for more