NEMHOF Historian Award Winner

Santoro comes to GBH News from RadioBDC, where he served as news director. Prior to that Santoro was a fixture on morning radio as the award­winning news director and morning news anchor for WFNX­FM from 1983 until 2012.

Throughout his 30 years as a morning anchor, Santoro has delivered coverage of many of the most significant news stories of the era, beginning with the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s and leading to the 9/11 attacks, the first election of Mayor Menino and the presidential election of Barack Obama. He has interviewed cultural and political personalities including Andy Warhol, Mitt Romney, Allen Ginsberg and Yoko Ono, and has a deep connection to local news and community events in Boston. He also has taught radio and journalism courses as an adjunct professor at Emerson College.

NEMHOF Benjamin Franklin Journalism  Award

Steve Morse Music History and Liberal Arts and Music Theory, Harmony, and Ear Training Steve Morse was the senior rock music critic at the Boston Globe for three decades and continues to write for the paper on a freelance basis today. During his tenure, he interviewed legends such as the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, Chrissie Hynde, U2, Pearl Jam, and Radiohead. He attended 250 concerts a year for 30 years, including frequent tour openings around the country as well as major events such as Live Aid and Farm Aid. Morse has contributed to Billboard and Rolling Stone magazines and served on the nominating committee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for a seven-year term. He hosted a radio show, "Morse on Music,'' for Boston station WBOS-FM for two years and has aired "60 Second'' reviews on VH1. Morse has done many industry projects such as writing liner notes for album releases by Billy Joel and the Dave Matthews Band. He grew up around Boston and attended Brown University. 

NEMHOF Radio  Broadcaster of the Year

Carter Alan is a disc jockey and radio announcer who has been working professionally in Boston since 1979. His work began at the student radio station at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, followed by 19 years at Boston radio station WBCN. At WBCN, he was the music director as well as a DJ.[1] Alan is perhaps most famous for playing U2 before they were popular in the United States, helping them to "break" the market.[2]

In 1998, he moved to WZLX. As the assistant program director, Alan also hosts the midday show from 10 am to 2 pm, compiles the Rock 'n' Roll Diary, hosts Sunday Morning Blues every Sunday morning, and produced WZLX's first charity CD, From the Vaults.

He has also written four books: Outside Is America, The Road to Pop (both about the rock band U2), Life on the Road: The Adventures of Dinky Dawson and Radio Free Boston: The Rise And Fall Of WBCN.[3]

NEMHOF Historian Award

Albert grew up in a medium-sized college town in the Midwest, being the oldest of 10. His first musical memory (as family legend has it) is requesting Shostakovich at the local music emporium at the ripe age of 3.

As a pre-teen in the 60’s, he lived for Top 40 radio, combing the AM airwaves for new and exciting music via baby blue GE transistors. His first exposure to “outside” artists came from an older neighbor who took young Albert under his wing and entrusted him with his vinyl. “Seemingly overnight, my Beatles, Stones and Byrds LPs took a back seat to the Blues Project, Fred Neil, the Holy Modal Rounders and the Fugs. I bought everything I could with my paper route money on the Elektra, Vanguard and Island labels, eventually taking things a step further witnessing live music at local universities, clubs and coffeehouses, thanks to a high-quality, fake ID (it was much easier then)”.

Aimlessly toiling at the family flower shop, Albert jumped at the chance to help move high school friends to Berklee in the early 70’s, visiting Greater Boston often and eventually staying permanently. Albert considered it “everything I dreamed of…open all night and all within walking distance”. A chance meeting in the mid 70’s with someone involved in the (then) SMU Dartmouth, MA radio station (“it barely reached down Chase Road”) opened the proverbial radio doors, eventually leading to stints at community MIT radio WTBS/WMBR, WLYN (pre-WFNX), over 20 years at legendary WBCN, and over 5 years at Greater Media’s WROR & WBOS.

Albert finds it both refreshing and re-invigorating to be involved with WUMB, be it hosting Highway 61 Revisited or sitting in for the stellar daytime hosts. “I feel like I’ve come full circle, doing ‘real’ radio again and featuring artists of all genres who actually have something to say for listeners who are both appreciative and knowledgeable – a rare breed in this day and age”.

https://wumb.org/people/albert-o/

NEMHOF Reporter of the Year

Jim Sullivan bio.  As a high school baseball player growing up in Maine, I used to pump myself up for games by playing Iggy & the Stooges Raw Power at full volume on my crappy bedroom stereo. The ultimate adrenaline rush. Or sometimes, Alice Cooper’s Killer, digging those hard-rocking, theatrical dark deeds. My friends and team mates didn't quite get it – they liked Chicago (the band) and whatever Top 40 stuff crossed their path. But that was OK: I was secure in my choices and my taste. And the punk rock revolution was around the corner. That's where my musical taste locked in with many others, all of us bored with corporate rock. That period was a time of extreme excitement (friction, joy, conflict) that helped inspire me to write about what I loved. And, it opened the doors to even more worlds, writing and otherwise.  I wrote for my college paper the Maine Campus and became a rock columnist and feature writer for Maine’s largest daily paper, the Bangor Daily News. My first rock interview was Slade in 1975, where, post-show, I asked Noddy Holder if he still got excited on stage. He exclaimed that he did – “My jeans are stiff as a board!” I was also writing for a music magazine, Sweet Potato, that started in Portland.  After graduating from the University of Maine, I moved to Boston in 1978. I continued writing for Sweet Potato – a new Boston edition opened - and began writing freelance music reviews and features for the Boston Globe the following year while attending Boston University, earning an M.S. in Journalism.  I also wrote for various national now-defunct music (The Record, Creem, Music-Sound Output, etc.) as well as doing a dozen or so pieces for the nascent USA Today – broadened my taste and sharpened my critical faculties. I found Boston most fascinating, the local rock scene and the many national and international bands that through. Maybe it wasn't New York or L.A., but most anything that hit those cities hit ours, too, and the diversity was most impressive. Name a genre on an any given night bands from that genre would be playing town. Difficult choices had to be made. Quality of the local scene: Never less than B+ and often in the A range.  I joined the Globe staff in 1988, writing for virtually every section of the paper at some point, but anchored in the Arts Section and specializing in pop music and culture. The landscape of coverage was immense – from Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis to Sex Pistols and Ramones, from Neil Young and Elvis Costello to Pink Floyd and Butthole Surfers, from Roxy Music and Sparks to Patti Smith and Tina Turner.  I left in the summer of 2005. Since, I've freelanced for, among others, the Boston Phoenix, the Boston Herald, the Christian Science Monitor, Best Classic Bands, WBUR’s ARTery, Rock and Roll Globe, The Hard Noise, the Cape Cod Times, and Playgirl (Yes, a ribald ride with Amanda Palmer and a profile of Lez Zeppelin). In 2022, it was time to combine things, to remake and remodel some of what I’d done over the years, add perspective and context, do some additional interviews to come up with Backstage & Beyond: 45 Years of Classic Rock Chats and Rants (Vol. 1), published July 21, 2023 and Backstage & Beyond: 45 Years of Modern Rock Chats and Rants (Vol. 2), to be published Oct. 19, 2023. The first volume of the anthology focuses on artists who came to prominence in the 1950s through the early 70s, but whose careers extended well beyond. Twenty-one of them are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Richard Thompon was kind enough to say, “These are wonderful stories across the whole range of popular music, by one of rock’s finest journalists. As history lengthens, and some of these legends move on. these become increasingly precious fragments of lives lived at the sharp edge of music.” The second volume deals with artists who took shape during the mid 70s, mostly the punk, post-punk, new wave eras. From Joy Division/New Order bassist-songwriter Peter Hook: “I have spoken to many journalists in my time, some good, some bad, some terrible. And it is lovely when you meet someone who is just like you - a huge music fan! Jim Sullivan is a music fan. I knew it very quickly after our first meeting in the early 80's. He is friendly, knowledgeable, forthright, and opinionated! An expert in his chosen field. Meeting him now is like meeting an old friend and one of the highlights of any American tour. He is no pushover. If you have faults or are resting on your laurels, he is the first to tell you off. I value his opinions highly and treasure his friendship even more.” Although much of the book revolves around things that took place in Boston, I didn’t want it to be an overly Boston-centric book. Hopefully, it’s for rock fans anywhere and everywhere. The five local-but-national acts I chose for the first two volumes: Aerosmith, the J. Geils Band, the Cars, Pixies and Mission of Burma. Jim lives in Brookline with his wife Roza and a trio of felines. If the season’s right and the weather’s nice, you may find him at Fenway Park at night -if not a rock club – and if it’s daytime, you may find him out on a golf course, forever trying to score in the 80s, succeeding enough to make him keep coming back. A summer 2023 highlight: Playing two 9-hole rounds in Newton with Alice Cooper, a smooth-swinging five-handicapper, who had some free time in Boston, prior to the Hollywood Vampires show at the Boch-Wang Theatre and tries to play every other day on tour. And, yeah, the 16-year-old me – if I knew this was in the future - woulda said, “That’s pretty cool!” And, frankly, so did the 66-year-old me: Alice telling rock stories, golf stories (and tips), showbiz stories, making a brief stop to pet the course border collie, Blush, and take a pic. All of us playing pretty damn good golf, too. One of those stories: Back in the day, Eddie Van Halen wanted to golf with Alice so they did and after the round he asked Alice how he did: “You are a great guitar player,” Alice said, politely. Yes, Eddie sucked, but the real reason he wanted to play with Alice was so that he’d introduce him to his friend Glen Campbell who was a fabulous guitarist and great golfer, as good as any pro from 60 yards in. Alice shot just a bit over par and they were two of my best rounds, too. It included a blind chip to the green over a hill on the sixth hole which landed two inches from the cup. Now, we do have “gimmes” in my little golf world, but not on a birdie putt. I walked up to the green without my putter before I remembered that, but Alice graciously handed me his putter for the polite tap-in.