WBLS New York
Frankie “Hollywood” Crocker (December 18, 1937 – October 21, 2000) was an American disc jockey who helped grow WBLS, the black music radio station in New York.
According to popeducation.org, Crocker began his career in Buffalo at the AM Soul powerhouse WUFO (also the home to future greats Gerry Bledsoe, Eddie O’Jay, Herb Hamlett, Gary Byrd and Chucky T) before moving to Manhattan, where he first worked for Soul station WWRL and later top-40 WMCA in 1969. He then worked for WBLS as program director, taking that station to the top of the ratings during the late 1970s and pioneering the radio format now known as urban contemporary. He sometimes called himself the Chief Rocker, and he was as well known for his boastful on-air patter as for his off-air flamboyance.
He’d been the program director at WWRL and felt held back by what he considered to be the narrow perspective of the station. He quit and was twice re-hired by the station management; “He knew how to attract attention,” the chairman of Inner City Broadcasting, Hal Jackson was the owner of WBLS and once said, “We called him Hollywood.”
By 1979 he was shuttling between the west and east coast, with programming duties at KUTE in L.A. which featured R&B before a format change instituted there and on the east coast at WBLS which he called “Disco and More”, relying on his expertise at “finding the music”. Speaking to Radio Report magazine, an industry periodical, Crocker said, “There is nothing I won’t play if I hear it and like it and feel it will go for my market”.
In October 2000, Crocker went into a Miami area hospital for several weeks. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and kept the illness a secret from his friends and even from his mother. He died on October 21, 2000.