Shotgun Tom Kelly after receiving his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2013 (photo by Bob Freeman).
12 August 2024
JCH Media Inc., Media Play News‘, the parent company of The Entertainment Magazine, is opening a boutique book publishing division focusing on biographies, autobiographies and memoirs of personalities from the entertainment and media worlds.
The first book, I only want to play hitswritten by legendary Top 40 DJ Shotgun Tom Kelly with veteran voice actor Neil Ross, is currently available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle e-book format. A limited edition hardcover copy will be sold at a series of book signings in Los Angeles and San Diego.
Shotgun Tom Kelly, real name Thomas J. Irwin, is considered one of the last great Top 40 DJs, an elite group that also includes Wolfman Jack, Cousin Brucie and The Real Don Steele. His radio career began in the late 1960s, when he was just 16 years old, at San Diego’s community radio station KPRI and blossomed shortly thereafter when he moved to popular Top 40 radio stations KGB-AM and KCBQ-AM.
With the advent of FM radio in the 1970s, Kelly continued his reign at KFMB-FM (B-100) before moving to Los Angeles, where he worked for nearly three decades at KRTH-FM (K-EARTH 101), the influential oldies station that kept the spirit of Top 40 radio alive well into the 2000s.
Kelly, who just turned 75, continues to appear daily on SiriusXM’s 60s Gold channel. All I Wanna Do Is Play the Hits chronicles both the highs of his career – culminating in a star on the prestigious Hollywood Walk of Fame – and the lows of drug addiction and open-heart surgery.
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“When we started out, Top 40 radio stations ruled the air, from the East Coast to the West Coast,” wrote the Beach Boys’ Mike Love on the back cover. “The Beach Boys know full well the important role Top 40 DJs played in getting our careers launched. Back then, radio was the only place you could hear new music, and DJs could make or break a new act. I’ll never forget the day we first heard ‘Surfin’ on KFWB and KDAY, two of the biggest radio stations in Los Angeles, and what a feeling it was for us knowing that our music was now reaching thousands of listeners all over Southern California. Being on the radio was everyone’s dream because it was a way to sell records and concert tickets. We all had our favorite stations and our favorite DJs. One of our favorites for decades was Shotgun Tom Kelly. And this book is an incredible journey through the life and times of a true rock’n’roll radio legend.”
