ROCK ROYALTY

The rock music business has a selection process that would make Darwin blush. The executives profiled in “Rock’s Top 40” (Aug. 28) may all deserve their positions on the list, but the people who made rock a viable business in the first place have been assigned an undeserved oblivion.

When rock ‘n’ roll first emerged in the ‘50s, there was virtually no one at the major labels who considered it anything more than a fad. They assumed it would pass at the same rate as the acne of its adolescent fans. The people who saw the possibilities were little guys at little record labels with little to spend on promotion. Yet they did have some allies, another class of little guys who made rock into a genuine success--the deejays.

What RCA, Decca, Columbia and Capitol did for the likes of Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, the McGuire Sisters and dozens of other top talents, the local deejays did for rock acts.

Alan Freed, though, is the only name anyone seems to remember, however justifiably. There was also his New York successor Murray (the K) Kaufman, who through the music he chose to play and the live shows he staged at the Brooklyn Fox Theater did as much as anyone to make R&B; performers acceptable to a white audience, who constructed the first multimedia disco long before the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, and who took rock across the radio band from AM to FM.

Bruce (Cousin Brucie) Morrow practically redefined personality radio. On the West Coast, B. Mitchell Reed, Art Laboe, Hunter Hancock and others each did their part to build a market for rock.

They did it with an ear for the music itself and a finger on the pulse of their listeners. Kaufman, for example, refused to play the A-side of a new release by a new singer named Dionne Warwick. Her managers couldn’t persuade him to play it. Neither could the label’s A&R; man. Even calls from Dionne herself couldn’t sway him. As far as Kaufman was concerned, the B-side was the hit. It was a tune called “Walk on By.”

By the early ‘60s, record company executives began to take notice. They looked at the numbers, saw the potential for profit and, literally, took control. The men who helped build the business were suddenly too independent, too cocky. They were, in fact, too proud to jeopardize their reputations and play someone else’s playlist.

So here’s to the original rock marketeers. They gave today’s Top 40 industry executives a business in which to be executives.

PETER ALTSCHULER

Santa Monica

Altschuler is the son of Murray the K.

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How disturbing that Robert Hilburn and Chuck Philips’ list of the industry’s most powerful people was almost exclusively record company executives, mostly CEOs who have little if anything to do with actually discovering and developing new talent.

Mo Ostin hasn’t done anything halfway original since Eddie Vedder was a fetus. And praising Arista’s Clive Davis--whose remark that “there’s much more opportunity for original, cutting-edge thinkers to make it out there these days”--is laughable. How anyone could give the King of MOR credit for anything other than drenching our radio stations with Whitney Houston and all of her clones is beyond me.

Why not give credit to at least a few of the lower-rung AOR representatives, publicists and interns that not only discover these bands, but work tirelessly to promote them, only to step aside when the band goes platinum so that their dinosaur company president can pose with the band (after, of course, he is introduced to them).

STEVEN KOZAK

Los Angeles

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In regard to “the 40 most powerful people in pop music”:

Who cares?

BRUCE BABCOCK

Burbank

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Your Calendar cover depicting a record company executive and a rock star as dogs is a monstrous insult.

To the dogs.

STEVEN BARTEL

Los Angeles