Alison Steele
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Alison Steele (January 26, 1937 – September 27, 1995) was a pioneering American disc jockey in New York City.
Born in Brooklyn, Alison Steele achieved her greatest notoriety as a DJ on WNEW-FM, where she spun records on the night shift, after a major change in station programming from an all-female MOR music format to progressive rock. Alison didn't know much about progressive rock when she started at this, and neither, apparently did the management of WNEW-FM. She was basically left to her own devices and in this process, developed her persona, The Nightbird.
She would start her show reciting poetry over Andean flute music, then introduce her show in her well-known sultry, smoky voice:
- “The flutter of wings, the shadow across the moon, the sounds of the night, as the Nightbird spreads her wings and soars, above the earth, into another level of comprehension, where we exist only to feel. Come, fly with me, Alison Steele, the Nightbird, at WNEW-FM, until dawn.”
and then transition to recordings of some of the more exceptional and experimental music acts of the time. Some of the groups she would feature at that time would be Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, Hawkwind, Lothar and the Hand People, Tangerine Dream, Edgar Froese, Moody Blues, Ramases, Renaissance, Curved Air, and many other groups of that genre. If it was raining on a Monday night, she would always play The Doors' classic "Riders on the Storm" as her first song setting the mood for that night's show.
Her show became a hit, and did much to push WNEW-FM into the forefront of progressive radio. She also served as Music Director there for a while.
Steele is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and in 1976 became the first woman named Billboard magazine’s "FM Personality of the Year".
She left WNEW-FM in 1979 and worked as a writer, producer, and correspondent for Limelight on CNN until 1985, in addition to serving as announcer for the daytime soap opera Search for Tomorrow from 1982-1984. She later worked as a disc jockey on New York's WNEW–AM from 1984–1986 and on WXRK from 1989–1995, along with some work for VH1 and running a boutique on the Upper East Side called Just Cats. Alison Steele died of stomach cancer in 1995.
