#116 Rock ‘N’ Roll Renegades (29th Anniversary Review)

[tomswift2002]

Published: October 1992
Publisher: Minstrel Books (1992-1999)
Author: Christopher Lampton
Other Hardy's by author: Mystery Stories 98*, 99*https://www.hardyboyscasefiles.com/forums/index.php?topic=3076.0, 100, 106, 109, 110, 116, 120, 162, Casefiles #64*, 65, 66*, Time Bomb* (*possible authorship)

Plot: Don't touch that dial! The shock-radio wars are about to rage out of control!

When the Hardys hit the airwaves, danger rises to the top of the charts!

Hardy rock radio WBBX Bayport has a new disc jockey, and he calls himself Joltin' Joe Hardy. The spot is hot -- in more ways than one: Joe's part-time job is fast turning into a full-time fight for survival. A pirate broadcaster, Skull and Bones Radio, is muscling in on WBBX, jamming the station's signal and threatening to knock it off the air.

The Hardys trace the illegal operation to a ship anchored offshore but find that they may be the ones who end up walking the plank. The pirate radio crew has a secret stake in sabotaging WBBX -- no matter who gets buried with it. For Frank and Joe, it's time to rock and roll: time to roll up their sleeves and rock this ship out of the water!

[tomswift2002]

I remember reading this book for the first time around 1997.  As a kid I seemed to enjoy it more.  This time I was finding that for Christoper Lampton, this was one of his poorer efforts and showed how his plots were kind of thin and he really preferred using the criminal-is-someone-the-Hardy's-meet-early-on-or-is-hired-by plot device too much.

Also one of the clues was very obvious early on by having a character with initials that are the same as the criminal's alias. 

As I was reading it, I was wondering how the story might've worked better had it been written 10 years earlier, during the Stratemeyer Syndicate era, with 20 chapters to fill instead of the 16 in this book.  The extra 4 chapters might've given the author more time to expand on the different crimes, rather than shoe-horning them all in as he did and leaving it in a mess. 

Now then Rock 'N' Roll Renegades is a product of the early-90's in terms of radio broadcasting.  The first few pages have Chet ask why Joe uses the term "spinning the twin turntables" when Joe's using CD, and then you have Joe saying that he remembered hearing it as a kid, and just liked it, and then Frank delivering a techno babble dump about how in 1991-92 some low-budget stations, like college stations, couldn't afford to replace a lot of vinyl or tapes with CD's, while, even for big-budget stations, some music still hadn't been released digitally, so radio stations still occasionally used vinyl and tapes (even now, in 2022, stations still occasionally use vinyl for stuff that has not received a digital release, such as when a local artist, who maybe released a few records independently years ago, passes away, and they never reissued the albums on CD or file, then the vinyl or tape is the only option if they wanted to play that artists best known song).  I've got a few radio programs from the 1989-1994 era, where shows like Solid Gold Scrapbook (that stations might air in the night hours or on a Saturday/Sunday afternoon) would send to stations on both vinyl and CD-R so that the station could play the format they wanted. (Yes CD-R existed in 1989-90, but only at the professional level.). And a lot of those CD-R's were mastered from vinyl (one I have, the CD-R has a vinyl skip in the middle of the announcer's intro to the song, but the vinyl copy plays clean), so some of the songs sound really terrible, since they still used 45's or 33's, so you would have a multi-analog generation loss (and this one is a Christmas program and they were playing Brenda Lee's Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree and during the first 20 seconds of the song on both the vinyl and CD you could hear the deejay's turntable skipping a few times because he was using a worn 45 copy of the song, and 45's usually had a lot of wear and skips at the outer edge from a ton of needle drops so you would get that scratch on a couple of grooves and partial music).  Now in 2022, most stations are subscribed to file services and play the music from higher resolution files, since it saves the station costs in terms of storage.  So this book is definitely dated in that sense.

Rating:  5.5/10

[MacGyver]

Nice review. I honestly don't remember much from this book but I still like to listen to the radio so this arena for a mystery makes for a fun one for me.