If you don't know who Rodney Bingenheimer is, you have two choices (although I recommend you do both): Watch Mayor of the Sunset Strip, or read the Guardian article below:

An excerpt from the article (the movie is finally opening in Britain):

In Los Angeles, if you don't know who Rodney Bingenheimer is you either run in a very small crowd of crabby, embittered puritans, or you just don't care about rock. Neither of which will get you far in this town. Bingenheimer's late night radio show, Rodney on the ROQ, has been lighting the way of righteous pop for all the young dudes and pretty babies since 1976. All across southern California kids curled up in their suburban bedrooms turned on to the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie And The Banshees, the Jam, the Clash, Blur, Teenage Fanclub, Oasis, the Smiths and Coldplay, to name a tiny fraction of bands he broke in the States thanks to his slot on the megawatt alt rock powerhouse KROQ. His impact on the music industry of the US has been extraordinary.

You'd have to be Rain Man to memorise the full list of favoured artists, but let's just say a lot of us owe Rodney plenty. In the mid-1970s I was one of countless Orange County teenagers whose own life was changed by Rodney with just one spin of the Ramones. I owe at least three jobs and four boyfriends to that discovery. One night in 1978 my brother lay in the KROQ hallway waiting for Debbie Harry to finish her interview with Rodney - she signed the volume of Yeats he brought to pass the time. Everyone has their Rodney story. Now, with the release of the documentary Mayor Of The Sunset Strip, Rodney, after 40 years at the centre of the scene, is getting the chance to tell his. ...

It feels a little shady to tee up the stickiest question about this, but Rodney has facilitated the multimillion-dollar careers of the biggest names in music. He got Bowie an American record deal -and yet he lives in a modest six-room apartment in Hollywood, plays his records on a $69 phonograph bought at a chain drug store and, most recently, his fabled radio show was rudely shunted into the midnight to 3am slot. On Sundays. Does he mind? A lot of people think this is a sad movie. "Yeah, death is sad," he says. We lost Lance Loud, my mom, Joey Ramone and Danny Sugerman. That's sad. But how can Gwen Stefani make you sad? Or all that music that's in the movie?" He deflects any suggestion that he should be bitter: "I wanted to stay behind the scenes. I like being the first to play a band. When I'm in a supermarket and I hear a band like Keane, I think, 'I played them first'." That sincerity helped him gain the trust of Brian Wilson, the Beatles, even Elvis. "I'm not pushy. I'm quiet and just stood in the back. I'm kind of getting over that now. I introduced Teenage Fanclub onstage at Reading."

It's hard to imagine Rodney telling his story any other way than on film. For one thing books don't have a soundtrack. For another, he likes a happy ending and, as it turns out, Mayor Of The Sunset Strip has yielded some nice surprises. He's been approached about a biopic of his life and thinks Johnny Depp could play him "because he's such a chameleon". A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame has also been mooted. Would he like one? "Sure," he says, clearly tickled, "then people can literally walk all over me." And then, to assure his happy ending, "Of course, from down there I can look up girls' dresses."

As one final note from your genial blog host, he was also immortalized (if that's the word) in an early 1980s song by Palm Springs, Ca. punk band Target 13: Rodney on the ROQ ("Feel the noise/down to your feet" -- lyrics from the song and a great six word descriptor for punk :) ).

I saw the movie last year and highly recommend it.

One of the themes, as you might have read above, was that Rodney has never really enjoyed great material success. But for a long time, he was in the centre of the vortex of cutting-edge music culture. Before becoming DJ, he was a rock club impresario: Rodney's English Disco, which was Ground Zero for glam in the U.S. in the early 1970s.

We'll likely never meet, but he enriched my life because he gave initial exposure to great bands whose music gave me great pleasure.

As Cher said in the movie, one doesn't get the feeling there was an angle with Rodney, that he just loved music and musicians. In a world crawling with slimy, phony, fame vampires, that speaks well of him.

While the movie makes the point he was drawn to fame, I think he would have been drawn to those personalities even if they weren't famous. Remember, he was the first to tout a lot of bands that were complete unknowns.

Sadder to me was how Rodney was a complete unknown to his family. In his father's house, there are pictures of everyone everywhere. The filmmakers asked "where's the pictures of Rodney?" There were none on public display. The father had to shuffle to a back room to get some off a photo binder on a closet shelf.

One of the things Rodney seemed to have in common with musicians was a bad home life. Many of Rodney's contemporaries also seemed to be to be escapees from bad family situations in the remote and stifling suburbs of  L.A.

Watching the film, he strikes me as a decent guy who, in his way, made a significant contribution to pop culture. I hope he gets his star.