From Russia to the Top of the Pops: A Conversation with Fred Bronson

Journalist Fred Bronson has spent decades covering popular music. Now he's here to tell us a crazy story about the evolution of the music industry in Russia.

A few years ago, I got an email detailing a new sign-up to my newsletter. It said a “Fred Bronson” was now subscribed. I immediately walked to my bookshelf and pulled out my copy of The Billboard Book of #1 Hits. That book, maybe the music book I consult more than any other, was written by a man named Fred Bronson. It couldn’t be the same guy. Could it? I reached out and was shocked to find out that it was.

Fred had come across one of my TikToks about the criminally underrated number one hit “Want Ads” by Honey Cone. Over the years, we’ve stayed in touch. When he released his latest book Rockin' the Kremlin: My Incredible True Story of Gangsters, Oligarchs, and Pop Stars in Putin's Russia, a collaboration with music executive David Junk, I knew I had to get him to sit for a conversation. Over an hour, we spoke about interviewing every musical legend from Carole King to Paul McCartney to Diane Warren, how he ended up appearing on American Idol, why he felt telling a story about the Russian music industry was so important right now, his unexpected stint writing for Star Trek, and so much more. Click the link below to get one of Fred’s books, including Rockin' the Kremlin.

A Conversation with Fred Bronson

Your book The Billboard Book of #1 Hits has been a research companion of mine for a long time. As I was flipping through it in preparation for this interview, I was struck by a few things, the first of which was the depth of research that went into making that book happen. You spoke to songwriters, producers, and basically anybody else involved in bringing those hits to life. What is your approach when researching a topic?

It all goes back to my education. I studied journalism in college and, even before that, I was writing and doing interviews. By the time I was 16, I had already interviewed Lesley Gore, Martha Reeves, Peaches & Herb, and so many others. By the time I got the call from Billboard in January 1984 to work on the book, I had the skills in place to conduct that research.

The latest edition of Bronson’s The Billboard Book of #1 Hits

How were you able to do those interviews when you were so young?

At the time, KRLA was the local top 40 radio station in Los Angeles. They published a biweekly newsletter called KRLA Beat. I had reached out to them, and they let me work on some pieces. It was through them that I was able to interview Peaches & Herb, Barry McGuire, The Turtles, and a few others. That lasted for about a year or two.

I was also the editor of my summer camp’s newspaper, my junior high newspaper, my high school newspaper, and then eventually my college newspaper. Actually, for my college paper, I interviewed Carole King for two hours in late-1970. She was in the middle of making an album that became known as Tapestry. I had no idea that she was in the process of creating one of the greatest albums of all-time. I just loved her songwriting.

How would you characterize your interview style?

Specific and in depth. If someone gives you a superficial answer, you need to press them to go deeper. People’s memories aren’t perfect. Sometimes they don’t remember things. Sometimes they misremember things. For example, when I wrote the entry about “This Diamond Ring” by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, I interviewed both Lewis and his producer. Their recollections were different. So, I included both of them. But you would never learn about those subtle differences if you don’t press people to try to recall things in specificity.

The amount of people you’ve interviewed is astounding. On the back of The Billboard Book of #1 Hits alone, you have quotes from Lesley Gore, Diane Warren, Mike Curb, Clay Aiken, Peggy March, and Lamont Dozier. Of all your interviews, who left you the most starstruck?

The first that comes to mind is Peggy March because her song “I Will Follow Him” is my favorite song of all-time. Part of the reason, I was so starstruck is that she was so hard to find. I knew she grew up in Philadelphia. I knew she spent some time in Germany. But her then-whereabouts were tough to pin down.

Where did you find her?

Funny enough, she was living 30 minutes from my house in Calabasas, California. After I got in touch, I went over to her house and interviewed her. That was 1984. We’ve been like family ever since.

Bronson [right] with Peggy March on a bridge in Germany named for the singer

Do any other interviews comes to mind?

For SiriusXM, I got to interview both Paul McCartney and ABBA. Those were two highlights. Paul is the only Beatle that I got to meet. He was coming to the studio to promote a new record, so the people at Sirius told me to only ask about the record and not The Beatles or Linda [McCartney’s wife who had died]. I didn’t even have to ask him, though. He brought up both of those topics himself. He was very pleasant.

How about ABBA?

The Mamma Mia! movie was about to come out, so Sirius had an ABBA channel for three weeks. I did all of the interviews for that. The people at Sirius told me that I would have 30 minutes with them. We talked for three hours, starting from their childhoods and going all the way to the release of the movie. It’s one of the best interviews I’ve ever done.

Fred Bronson, one of the leading experts on the Billboard Hot 100

If we’re talking about bests, can you tell me about the worst?

Gerry Goffin. As I mentioned earlier, I’m a big Carole King fan. It was the 1980s and I was working for Dick Clark. Gerry was coming into the studio for an interview with his current wife. He’s gone now, so I don’t mean to speak ill of him, but every answer was hostile. And I was tossing out softball questions about his life and writing. About 20 minutes in, I knew I wasn’t going to get anything usable, so I just cut the interview short. Sometimes you meet your heroes, and they disappoint you. I try to be sympathetic, though. I think he had a drug problem at the time.

You noted before how difficult it was to find Peggy March. As someone who has grown up with the internet, I find everyone and everything online. How did you go about tracking people down in the pre-internet days?

A lot of my contacts came through performance rights societies like ASCAP and BMI. They usually had the contact information for songwriters and artists. In Peggy’s case specifically, she had written a song for this singer named Audrey Landers. I had worked with her sister Judy on a show called BJ and the Bear. Judy gave me Audrey’s number. Audrey had been produced by a man named Jack White. (Not The White Stripes’ Jack White. A different Jack White.) Audrey gave me Jack’s information. Jack had Peggy’s contact information.

I started this interview by saying that a few things jumped out to me when consulting your Billboard Book of #1 Hits. The first was the depth of research. But the other thing that struck me was your impartiality. You could be writing about an absolutely unlistenable song, but you treat it with the same respect as something by The Beatles of Elvis Presley. Is it difficult to maintain that tone?

Not really. Again, that comes from my training as a journalist. Am I always an impartial observer? No. I have many opinions. But I wasn’t reviewing songs in that book. It was informational as well as biographical. With all due respect to Wild Cherry, I’m not a big fan of “Play That Funky Music”. But I tried to treat that number one with the same dignity and respect as all the others.

With these ideas of impartiality and depth of research in mind, I want to turn to your most recent work, Rockin' the Kremlin: My Incredible True Story of Gangsters, Oligarchs, and Pop Stars in Putin's Russia, a book you wrote with David Junk about his time running Universal Music in Russia in the late-1990s and early-2000s. When you’re trying to help someone else tell their life story, does your approach to writing change?

Four of the previous books that I’ve written involved me interviewing people. Of course, one of those was The Billboard Book of #1 Hits. But I also wrote a book with Dick Clark about American Bandstand. I spent a summer interviewing him about the show and his life for that. Then I wrote a book about The Sound of Music where I interviewed all of the actors that played Von Trapp children in the movie. After that, I wrote a book about the Jackson 5 with Marlon, Tito, and Jackie. Again, I interviewed them extensively for that book. I say all this to make the point that when David Junk and I decided to work together that I had extensive experience interviewing other people and telling their stories.

David Junk, the subject and coauthor of Rockin' the Kremlin

David and I initially met at Eurovision in 2000. We lost touch at some point until Billboard asked me to do a story about Ukraine and Russia at Eurovision 15 years later. I reached out to David for that piece. After an interview, he suggested we get together for dinner. At that dinner, he told me that he wanted to write a book about his time in Russia. He didn’t have a publisher, so I pitched it to my editor. He loved the idea. From there, I interviewed David 33 times in order to build a roadmap of his life and career. The book emerged from those conversations.

From falling into this job as an executive for Universal Music Russia because no one else wanted it to trying to take down Russian mobsters who were pirating music, there are so many elements of David’s story that are crazy. With all that craziness, how did you find the stories that were worth telling?

I had to keep the book around 70,000 words, which gave us about 1,800 words per chapter. It’s always better to over-interview than under-interview because it’s very hard to write a story when you’re running out of information. But with David, I felt like I got the perfect amount of stuff. I don’t think we had to leave much out.

Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine floats in the background of this story, especially since Russia has become increasingly hostile towards popular music as Putin’s military ambitions have increased. I was surprised how often David disavowed artists he’d previously worked because they continued to support the Kremlin. Was it important for you and David to address the current situation in the Ukraine and Russia’s actions to destabilize the region?