Artists react positively because I'm well-informed, and I really love records. Artists know that I'm not bullshitting them and asking them the same four standard questions about when they're going on tour. I even put Bowie on once so people could hear his '70s stuff. Pinfield comes across as the ultimate music fan, a spokesman for a demographic that MTV, with its emphasis on the visual over the aural, hadn't really addressed before. It's definitely that silent majority, people that have a love for music and want to buy records and go out to see concerts.
Music is a part of their lives.
So being on the air is a privilege and a responsibility. When I go out, if somebody stops me and has a question about music, unless I have to catch a plane, I'll generally stop and talk to anyone. I'd be doing it anyway, looking for somebody to talk to about music, if I was in a bar, somebody to bond with. By 16, he was DJing at the radio station at Rutgers University, where he would enroll two years later. In the mid '80s, he became program director at the pioneering alternative-rock station WHTG in Asbury Park, where his broadcasts drifted across the sea toward Manhattan.