Radio Stations

Super Bowl Week is filled with plenty of unique scenes that have nothing to do with football. Each day leading up to the big game, the Daily News will share our writers' unique view of the scene with our readers in "Postcards from Glendale. " Here is the first installment: PHOENIX ? As far as journalism, we in the printed press still feel like we have the upper hand, but an event like the Super Bowl only magnifies the influence of broadcast media ? particularly talk radio. Radio Row at the Super Bowl grows bigger and bigger each year.

Riccardo Muti's youthful face, circa 1985, peers from the cover of the Philadelphia Orchestra's recording of Alexander Scriabin's sprawling landscape of orchestral color known as his Symphony No. 2 - a disc now getting another chance after daring to be among the first of its kind. In recent weeks, the disc occupied prime real estate on the home page of ArkivMusic.com, as the flagship release in a new agreement that gives the classical-music Web site the rights to discontinued items in the EMI catalog - but this time free of marketing projections or sink-or-swim sales goals.

The cellist's talent jumps off the fingerboard in a piece by Piazzolla, but this Masterman senior can also do a mean beatbox. The clarinetist, 18, dreams of a job in the Metropolitan Opera orchestra, but doesn't turn up his nose at klezmer. And sure, the 16-year-old violinist with the formidable name of Fabiola Kim played with the Seoul Philharmonic at an age when some children are casting off their training wheels. To her friends, though, she's just Farrah. Here, on the stage of the Kimmel Center's Verizon Hall Tuesday night, is the face of classical music - at least the young, unpretentious faces curated by From the Top , the national radio show that came to Philadelphia for the second time to tape a show.

Saturday night, if 30 years is our guide, Bob Pantano will be holding a microphone while hundreds of people dance in front of him. Pantano has not missed one of his Saturday Night Dance Party shows since Jan. 12, 1985 - and that was because he was getting married the next day. A broken leg 12 years ago couldn't stop him. From 7 p.m. to 2 a.m., 800 to 1,000 people will pass through Benny the Bum's in the Holiday Inn on Packer Avenue in...

Arizona coach Lute Olson labeled speculation that he has Parkinson's disease "a vicious, vicious rumor" that is "totally false. " The 72-year-old coach brought up the subject at his weekly news conference yesterday. "I have gotten some calls about rumors and certain radio stations running some things about me having Parkinson's, which is a complete lie," Olson said. "I have physicals like everyone else does. There is absolutely no medical indication of any type of problem.

Frank Hogan is an encyclopedia of local radio. At the drop of a hat, the Rowan Radio general manager can spout off an endless list of long-forgotten call letters of stations as well as the disc jockeys who manned them. Hogan has been in radio more than 30 years, and helped in the transformation of WGLS-FM (89.7), which from 1964 to 1991 was a student-run, low-power outfit that had a range of "maybe three miles. " On Nov. 1, Hogan was awarded the March of Dimes Achievement in Radio Milestone Award.

Radio-station operator Entercom Communications Corp. agreed to pay $4.25 million to settle "payola" accusations, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said yesterday. Spitzer's lawsuit, filed in March, alleged that the Bala Cynwyd company engaged in "pay-for-play" - that is, trading airtime on its stations for promotional items, personal trips, and gifts from record companies. The suit also alleged that the company created overnight programs on which record companies paid to have their songs played.

Clear Channel Communications Inc., the nation's biggest operator of radio stations, said yesterday that it had agreed to be acquired for about $18.7 billion by a private-investment group. The transaction would be one of the biggest deals in which a publicly traded company has been taken private, and it showcases the vast sums that buyout groups have been able to assemble for acquisitions. The buyer, led by Thomas H. Lee Partners L.P. and Bain Capital Partners L.L.C., is paying $37.60 in cash for each share of Clear Channel, a 10.2 percent premium over its closing price Wednesday.

David Marks had a decision to make. As the new Famous Dave's restaurant franchise owner in Philadelphia, his corporate office had sent him six radio commercials. He had to pick one. That wasn't easy, so Marks, who likes to combine his "gut" with statistics, decided to try Spot Q, a new service for advertisers at B101: Denizens of the soft-rock station's Web site listen to commercials and rate them. Facing unprecedented competition for advertisers and listeners, B101's research-minded owner, Jerry Lee, last year started Spot Q as a way to help advertisers and, at the same time, make the station sound better.