Joel Najman, courtesy of VPR 

On Wednesday, April 24, the Vermont Legislature surprised Joel Najman with a resolution congratulating the local DJ on his 30th anniversary as the host of the Vermont Public Radio show, and rock-and-roll time machine, “My Place.” 

“My Place” was originally hosted by David Field and began life as a wide-ranging, interactive retrospective of rock and roll from the 1950s and ’60s. But Najman dramatically revamped the show’s format when he took over in 1983, after serving as a substitute host the year prior.

Najman is as passionate a musicologist as he is a fan, which is really saying something. In each hourlong episode, he hones in on a specific theme or topic, sometimes sharpening his focus to a single song, and examines its historical context and cultural importance in painstaking detail.

He’s said those details can take years — yes, years — of sleuthing to fully unearth. Recent episodes of “My Place” have explored the first and second waves of the British Invasion, Berry Gordy’s pre-Motown canon and “Popular Songs About Women.”

Dan Bolles is a culture coeditor at Seven Days. He joined the paper in 2007 as its music editor, covering Vermont's robust music, comedy and nightlife scenes for a decade before deciding he was too old to be going to the Monkey House on weeknights to see rock shows for a living. He became assistant arts editor in 2017 and culture coeditor in 2021. Bolles has received numerous local and national awards for his writing on Vermont arts, sports and the occasional celebrity canine murder mystery. He loves...