John Peel, the British disc jockey who died on Monday at age 65,promoted the more esoteric and extreme fringes of contemporary popular music for more than 30 years, becoming a national and international institution in the process.

Peel did not conform to the cliches of the rock ‘n’ roll fast life: balding, paunchy, badly dressed, he had more the air of an anoraked trains potter. That was his attraction for generations of listeners, for by eschewing the foibles of pop, and by resolutely championing music that few other DJs would touch, he engendered trust among his angst-ridden and suspicious teenage listeners, retaining their loyalty as they grew up.

Peel somehow managed to appear both enduringly adolescent and old before his time. Relentlessly professional, his trademark was a slightly weary but amused, deadpan style of presentation; he had a dry, self-effacing wit and the ability to broadcast as if he were speaking to just one person. Clearly not on the payroll of any record company, his recommendations carried weight. Time and again, music that seemed marginal when Peel first enthused about it came to be accepted as being at the heart of the history of pop.

In the late 1960s, he played Captain Beef heart, T-Rex, and the Velvet Underground; he was an advocate for punk, reggae, hip hop, noise, thrash, and hardcore. He always admired innovation. He could claim to have broken the Smiths, Pulp, the Fall and the Undertones – the last of whom, in 1978, were signed by Sire Records the day after Peel played their home-produced EP on his show. Peel’s all-time favorite record, he liked to say, was the Undertones’s “Teenage Kicks.”

His one regret was that he could not sing, although he admitted that this did not stop half of the people he featured on his radio show from making records. “I’d like to be able to sing. Making a noise like a dolphin is a very poor substitute.”

Peel said that, as a general principle, he would always be more interested in a record that he had never heard before than in one he had. Ninety per cent of the records he played had never been played on radio before.

He expected to be sacked every week, and always regarded his future employment prospects with paranoia. On one occasion, according to lore, he was ordered to take a holiday; instead of doing so, he chose to turn up at the radio station every night to stare down his stand-in.

One of two sons of a cotton merchant, John Peel was born John Robert Parker Ravenscroft near Liverpool on August 31, 1939. Peel was a shy boy who tended towards obstinate nonconformity, for which he paid in regular thrashings; the school authorities, he recalled, “practically had to wake [me] up during the night in order to administer the required number of sound beatings.”

Peel estimated the flagellation rate in his first term at “once every three days … when I was 13 I was rather lovely, and much sought-after by older boys who, if they developed an appetite for you, could have you beaten on a number of pretexts. Several of them have gone on to achieve positions of some eminence in the financial world. I’m sometimes tempted to turn up with a little rouge on my cheeks and say, ‘I’m ready for you now, my angel’, to some ageing captain of industry.”

After working at several dead-end jobs and a couple rocky years as a radar operator in the Army, Peel left for America in 1960, landing at Dallas, where he sold crop insurance. He was present, as a self-appointed stringer for the Liverpool Echo, at the press conference for Lee Harvey Oswald, when the alleged assassin of President Kennedy was shot and killed by Jack Ruby.

Then, after a telephone conversation with Russ Knight, a disc jockey known as “the Weird Beard,” Peel managed to secure employment as a DJ on the station WRR. He soon discovered that in America, with the onslaught of Beatlemania, a vague approximation of a Liverpool accent accorded the speaker a certain cachet – especially among younger female pop fans, who regarded the nasal pronunciation and short vowel sounds as powerfully exotic.

Peel offered himself on WRR as an expert on all things Beatles-related – more than once he interviewed George Harrison, as played by himself – and almost overnight found himself a celebrity. “I was suddenly confronted by this succession of teenage girls who didn’t want to know anything about me at all. All they wanted me to do was to abuse them, sexually, which of course I was only too happy to do.”

After a run-in with the Dallas police over a girl who turned out to be younger than she claimed, he was expediently hired away by a radio station in Oklahoma City. In 1967, he returned to London.

The mere fact that Peel had been in America soon procured him a job with Pirate Radio London, which broadcast from aboard a ship anchored in the North Sea. Six months later, when the station was closed down, he was recruited by the BBC for the new Radio One.

His “Perfumed Garden” evening program, which featured such performers as the 12-piece “Principal Edward’s Magical Theatre,” the “Third Ear Band,” and stories about mice, soon attracted a cult following.

Like the columns which he occasionally wrote for such magazines as Gandalf’s Garden and International Times, in which he advised readers to “Touch the bark of a thousand trees, shoeless… then go to the children’s playground in Kensington Gardens and stare at the elves on the trees there, “Peel’s show had more than a whiff of joss-sticks about it. It also showed the influence of Marc Bolan, a close friend of Peel before the musician enjoyed mainstream success.

Despite the hallucinogenic overtones, Peel himself refrained from indulging (“I never even saw him smoke a joint,” recalled Germaine Greer), and his affinities with hippie culture stemmed mostly from a strong idealistic streak in his character; he was well known as an easy touch for aspiring bands looking to fund the purchase of an amplifier, instruments, or even a van.

Somehow, over more than three decades, Peel managed to remain on the cusp of what was new while remaining a connoisseur. Almost alone among BBC DJs, Peel was given free rein by his employers to play whatever he wanted.

In recent years, Peel found unexpected success narrating documentaries and hosting “Home Truths,” a domestically-oriented show based around interviews with perfectly “normal” families.

In 1999 the BBC marked his 60th birthday by scheduling a “John Peel Night” in his honor. He was appointed to the Order of the British Empire in 1998. In 2003 he was offered over $2 million to write his autobiography.

John Peel’s first marriage was to a 15-year-old Texan girl who had lied about her age; the marriage was dissolved soon after they returned to Britain. He married more successfully in 1974, and had three children. He became a grandparent for the first time last year and announced that he enjoyed “vigorously grand parenting.”