by Carter Alan
“There’s no question as I look back, but I was quite insane,” Segal added; “I was clearly bi-polar. We knew I had something, but we weren’t sure what it was. Manic depression sounded kind of right; it was a Jimi Hendrix song and it made some sense.” Despite Segal’s genius as a DJ, his personal life of constant chaos indicated that he might not be the best choice to lead the air staff, so Sam Kopper assumed that role. “When Steven arrived, he was the P.D. [program director], and the ‘John Lennon’ of our station. I basically exercised and made real his visions.”
The term “program director” was not a real part of the WBCN vernacular yet, but someone had to sit in the middle and make adjustments, even if those decisions were pondered in billows of smoke around a hookah pipe or during the meandering circles of a passed joint. Indeed, in the June 1970 issue of Boston magazine, journalist (and future WBCN employee) David L. Bieber wrote an in-depth six-page article about the radio station, not mentioning the words “program director” once. He did, however, explain ’BCN’S method for loosely organizing the anarchy of musical choice available to each jock: “Steve Segal refined and formulated the current station concept of programming as a train of thought via music. In this approach, two to four related records are connected by a sometimes fragile relationship which can be musical, thematic or consist of several different cuts which evoke a uniform feeling. Each of the station’s announcers follow the formula.” Joe Rogers commented on that concept in the article: “The music is all flow of moods, and, properly displayed, sparks can flash between two cuts.” Creating montages of related sound bites, songs, and comedy pieces completely on the fly, thereby providing golden links in some kind of intellectual or even spiritual thread, made the station unique among its counterparts as the jocks strived for something greater than merely putting two songs back to back.
As Peter Wolf and Jim Parry stomped their feet in the Tea Party to stay warm, the last of winter finally transformed into a magical spring. Boston’s underground radio experiment dropped its training wheels and began wobbling down the road in all of its groovy, hit or miss glory. The station’s first promotional placard appeared: a pen-and-ink sketch of a lovely psychedelic lady peering out from her tresses to proclaim, “Ugly Radio Is Dead!” Record label representatives, swiftly realizing the opportunity to promote their hip underground albums through WBCN airplay, began dropping stacks of promotional copies off at the station. Rapidly growing record libraries were established at both Newbury Street and the back room at the Tea Party, sparing the jocks that long walk with heavy boxes of vinyl from their home collections (except for Wolf, of course, who still relied on his prized assortment of R & B singles). Parry remembered, “The record library [at the Tea Party] was four shelves in this closet in the back room. One night, I think it was when Ten Years After was there, Ray Riepen [walked in] and expansively told [guitarist] Alvin Lee, ‘Hey, you want some records? Take anything you want.’ So, he took the whole first shelf, which was everything A through Beatles, and like, the Doors! So, for the next month or so, we couldn’t play any band whose name began with anything before the letter E!”
Back at 171 Newbury, “We had two Sparta boards tied together, five-channel each, with rotary pots, the cheapest you could get for a radio station,” Sam Kopper recalled.
But we had a [great] Neumann microphone and these two big old transcription turntables. The platters were, like, 17 inches across! They were really slow-starting, you couldn’t just hit the start switch, so you had to slip-cue all the records [start the turntable, hold the disc steady on its felt pad while the turntable rotated below, and then let it fly when it was time to play the song]. Directly behind the disc-jockey was the outside wall and there was an air conditioner in there. In the summer of ’68, our engineer, Sassy John “Ten Thumbs,” who wore a long green raincoat like a flasher and never took it off, rigged up a relay so that whenever the microphone was on, the air conditioner would shut off. Therefore, every time the listeners would hear a [jock] start talking, in the background they’d also hear this “EEEEEEEEEUUUUUUUUU . . .” sound of the air conditioner [winding down]!
“Because the air conditioner was completely incapable of doing anything to keep the studio livable,” Parry laughed, “we’d climb out onto the roof of the next building from a window in the production studio.” Recalling the scene for Record World magazine in 1978, Parry added, “It was like looking over the rooftops of Paris. We’d get long cables on the microphones, run them out the window and broadcast from the roof as the sun was coming up.”
Soon, a quarter-million students made their annual fall migration to Boston. After three months at home, many were delighted to hear that the hip, underground radio experiment they’d loved during spring semester had not gone away and, in fact, had thrived. WBCN’S attic studio, dubbed the “Penthouse” by Wolf, no longer stifled its inhabitants, and the underwhelming air conditioner was shut down for the season. As the cold returned, the adjoining roof where the jocks had fled for relief from the heat now doubled as a wintry battlefield. “There were some infamous snowball fights out on that roof,” Perry recollected with a laugh. “We had a big fight one night while Charles was on the air,” referring to a brand-new jock named Charles Laquidara. “He made two or three snowballs and brought them into the studio [for defense], then put them on the board. Of course, they melted! The damn station went of the air!”
Laquidara rebutted this tale: “The real story is that a listener named Deirdre, who called herself ‘Green,’ came in from the street and handed me that infamous snowball with a green ribbon wrapped around it.” But, the result was the same: the snowball was forgotten and the sound of static soon replaced that of music on 104.1. Laquidara, who began working at the station in December ’68 and would become WBCN’S most enduring, and endearing, personality for its entire history, was one of two significant hires. The other new voice was J.J. Jackson, who would achieve industry notoriety as the earliest radio proponent of an unknown new band named Led Zeppelin, as well as gaining nationwide popularity as one of MTV’s first video jocks.
By day, Jackson held down a computer technology job to pay the bills, and then hit the clubs at night to explore his real passion: music. One evening he discovered the Hallucinations playing a show and, after striking up a conversation with the band’s lead singer, found that Wolf doubled as a disc jockey on the all-new WBCN. A novice jock himself, on Tufts University’s AM station WTUF (the facilities of which would soon be closed down by the FCC and occupied by WMFO-FM in January 1970), Jackson tuned in 104.1 and was blown away. “I really flipped out over it,” Jackson told Record World in June 1978. “I went up to visit Peter while he was on the air, and I just fell in love with the station and everyone I met. There was a lot of love and warmth there.”
Sam Kopper on the air at 171 Newbury Street, WBCN’S first location. Courtesy of the Sam Kopper Archives.
“I knew J.J. Jackson to be a 300-pound R & B singer,” Wolf recalled. “So he called me from an old club called the Sugar Shack. I said, ‘Well, come on by.’ There was no one in the studio but me, so I ran downstairs, opened the door and there was this thin cat there, wearing ‘the hat’ and glasses: the whole ‘Super-fly’ outfit, pimped out. I realized, ‘This is not the R & B singer.’ He says, ‘I love your show; can I come up?’ He seemed genuinely into the station, so I said, ‘Sure!’” Jackson’s timing, like all of those in ’BCN’S early lineup, was simply perfect, plus he was a black man. Jackson arrived at a time when diversity and “love your brother” were real aims. “Early on we wanted to hire a black guy,” Sam Kopper explained, “plus, J.J. Jackson was one of the great souls and hearts going; he was just a sweet human being.” The new guy was slotted into the WBCN’S midday shift.
Steve Segal worked closely with the station’s new hire: “I was the one that kind of mentored J.J.; I was the one who taught him to say ‘ask’ instead of ‘acts.’ J.J. was obviously a historical figure; he figured out how to be a commercial success and e
ventually became the first Afro-American VJ.”
“The racial irony of the thing,” Kopper revealed, “was that out of all of us, he probably played the least Motown and soul, and the most Led Zeppelin and Yardbirds.” The evidence agrees: J.J. Jackson was acknowledged by guitarist Jimmy Page as being the first disc jockey in the world to play Zeppelin’s second and third albums on the air. Laquidara recalled that the station also played a “white-label record” (advance promotional copy) of Led Zeppelin’s first album when no one else had even heard of the group. J.J.’s own memorable moments included emcee spots for Led Zeppelin at the Boston Tea Party, Carousel Ballroom in Framingham, and Boston Garden. Pete Townshend joined J.J. Jackson in the ’BCN studio to personally debut The Who’s Tommy on the air; the DJ hosted The Who at Boston University, and he brought Jimi Hendrix onstage at the Garden.
Any radio sales manager will tell you that the morning and afternoon drive shifts provide most of a station’s bread and butter. In 1968, though, evenings and overnights were where the action was at WBCN. Wolf might have kept vampire hours, but his shift was key in achieving Riepen’s advertising goal. But, as the year grew long in the tooth, “Woofuh-Goofuh” began having second thoughts. The Hallucinations had packed it in, and the singer fell in with a new group of musicians, the J. Geils Blues Band. As that group expanded its lineup and moved from acoustic to electric, the members dropped the “Blues” from their name and began attracting a following around town. Soon his growing commitment to the new project edged into Wolf’s all-night radio turf. Sam Kopper related, “It was early December that Peter said he couldn’t do a show five days a week anymore because [the J. Geils Band] was gigging all the time. He said he would do some kind of shift when he could.”
Up to this point, the occasional missed shifts were covered by Wolf’s crew, as Master Blaster revealed: “It was always his show, I was just hanging out. [But] sometimes when he’d go to a rehearsal or something, I’d have to do the show myself. I didn’t really know what I was doing; it was flying by the seat of your pants, but it was cool.” Steve Segal remembered, “When the band finally started to make it, Peter would miss his show, like, three or four times a week. He’d put the Master Blaster, the black jumpsuit guy, on instead. ‘Hey’ [imitating the sidekick], ‘it’s Master Blaster, gonna give it to you faster. All you young white girls, you ought to come on down!’” Segal chuckled at the memory: “I heard this [on the air] coming back from a jazz show in Newport and I was, like, ‘No, no, no!’ So, that’s when we had to give Peter the option: you can either do overnights or you can become a rock star, but it’s got to be your choice.”
At this moment, in another example of perfect timing, Milford, Massachusetts, native Charles Laquidara arrived back in Boston after a long voyage of self-discovery that had taken him to the Rhode Island School of Design and out to Southern California, where he studied performing arts at the historic Pasadena Playhouse. After an intense period of taking acting classes, reading for auditions, acting in shows, and even writing and directing his own play, he graduated with a bachelor of theater arts degree in 1963. However, like most of the male members of his class, he now worried about being drafted. While that threat loomed, Laquidara’s primary focus became a search for employment. In 1967, he auditioned for director David Fleischer in the lead role for The Boston Strangler but, as an unfamiliar face, lost that part to Tony Curtis (an event Laquidara would rue publicly on the air for his entire radio career). However, the frustrated actor did manage to find some work, a fortuitous path as it turned out, from an unexpected quarter: the basement of the Pasadena Presbyterian Church.
New recruits: J.J. Jackson and Charles Laquidara on Cambridge Common, 1969. Photo by Sam Kopper.
Laquidara found out about the opportunity from his buddy Dave Pierce, another starving graduate who wanted more than anything to be a rock and roll disc jockey. He had settled for spinning classical records on the local radio station KPPC-FM, owned by the Presbyterian church, which programmed the music when it wasn’t broadcasting Sunday services or midweek devotionals. Pierce, who knew very little about the genre, nevertheless took the gig and would listen to his favorite R & B records off the air while he spun the long symphonic pieces on the radio. He invited Laquidara, who knew slightly more about classical music, down to the station to help him out. “Dave Pierce taught me how to do radio, how to run the board, and he got me a job,” Laquidara remembered. “I couldn’t pronounce the names of the composers, so I had to be tutored.” While the two gradually got a handle on how to suavely pronounce Shostakovich and Prokofiev like the pros, they managed to survive at KPPC while their station went through some rocky management changes, passing from a classical format to jazz, and then finally morphing into the second underground rock station in the country in 1967.
A year later, now a rock radio veteran with experience under his belt, Charles Laquidara had to head east when his mother died. Back in Milford, he tuned in WBCN, heard Jim Parry on the air, and called him up. When Parry noted Laquidara’s local roots and West Coast experience, he encouraged him to visit the station, where the two met and Parry introduced him to fellow KPPC-FM alum Steve Segal. Now, as the ’BCN’S overnight star was about to leave, Laquidara found himself in the perfect spot. Sam Kopper recounted: “I remember there was this [final] falling out between Peter Wolf and Ray. So, it went [quickly] from ‘maybe we should bring this Laquidara dude in’ to ‘Laquidara is doing nights.’”
“The timing was amazing,” Steve Segal mentioned. “Charles just walked in. I said, ‘Sam and I just thought we’d throw you on the air and see what happens.’ At the time, he was an actor playing an underground disc jockey, but over the years he became a knockout performer.”
“I was a mediocre everything: a writer, cartoonist, actor, disc jockey,” Laquidara explained. “However, in 1968, with the advent of underground radio, there was a place for a guy who was simply real. He didn’t have to have a deep voice; he didn’t have to talk fast or have a golden throat. And, he could fuck up, which I did . . . a lot! Sam Kopper went to Ray Riepen and he hired me. To this day I’m indebted to Ray Riepen.” Then he added with a snicker, “Even though he tried to fire me a couple times.”
The only thing anybody was ever concerned about was the FCC. That was the only brake on the system. Nobody would ever say, politically: “You’re too radical.” Frankly, the listeners loved it, the bands loved it, the staff loved it. BILL LICHTENSTEIN
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By the beginning of 1969, the Wheels of Fire album by Cream, with its rambling, fifteen-minute rock jams and abstruse, poetic lyrics, had gone to number 1 in America; the “all-you-need-is-love” Beatles were squabbling, and Janis Joplin brought San Francisco acid blues to the top of the album chart. Martin Luther King Jr.’s path of nonviolent civil rights protest ended in gunfire and death; three Americans had just circled the moon in Apollo 8; the Vietnamese peace talks commenced in Paris; the Democratic National Convention had been ravaged by a torrent of street violence; and likely presidential nominee Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated in Los Angeles. “The jocks really knew their stuff,” Ron Della Chiesa observed. “They were on the edge of what was new, what was happening, and what the youth market was going to be. Think of the timing of all that: Vietnam was going on, the protests, civil rights, the spin-offs from the assassinations, the country in upheaval. Then, there was the music; it couldn’t have been more timely . . . the stars lined up.” Tommy Hadges remembered, “There was an amazing array of music that was coming out. The war was going on; there was a cultural revolution, a drug revolution, a political revolution. But [it was] also about being in Boston . . . in a city where it is renewed and refreshed every year with all the new students that come in. With the university environment having a lot to do with the social revolution going on, WBCN fit right into that.”
Joe Rogers offered his view of WBCN’S music mission: “I always felt that I was there to bring this
music to the people. The reflex was, you’ve got this huge record library and ‘look at the things I’ve found!’ The emphasis was on doing sets [of music] and segues; we thought that’s what our craft was. You tried to sneak one song into another in a clever way, whatever that would mean.”
“It was kind of like college radio, you played the music you liked and you talked about it,” Jim Parry described. “Each show was quite a bit different. I would put a lot of folkie things in and Charles, at one point, was fired because he was too ‘rocky.’ That lasted a couple of days and then he was back,” he laughed. “We all pretty much winged it.” Tom Gamache (known as “Uncle T”), who eventually got on the air at ’BCN in March 1969, thrived on the spontaneity: “I decide what I’m going to play about two minutes before I put it on the turntable,” he told the Boston Globe that same month. A lot of Gamache’s choices were “the most bizarre,” according to Laquidara. “He blew our minds with Frank Zappa and the Mothers; he turned us all onto ‘Witchi Tai To’; he was the guy that played Captain Beefheart, John Coltrane, and Roland Kirk. If every station has that guy that pulls the most brilliant songs out of his ass, he was that guy.” J.J. Jackson told Record World magazine in 1978, “The jock was allowed to show his personality on the air, and lay out the show the way they wanted. You could play everything from Stockhausen to Alvin Lee; the only record you knew you were going to play was the first one.”