Radio Free Boston

by Carter Alan

  “It was a very mellow presentation,” Sam Kopper described. “A lot of times we were stoned on the air and we came across very gently, very conversationally; that’s one hallmark of that time. The other thing I really give due credit to Steven [Segal] and then Charles, was the madness that lasted at ’BCN into the early nineties. That was laid down at the very beginning.” Segal found the on-air lunacy to be quite normal because “there was so much bizarre stuff happening in real life! For me, I’d just kind of start the engine and see what came up. It was almost always spontaneous; I never knew what I was going to say on the next break.” As good as he was, “the Seagull” was still inspired by the DJ who became one of his best friends, Joe Rogers (as Mississippi Harold Wilson on the air). “Joe did things with nuance, things that came in from completely out in left field. He was a soft-spoken guy who didn’t have a mean bone in his body.” He laughed as he recalled an example:

  Mississippi had Ian Anderson on; [Jethro Tull] was at the Tea Party and he had to come to ’BCN for an interview. Ian was a totally unlikable person, an unbelievably arrogant human being, and he was really nasty to Joe. I heard them going on for a few minutes and I remember coming in after Ian had finished being sarcastic and smarmy, and over Joe’s shoulder I said something into the mike like, “Are you this nasty to all of the disc jockeys who play your music so people will know what you’re doing? Could you ever come in and just answer a question straight without any attitude or acting superior?” For a moment I think he had the starch taken out of him! To this day I know Joe would say that’s the way a lot of musicians were, and it’s true, but it didn’t make it a good thing to do. That was my favorite: basically calling Ian Anderson an asshole.

  He added with a snicker, “Did I get that one right or what!”

  Early in 1969, the fledgling WBCN air staff lost two of its own. A founding rock and roll father in “The American Revolution,” Tommy Hadges, became an absentee jock, only showing occasionally for fill-in shifts, now that he had decided to concentrate on his studies at Tufts Dental School. “Yeah, going back to Dental School, that was a great idea,” Steve Segal kidded glibly. “I said to him, ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this!’” But shortly after Hadges’s exit, the West Coast guru himself defected, heading back to Los Angeles to be a pioneer on the new underground outlet KMET-FM. That promising experience would prove to be so unsatisfying and “corporate,” according to the jock, that he left after only a few months and ended up back on KPPC in Pasadena. With Segal’s sudden absence, Charles, who had moved in to replace Peter Wolf, now assumed an earlier time slot, while Uncle T and Jim Parry handled the late shifts. As of April 1969, the weekday lineup had shaken out to 7:00 to 10:00 a.m.: Sam Kopper; 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.: J. J. Jackson; 2:00 to 6:00 p.m.: Mississippi Harold Wilson; 6:00 to 10:00 p.m.: Charles Laquidara; 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.: Uncle T; and 2:00 to 5:00 a.m. (until the smattering of taped religious broadcasting began) was handled by cleanup man Jim Parry.

  Al Perry, who still managed to avoid a good night’s sleep by jocking on the weekends and doing overnight fill-ins, was now out on the streets selling ad spots most of the time. Perry, who had become sales manager, recalled that “in the beginning there was me and Jack [Kearney]—couldn’t have done it without him. He was one of the financial cinderblocks of that place, as was Kenny [Greenblatt], who was a real character.” Tim Montgomery, who joined the station two years later and eventually became a sales manager, remembered Greenblatt fondly.

  Kenny’s job was to interface with the record companies, so his job, to tell you the truth, was almost as important as the program director. He lived in the heart of Harvard Square next door to Peter Wolf, and the only thing he did was hang out with [record company] promo people. He was out and about every night, seven nights a week . . . which is, unfortunately, why he’s not with us anymore! He wore moccasins, had long hair, was fond of saying that everything was “far out.” He would twirl his handlebar moustache and say, “Timmy, Timmy, you’ve got to hear this! It’s heavy, it’s far out!”

  The members of the fledgling WBCN sales department, as sleepless or as consciousness altered as they might have been, were kicking butt. Ernie Santosuosso noted that fact in his 1969 Boston Globe article: “The station now has almost $25,000 in ad billings a month, the second-highest for an FM station in this area. WJIB-FM, an ‘easy-listening’ station, is first.” Al Perry and his crew achieved this despite the rule set by Ray Riepen that ’BCN’S commercial load was not to exceed eight ads an hour. Perry noted, “No one believed we could make it; we were the underdogs, not just from a radio standpoint, but a musical one too. All of FM radio only had a 10 [percent] share [of the Boston audience]; WRKO-AM was the king.” That AM Top 40 giant alone often pulled in twice the ratings of the entire FM band. But even if WRKO possessed massive numbers, WBCN still had the guns. Al Perry elaborated, “Jack Kearney, J. J. Jeffries—who was a jock at ’RKO, and I, we’d all go out drinking, and J.J. would say, ‘I was getting laid last night [while] listening to ’BCN!’ No one cool listened to ’RKO.”

  Apparently, though, there were a lot of cool people listening in to ’BCN, many of them college students whom the Arbitron ratings service did not survey because of their transient nature. Charles Laquidara recalled, “You could walk from one end of Boston to the other, from Stuart Street all the way to Cambridge, and you wouldn’t need a radio because every dormitory, every apartment, all the stores, would have ’BCN blasting out the windows.” If the station featured a brand-new group or a song that hadn’t been released as a single yet, chances were that people were hearing it first on WBCN. Sam Kopper told Boston magazine in 1970 that over a year earlier, he had witnessed clear evidence of the station’s influence with two releases. “The distributor brought us a tape of Traffic’s second album four weeks before the record came out. We were the only station playing Traffic, and when the album was released, it completely sold out locally in a few days. After similar prerelease play of Led Zeppelin’s first album, the local stores received their shipments in the morning and all copies were gone by afternoon.”

  Kenny Greenblatt with Jim Parry on Cambridge Common. Greenblatt worked the record labels for ’BCN and found an enthusiastic source of income. Photo by Sam Kopper.

  Business was going so well at the end of 1968 that Ray Riepen managed to convince Mitch Hastings to give the DJS a raise, as Sam Kopper revealed: “We all started at $85 a week, and by early ’69 or so, all the jocks were making $125 a week!” Riepen also successfully pointed out the need to move into bigger digs. Jim Parry elaborated, “Mitch had this dream of having a real radio station on Newbury Street, with that prestigious address, but it wasn’t really viable as a station; we ran out of space.”

  “We moved to 312 Stuart Street [which] was just above Flash’s Snack and Soda and down from Trinity Liquors,” Sam Kopper added. “Charles went to work just as we moved, right at the end of 1968.” The new location, nestled behind the bustling Greyhound Bus terminal, would be WBCN’S home until June 1973. Flimsy and cheap quarter-inch paneling notwithstanding, the layout was much more conducive to running a radio business, with accessible areas for reception, sales, and management; studios in the back; and the record library across the hall. Perhaps best of all, the DJS had escaped their claustrophobic Newbury Street attic; they wouldn’t freeze during the winter months or roast in their own sweat next to a loud and impotent air conditioner during the summer.

  As WBCN settled in on Stuart Street, some fresh voices appeared on the air. John Brodey, who would eventually become a radio star in his own right and a future music director, had listened to ’BCN with great interest during his frequent visits home from the University of Wisconsin to see his parents in Boston. “I knew a girl who had gone out with Steven [Segal] for a while and I said, ‘If you can just give me an introduction, I’ll take it from there.’ Soon I was interning for Steven, weaseling my way in. I had to put away his records, get him stuff, and drive him home because he had a car but
didn’t drive. We started talking, and soon it was: ‘Oh, you know something about music, man.’ It was a nice relationship and . . . I lasted!”

  Sam Kopper also hired Debbie Ullman to be WBCN’S first female jock after she had worked with the close-knit crew in the sales department for a time and also volunteered to helped transport the station’s voluminous record library from Newbury to Stuart Street. “I liked her voice, intelligence, and spirit,” Kopper mentioned. He was also impressed when she took the initiative to study for and pass the FCC exam for a radio license, not necessarily an easy thing to do, and unusual, at the time, for a female. “I was the only woman out of about forty taking the exam; afterwards the guy looked over my test and was startled.” So now she had the endorsement of Uncle Sam, but did she have the chutzpah to do a show? Kopper decided to find out. As Ullman worked in the sales area one afternoon, the jocks arrived for an air staff meeting. “That usually meant that someone would play long tracks on the radio, like a Grateful Dead side, while they met,” Ullman remembered. “On this occasion someone came [to me] and said, ‘We’re going to have a meeting in ten minutes; if you can learn the [air studio] board, you’re on.” She wasn’t thrown by the challenge. “I’d already been watching [the other jocks use] the board . . . so that wasn’t hard. I went on while they had their staff meeting; apparently, I didn’t fumble things too badly!”

  Sam Kopper also hired Andy Beaubien, a recent University of Rhode Island grad who had begun working in local radio when he was only sixteen and did shifts at some small Rhode Island stations throughout his schooling. “As I was wrapping up my college years, I was saying to myself, ‘I’m getting kind of tired of this radio thing.’” Beaubien laughed because, as it turned out, being a DJ and radio programmer would become his lifelong career. “There were only two stations I was really interested in working [at]. One was WNEW-FM in New York and the other was ’BCN. I asked Sam if he had any openings, and he said, ‘If you want to start working part time, you can.’ The weekend I started was the weekend of [the] Woodstock [festival], August 1969, so that’s why I didn’t go [to the concert]. I worked there for about a month or two; then Steven left and created an opening.” Beaubien recalled that Ray Riepen wanted to meet him when Kopper recommended him for the full-time position.

  I was very intimidated because I had heard all the stories about Ray Riepen. I walked in there and he said, “Well, tell me about yourself.” So I gave him my story, and then he said, in his Kansas City accent, “You know, there’s only one thing about you that kind of worries me.” I said, “What’s that?” “You’ve got previous radio experience. I prefer people who aren’t tainted by commercial radio.” I had to explain to him the reason I wanted to work at ’BCN was [that], simply, I didn’t want to have anything to do with typical radio and that I wanted to get into the music. Obviously, I convinced him because he gave his blessing and I ended up working there.

  Beaubien immediately fell in love with his job.

  It was the most fun radio experience I ever had, even more fun than college radio. The station was truly free-form, no restrictions at all. The only thing we tried not to play was something we’d done in the previous couple of shows; the idea of repeating something was bad. We would have meetings once a week and sit around and talk about various issues, including the music. We tried, in a kind of informal, unstructured way, to keep a certain level of consistency in the programming. In other words, if somebody was going too far off the deep end . . . let’s say, playing too much John Coltrane, someone might say: “Hey, it’s cool to play Coltrane, but you don’t want to do three jazz artists in a row.” All of us had our predilections. Charles liked to play a classical piece every so often and we’d have discussions about that. We’d say, “Charles, when you played that Brahms symphony, it really sounded so . . . unlike us!”

  Chuckling to himself, he continued, “Jim Parry was really into folk music and acoustic blues—that was his predilection, and sometimes he’d go off the deep end there. I was really into guitarists in those days, so I was liable to go off in an Eric Clapton and Django Reinhardt set.”

  “If you can imagine eight or nine people sitting down in a music meeting for an hour and trying to agree on anything—it was impossible!” Tommy Hadges laughed. “But . . . it was also wonderful . . . to have that freedom. It just isn’t anything that exists in broadcast radio today.”

  Music epitomized the main message of the early WBCN, but a voice of conscience always ran close alongside. The DJS didn’t attempt to separate music from their politics, which they wore on their sleeve. Ernie Santosuosso, in a March 1969 Boston Globe article entitled “The Beautiful Radio People,” wrote, “In an industry saturated by news broadcasts, WBCN is predictably unique. The announcer often allows the record of the moment to serve as his vehicle for a solitary news item.” Sam Kopper told Santosuosso how he handled the moments leading up to Senator Robert Kennedy’s death: “I read the hospital bulletin during the playing of ‘Come On, People, Let’s Get Together’ [the Youngbloods’ “Get Together”] and just before the beginning of the vocal. It fitted beautifully.” Steve Segal described in the article about how he reacted to the scenes of street fighting at the Democratic Convention: “I couldn’t refrain from talking about the Chicago violence. When I saw something as blatantly ridiculous . . . and friends being clubbed, I spoke about five words and put on [Everett] Dirksen reading the Declaration of Independence.” Everett Dirksen was a Republican senator from Illinois, the Senate Minority leader, and a staunch supporter of the Vietnam War. Years later, Segal clarified, “He had [put out] an album of folksy, yet arrogant, readings of the Declaration of Independence and other documents of freedom over muted patriotic music. That this puss bag had put these amazing words on vinyl for profit at such a time of government suppression and violence toward its own people seemed so bitterly ironic and innately satiric on so many levels, I figured not a whole lot needed to be said.”

  Sam Kopper at WBCN’S second location on Stuart Street. “Above Flash’s Snack and Soda and down from Trinity Liquors.” Photo by Don Sanford.

  For the first year and a half after WBCN’S underground radio transformation, there was no formal news department at the station. However, discussions about headlines and politics on the air were part of each DJ’s show. “It was important to let people know where they could get advice on what to do about the draft and the war,” Joe Rogers remembered. “The station insisted that [listeners] become informed on the subject; if you were pressed up against choices, that you knew what your choices were.” Ray Riepen did not restrict his staff from expressing themselves politically: “That was part of the deal . . . that’s what we were. We didn’t take any radical rant and rave stuff [on the air] because I wanted them to play music, but we were against the war in Vietnam and nobody else [in the media] was yet. A lot of people were upset that we weren’t toeing the line as far as the war, but that’s what we were all about.” Debbie Ullman acknowledged, “The ‘programming’ of the music was definitely about fun . . . and hedonism and all of that. But there was also a very strong visionary sense. We actually saw the civil rights movement come to some degree of fruition, we were in the process of bringing the Vietnam War down . . . there was a tremendous sense that we could change the world. We thought we were creating a model of working together and a more peaceful world. It wasn’t a spectator sport.”

  Al Perry added soberly,

  We had a sense that something was wrong in America, with the war and Nixon. It had to change and we were a part of that. I think it was when we went into Cambodia, everything had just erupted—Harvard Square was a mess, kids were demonstrating. I remember this guy, I believe he worked for Hancock on Stuart Street, came up the elevator. I was there early in the morning and I said, “Can I help you?”

  He said, “I was listening to [BCN] last night and it’s outrageous what you do and say on the radio. I’m going to call the FCC.”

  I said, “Well, what are radio licenses for?”


  “What?”

  “What are FCC licenses for? They’re to serve the community. If you had been here at two o’clock this morning and seen the phones ringing off the hook and a bunch of volunteers answering them because [the United States] just invaded Cambodia . . . who are you kidding?” He got pissed off and left. But that’s it, isn’t it? We served the public. Maybe we didn’t serve all the public, but we served our public.

  In October 1969 WBCN took its political pursuits one step further by creating its first news department, but it all happened in a rather roundabout way. Sam Kopper tapped Brooklyn native and Brandeis student Norm Winer to be WBCN’S latest part-timer after the twenty-one-year-old impressed him with his knowledge of music. Winer remembered, “Andy Beaubien joined the station at about the same time, and he and I were both going for Steven [Segal’s] gig. Andy got [it], so they tried to find me something to do around the station. Since I read the New York Times every day, they hired me to be the first news director.”

  There had been no newswire service at WBCN since United Press International removed its teletype machine years earlier. Since then, any headlines read by the jocks came from a newspaper, so breaking stories on the air was out of the question. In response to the audience’s hunger for information, especially about its own government and also the Vietnam War, as well as to satisfy FCC requirements to broadcast a certain amount of news and public affairs programming, Ray Riepen arranged a contract with Reuters. The venerable, century-old newswire service from London installed one of its teletype machines in the Stuart Street headquarters, and soon reams of paper were cascading out of the chugging contraption, providing the jocks with what they referred to as “rip and read” news: available for their shows even earlier than the newspapers could report it. There was some significance to having a foreign news service supply WBCN’S information as opposed to the U.S.-based companies, as Joe Rogers pointed out: “Reuters from England had some perspective on world affairs, it was not just rote [information].” Danny Schechter, who would soon arrive and make a memorable mark as ’BCN’S principal news reporter, pointed out in his book The More You Watch, The Less You Know that there was also a more pragmatic reason for installing the English teletype: Reuters offered its services at a cheaper rate than Associated Press or United Press International, so Riepen saved the ever-parsimonious T. Mitchell Hastings a bit of cash.