by Carter Alan
Constant debate over which commercials would be acceptable to WBCN’S hip, young audience led to disagreements between the staff and Ray Riepen, who turned bitter remembering that aspect of his ’BCN stewardship. “I got screwed a few times because they, literally, turned down [accounts] instead of taking them and telling them what to do [to conform with ’BCN’S image]. Kinney Shoes and the big companies were calling me; Coca-Cola called up, and the guys in the sales room would not take them.”
“No one wanted Coca-Cola on WBCN because it epitomized ‘The Man,’” Tim Montgomery stated. Nevertheless, some in sales felt that, with the proper tweaking, the soft drink giant’s message might be acceptable. Some sample Coca-Cola commercials were mailed up from the ad agency in New York so the DJS might find some creative ways to rework the content. In the meantime, Tim Montgomery, as the new sales manager, headed to Manhattan as part of his first national sales call. “My first time in New York; I was probably all of twenty-five years old and a little green. My [national sales] rep and I went to McCann-Erickson, which was the agency for Coca-Cola.” The powerful advertising firm had been a key player in developing “I’d Love to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)” into a massive 1972 Coke marketing campaign. But that jingle, also a best-selling Top 10 hit in America, clashed hideously with ’BCN’S radical musical views and countercultural slant, and should have portended the debacle to come.
Montgomery headed into his big meeting with McCann’s media buyer. “I introduced myself. She was a fairly burly woman behind her desk. She stood up, looked me in the eye, and said, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are!’ I was, sort of, blown back into my chair; I’m going, ‘Uh . . . Uh . . .’ This was my greeting, my first call!” Montgomery sat there stunned. The customary civility and decorum associated with any high-level business negotiation had been rudely tossed out the window—and flown back in his face. He was totally mystified as to why. The woman held up a small cardboard box for Montgomery to see; it was one of the mailers that agencies used to ship reel-to-reel tapes of commercials. This particular box looked like it had been mailed to WBCN and then returned. “I looked at it and I saw that someone had written in grease pencil on it, ‘FUCK YOU!’ Whoever was in production at the time, I think it might have been Sam, got the tape at the station and mailed it back like that! Suffice it to say, it was a long time before we got any Coca-Cola ads!” When asked about his possible role in the matter, Sam Kopper only smiled deviously and pled ignorance.
The inmates ran the asylum, but Riepen didn’t want to believe it. Debate over the commercials extended into the programming. As WBCN had been set up to be a true free-form music vehicle, these disagreements were seen by the staff as sacrilegious. A famous story in this regard began with a normal Sunday midday show hosted by John Brodey, who had only recently conquered the stage fright he’d had on his initial shows. “I couldn’t speak; my voice just froze. I’d just play music—for hours.” Brodey was finally getting his rhythm, and as Charles Laquidara put it in an essay he wrote in 1978, “Sunday radio was a snap: just throw on a little Joni Mitchell, and if you need to organize, put on a side or two of Woodstock.” Laquidara would probably need some of that organizational time since he was relieving Brodey at five and had spent the entire day tripping on acid: “Riding the cat, falling in the park, sitting paranoid in the shade, listening to ‘Let It Be’ and ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ on the stereo, drawing pictures, philosophizing, and finding easy solutions to problems that had stumped the world’s greatest minds.” Still buzzing, Laquidara drove in while listening to the station. “Good old John Brodey was playing the Ginger Baker cut from the Blind Faith album. Thump-thump tha-thump. ‘What a mothafuckin’ drummer!’ I thought.”
John Brodey, digging a Ginger Baker drum solo. Photo by Dan Beach.
“You could play anything, and I took that pretty literally,” recalled Brodey, who isn’t sure exactly what he was playing that day: “I think it was ‘Toad’ because the live version does have a twelve-minute drum solo.” So, there’s a discrepancy about whether the cut was “Do What You Like” by Blind Faith or “Toad” from Cream. Which one it was is not necessarily important, since both featured English drummer Ginger Baker performing one of his trademark solos for a very long time.
“The red phone in the studio blinks; it’s the hotline . . . somebody important,” Brodey recalled. “It was Ray, who immediately says, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I’m like, ‘Oh my God, it’s the big guy!’ He said, ‘What in the hell made you think that playing a ninety-minute drum solo on a Sunday afternoon was a good idea?’ I said, ‘Well, I . . .’ Then he said, ‘Shut up!’ And then something along the lines of, ‘That’s going to be your last drum solo!’ I thought, ‘That’s it, I’m done.’” Riepen admitted, “I never called [the jocks on the air], but I did that day. I said, ‘Hey pal, that’s a tune-out! You can’t play a drum solo for twenty-two minutes regardless of what kind of station we’ve got!’” By the time Laquidara walked into the studio “Brodey looked pale. He was visibly shaken. He explained that the station president had just called him on the hotline and blasted him for playing a long drum solo.” Laquidara was outraged at Riepen’s action, which in his view violated one of WBCN’S fundamental constructs. “ ‘Oh John, I’m sorry, he’s not supposed to do that. He should know better.’ John went home totally deflated and there I was, all alone in that studio, my head still spinning from breakfast”— LSD breakfast, no less.
Some strange and uniquely personal gears clicked in Laquidara’s mind at that point, setting him on a course that most would not have taken. From his 1978 essay, he said, “I put the long version of ‘Toad’ on the turntable and turned on the mike. ‘Good afternoon. This is WBCN in Boston. My name is Charles Laquidara. We have this boss who thinks he has impeccable taste, and he sometimes likes to impress his friends so he calls up the announcers on the hotline and makes requests or gives orders, or yells at us. It’s hard to do a good show after the boss calls, and poor John Brodey, the guy who was just on before me, got this call from our boss and was yelled at because he played a drum solo. I guess we should settle this once and for all.’” Laquidara admitted being plagued by self-doubt as his inner voice of reason fought for control: “God, Charles, wait! What the fuck are you saying? People out there must think you’re crazy.” Nevertheless, outrage at Riepen, who had now become “the Man,” and definitely some residual chemical agents, prompted Laquidara to ignore his unease and push the turntable switch. Ginger Baker took off on his extended rhythmic romp; and that was just the beginning. The DJ rooted through the vast WBCN library and came up next with “Mutiny,” a seven-and-a-half-minute drum piece from the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation, following that with some classic jazz thumping from Buddy Rich. “When they found me two hours later, I was wrapped around a beanbag chair in a corner of the air studio. Side 4 of Tommy was just ending. ‘It’s okay, Charles. Man, that was beautiful. The whole town’s talking about it. You’re a hero!’” But he was certain he’d be fired, as he wrote in his essay: “A hero? An unemployed hero. A hero on welfare. You-got-any-spare-change-mister hero. I can’t even work at the Phoenix. The son-of-a-bitch owns that too!”
“I’ve got nothing against Charles,” Riepen protested, “but he has always tried to give this image himself of being this really hip guy who always had to fight to create his terribly important show on WBCN. I mean, Charles Laquidara wasn’t the morning king when he worked for me; he was just another disc jockey. I probably said five things to him in the whole time [we] were there.” In regard to the drum solo incident, Riepen said, “I might have had discussions with some of the guys at times, but I didn’t care what they played. I never was on anybody’s back.” Nevertheless, things quickly went from bad to worse when Riepen brought in Arnie Ginsburg to act as WBCN’S general manager. As the legendary AM radio king who had ruled the Boston airwaves for ten years, Ginsburg was not necessarily a bad choice for boss since he knew the many aspects of radio business an
d engineering intimately. But because he embodied the hyperactive, pimple-cream-selling, screaming and “teening” AM Top 40 style—the very antithesis of what WBCN represented—this appointment was viewed by the staff as an enormous slap in the face and a potential threat. “When Arnie Ginsburg came in we were all flipped out. Here was the guy that was the enemy,” Sam Kopper remembered. “We were fearful Ray and Arnie would tighten us up and turn us into Top 40.”
Desperate for information about Arnie Ginsburg’s plans, and paranoid enough to do something about it, several members of the staff hatched a scheme. “That was the time that Ray felt threatened by Charles,” Norm Winer noted. “There was concern to make sure we knew what was going on.”
“We bugged his office,” Kopper revealed gleefully. “We took a microphone and ran a cable above the ceiling from Arnie’s office to the engineering room.”
“The engineer was Mike Ward,” Winer added, “who also used to do the occasional Sunday morning shift until we realized he was just tracking Savoy Brown album sides and playing boogies at 7:00 a.m. But, he was a great hippie engineer. From [his] office in the opposite side of the building, we could hear every meeting, phone call, everything going on in Arnie Ginsburg’s office.”
“I set it up, but it was not all my idea; we had meetings and voted on things,” Mike Ward recalled. “It was a full-size broadcast microphone on a stand sitting up in his hung ceiling, pointing down through a vent screen [over] his desk. If you looked close, you could see the chrome gleam.” Nevertheless, Ginsburg never had cause to glance upward, and the apparatus remained undiscovered, “for weeks, possibly months,” Winer figured. This small example of pre-Watergate espionage much resembled some of the government’s underhanded activities that ’BCN so often railed against, but in the interests of the “revolution,” the bugging was seen as justified.
Arnie Ginsburg tightened up the rules around the place, but his main concern was transferring and upgrading WBCN’S transmitter from the (old) Hancock Building to the top of the Prudential Tower (the new Hancock Tower, then rising on the Boston skyline, was significantly impairing the station’s signal). While this went on, the staff knew his every move, even being forewarned and given time to scatter when the general manager decided to inspect the premises. Ward remembered, “He was one to interrupt a reefer break in the production studio, causing us to hastily vacate via the back staircase. Then, casually wrecked, [we’d] come back up the elevator,” like nothing happened. Ward attached a tape deck to the mike and was able to record anything the conspirators wished. Kopper laughed, “But we were idiots, the Three Stooges of espionage!”
“One day the cleaning lady left a chair on his desk while doing the floor and did not return it,” Ward elaborated. Ginsburg came in to work the next morning and was greeted by the unusual sight. “So, being suspicious, he looked up from the chair.”
“The sun, perhaps, glinted off the metal,” Winer supplied. “So, he followed the wire and tracked it down to the engineer’s office . . .”
“. . . to the tape recorder,” Ward finished. “I got word from a secretary out in front just in time to remove the tape . . . I denied everything.” The engineer didn’t get fired for the incident, probably because he had a lot of complicated transmitter work to accomplish for Ginsburg, but as Ward pointed out, “Let’s just say I was on Woo-Woo’s list to replace!”
With Ginsburg threatening to fire conspirators in the wake of Stuart-gate and the frequent skirmishes with Laquidara over the content of his show (he once asked everyone in Boston to flush their toilets at the same time, a request the DJ had to rescind once too many people phoned in to warn him that the system couldn’t handle it), the mood at the station seesawed between uncertainty and outright paranoia. Laquidara was actually fired by both Riepen and Ginsburg but quickly rehired because of staff dissent and listener response. The members of the WBCN collective discussed ways it could protect itself, and the best way to do that, according to Danny Schechter, who had studied at the School of Industry and Labor Relations at Cornell, was to form a union. He continued, “Instead of a normal broadcast union like AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), which is just for on-air personalities, we wanted to find [one] where everybody could be a member, as part of the whole spirit of ’BCN. So I researched it and found the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America union (UE), which had been a progressive [labor organization] in GE plants. It was sort of left wing and had ‘radio’ in the title, even though they were referring to manufacturing radios.” The UE accepted their new shop, and after the ’BCN staff took a “yes” vote and signed the official papers, Danny Schechter was elected first shop steward. At the time, the employees at WBCN had no way of knowing that this union would play a historic part in the station’s survival just eight years later.
The establishment of WBCN’S union was the final straw for Riepen, the station’s largest shareholder. “It broke my heart that [Danny Schechter], who I gave a job to, organized my station. What could they complain about? It was just a deal to be hip for them.” The power struggle just wasn’t worth it to Riepen, who had also been dealing with similar staff disagreements at the Boston Tea Party and the Phoenix. Those disputes had resulted in the hippie entrepreneur selling his interest in the concert hall in late 1970 and bailing out of the newspaper the following May. Don Law, who picked up the remains of the Tea Party, marveled, “It was amazing that [the Tea Party, Phoenix, and WBCN] all unraveled at the same time. I don’t think any of us saw that coming.”
“The reason I sold ’BCN was that they stabbed me in the back,” Riepen remembered with sadness. “I walked away from it.” The Boston Globe reported in its 12 September 1971 edition that he sold his interest for “for $238,000 and some change” and “officially extricated himself from WBCN-FM, where he had been persona non grata ever since the station’s staff had rebelled over what it thought was his ‘artistic interference’ in running the station.” Within days Riepen would vanish from a scene that he had significantly influenced.
WBCN’S yearlong power struggle was unknown to most of the station’s listeners, who could still call up the Listener Line and report a missing pet, request “Room to Move” by John Mayall, or ask one of the eager staffers how many ounces made up a “key.” Joe Rogers returned to the station in ’72 after some disheartening experiences with the underground radio scene in California. The somewhat cynical prodigal son told James Isaacs at the Real Paper that WBCN featured “the most tasteful radio in the country. You’ll hear less shitty stuff on it than anywhere else.” The station pushed the boundaries with Jimmy Byrd’s gospel program Sunday through Friday from 6:00 to 7:00 a.m. and Little Walter’s oldies show on Sunday nights. Starting in 1972, Eric Jackson, widely referred to years later as the “Dean of Boston jazz radio,” spent five years at WBCN. The station began broadcasting many shows from the newly opened Intermedia Sound recording studio on Newbury Street, including Jerry Garcia and Howard Wales, the New York Rock Ensemble, and Loggins and Messina. Winer recalled that “Jim Messina, from Buffalo Springfield and then Poco, was a good friend of Charles. His album with Kenny Loggins had been out on Columbia for six months and it did nothing . . . just sat there on the shelf. We had them come in and do a broadcast with some people watching on a Friday night and it was incredible! Literally, the record took off [after that]. They sold out of it for multiple weeks at the Harvard Coop. It really got the project going.”
A similar Intermedia broadcast in March 1972 featured Canned Heat on a snowy winter’s night. “We all got stuck inside,” Winer laughed, “so what was supposed to be an hourlong show turned into multiple reels of tape. Some members of the J. Geils Band had nothing to do and were hanging around, [so] Peter Wolf sat in. The singer, Bob ‘The Bear’ Hite, assumed that Peter Wolf, being the singer of a well-known band, was J. Geils. So he kept calling him Jay all night and Peter never corrected him!”
“Plus, he kept saying Jay ‘Jiels,’ not Giels,” laugh
ed Charles Laquidara. WBCN also instituted a live broadcast series from the Jazz Workshop nightclub on Tuesday nights, thanks to the engineering prowess of Sam Kopper, who was now heavily involved in the production of live performances for the station. Winer remembered broadcasting such icons as Chick Corea, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Stan Getz, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, although nothing much, if anything, remains of that series on tape. “In those days,” Kopper remembered unhappily, “there were shows I didn’t even record because I had so little money. I couldn’t afford the tape!”