Radio Free Boston

by Carter Alan

  There was this shock that someone would have the nerve to try to take what we were doing and castrate it to make it more commercially viable. JOHN BRODEY

  THE

  BATTLE

  JOINED

  It’s interesting to consider that one of WBCN’S cornerstone talents, who would remain with the station for thirteen years, developed his Boston radio career by working to co-opt the very audience that “The American Revolution” had fostered since 1968. Ken Shelton would participate in a near-dismantling of Camelot, a surprise attack from across the radio dial that WBCN’S denizens, absorbed in their own greatness, would remain badly naive of until it was almost too late. As one of the standard-bearers at the upstart WCOZ, Ken Shelton was destined to plunder large numbers of listeners from the ranks of a station once considered bulletproof, protected by the unwavering support from its community since inception. But as the seventies passed the halfway point, ’BCN, in a languished state with a depleted rank of veterans, found itself vulnerable to a new rival with roots in an old approach — the Top 40 system of concentrating more attention on fewer songs.

  As a kid in Brooklyn, Ken Shelton grew up loving the music of Elvis Presley and the pop hits of the late fifties and early sixties, furtively listening at night to a small transistor radio hidden under his pillow. Later, he discovered and embraced the sixties counterculture, hanging out in the Village and seeing the Fugs and the Blues Project as well as the Band at the Fillmore. He graduated from college with a bachelor’s in speech and theater, ostensibly for a career in television. “It was 1969; Vietnam was still going on, so the goal was to stay in school,” he remembered. “I looked around for graduate schools and ended up at BU.” When Shelton arrived in Boston, the first thing he did, like everybody else, was set up his stereo system. “I scanned up and down the dial and suddenly I heard ‘Witchi-Tai-To’ by Everything Is Everything. [I] never heard that before. So, for the next two years, I did not move that radio dial from ’BCN; I couldn’t tell you the name of any other station.”

  After graduation, considering Shelton’s distinctive deep voice and passion for radio, it seemed a likely career choice, but marrying his college sweetheart meant that he better bring home the bacon — and quickly. Since he’d studied for a job in television, Shelton got a job at Channel 4 (WBZ-TV) as an assistant director, working nights, weekends, and holidays, and becoming the floor manager on Rex Trailer’s Boomtown kids show. “Rex used to ride his horse into the studio, and one time, there was a big [accident] on camera,” Shelton recalled, pinching his nose and chuckling. “Somewhere was a pot of gold and some creativity in TV production, but it sure wasn’t there!” Then, the restless director ran into Clark Smidt, one of his grad school buddies, who had worked his way into WBZ’S radio division selling ads for the AM station and managing the younger FM signal, which broadcast classical music by day and jazz at night. Shelton expressed his unhappiness, mentioning he was tired of sweeping up after . . . the talent. Smidt rapidly became Shelton’s ticket, finagling his buddy into the radio division as his programming assistant.

  When the parent company, Westinghouse, decided to flip WBZ-FM over to a contemporary Top 40 rock format, the station became an automated jukebox with Smidt and Shelton picking the songs and voice-tracking the entire broadcast day on tape. “It went on the air December 30, 1971, and the first record was American Pie, the long version,” Smidt recalled. “It was a tight playlist, but we did slip in a few album cuts.” The pair came up with innovative features like the “Bummer of the Week,” where listeners suggested a song they hated, and the DJS would, literally, break the vinyl on the air. The format quickly generated impressive ratings, even if the company didn’t want to put too much effort into it. “The general manager came in one day,” Shelton recalled, “and said, ‘We don’t want you guys to have too much of a presence; it’s the music [that matters], so from now on, no last names on the air. You’re Clark. You’re Ken.’ I had a little desk in Clark’s office and he would call over to me, ‘Hey Captain!’ I thought that ‘captain’ had a nice ring to it. They said no last names, but nothing about nicknames, so, I started using ‘Captain Ken’ on the air and it stuck like Krazy Glue!”

  At the end of ’74, Smidt and Shelton made a fervent pitch to Westinghouse for more resources, but the company balked at the idea of pumping additional dollars into WBZ-FM. “The head of Westinghouse thought FM was just a fad,” Shelton bemoaned. “Our hearts were broken. Clark didn’t stay much longer, and I was only there a few months after that.” But the lessons learned in that experience proved that there was room for a station in Boston that played a mixture of rock-oriented Top 40 hits and appealing songs from LPs, which had become the medium of choice for much of the college-aged audience. In 1972, Blair Radio had purchased WCOZ, a beautiful music FM station with the slogan of “The Cozy Sound, 94.5 in Boston.” Three years later, “Clark got the job as program director to turn ’COZ into a rocker and go against ’BCN,” Shelton stated. “I was the first person he hired.”

  WCOZ switched to rock programming on 15 August 1975 and then, during the Labor Day weekend, aired a syndicated special called “Fantasy Park: A Concert of the Mind.” Smidt marveled, “What a reaction that got!” Originally produced at KNUS-FM in Dallas and broadcast in nearly two hundred markets, the two-day “concert” generated excitement in nearly every market it aired. Songs from existing live albums were assembled to make it appear as if all the best rock bands in the world were together on the bill of some incredible concert that was being broadcast as it happened. “It was a three-day fictional Woodstock-like event designed for radio,” said Mark Parenteau, soon to be hired by the newly minted WCOZ. “People weren’t sure if the concert was real.” David Bieber, at the time a freelance marketing specialist, was also impressed: “It was a total cliché of radio being a theater of the mind, grabbing live album tracks and presenting this concert that had never occurred. ’COZ just came along, taking all these marquee names that ’BCN had been present with during the creation of their careers, and stole the thunder.”

  Mark Parenteau gets his break at Boston’s Best Rock: 94 and a half, wCoZ. Photo by Dan Beach.

  After WCOZ’S dramatic arrival, Clark Smidt began replacing the automated programming with live DJS, installing his protégé Ken Shelton in the early evening. George Taylor Morris, Lesley Palmiter, Lisa Karlin, Stephen Capen, and others were soon to follow. “Then there was Mark Parenteau,” Smidt laughed. “I remember him telling me, ‘I’m so broke, I’ve got to get hired. I had to run the tolls from Natick just to get here!’” Parenteau then suggested that Smidt hire Jerry Goodwin, one of his buddies at WABX-FM in Detroit, who had been a veteran announcer with his “deep pipes” at several A-list radio stations around the country. Goodwin, a native New Englander, had returned to Boston to pursue a PhD in social ethics at Boston University’s School of Theology. “Mark [Parenteau] seriously hunted me down. He said, ‘Give up this religious zealotry you’re into. Come back to where you belong!’ It seemed like a good idea, so I started working for ’COZ [as] their production director and doing weekends.”

  WCOZ’S list of album tracks and mainstream hits included songs that would become classic rock standards many years later: “The Joker” from Steve Miller, “Baba O’Riley” by The Who, Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” and “Sweet Emotion” from Aerosmith. Along with a tighter playlist, ’COZ guaranteed fewer commercials, less talk from the DJS, vibrant station identifiers, and up-tempo production. Smidt called it, “Boston’s Best Rock: 94 and a half, WCOZ.” The mix appealed to an audience that suddenly had an alternative to the only FM rocker in town. “The first book [ratings period], fall ’75, was a legendary one,” Smidt recalled. “For listeners twelve years and older, WCOZ jumped to a 2.9 [share] right out of the box, and ’BCN had a 1.9.”

  “The purists among the radio elite in Boston were horrified,” Parenteau pointed out, “but the audience dug it.”

  “[WCOZ] had a f
ocus to their programming, and what had been an advantage at ’BCN turned into a confusion,” David Bieber reasoned. “WBCN had a story to tell and their story got stolen; a Reader’s Digest version of the station defeated them.”

  “When ’COZ happened, it was like a pail of cold water,” Tim Montgomery said. “I remember thinking at the time, ‘Man to man, we are a little indulgent.’”

  “There was so much of that self-sanctioned, self-righteous thing in radio, and at ’BCN, at the time,” added Parenteau. “For instance, if it was a windy day, each jock would come in with the same genius idea; you’d hear ‘Wind’ by Circus Maximus, ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ [from Hendrix], and ‘Ride the Wind’ by the Youngbloods—forty-five minutes of fuckin’ wind songs!”

  Not only did Clark Smidt and his tighter playlist exploit the inconsistencies of a station where the individual radio shifts were self-governed, but also certain songs and genres either intentionally or inadvertently missed at WBCN became important building blocks of WCOZ’S programming. Ken Shelton stated, “’BCN played the Allman Brothers, but considered Skynyrd to be a cheesy bar-room rip-off. [But] people were calling ’COZ: ‘Play “Free Bird”! Play “Free Bird”!’ ’BCN stopped playing ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ They must have looked at the log and realized that they’d played it five thousand times; wasn’t that enough? So, they started losing listeners to the ‘common man’ radio station.” ’BCN’S jocks reacted, feebly at first, not yet grasping the seriousness of the situation. “We just started making fun of them,” John Brodey remembered. “They were the fakes; we were the real deal.”

  “They put on the cheesy announcers like Ken,” added Tim Montgomery. “Now, don’t get me wrong, he’s a fabulous guy and he [would have] a great career [later] at ’BCN, but back then, my God, he sounded like . . . an announcer! He had a nice voice!” But, no matter how little regard the WBCN jocks had for their streamlined challenger, the disdain was not enough to prevent WCOZ’S steady rise.

  Aside from the listener’s acceptance, WCOZ also began to gain some measure of legitimacy within the music business as record labels recognized the value of promoting their releases on “94 and a half.” As ’COZ’S ratings swelled, a seesaw battle ensued, with each station racing to obtain exclusive association with the biggest talents of the day. Most often, WBCN could rely on the relationships it had fostered over the years with record promotion people and the bands themselves, many of whom had grown up with the station. However, that was not always the case, especially when WCOZ became more aggressive in pursuing its opportunities, as when Mark Parenteau pirated The Who right out from under WBCN’S nose. The original FM rocker had always enjoyed a tight relationship with the English band, dating back to even before Pete Townshend introduced Tommy on the air with J.J. Jackson in 1969, but that didn’t stop Parenteau from recognizing an opportunity and then exploiting it to the max.

  On 9 March 1976, The Who returned to play Boston Garden, and although scheduled to be on the air later that night, Parenteau still had time to see a good chunk of the band’s performance before he’d have to leave. “While we were waiting for The Who to come on, all of a sudden there was this big commotion in the loge next to us; some trash was burning under the bleacher seats,” Parenteau remembered.

  People started moving quickly, lots of screaming, “Get out of the way! Get out of the way!” This giant column of smoke rose up and hit the ceiling of the Boston Garden, then mushroomed out and settled back on the crowd. The fire alarms went on, all the emergency doors opened, and the Boston Fire Department came in with fire hoses to get this trash fire out. People were trying to find places to sit . . . in stairways, aisles; they moved people away from the fire, but they never closed the show down. Meanwhile during all this extra time, Keith Moon, the drummer of The Who, was doing what Keith Moon always did—getting really fucked up backstage. I think on a good night, they had that all timed out so there wasn’t this enormous break between bands, so he was just high enough to go on stage.

  Finally the lights came down and everybody went “YEH!” The fire’s was put out, we weren’t gonna die, and everything was great. The Who came on and started playing, but when they went into the second song, Keith was all over the place; he raised his arms, hit the drums, raised his arms . . . and fell backwards right off the drum [platform] and out of sight! So, off they went and the houselights came back on. Everybody was all tuned up on whatever drugs they were doing and [going] “uhhh . . . what?” There was still smoke in the air, and it was cold because the doors were open; the fun had just been leached right out of it all. Then Daltrey came running [back] on and said, “It’s a bummer; our drummer is ill! But, we’re going to come back!” Everybody was booing, so we went backstage. I found Dick Williams and Jon Scott, the two heavies from MCA, the band’s record label. They said, “Oh, Mark . . . terrible . . .”

  “Listen, here’s the hotline number; if you want, those guys can come over on the air and explain what just happened.” So I went back to the studio and told the whole story; the phones were buzzing with people being pissed off.

  Parenteau was barely into his show when the hotline rang. “The security guard called and said, ‘There’s a Jon Scott down here with some other people and they want to see you.’” It was Roger Daltrey, who immediately wanted to go on the air. “He explained what had happened and said, ‘We’re going to come back,’ and gave the date [1 April]. So, the next day it was in the newspaper; the article mentioned he had come by WCOZ . . . and ’BCN had nothing to do with it. The ramifications were loud and long lasting. This was a major story, a major event at the Garden, a major band. That legitimized ’COZ as being the right station at the right time, where the action was, and a nail in the coffin of ’BCN—for what they were doing at that time. Norm Winer [must have] gone out of his mind!”

  David Bieber observed that it was a most difficult period for WBCN: “The station was searching for its own meaning and what it was all about; if 1976 was the real challenge and crossroads time, then ’77 was the year of twisting in the wind and not knowing where to go.” Music was changing: from the radical underground rock of the late sixties and political Vietnam rants of the earlier seventies to a smoother, more mainstream, arena-rock style that sounded tailor-made for the streamlined WCOZ but was accepted with difficulty on the veteran station. Boston released its first album in September ’76; Steve Miller’s Fly Like an Eagle became one of the year’s biggest hits; and Frampton Comes Alive spent ten weeks atop the Billboard chart. “A more uniform, bland tone pervaded the FM airwaves,” summed up Sidney Blumenthal in the Real Paper in 1978. “Rock became commercial culture.” David Bieber added, “You had some acts that were originally great BCN [artists] now crossing over significantly into Top 40. For example, the monstrosity that Elton John became: complete indulgence and decadence, costumes instead of content.”

  The only member of the full-time staff who seemed to thrive during this time was Maxanne, whose original disposition toward rock and roll had pointed the DJ toward the future way back in 1970. Her passion had helped ignite Aerosmith’s career, which by 1976 had resulted in two platinum albums, a handful of hit singles, and sold-out tours. A personal and professional interest in Wellesley singer and guitarist Billy Squier had helped his band Piper get a record deal with A & M, setting up his later, and significant, solo success in the eighties. Plus, as the Boston Phoenix reported in a retrospective article in June 1988, “Maxanne Sartori was an original champion of the Cars. Throughout ’76 and ’77 she played demo tapes of the band, providing it with a ready-made audience in a key college market when it signed with Elektra.” She told the Boston Globe in 1983, “I played the first Cars tapes so much that people at the station used to take the tapes out of the studio so I couldn’t play them!”

  “Maxanne was the only jock who was really rocking,” remembered “Big Mattress” writer Oedipus, who was similarly excited by what he called “the nascent rock and roll scene developing in the clubs.” Oedipus worked th
e morning show shift (paid by whatever records and tickets he could scrounge), headed home and slept all day, and then went out nightclubbing, returning to the station after last call. “I’d stay up and hang out with Eric Jackson or Jim Parry.” Not only did Oedipus get to know the overnight personalities at ’BCN, but he was also there when the news department reported for duty in the early morning. “John Scagliotti knew that I got around town, so he said, ‘Why don’t you report on what’s happening?’ I was able to go to all the concerts, the cabaret shows and all kinds of cultural happenings.” Oedipus began taping one-minute reports that ran in the afternoon on Maxanne’s show. “It got sponsored and I actually got paid. So, for my report, I made twelve dollars a week, and I sure needed it! On Fridays I’d get to ’BCN and wait for Al Perry to sign the damn checks; that was my food.” Because of his associations with Maxanne and the news department, Oedipus was not left high and dry when his mentor Charles Laquidara left WBCN for the “Peruvian” mountains in 1976. “I said, ‘Charles, I should take over for you.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Oedipus, you’ll never be hired at WBCN as a DJ!’”

  With Al Perry, Norm Winer, and Laquidara gone, the rebuilding effort at WBCN began with the appointment of a new general manager, an experienced radio man named Klee Dobra, whom Mitch Hastings plucked from KLIF in Dallas. In late January 1977, the new boss brought in Bob Shannon, another outsider weaned on radio in Texas and Arizona, to assess the station and interview to be its next program director. Shannon camped out in a hotel room and tuned in the two radio opponents to see if he could determine why a young upstart was beating up Boston’s legendary FM veteran. “What I discovered after listening for awhile was that ’COZ was playing the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin [while] ’BCN was playing Graham Parker and the Rumour. There was no question ’BCN was too hip for the room.” Shannon went back to Dobra: “I said, ‘With all due respect, three-quarters of the stuff I’m hearing on the radio station, I’ve never heard [in] my whole life. There’s a lot of people that want to listen to this radio station: they tune in, [but] they hate what they get, so they tune out.’” After being hired, the new program director worked on a plan to rescue the station, concluding, “At the time everybody played exactly what they wanted, and as a result, when people were great, they were great. But when they were not in a good mood, it was awful. Plus, there was no consistency from shift to shift.”