by Carter Alan
But as Boston dug itself out from the “Blizzard of ’78,” and even before Bieber had settled into his new office, Tommy Hadges arrived at a difficult decision: he would accept the offer he’d received to join WCOZ as its program director. At the same time, quite independently, ’COZ’S afternoon drive personality Mark Parenteau decided he needed to move on, too. While Hadges desired the professional surroundings of Blair Broadcasting, “a more respected company,” as he put it, Parenteau had grown to hate the place: “WCOZ had a corporate mindset, not at all like where I was in Detroit, which was a hippie station like ’BCN. Tight playlist . . . I had to sneak records in. You couldn’t even touch the records either; they had union engineers. You were at a desk with a microphone and a phone; that was it.” Parenteau met secretly with Klee Dobra at the Top of the Hub restaurant and cut a deal while Hadges worked on his own arrangements. Then, as in some Cold War exchange between East and West, the two left their respective jobs on the very same day, passing each other on their chosen paths like two captured spies swapped by their respective governments.
WBCN’S newest addition had been introduced to radio at a very early age in Worcester, thanks to his mother, who was part of an afternoon women’s talk show on WAAB. He’d stop by the station on the way home from school and inevitably be invited into the on-air conversation. “They’d put the big boom microphone on me, and they loved me because I would just talk. There was no stopping me; I’d just go on and on.” As Parenteau got older, he hosted his own record hops on Friday nights at the Bethany Congregational Church, which catapulted him onto Worcester’s premier Top 40 teen station, WORC-AM, when he was only fifteen. “I became Scotty Wainwright on the air; I was a sophomore in high school making a ton of money. I’d be on from 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 in the morning. My mother would pick me up and take me home; I’d get some sleep and be in school at 7:30. The kids that had gone to sleep listening to me were now sitting next to me in school.” By eighteen, Parenteau as Wainwright, was living in Boston and taking the commuter rail to his new gig at WLLH in Lowell. When he attended the infamous Alternative Media Conference in Vermont early in 1970, connecting with some Detroit radio movers and shakers, it led to a successful stint on FM rockers WKNR and then WABX before he returned to Boston as a seasoned veteran nearly six years later. “But I always wanted to be at ’BCN . . . the great station.”
With the departure (again) of Steven “Clean,” Matt Siegel (displaced and a bit unsettled by Laquidara’s return) ended up in afternoons for a short time. New arrival Mark Parenteau grabbed the evening shift, and Tracy Roach took middays. When Klee Dobra brought in radio veteran Charlie Kendall to be operations manager (a program director with some expanded responsibilities), the team, befuddled by the defection of their boss and friend Tommy Hadges, now had an experienced programmer at the helm.
“The thing about ’BCN was that the attitude was so counterculture that it was hard to get them to focus on the fact that it was a business and we needed to be entertaining,” Kendall pointed out. “I had to instill the will to win in that staff and give them a few tricks on how to do that: getting in and out of a break and how to relate to the audience in some way other than simply being self-focused and self-serving. I introduced a thing called center-staging: ‘As long as every other song is by an artist that can fill up the Boston Garden, we’re going to win.’” Matt Siegel didn’t think the new restrictions were a big deal at all. He chuckled, “When you talk about Kendall tightening things up, it was like telling your kids, ‘You really have to be in by 4:00 a.m. on school nights!’”
But not everyone agreed with Siegel. “Kendall was really a formatted radio guy; he didn’t have any sympathies for what we were doing,” Jim Parry charged. “It definitely tightened up a lot and became a very different station.”
“Charlie Kendall didn’t really like me on the air; his was more of the slick school of progressive rock radio,” assessed Sam Kopper. In other words, Kendall understood and felt affinity with the WCOZ way of doing things: quick breaks, smooth DJ delivery, and tighter playlists. Kopper, who was driving his “Crab Louie” recording bus all around the East Coast to engineer as many as three live broadcasts a week for several radio stations, took the hint: “He wanted me to leave, and I was so busy anyway, we decided I would resign at the end of 1978.” Kopper got a bigger bus, stuffed it with recording gear, renamed his company “Starfleet,” and went on to continued success. In his defense, Kendall stated, “There were some who didn’t like me, but it’s what had to be done, or the place would have become a parking lot.”
In May 1978, not happy with the energy level of the station, Kendall sought out a music director with a harder rock and roll edge to replace John Brodey, whose tastes ran more toward R & B, reggae, and soft rock. The DJ, operating on the air under the moniker of “John Brodey, John Brodey” in honor of the popular television sitcom “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” kept his air shifts but would only hang around till early ’79, when he left for a job at Casablanca Records (promoting the dance music he loved but also, ironically, the primal thump of Kiss). Kendall filled the vacant slot with Tony Berardini, whom he found at San Rafael’s KTIM-FM. “All Tony wanted to be was a DJ; I said, ‘No, no, no, you’re the music director; I need someone who rocks!” Nevertheless, he promised Berardini a radio show, and the new recruit packed up his beloved VW bus and drove east. “My first three songs on the air at ’BCN were AC/DC’S “It’s a Long Way to the Top,” Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love,” and “California Man” by Cheap Trick. I figured that was a good sampling of where I was coming from musically!” Tony Berardini would began his WBCN career with no more aspirations than enjoying his next radio show and organizing the station’s music, but he’d soon be thrust into greater roles, desired or not, to eventually become one of the station’s principal sculptors for a great portion of its history.
California governor Jerry Brown visits WBCN. (From left) Tony Berardini, Oedipus, Brown, Tracy Roach, Danny Schechter, and Lorraine Ballard. Photo by Eli Sherer.
Then, Charlie Kendall took a sobering look at the news department and slashed the daily newscasts: “They were running ten, fifteen minutes long, all day long!” When he did that, “everybody got upset,” Kendall recalled.
“News was reduced in size and importance,” Schechter pointed out. “The consequence was that an important part of the character of the station began to be lost: that we were concerned with issues, engaged with the community, and giving airtime to people who were advocates of change. As the airtime went away, those people would go away.” Kendall was not entirely unsympathetic; out of this developed WBCN’S long-standing news and entertainment show called the “Boston Sunday Review.” Sue Sprecher, hired as a reporter into the news department from the University of Wisconsin in 1976, liked Kendall’s idea: “The station’s other public affairs programs had become rather tired and almost cliché; there was a gay show, a women’s show, a black show, [and] Mackie MacLeod did the prison show. I can see why Charlie, as a programmer, would take all this time and put it into Sunday morning.”
“Danny told me, ‘I like that. It can work,’” Kendall explained. “That got him off my back.” Schechter, for his part, didn’t remember being as agreeable to the idea and saw the show as a bittersweet compromise, but the “News Dissector” would be gratified to witness the “Boston Sunday Review” win the Boston Globe Reader’s Poll as best radio talk show in the city and gain high Arbitron ratings for its time slot. A testament to its enduring strength and popularity, the “Boston Sunday Review” would continue to thrive, past the departures of Sue Sprecher and Danny Schechter in the forthcoming decade, to live on, even beyond the long-distant demise of its parent radio station.
The uneasy feelings began when I saw that the first people who preceded the new owners were locksmiths. SUE SPRECHER (SHOP STEWARD)
POWER TO
THE PEOPLE
As the newly remodeled WBCN, circa 1978, began to get its balance, a ren
ewed spirit of optimism could be felt on the fiftieth floor of the Prudential as the staff dug in its heels to take on the threat of WCOZ. “It seemed like it had a conscious turnaround in attitude,” David Bieber told the Real Paper in March ’79. “Everybody was excited. We were going places again.” The article went on to say that “ratings nearly doubled from spring to fall of last year and advertising revenues reached an all-time high.” But another drama had been unfolding behind the scenes, cloaked in board rooms and lawyers’ offices, for months. As these new developments came to fruition, not only would they divert all attention away from the battle with ’BCN’S crosstown rival, but they would also threaten the very survival of the station itself. As WBCN’S employees drew up battle plans and mapped out strategies, no one seriously considered that the frail-looking radio station owner in their midst was actually far more focused than they could have imagined. Challenged, yes, but still wielding all the power of his corner office, T. Mitchell Hastings redoubled his efforts to sell WBCN, and early in the year he had himself a buyer.
Thirty-four-year-old Michael Wiener and his business partner Gerry Carrus had formed Progressive Communication Corporation in 1972 to purchase the rock station KOME-FM in San Jose. Four years later, the team marshaled the capital needed to purchase another radio property, WIVY-FM, a Top 40 outlet in Jacksonville. In April 1978, as reported by the Real Paper, Wiener “incorporated Hemisphere for the stated purpose of buying WBCN” and “mortgaged his other two stations to raise the necessary funds.” On 4 May it was publicly announced, and reported in the Boston Globe the next day, that Concert Network, Inc., parent company of WBCN, had agreed in principle to sell its radio station to Hemisphere Broadcasting Corporation, a subsidiary of New York–based Progressive Communication Corporation, for $3 million (Hastings craftily added another $50,000 consulting fee paid to him directly for each of the ten years following the station’s sale, adding another half million to the total price). A purchase agreement was signed within a week and an application filed with the FCC to reassign WBCN’S license to the new owners, who would take possession of the facility and radio signal as soon as the government approved the transfer. However, bureaucratic twists and numerable delays from both the FCC and the two companies involved dragged the approval process on for months. “As a result,” David Bieber pointed out, “WBCN was in limbo. Hastings, knowing he was going to sell the station, didn’t want to spend any money on it for marketing, promoting, advertising, enhancing, hiring—whatever. The [the new owners] didn’t hold the license [yet]; therefore, they wouldn’t spend any money either. It was a real scramble to try and make something out of nothing; we were left to our own devices and improvisational skills.” Charlie Kendall’s grand design to reboot the station languished, severely crippled by an utter lack of funds.
The period of limbo dragged on from May to the end of the year, and then even longer into February 1979. During that time, representatives of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America union and stewards in the WBCN’S shop aimed to secure assurances from the pending owners that their union would be recognized and the progressive nature of the station’s sound and presentation maintained. The Committee for Community Access (CCA), a group of concerned citizens “interested in media and diversity in radio,” according to Martin Kessel, one of its members and a former reporter for the WBCN news department, became involved, tracking the transfer process. While its endorsement was not required for FCC approval, the CCA had achieved a reputation as an organization with teeth, fighting for the media and, to that end, lodging lawsuits with the FCC to hold it accountable in serving the public interest. Michael Wiener met with CCA chairman Jack Bernstein, counsel Phil Olenick, and Kessel on 30 September for two hours at the Fenway Community Center, assuring the delegation that “his approach to radio was progressive ‘in every sense of the word’ and that the thing he valued most about WBCN was its heritage.” The exact definition of the term “progressive” would be bandied about later, but based on this perceived sincerity, the CCA recommended that the transfer to the new owner “definitely would be in the public interest.”
On the second point concerning WBCN’S union shop, however, things were not so neat and tidy. Wiener continued to assert that he had no obligation to assume the responsibilities of the station’s union contract when the FCC approved the transfer, so the disagreement between Hemisphere and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) representing WBCN’S rank and file simmered through most of 1978 and into the following year. Phil Mamber, field organizer of Local 262, sparred with Wiener through Hemisphere’s lawyer and lodged a protest with the FCC stating that WBCN’S “existing Collective Bargaining Agreement did require assumption by purchaser of the agreement,” and recommended the government not approve the transfer until that assurance was received in writing. In the meantime, a letter to Wiener on 22 October from virtually the entire ’BCN staff stated that they looked forward to their new relationship with Hemisphere but were also committed to upholding the existing union contract. On 29 December 1978, the FCC granted assignment of ’BCN’S title to the new owners, although the actual takeover of the station would not be effective for nearly two months. The decision passed the buck on the union argument to other governmental agencies, not the FCC, so when Hemisphere officially assumed control on the fiftieth floor of the Prudential Tower on 16 February 1979, that issue, the critical one as it turned out, remained unresolved.
“We were really looking forward to the new owners coming along,” David Bieber recalled. “They were, by reputation, these aggressive guys from New York who owned two stations and were developing this company. They were known as people that would support the properties they acquired, and we were the biggest. They were taking the most financial chance they ever had in their career. How could they not want to invest in what they were acquiring?” With Wiener’s assurances that the format would be respected and the proportions of news, public affairs, and music maintained, anticipation for Friday’s takeover was high, curiosity in the staff far outweighing any foreboding over Hemisphere’s stonewalling of the union. Bieber continued, “We even had this incredible, dramatic, floral bouquet with a big welcome ribbon in the lobby there to greet them as they came in to take over their new property.” The arrangement wasn’t even acquired as part of Bieber’s miniscule promotional budget but, in fact, had been purchased with funds from an officewide collection. When Wiener arrived on the fiftieth floor of the Prudential Tower and walked in the front door at WBCN, he saw the display, thanked those present for the flowers, and then vanished quickly into his office.
Soon, the new owner of WBCN began summoning staffers, ostensibly to meet and evaluate them. Sue Sprecher, as the union shop steward, witnessed what came next. “People started getting called in and one by one were coming out saying, ‘I’ve been fired!’”
“There was a security guard there and a lawyer,” David Bieber added. “I didn’t know what was coming up, so I shook [Wiener’s] hand and then he basically just read from this parchment that ‘we are the new owners and we have no financial obligation to you and here’s a severance check—see ya later!’ There was no cordiality, no sentiment; they didn’t want to have any connection to you.”
“We started hearing of one or two or three firings and we started freaking a little, but we expected some casualties along the way,” Steve Strick, who was WBCN’S acting news director at the time, told the Real Paper. “Then it was six and seven and eight.” Soon it was Strick’s own turn to face Wiener. “That whole time he never once looked at me in the eye. It was like he was reading from a Teleprompter over my shoulder. I didn’t know what to say . . . I just said thank you and left.”
“They took over, they fired nineteen people, [and] they violated our union contract,” Danny Schechter summarized. “They were pretty arrogant and didn’t give a shit: ‘We bought it, we own it, and fuck you’ kind of attitude. I said, ‘Look, you can’t do this, man. We have a contractu
al agreement with the company; you can’t just unilaterally invalidate and dismiss it.’ They said, ‘Don’t tell us what we can do,’ and such and so forth. Then I got thrown out physically by a security guard.”
“I think Danny knew what was coming up, and he may have salivated into his palm before he shook Mike [Wiener’s] hand,” David Bieber chuckled. Although a miniscule and symbolic blow certainly, that insult would, perhaps, be the only victory in a long and bloody day.
By the end of business hours, Wiener had terminated over half of WBCN’S thirty-seven employees. This included Danny Schechter, David Bieber, Steve Strick, Jim Parry (the last remaining original jock from March ’68), punk maven Oedipus, and newly arrived part-time announcer Randi Kirshbaum. Along with several of the office staffers, the new owner also canned longtime account rep Kenny Greenblatt and half the sales department, which, in a gesture of solidarity with Wiener, had ironically petitioned to leave the union in January. Once the members of sales had met with Sue Sprecher and Phil Mamber just prior to the takeover, however, they rescinded that offer, deciding that to leave the union would be destabilizing. Wiener rewarded them by slashing through their ranks. The new owner defended his actions to Dave O’Brien at the Boston Phoenix, who in turn reported, “His startling cutbacks were necessary because the previous owner had allowed the station to become overstaffed, and his intention was to turn a station which had ‘an accumulated loss of over a half-million dollars as of December 1977’ into an ‘economically viable one.’”
Wiener also explained the cutbacks to Jeff McLaughlin at the Boston Globe, rationalizing that the firings “were based on our analysis of the station operation, including the fact that no other FM station I know of has anywhere near as many employees.” McLaughlin, being a diligent journalist, checked that claim out, calling a few other Boston stations to find out if WBCN’S thirty-seven-person staff was, indeed, excessive. He found that rival WCOZ employed thirty-two full-time and five part-time employees, WXKS-FM (KISS) had “somewhere between 25 and 30,” and an identical amount was employed at WROR. But even if one agreed with Wiener’s claim that dire economic concerns justified drastic action, the issue of how cold-bloodedly the ends were accomplished on “Black Friday” still remained. Tracy Roach told McLaughlin in the same article, “There are lay-offs in our business, of course, but Mr. Wiener had best realize that there are also procedures for negotiating lay-offs, and they start with union recognition, not massacres and union-busting rhetoric.” Wiener, for his part, maintained in an earlier Boston Globe story on 17 February that “we know we have violated no contract. We have no contract.”