by Carter Alan
Tim Montgomery, as sales manager, was never a member of the union, but at this point he’d been an eight-year veteran of WBCN since its days on Stuart Street.
They came to me before they bought the station and said, “We want to work with you, you’re our kind of guy, we think you get it,” and blah, blah, blah. But the beginning of the end of my career at WBCN was that day they took over. They called people into the office, where Mitch Hastings used to be, and fired them one after another in a sort of conga line. And people were coming out, in a few cases crying, “They’re firing us! We didn’t know this was going to happen!” I charged in and said something like, “You don’t know what you’re doing; you don’t understand what this station is, apparently!” Well, that was the end of me; I was supposed to be “their guy.” I lasted about nine months [after that]. They didn’t understand what ’BCN meant to the community or to the culture; they didn’t know what they had bought.
“What they definitely wanted to do was get rid of the sales staff,” David Bieber recalled. But it wouldn’t be as easy as it seemed. “Basically, 90 percent of the staff was in that union, and that’s the last thing Wiener and Carrus wanted.” At nearly every radio or television station in America at the time, if the employees had organized themselves at all, typically there would be different unions representing different departments. WBCN’S relationship with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, Local 262, was a rare exception. Danny Schechter pointed out, “Everybody was in the union, including the salesmen and the engineers.” Out of all the departments, presumably protected together under one umbrella, the only one left virtually intact during the bloodbath was the full-time air staff. Sue Sprecher observed, “They kept anybody who had an on-air presence. [The new owners] really wanted to show the public that there wasn’t any change [at the station].” As such, Charles Laquidara, Tracy Roach, Matt Siegel, Mark Parenteau, John Brodey, Jerry Goodwin, and Tony Berardini all survived the cut.
After his firing that Friday, David Bieber walked numbly to his office and then began to collect his things to remove from the station. “Charles had already done his show and was out of the building, so I called him to tell him what was going on. His attitude was, ‘We’ve got to mobilize; we’ve got to do something because they can’t do this,’ even though he wasn’t one of the ones being terminated.” Bieber contacted the Boston Globe that afternoon, which ran a story the following morning, announcing that the entire WBCN staff, those fired as well as those who retained their jobs, would be holding an emergency meeting at 2:00 p.m. that day. A source, reported as “unidentified,” told the paper, “You’d better believe that a very wide range of possibilities, including a walkout, will be discussed.”
“I remember leaving that Friday and walking with Julie Natichioni from our sales department, talking and arguing about whether or not there’d be a vote for a strike,” Sue Sprecher recalled. “I can remember Julie saying, ‘Charles won’t vote for a strike.’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah he will!’”
“I was influenced in a union household at a young age,” Mark Parenteau said. “When push came to shove, I could have kept my gig. But it was too horrible. They would have gotten away with it if Charles and I went back. I called my dad and he said, ‘Stick with the union.’”
“Nixon had his Saturday Night Massacre and he lived to regret it, and you’ll live to regret this too. You don’t know this station and you don’t know this town,” Danny Schechter hurled at Wiener as he was removed from the station premises (as reported by the Real Paper).
“We had been doing everything we could from the previous May or June until this February winter’s day, with spit and glue and a little frosting in a can, to try and keep the station together, and they came in and just decimated it. [But] they had no idea what they were up against,” David Bieber related.
“They were misadvised,” concluded Oedipus, who was also a union shop steward. “They figured they’d fire half the staff and there’d be no power anymore. But they underestimated.”
On Saturday, some—like Bieber, Schechter, or Laquidara—might have been fired up and ready for battle, but most of those terminated just appeared stunned, straggling into Tracy Roach’s Back Bay apartment to discuss their future at WBCN, if any. Their rights under the union contract, even though not recognized by Hemisphere, were explained and discussed for hours. Wiener’s hardline, confrontational, and nonnegotiating attitude seemed to indicate that the opportunity for compromise didn’t exist, so the assembly eventually boiled down its options to a simple black or white choice: give up or walk out. To Danny Schechter, the catalyst in bringing a labor organization into ’BCN years earlier, it was absolutely clear what had to be done. But would other, less committed or nervous staffers agree? In the end, someone proposed a vote to strike, and the motion carried with only one dissenting opinion. The “News Dissector” was heartened: “People who were not really political got together and said, ‘We have to fight this!’”
“It was an incredibly passionate time,” Sue Sprecher added about the final decision. “There was not a single doubt about what we had to do.”
After the vote, several in the group sat down to draft a public statement that everyone in the room could agree on. The work was finished by 5:30 p.m., and Laquidara called the radio station. The on-air jock, John Brodey, saw the hotline light flash and knew what was coming: “If the vote was for a strike, I’d get the call and be expected to walk out in solidarity.” He put Laquidara on the air, who began reading the statement: “WBCN employees, including all announcers and disc jockeys, news people, engineers, creative services, office people and sales staff, are on strike . . .” Moments later, he concluded with, “We call on all WBCN listeners, advertisers, and supporters to respond to our actions. We are taking these actions to save WBCN.”
“I told John,” Laquidara explained, “When you leave, just be sure everybody knows that the real WBCN is walking out the door and that what people are going to hear after that is a bunch of pretenders.”
“I said, ‘Okay, I understand that,’” Brodey remembered. “Then I thought, ‘Man, this is really weird; I’ve got a song playing and I got to walk out.’ But the company had the wagons in a circle; they had somebody out there waiting to jump in.”
As a managing employee of Hemisphere Broadcasting, the burden of responsibility now fell on Charlie Kendall. “The company guys came in and they said, ‘No union!’ I went, ‘These guys are ingrained; you are not going to be able to break that union in this town.’ They said, ‘You just keep that station on the air!’” There was no option; if Kendall wanted to keep a job, he’d have to operate as an agent for the opposition.
“Charlie had to stay on because he was management, but he was totally supportive of the strikers,” Mark Parenteau said in sympathy.
“It really killed him when the strike happened,” added Jerry Goodwin. “All of a sudden we couldn’t talk to him anymore. I didn’t envy his position.” Putting in some calls, Kendall located a few DJS who, as he put it, “were, basically, starving.” The program director explained to them that they would be vilified during the strike and, if the union won, then they would most likely never work in Boston radio again. Nevertheless, a few who were willing to cross the inevitable picket lines stepped forward.
On strike! WBCN’S Mark Parenteau, Charles Laquidara, and Sue Sprecher meet the press at the picket line in front of the Pru. Photo copyright by Stu Rosner with courtesy from the Boston Phoenix.
Kendall himself kept the station on the air after Brodey’s walkout, playing song after song until six, and then, according to the Boston Phoenix, “aired a taped Queen concert, followed by a taped Blondie concert (an affair at the Paradise hosted, ironically, by Oedipus), followed by a taped Steve Miller concert. It wasn’t until after midnight that the actual live voices of strikebreaking announcers began to come over the airwaves.”
“There was no automation, so it had to be live jocks,” Kendall mentioned. “I
remember one guy came down to the station who had one arm!” Nevertheless, the applicant demonstrated that he could cue up a record and perform the other required tasks to run a radio show, so Kendall impressed him into his ragtag group of replacements. Michael Wiener arranged for a few pros to jet in from his other properties in San Jose and Jacksonville, and soon the alien voices had taken over the high ground. That they were thrown off somewhat by the sudden reassignment could be heard from time to time: Alan MacRobert in the Real Paper reported that one of the announcers forgot where he was and identified the station as “WBCN, Chicago.”
While Michael Wiener sat in the nearly empty WBCN office with a skeleton crew of Kendall, Tim Montgomery, the chief engineer, a worker in the accounting department, and the motley assortment of replacement DJS, the striking staffers got right down to business, organizing themselves with the help of Phil Mamber from the UE. A list of demands was drafted, including recognition of the union and reinstatement of all fired employees, and then presented to Hemisphere’s president. Wiener summarily rejected its arguments, telling the Boston Globe, “The union was recognized by the previous owner, but that contract is non-assignable.” Matt Siegel acknowledged this in a prepared statement, saying that the FCC informed their union that the new company “need not accept a contract negotiated by the old WBCN, but it must recognize the United Electrical Workers, the union that has been certified by the federal government as our legal representative. This, the new management has refused to do. Rather than sit down with us to resolve our differences, they choose to misrepresent our cause and malign our union.”
By Monday, 19 February, at 9:00 a.m., the entire group of striking employees, with a cloud of supporting station volunteers and concerned listeners, had thrown up a picket line in front of the Prudential Tower and then held a press conference to announce the strike in greater detail. The following morning, both of the city’s premier dailies, the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald American, featured articles about the action, including nearly identical photographs showing the circle of picketers braving the February chill, with producer Marc Gordon in the foreground holding aloft a sign that read, “Don’t Destroy WBCN.” Both of Boston’s foremost weeklies, the Real Paper and the Boston Phoenix would soon chime in with their own in-depth articles, thus beginning a nonstop rush of media attention, including scrutiny from national stalwarts the New York Times and Rolling Stone magazine. “There was such participation by both local and national media,” David Bieber recalled. “People like Jeff McLaughlin of the Globe covered it almost on a daily basis, which was unprecedented.”
While Phil Mamber and the UE filed an unfair labor practices suit against Hemisphere with the National Labor Relations Board, the rank and file of Local 262 strategized. Danny Schechter realized that it was a long shot, but in this situation, their union actually had a chance to win. Gathered under one collective bargaining agreement, the WBCN staff, with all its departments, displayed a unique strength that made victory possible. Schechter explained, “It’s completely unusual in broadcasting because of the craft union structure, [for instance,] the engineers in one union and the announcers in another. There’s never really the unity [needed] to beat the company; they could play different people off one another.” With everyone gathered together in the UE, the WBCN strike committee began to set up responsibilities based on its many members’ unique abilities. Jerry Goodwin recalled with a laugh, “I was on the ‘knee-busters’ committee. Our job was to go to the Sheraton next door to ’BCN, where all [the replacement DJS] were staying, and wait for them to come out of their door and suggest that they just get in their car and hit the road, as simple as that. We threatened to ruin their car . . . but never did. We didn’t have to; they were outta there!”
“It was called the ‘Dirty Works’ committee,” Oedipus clarified. “We would call those guys up on the hotline all the time, harass them, and a lot of them walked.” The punk jock also performed another, more surreptitious and clandestine job as an actual WBCN secret agent. “I would meet with Charlie Kendall to find out what was going on over on the other side. We would meet downtown in a movie theater and sit next to each other. It really was like ‘Deep Throat [from the Watergate scandal].’ I saw one of my favorite films, The Warriors, three times with Kendall.”
Oedipus lists the strikers’ demands while a concrete overhang protects the crowd from a cold February rain. Photo by Sam Kopper.
The other committees were more high profile and, somewhat, less scandalous. David Bieber fed the media a steady diet of information from the strikers and organized support from his contacts, while Tony Berardini, as music director, worked through his Rolodex. “It was my responsibility to talk to the guys from the record labels and see if they would support the strike, and they all did!” Berardini became the station’s mouthpiece to all the national music trade magazines, including Radio and Records, Album Network, the Gavin Report, and Record World. He also left Boston midstrike and traveled with Kenny Greenblatt to the Radio and Records convention in Los Angeles, where he was given generous podium time “in a room with seven hundred people” from the music industry to explain and urge support for his union’s actions.
The striking sales representatives received the task of cutting off the flow of money to the station. Sue Sprecher explained, “I think they were the ones put in the toughest spot of all. They had to call up their clients and ask them not to advertise on WBCN, after years of working on those [relationships].”
“One of the key factors was that we reached out to the advertisers and told them that this was not the real ’BCN,” David Bieber pointed out. “If they were spending their money, they weren’t getting their money’s worth.” In mere days, the sales staff achieved remarkable results; by Wednesday the 21st, Boston University’s Daily Free Press reported that most of the advertisers on WBCN had thrown in their support for the strikers and withdrawn their commercials. Jim Parry told the student newspaper, “Most advertisers withdrew their spots because the station they bought isn’t what they’re getting.” By the end of the strike’s second week, the only major advertiser yet to pull commercials off the air was Don Law. Since Charles Laquidara had known the concert promoter for many years, his assignment was to convince the impresario to follow suit. “That was a big deal,” Steve Strick said. “Charles really worked on Don.” To be fair, the Real Paper revealed that Law provided the Orpheum Theater at cost for a strike benefit concert on 4 March [and another a week later] and then reported, “But he has yet to match the extraordinary steps taken last week by other local corporations such as Brands Mart, Rich’s Car Tunes, Tweeter Etc., and Strawberries. In addition to removing all advertising from the struck station, these companies have also donated paid commercial time on other radio stations to advertise the striker’s benefit.” As published criticism began to mount, Law fell in line after realizing how important his company’s action would be to the strikers’ efforts: “I spent a lot of time with Charles and I was responsive to what he said. We followed his lead and pulled our commercials.”
“It was one thing for the newspapers to give [the strike] coverage, which they did, but they [also] ran ads in our support at no charge,” David Bieber marveled. “I was connecting with people like Peter Wolf and the J. Geils Band to run ads in support of the strikers and the listeners who marched in the picket lines, and to do concert benefits for the people who were out of work. Don’t forget, this was February 1979, dead of winter, freezing cold.” Within days of the walkout, the J. Geils Band had published “An Open Letter” to Michael Wiener regarding “The Strike to Save WBCN-FM,” insisting “that any station endorsements made by members of our band be immediately removed from the airwaves until negotiations are completed.” Peter Wolf concluded the letter by writing, “Personally, as a former WBCN disc jockey, and now as a listener, it saddens me that such estrangement between management and staff has occurred at a time when I feel the station was sounding better than ever.” Then there was the very quot
able closer: “P.S. The only scabs I dig are the ones on my elbow.” In short order, all of Boston’s biggest bands had published their own manifestos of support, including Aerosmith: “These people need us and we need them”; the Cars: “We will never forget WBCN’S contribution to us. Let the Good Times Roll . . . Again”; and Boston: “There’s no place like home and WBCN is a part of our home. Let’s keep it that way.” A consortium of local band managers, club owners, and musicians joined forces to declare their support in the press, and then backed up that statement by offering their talents and services to the strike committee.
Those offers were swiftly organized since there was an immediate need for funds to buy groceries for striking employees, pay their bills, and avert the pressure of being forced to consider work elsewhere. The most visible benefit concert was the Orpheum Theater show on 4 March, featuring James Montgomery, the Fools, the Stompers, and Sass. All the bands worked for free, and even the lighting and sound technicians, with all their equipment, refused a paycheck. Members of the striking ’BCN staff took the stage between acts to plead their case and thank the listeners who had stampeded down to Tremont Street to sell out the old theater. Then the J. Geils Band capped the evening with a high-octane surprise performance. This Sunday-night show was so successful that the strikers planned a second event for 11 March, featuring other A-level Boston bands: Robin Lane and the Chartbusters, Private Lightning, and Pousette-Dart Band. Using his relationship with the Rat in Kenmore Square and contacts among the Boston punk community, Oedipus spearheaded a weeklong series of nightly benefits featuring the cream of the new “underground” scene, while a major North Shore fundraiser at the Main Act in Lynn featured the Neighborhoods, Human Sexual Response, and more. FM, the movie depicting a fictional radio station’s labor struggle, was given special benefit showings at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge. “The movie depicted a strike at a radio station purported to have the same kind of spirit WBCN had,” David Bieber observed. “But, in ninety-minutes, how do you tell a tale comparable to what we went through . . . a real, ferocious, on the street battle. No way FM could do justice to what we endured in the end.” But how appropriate it was that a Hollywood yarn about a West Coast radio strike would help to fund a similar, but very real, drama unfolding in Boston.