Radio Free Boston

by Carter Alan

  That year, the radio station moved for the third time, out of the Prudential Tower and down Boylston Street to the Fenway area. Slightly more than a right-field foul from the home of the chronically pennant-less Red Sox, the rear of the one-story brick building emptied directly into an outdoor parking lot just across the street from Fenway Park. On game nights the roar of the crowds and their groans of disappointment could be heard easily at 1265 Boylston Street, where curious employees could even sneak a peek over the wall at the stats displayed on the park’s jumbo screen. Mark Parenteau remembered the first time he saw the place: “Tony brought me in his Volkswagen bus to look at the property, and as we drove by, I said, ‘This is perfect, Tony. We have the baseball stadium over there . . . and a gay bar across the street!’” Kidding aside, Parenteau added, “The move was an empowering thing for the station. It took ’BCN out of that gilded tower in the clouds and put it on the street, in a neighborhood. And it became the entertainment neighborhood with the Red Sox right there and the Spit and Metro nightclubs [two blocks] over on Lansdowne Street.”

  The new building provided plenty more space than the Prudential’s submarine-like office space with its one hallway and was renovated in stages. “I was the first voice to broadcast out of the new building because they had the news department move over first,” Steve Strick mentioned. “They were still doing carpentry in there. It was comical: saws were going off while I was on the air.”

  “That entire place was built by the engineering department through the miracle of cocaine,” Mark Parenteau laughed. “You’d go over there and their eyes would be open with toothpicks, all wide-eyed and crazy, and they had been there for, like ten days straight.” As soon as the air studio had reached a sufficient state of completion, the jocks moved over during a clever live broadcast that originated in the Prudential, and then transferred to Boylston Street via Sam Kopper’s Starfleet mobile studio, which was driven to ’BCN’S new digs as Mark Parenteau handed over his shift to Tracy Roach. Kopper recalled, “We stayed on-air all the way out of the fiftieth floor, down the elevator, out the front of the Pru, and into the bus. We were literally and symbolically coming down from our perch fifty floors above Boston, back to the streets. We fired up the bus and drove slowly up Boylston Street, parade style, blowing the air horn, Bostonians cheering from the sidewalks.” Bob Demuth, an engineer who worked with Kopper, maneuvered the big Starfleet rig over to the new location, parking it out in front while scores of cars that had tailed the bus searched for similar spaces.

  “Then they came into 1265,” Tom Couch remembered, “and we played a tape of my voice with the big MGM fanfare behind it: ‘Tracy Roach, this is your new studio!’ And she said, ‘It’s so nice . . . it’s so big!’” It was big, the largest studio anyone had ever worked in, encompassing enough space to house the control board, record library, a band performance area, and a couch for guests to watch from (and fool around on). The rest of the entire station surrounded this central hub, an axis of amazing activity, and home to WBCN for the next twenty-five years.

  One of the most significant moments at WBCN’S new Fenway location occurred the same year as the move. Of 8 December 1980, Oedipus recalled, “I was on the air the night John Lennon was shot and I had to read the teletype [bulletin] on the air. It was devastating. Then, I was supposed to go to a commercial. I just couldn’t do it, commerce seemed so . . . meaningless. I just started playing music, and friends of mine, musicians, began calling. I told them to come on over, and they started picking records out and playing their favorite Beatles songs.” Tony Berardini was watching the Monday night football game between Miami and New England when Howard Cosell made his unforgettable announcement on ABC-TV. “I called Oedipus immediately and agreed with him, ‘Do nothing but play Beatles music; take all the commercials off the air.’”

  “That’s the great thing about radio; it’s so immediate,” Oedipus added. “It’s where people can gravitate and be together, share and hear voices, cry and laugh.” Jerry Goodwin followed Oedipus onto the air that terrible night. As a DJ in Detroit in 1964, he had actually emceed for the Beatles at Olympia Stadium and sat backstage with John and Yoko at a benefit for incarcerated activist John Sinclair in 1971. “David Bieber came in, and Bill Kates, my producer, who was a musicologist in his own right, was there. The listeners called in and told me about Lennon’s influence [on them], then we hustled to go find out if we had the songs they wanted. It was an amazing four-hour tribute I will never forget.”

  If rock and roll could be visualized as a burning spirit, then the fire at 1265 Boylston Street was the best place to huddle for warmth and comfort. Listeners wrestled with their emotions live on the radio while ’BCN’S employees worked through the same grief. Everyone might not have spent time with John Lennon as had Jerry Goodwin, or interviewed the man as did Mark Parenteau, but all had grown up with him. “I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and I was hooked for life,” producer and future music director Marc Miller commented. Miller joined nearly all the members of the WBCN air staff, who hung around the station on 9 December, not knowing really what else to do. Tony Berardini said, “The whole day, we put listeners on the air, played Beatles music, and dropped all of the advertising.” Everyone pitched in to construct a broadcast tribute to John Lennon, locating documentary sound clips and recording segments for the special, including a stirring editorial from Danny Schechter, which wasn’t completed until seconds before it ran on the air.

  “We’d been there all day, and at some point I went to the front of the building and looked out the window,” Miller said. “There were all these people out there with candles, all singing.”

  “There must have been five hundred people, who had been at a candlelight vigil on the Boston Common, who walked over,” Tony Berardini remembered. “There were so many standing in front of the station that they blocked Boylston Street. We had been talking about our Lennon retrospective tribute all day; they wanted to hear it, but we had no speakers outside on the building.”

  “So Tony and I went out there,” Miller continued, “and we sort of said [to the crowd], ‘We know, we feel it too . . .’”

  “The two of us grabbed a couple of boom boxes and stood on the steps of the radio station holding them up in the air so people could hear the special.”

  WBCN “Soundwaves” poster from 1970 featuring caricatures of “Mississippi Harold Wilson” (Joe Rogers), Charles Laquidara, JJ Jackson, Andy Beaubien, Sam Kopper, and Jim Parry. Poster art by Paul Bernath, photo of poster by Don Sanford.

  WBCN “Stereo Rock” bumper sticker from 1971. Photo by Dan Beach.

  WBCN poster from 1973 designed by the master of macabre illustration Gahan Wilson. Wilson was hired by the station to do the artwork and traveled from Chicago to sketch in the studio during a shift by Old Saxophone Joe. By kind permission of Gahan Wilson. Poster courtesy of the David Bieber archives.

  WBCN “Chrome” bumper sticker, early eighties. From the author’s collection.

  WBCN “Comic Book” bumper sticker, eighties. From the author’s collection.

  The air staff in Fenway Park. Taken from the 1986 WBCN Rock ’n’ Roll Calendar. Photo by Ron Pownall/RockRollPhoto.com.

  On the parquet at the old Boston Garden. Taken from the 1988 WBCN Rock ’n’ Roll Calendar. Photo by Ron Pownall/RockRollPhoto.com.

  Wicked Yellow’s license plate. Saved by Tank moments before the legendary radio station vehicle plummeted from a crane to her death on the asphalt during WBCN’S famous “Drop Era.” Courtesy of Tank’s personal collection.

  LEFT First WBCN River Rave in 1995, the only one by a river! From the author’s collection. RIGHT 1996 X-Mas Rave All X-Cess Pass. From the author’s collection.

  The famous eighties period “yellow-winged” and purple WBCN Aerosmith bumper sticker. From the author’s collection.

  “Rock Revolution” sticker created in 1995 to announce WBCN’S new alternative music focus. From the author’s collection.

  Pearl Jam b
umper sticker. From the author’s collection.

  WBCN/Patriots Super Bowl Champions bumper sticker, 2002. Courtesy of Tony Berardini/New England Patriots.

  Steven Tyler and the author at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston, November 2012, talking Aerosmith and WBCN. Photo by Tim Staskiewicz.

  Miller shook his head at the memory of the remarkable WBCN moment. “It was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen: all those people just showing up at the station, because they didn’t know where else to go.”

  Later that very same night, Mike Wiener and Gerry Carrus took Berar-dini out for a previously scheduled business dinner. The pair had already begun working on a plan to leverage WBCN’S equity into purchasing more radio properties (they would acquire WXRK-FM and WJIT-AM in New York as well as WYSP-FM in Philadelphia the following year). “They told me, ‘We’re buying more radio stations; we can’t be in Boston all the time, so we want you to be general manager.’” The statement hit the program director like an 18-wheeler. But after the shock passed, Berardini politely declined. “To me, being in the programming end of things was getting away from the music, and I didn’t want to get even further away.” Wiener and Carrus smiled, finished their meals, paid the check, and bided their time. “They kept asking me, and this went on till the following April. I said, ‘I don’t know anything about being a general manager. Gerry’s comment to me was, ‘You didn’t know anything about being a program director either.’ So, I finally went ahead and said I’d do it.”

  Berardini immediately chose Oedipus to replace him as program director. His bosses wanted to know why. “I told them, ‘Yes, he doesn’t know anything about the job, but he’s passionate and loves music, and that’s what this station is built on.”

  “Tony took me out to a restaurant to ask me and I totally did not expect it,” Oedipus recalled with a smile. “Why me? I was the black sheep!” He pondered through dinner but finally accepted the job and delighted his boss. “Tony said, ‘Let’s celebrate with some Sambuca!’”

  “I ordered us two Sambucas with the beans and all, because I’m Italian, right?” Berardini recalled. “I lit the drinks on fire; we did a little toast and I said, ‘Blow out the flame before you drink it.’”

  “But when I blew mine out, I blew too hard and it went all over Tony—burning!” Oedipus recounted, laughing. “It was very funny.”

  “I look up and I saw a wave of fire coming at me! Thank God it went out. I said, ‘Great, I offer you a job and you try to immolate me!’”

  The new general manager and program director had barely accepted their congratulations before turning to face the surprising reality of WCOZ’S second coming. It was entirely unexpected, since WBCN had wrestled its competitor to the ground immediately before and after the strike. In the spring of 1980, ’BCN led in listeners with a 6.2 share to ’COZ’S 4.1. But by that fall’s rating period, which ended in December, the month of John Lennon’s murder, a dramatic flip-flop had occurred as ’BCN’S share sagged to a 4.2 and WCOZ soared to more than double that with a 9.1. Clearly a great change had occurred at “94 and a half.” When Tommy Hadges decided to move on from WCOZ in the summer of 1980, the suits at Blair replaced him with a young programmer out of Phoenix named John Sebastian. During his tenure at KUPD-FM, he had transformed the station from a Top 40 outlet into a full-on rock station. “That was the first station where I used the moniker ‘Kick-Ass Rock and Roll,’” Sebastian recalled. The new format specialized in a concentration of rock hits, rotated relentlessly in Top 40 style, without a great deal of sympathy for the eclectic fringes that WBCN so specialized in.

  WBCN’S new location next to Fenway Park at 1265 Boylston Street. The staff greets Yes guitarist Trevor Rabin. Courtesy of WBCN.

  “When ‘Kick-Ass’ radio signed on at ’COZ, we took a huge hit,” Tony Berardini admitted. “It was two hundred rock songs played over and over and over and over again.” Sebastian’s selections included many mainstream, “meat and potatoes” bands that his heritage competitor largely avoided, like REO Speedwagon, Rush, and Kansas, along with a steady diet of cornerstone rock from Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, The Who, and Jimi Hendrix. He also chose unknown talent if the music sounded right for his format, creating massive hits for newcomers Shooting Star, the Tarney Spencer Band, and Sheriff.

  “It pounds home the message 24 hours a day with an endless parade of slogans: ‘The Rock ’n’ Roll Mother.’ ‘THE Led Zeppelin station in Boston.’ ‘No Disco.’ And the truly hard-sell: ‘All Rock ’n’ Roll—no B.S.,’” the Hartford Courant reported in 1981. Sebastian ignored criticism and kept up the onslaught. The combination of rock hits with WCOZ’S flashy television, billboard, and print ads swept WBCN up in a wave it could not counter. Sebastian offered, “In my opinion, ’BCN believed their press too much, thought they could get away with playing almost anything. They didn’t take what I was doing seriously, [so] we caught them unaware.”

  “We didn’t know the significance of ’COZ at that point,” Charles Laquidara said. “We just knew that something was wrong.” It got worse: in the summer 1981 rating period, “Kick-Ass Rock and Roll” stomped all the way up to an extraordinary 12.6 share, while body slamming ’BCN into the mat with a lowly 4.6.

  “It was very clear that if we didn’t turn it around, the station would cease to exist,” Oedipus stated.

  Mike Wiener and Gerry Carrus, who had been involved in plenty of radio battles before this, advised their new general manager and program director to do some music research. Berardini pointed out, “It was the first time that research was ever used at ’BCN. What we got out of it was that listeners thought our playlist was way too broad; we were playing everything, including Rick James and James Brown!” Plus, the station chronically avoided many of the bands that listeners really wanted to hear, simply because the jocks considered them uncool. REO Speedwagon, which had released Hi-Infidelity, one of the year’s biggest-selling albums, was the prime example. Oedipus said, “We were very, very elitist. In that whole center-stage theory, we weren’t even on the stage; we were up in the boxes! We had the talent, definitely more musical knowledge; we were much more creative, but we had to do it in a more focused manner. I had to eliminate some of the musical choices of the DJS because people wanted to hear the hits more often and not hear other songs too often. There’s a balance there. At the time, I was quoted as saying, ‘I’ll play the fuckin’ Grateful Dead if that’s what it takes to play the Clash!’ And we did.”

  In the summer of ’81 John Sebastian left WCOZ to start a programming consultancy company that, at its height, advised over two dozen “Kick-Ass Rock and Roll” stations around the country, including WCOZ. Andy Beaubien, the former ’BCN staffer who had crossed over to the competition four years earlier, was promoted to program director under Sebastian’s guidance. Beaubien boasted to Billboard magazine in the 8 September 1981 issue, “If the Spring book proved anything, it’s that WCOZ is here to stay.” But WBCN’S revamped approach closed the gap; in the Winter ’81 survey, ’BCN scored a respectable 5.9, while ’COZ descended from the heights with an assailable 6.7. While much of the reason was WBCN’S willingness to adapt its approach to meet the threat head on, the other was that Sebastian rapidly became bored with his achievement, moving on to a new creation he called EOR, Eclectic-Oriented Radio, which would find some success and be a model for the adult alternative radio format. “At the height of [my consulting], I said, ‘I’ve come up with a new idea and if you want to keep doing [“Kick-Ass”], great. It was probably the worst business decision of my life.” With the founder abandoning the ship, “there was almost no place to go but down,” Beaubien remembered. “When the narrowness of the format began to burn out the music, there was no rescuing it.”

  “’BCN got a lot better,” Sebastian pointed out. “Then they took full advantage of what they already had and what they would never lose: that incredible, legendary image that ’COZ never had. Nothing against Andy, but I think management got too involved and t
hey didn’t do the right aggressive moves to stave off ’BCN’S rise back.”

  The tide finally turned in the fall 1982 Arbitron ratings book when WBCN slipped ahead with 5.6 share to ’COZ’S 4.9. Not only had the competitor been beaten, but also it would never again rise to challenge ’BCN. As far as me, I was holding down a regular schedule of three weekend shifts when the ratings came out and we discovered that ’BCN had beaten ’COZ. Everyone started yelling and backslapping, hugging, even crying. The tension had been so steady, so complete, for so long that there was this intense rush of jubilation from everyone—jocks to the sales people and even the office staff. The J. Geils Band heard the news and sent over an entire case of Dom Pérignon. Folks were in the hallways swigging the expensive stuff right out of the bottles. This is what victory felt like, and it felt pretty damn good! In 1983, Blair banished the “Kick-Ass Rock and Roll” format, replacing it with an adult contemporary blend of mellower rock sounds. Then, a year after that, even WCOZ’S call letters were erased when the station converted to Top 40 WZOU-FM. The deadly “Kick-Ass” Transformer had been toppled and silenced.

  It was a playground, rather than this place you had to go where everything was the same every day, like “Groundhog Day.” It was fun . . . we had permission to play. BILLY WEST

  I ( DON’T )

  WANT

  MY MTV

  The coolest people in the know, the hippest of the hip, the taste makers, and the trendsetters watched the pitched battle between WBCN and WCOZ unfold with great interest, perhaps even laying the occasional wager on the outcome. But as the boxing match continued through 1981 and into the following year, the attention of these cognoscenti soon dissipated almost entirely. Why bother? To them, the whole radio struggle had suddenly become irrelevant. MTV’S debut in New York City on 1 August 1981 represented the opening shot of a brave new world in broadcast media. Even though only a few viewers possessed the cable hardware necessary to receive the twenty-four-hour music-video channel, the prophets anointed the medium as the logical successor to radio, at least the kind of music-oriented radio in which WBCN and WCOZ specialized. In an obvious nod to that premise, MTV debuted with a video clip for the 1979 hit “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the English duo the Buggles. Recalling an earlier era in 164 which the advent of television sidelined radio as the primary medium for mass communication, the song transposed smartly into its new setting. As the cries of “I want my MTV” echoed across more and more subscribers’ living rooms, anxieties in the radio business grew. A worry emerged that the whole armature of support for something even as legendary as WBCN would cease to exist, running down like a dying battery, its advertising base vanishing as listeners abandoned the radio dial for their TV remote.