by Carter Alan
It would be realized in following years that the reports of radio’s death were greatly exaggerated; it weathered the introduction of its new competition just fine. In fact, MTV became music radio’s great ally because the visual medium more effectively exposed new acts and their sounds to the masses. The songs became three- or four-minute video commercials, introducing not only a tune but also an artist’s appearance and manner—the whole package. This made it easier for radio stations to “break” these latest singles on the air and parlay them into hits. As a result, rock music underwent a vast diversification of style as the multihued colors of a new wave scene mingled with the library of tunes from classic bands and artists (at least the ones astute enough to shoot videos). The advent of this sweeping promotional tool helped bolster a sagging U.S. record business, which had hit a recession by the end of the decade. Seasoned warriors like the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart now advertised their sharp stage moves on the small screen, and a series of creative videos finally pushed the enduring J. Geils Band to number 1 in February 1982 with Freeze-Frame. Regional arena-rockers REO Speedwagon, Styx, and Journey all broke nationally with multimillion sellers, while hard rock blasted a path to platinum with AC/DC and Van Halen. Then there were new arrivals like the Go-Go’s and their album Beauty and the Beat, which was number 1 for six weeks in ’82; Joan Jett’s chartbusting single “I Love Rock and Roll”; and Rod Stewart soundalike Kim Carnes with her hit “Betty Davis Eyes.” Artists of all kinds found their careers jump-started by MTV and then aided and abetted by radio, which steadfastly refused to go away.
A huge part of WBCN’S mission, from the first drop of Joe Rogers’s needle on “I Feel Free” to 1981’s “Turning Japanese” by the Vapors, remained its commitment to the broad palette of rock music. Diversity was a tricky thing to present, but with the turning of the tide against ’COZ, it became evident that Oedipus had gotten a handle on how to do it. He told Radio and Records in May ’82, “We allowed ourselves to get too far ahead of our audience and we were losing them. We put together a musical structure; I hesitate to call it a format, because the jocks still have freedom of musical choice. But there are boundaries. It’s like a painting where the artist works within the boundaries of his canvas. The WBCN canvas covers all the years and types of rock. We play many of the same acts that all AORS [album-oriented rock radio] do; we have to. but there’s also other great stuff that should be played that the other AORS won’t, everything from reggae to Ray Parker Jr.”
Here’s an example playlist from a Saturday afternoon shift I did on 24 July 1982 that demonstrates how the presence of some research and formatting had effected the height, breadth, and width of the station’s music mix.
Jimi Hendrix, “Stone Free”
The Clash, “Magnificent Seven”
Fischer Z, “So Long”
Survivor, “Eye of the Tiger”
Nazareth, “Love Hurts”
Dave Clark Five, “Because”
Van Halen, “Little Guitars”
Patti Smith, “Because the Night”
Gary U.S. Bonds, “Out of Work”
Steve Miller Band, “Living in the U.S.A.”
Ramones, “Do You Remember Rock ’n’ Roll Radio?”
Fleetwood Mac, “Hold Me”
Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, “I Don’t Want to Go Home”
The Who, “I Can See for Miles”
The Probers (local band from Providence), “Violets Are Blue”
Rolling Stones, “Start Me Up”
Judas Priest, “Electric Eye”
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “I Fought the Law”
By the end of the year, the station would also be featuring the two huge R & B albums of 1982 and ’83: Michael Jackson’s Thriller and 1999 by Prince. We might not have been allowed to play “Flight of the Bumblebee” by Rimsky-Korsakov, as Charles Laquidara used to, but otherwise, the revamping of ’BCN’S music policy hadn’t become the terrible vise many of us feared. It truly remained “360 degrees of rock and roll.”
Since WBCN thrived on new music, the major record labels considered the station a mandatory and essential stop for every band on the road to potential stardom. This early, and often critical, involvement usually endeared ’BCN and its staff to the artists well before they hit it big. For instance, Oedipus’s enthusiasm for the Clash placed the band’s first two albums high in WBCN’S consciousness even though there was little sales evidence in America to warrant the effort. But early airplay of songs like “Julie’s in the Drug Squad,” “Police and Thieves,” and “I Fought the Law” would bear fruit when the band came up with its brilliant double album, London Calling, at the end of 1979. Not only did “Lost in the Supermarket,” “Clampdown,” and the title song become WBCN staples, but also “Train in Vain” went beyond Boston airplay to become a number 23–charting single in the United States with the album a gold seller. After the Clash’s finale a few years later, the members continued their friendship with the station: Joe Strummer as a solo artist and Mick Jones as the leader of Big Audio Dynamite. When an unknown Athens, Georgia, group called the B-52’s appeared, as colorful as a circus and sporting two female singers each with massive beehive bouffant, ’BCN’S airplay of their quirky 1978 independent single, “Rock Lobster,” helped the band land a major Warner Brothers contract. As a trio of English bottle blondes, the Police first arrived in Boston in a station wagon, playing the Rat in October of 1978 and releasing a catchy single about a prostitute named “Roxanne.” The import 45 garnered an instant reaction at ’BCN, leading to a pair of concert broadcasts from the Paradise Theater in April and the Orpheum Theater on 27 November 1979. The station enjoyed a close association with the Police through the band’s demise in 1983, which continued as the members went solo. Over a decade later, the group would chronicle that entire 1979 WBCN Orpheum broadcast when it was released as one half of the Police Live! two-CD set.
Then there was U2: perhaps WBCN’S most famous band association, along with Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, and Bruce Springsteen. The legendary story of that group’s first appearance at the Paradise Theater on 13 December 1980 has been told and worshipfully retold, each time gaining another layer of mythology, until it hardly seems possible that the tale ever occurred. But, in fact, it was one of those rare, “A Star Is Born” moments, and combined with other exploits in other places, lots of hard work, and a great deal of luck, the members of U2 rode their fantasy all the way to an international superstar reality. The love affair began, like countless others, in the ’BCN music room. U2’s Irish import single, “A Day Without Me,” had caught my ear in August 1980 at a part-time record store job. I bought the 45, and when I played it for Jimmy Mack, ’BCN’S music director, he was totally into it, giving me the go-ahead to feature the song on my weekend overnight shift.
So, I get the credit for the first spins, but things wouldn’t have gone much further than that unless two other events combined to create a small “perfect storm.” On 20 October, U2 released its first album, Boy, in Europe, and one of the few import copies in Boston got into my hands within the week. The album featured U2’s brand-new single, “I Will Follow,” which seemed even more accessible than the previous one. At the same time, WBCN signed on to host a promotional event for Capitol Records and one of their new acts, a Detroit boogie band named Barooga Bandit, at the Paradise Theater. Capitol would rent the club, and ’BCN would give away discount tickets on the air or sell them on the night of the show. After only a week or so of promotion for the event, U2 suddenly appeared on the bill as warm-up act, an unexpected development given the total dissimilarity of the young Irish band’s musical style. Tony Berardini now wanted to bump up ’BCN’S exposure of U2 to complement the attention being given Barooga, so I donated my import copy of Boy to the station. Within days, the airplay of “I Will Follow,” and another cut, “Out of Control,” ramped up as all the jocks eagerly featured the songs.
When the evening finally arrived, just before showti
me, perhaps 150 people stood about the club as Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen Jr., all dressed in black, took the stage for the first time in Boston. None of the members were of legal drinking age yet, an innocent bunch with a raw live attack, yet their fledgling set quite impressed the audience, as Edge related in U2’s 2006 autobiography: “Our show in Boston was a real surprise for us because we opened for a band called Barooga Bandit in a cramped little club and noticed we were getting a particularly good reaction. We left the stage feeling incredible because the audience was so enthusiastic. Then we went back down to check out Barooga Bandit, only to find that everyone had left. It was then that we realized that they had come to see us.”
Sharing the love with U2 from 1980 until the end. The ’BCN staff hangs with the Edge in Foxboro Stadium (1997). Courtesy of WBCN.
The remaining forty people, which included U2 and their manager Paul McGuinness, sympathetic ’BCN staffers, and an embarrassed Capitol Records’ representative, stayed to watch Barooga Bandit proceed in an exercise of futility. While that band would soon fade into obscurity, U2’s star had just risen above the horizon, leading to many future encounters in Boston, including a pair of headlining sellouts at the Paradise just three months later and the band’s first arena show in America at the Worcester Centrum two years after that.
“In the days when we used to come and play the Paradise we made friends with Carter Alan and the folks at WBCN who really supported us. Consequently, our rise in the Boston area was very rapid,” Adam Clayton told the Boston Globe in 2005.
“WBCN, they were banging U2’s music from the very beginning,” Larry Mullen Jr. observed in U2’s book. “So when we went to Boston, it was a bit like a homecoming. It was a big deal for us. You could say we broke out of Boston.”
Bono was more succinct. In a video clip sent to the station for its twenty-fifth birthday celebration, he filmed himself walking along the beach in Howth, Ireland, smiling broadly, then blurting, “If it wasn’t for ’BCN, we’d all be fucked!”
U2 visited the station for the first time in May 1981, for an interview that Ken Shelton found to be one of his most memorable. The members were more than willing to be guest DJS, and the teenage Larry Mullen sounded hilarious when acting the part of a loudmouth American weatherman giving his report. “My favorite interviews were the new, up-and-coming people,” Shelton commented, “like U2, who were just so happy to be on the radio.” Before their fame had arrived, John Cougar (Mellencamp), R.E.M., Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Patti Smith, the Motels, and Talking Heads, among many others, would arrive at the station during this period as young, virtually untested talents. “From Elvis to Elvis,” commented David Bieber. “That’s what the station was all about.”
The experimental attitude was, perhaps, best exemplified by the WBCN Rock ’n’ Roll Rumble, an annual event in which the station sought to crown Boston’s best up-and-coming band from a field of two dozen contenders. The local competition, spread out over nine nights, was the brainchild of Bieber, who launched a prototype of the contest in 1978 at the Inn-Square Men’s Bar in Cambridge. “Eddie Gorodetsky and I came up with the original concept. We didn’t want to call it a battle of the bands, and in one of our brainstorming sessions we arrived at the title, which was sort of linked [pun intended] to the Link Wray song [1958’s instrumental ‘Rumble’].” By 1979, the competition had shifted over to the Rat in Kenmore Square for its official first year. “The Boston music community was coming into its own,” Bieber continued. “We started out very primitively in 1978, but there was a natural growth and progression of Boston bands that advanced through ’79 and ’80. We started doing T-shirts, printing supplements [in the Phoenix], and putting together consequential prize packages that would be worthwhile to the bands: not just money, but recording time, makeovers, equipment, and advertising space.” Various sponsors also climbed on board over the years to offer significant prizes to the winners and also kick in the cash that allowed Bieber much greater clout in placing the station’s local advertising for the competition. Ironically, one of those supporting sponsors was the new kid on the block that many people thought would kick WBCN into an early grave: MTV.
The 1979 Rumble awarded the best new talent prize to the popular rock trio the Neighborhoods, while 1980 would crown Pastiche in a battle branded by the local media as a victory for new wave over heavy metal, as the hard-rocking France was defeated. The competition was not without its hiccups: one night a prankster set off a sulfur bomb in the women’s bathroom, sending billowing clouds of acrid smoke into the dingy catacombs of the Rat. As bands and patrons alike fled in panic, running madly upstairs into the street, a somewhat-dazed Ken Shelton lingered on, nearly hidden in the smoke at the judges’ table, holding his ballot and a couple of remaining free-drink tickets. “Is there a fire?” he asked torpidly, before being shooed out the door. When the Rumble had moved to its new home at Spit and Metro a couple years later, an incident involving a high-powered record label VP threatened to give WBCN a media black eye. The executive, serving as a judge, was caught by a local newspaper reporter out on Lansdowne Street trying his best pickup lines on a pretty lady while the bands toiled inside. WBCN publicly banished the indifferent and intoxicated exec from the competition, and then threw out his scores.
That the writers from such newspapers as the Boston Globe, Herald, Phoenix, Sweet Potato, Boston Rock, and enduring local rag the Noise would devote significant space to covering the Rumble, also serving regularly on the judges panel, ensured tremendous exposure for budding artists who starved for such attention. As the event gathered steam over succeeding years, the music industry sent streams of talent scouts into Boston to size up prospects from each new list of two dozen hopefuls. “For a Boston music fan, it’s an opportunity to sample the sounds of the up-and-coming bands,” Jim Sullivan reported in the Boston Globe in May 1991 (when the Rumble fielded its thirteenth year of competition). “Win or lose, it’s a chance to be seen by the record company honchos. That is, after all, the main idea from a band’s point of view.”
“A lot of our bands went on to get record label deals. ‘Til Tuesday was a prime example of that,” Mark Parenteau pointed out about 1983’s Rumble-winning contestant, which impressed the scouts sent to the competition from Epic Records. Within a year, the quartet, led by singer/songwriter/ bassist Aimee Mann, had signed a recording contract and in early 1985 released its debut album, Voices Carry, which eventually sold over five hundred thousand copies. After two more ‘Til Tuesday albums, Aimee Mann embarked on a solo career that she has sustained ever since. Albert O, who joined the WBCN air staff in July 1982, soon became involved in organizing the annual contest. “Some of the best bands didn’t win, ones that all went onto national fame,” he observed. “How about the Del Fuegos, Big Dipper, the Lemonheads?” The Del Fuegos, which signed to Slash Records and eventually Warner Brothers, became a much-beloved and influential alternative “roots” band in America for years to come, but in 1983, the group never even won its Rumble semifinal round.
I remember stepping up on stage at Spit at the end of the night to announce the winner. After witnessing four bands, everyone in the audience was well lubed, bellowing out their encouragements and insults, most chanting the name “Del Fuegos!” . . . “Del Fuegos!” . . . Embarrassing emcee situation number 1: the microphone won’t work. Well, it didn’t, and after a couple of moments of just dying up there, I jumped down and ran through the rowdy crowd into the DJ booth to use that mike. Perched a few steps above the dance floor in a small cupola, the booth might have made it harder for people to see me, but it also provided a greater measure of protection. Good thing, because as soon as I yelled, “The winner is . . . Sex Execs!” the place erupted. Ice cubes were hurled in at the booth, a couple smacking me in the face. That had barely registered before I heard the sound of glass shattering on the wall. The club DJ yelled, “Down! On the floor!” He pulled the door shut and locked it. We huddled in our foxhole and didn’t dare poke our he
ads over the lip until the lights had come on and the bouncers cleared the place out.
By the seventh annual Rumble in 1985, the finals were being held downtown at the Orpheum Theater, illustrating the exploding popularity of the Boston music scene by the middle of the decade. The competition reached a pinnacle of sorts the following year, when the stately old theater was nearly ripped open by the hardcore unit Gang Green. “They were a bunch of punk-surfing, drunken buffoons from Boston,” Mark Parenteau laughed, “But, hey, they won!” Front man Chris Doherty totaled a keyboard onstage with a sledgehammer and, for good measure, happily mooned the crowd as he walked off stage, picking up a unanimous triumph from the panel of five judges. David Bieber affirmed the decision: “I think of Gang Green up on that stage, shooting beers,” he chuckled, “that band could have been Green Day.” The happy and wanton amalgam of misfit toys bashed out their thunderous sonic victory over the more commercial country-rock flavor of Hearts on Fire, whose guitarist, Johnny A, well remembered the night: “It felt almost like Good vs. Evil, because they were such punks and abrasive guys, and we were musicians just trying to write good music. So, we lost and, I guess, Evil triumphed!” he laughed. “But, it was a big deal to be playing the Orpheum Theater, and it was a great music scene back then. I miss that.” After the finalists had performed, and while the audience waited for the votes to be tallied, the Rumble tradition of presenting a surprise guest artist each year was fulfilled by Peter Wolf and also (the famously nonwinning) Del Fuegos.