by Carter Alan
Announcing the 1986 Rumble winners from the Orpheum stage. (From left) Steve Strick, Dan McCloskey, Carter Alan, and Albert O. Photo by Leo Gozbekian.
As far as sheer attendance numbers went, this would be the high water mark for the Rumble, the finals remaining in the Orpheum for three years before moving back into the nightclub atmosphere of Metro and then the Paradise Theater, the Middle East in Cambridge, and Harper’s Ferry in Allston. There would be noteworthy winners who went on to fame: Tribe, the Dresden Dolls, Heretix, and Seka (which changed its name to Strip Mind and featured Godsmack founder Sully Erna), but the central idea always remained the same: focus on the music, no matter what the style and no matter which venue it was presented in. The Rock ’n’ Roll Rumble became one of WBCN’S most enduring traditions, surviving even beyond the station’s FM radio sign-off. In 2011, local music maven and former ’BCN jock Anngelle Wood resurrected the event after a one-year absence, holding the thirty-second contest at TT the Bears in Cambridge under the auspices of classic rock sister station WZLX-FM and the surviving HD-radio and streaming versions of “Free Form ’BCN.”
As the decade got into gear and WBCN assumed its new positioning identity as “The Rock of Boston,” there were a lot of new faces standing at the bar on those Rumble nights at Spit. Tracy Roach had decided to move on in 1980, and Lisa Karlin, drafted from crosstown ’COZ to do evenings, would remain for two years. The “Duke of Madness” left as well, cut loose by the station after an altercation he had with Charles Laquidara early one morning as the “Big Mattress” crew sleepily arrived to set up the day’s show. Neither DJ remembers too much about the argument, but Jerry Goodwin did recall, “There was a wonderful camaraderie amongst the people who worked there, [but] Charles and I were always at each other’s throats. I’d rag him all the time about his nonprofessionalism.” For years, radio folklore held that the two jocks had a knock-down, drag-out fight in the air studio as the overnight host left and ’BCN’S morning maniac took his place. The tale got taller as time went by: one of them choked the other against the studio wall, one flew through the air like that guy in every Western who’s tossed through the saloon window in a shower of glass. “That wasn’t it at all, man,” Goodwin corrected, stating that there were only words between the pair. “It’s reasonable to say,” he smiled, “that there were professional egos in the way”—that, and perhaps some controlled substances as well.
“It was verbal; no one hit each other,” confirmed Bill Kates, Goodwin’s producer. “Frankly, it was really a kind of ‘tempest in a teacup’ as far as I could see.”
“Charles said, ‘Fuck this!’ and walked out one side [of the studio] through one door, and I walked out the other,” Goodwin continued. “I lived in Back Bay, so I walked home and went to bed as usual. Then I got that phone call about one o’clock in the afternoon from Oedipus: ‘Get to the station right now!’ Only then did I realize that Charles had kept walking too and he had not gone on the air. Poor Bill Kates had to take over the show. There were two doors in that studio; we both went out each one, and ‘never the twain shall meet.’” Since no licensed operator remained on the station premises, an FCC regulation had been breached, and Goodwin, still signed in on the transmitter log when he abandoned ship, took the fall. Goodwin’s departure meant that I finally got a full-time position, as I replaced him in the weeknight 2:00 a.m. slot. Six months later, Oedipus would move me into the 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. shift, which I’d occupy for nearly four years.
A young and boisterous crowd of “weekend warriors,” who would take important supporting roles in the subsequent decade, appeared: Dave Wohlman, Carla Raczwyk (known as “Raz on the Radio”), Albert O, Carla Nolin, Carmelita, and Lisa Traxler. New jocks were given their own silver satin WBCN jackets with their name embroidered on the front. “As gaudy as it was,” Dave Wohlman remembered, “that was a symbol that you made it; that you were there! What a point of pride: a manifestation that it wasn’t a pipe dream, you were actually a part of the staff.” The satin would disappear later in the eighties, but not the pride, as Oedipus ordered a new set of custom leather jackets to replace the silvery velvetiness of the seventies model. After four failed audition tapes Brad Huckins finally got his leather prize and was redubbed “Bradley Jay” on the air, a talent destined to be the final DJ on WBCN many years later. One other notable weekend warrior of the time was longtime Boston radio veteran John Garabedian, who joked in 1983 that he was “a semi-legend.” But that statement actually rang true: as a star of 1960s AM radio in Worcester at WORC and Boston on WMEX. Garabedian’s up-tempo, listener-proactive style would soon endear him to viewers of his own local video channel, V66, and later the hugely successful syndicated Top 40 show Open House Party.
Oedipus credited ’BCN’S victory over WCOZ to “great announcers, plus great production. We did fun and creative things; production was always an important part of that.” From the tone and imagination going into the taping of commercials, radio station IDS, and promos to the “Mighty Lunch Hour” song remakes, WBCN’S production department underwent a major generational change as Tom Couch and Eddie Gorodetsky transitioned out after being discovered by Don Novello and relocating to Toronto to write comedy sketches for SCTV. Despite losing this gifted pair, the department didn’t skip a beat, owing to the talents that took over. First on the job (some of the time) was Billy West, who would go on to become one of America’s great voice talents, following in Mel Blanc’s Looney Tunes footsteps as Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd; originating and starring in Ren and Stimpy; acting as a principle voice in Futurama; and, heck, he was the red M&M! But Billy West’s story was one burdened by incredible personal struggles and years of pain, and to everyone around him at WBCN, each day seemed like it could easily be his last. West, who’s been sober for decades, said, “I was just a real bad boy, cross-addicted on cocaine and alcohol . . . high voltage. Once somebody like me started drinking, there was not enough booze on the street . . . or in the city.” But West’s hours at WBCN resulted in some of the most memorable comedy bits that the station ever broadcast: “Y-Tel Records presents The Three Stooges Meet the Beatles!” and “Popeye Meets the Beach Boys!”; “Falk-in’ Athol” (the impersonated actor touring the Massachusetts town); “Kangaroo Balls”; “Merry Christmas Boston” (a remake of the Beach Boys holiday classic); “The Rare Elvis Drug Song”; and the fictional, multihour “Fools Parade,” allegedly taking place out on Boylston Street during April Fool’s Day.
Billy West before Ren and Stimpy, Bugs Bunny, and the Red M&M! Pictured with (from left) Larry “Chachi” Loprete, Tank, and Peter Wolf. Photo by Mim Michelove.
Billy West came to ’BCN through an impromptu, on-the-air routine. “I was living in Weymouth and a friend called me up and said, ‘Hey, call ’BCN! They’re playing this game, and they want to find somebody who sounds like Mel Blanc.’ Charles was up in the Pru, and they were doing “Mishegas,” so I called up. Eddie Gorodetsky, who was just a kid then, an intern, was screening the calls. ‘Hello, ’BCN. Ya sound like Mel Blanc?’ It totally caught me off guard, and I didn’t know what to say, so he just hung up on me.” West sat there dumbfounded for a second. “Then I said to myself, ‘Fuck this guy, I’m gonna call back that radio station.’ He goes again, ‘Hello, ’BCN, ya sound like Mel Blanc?’ And I laid into him with a litany of [Blanc] voices, one after the other, like asteroids hitting him!
“‘Wait, hold on.’ And he went and got Charles, so I ended up getting on the radio that day.” But that was not enough to clinch an on-air berth for West, who was far more into partying than pursuing the opportunity most hopefuls would die for. “I was drunk later that day; I didn’t even remember it.” As a guitar player, he submerged back into his world of selling instruments and amplifiers in Harvard Square. That might have been the beginning and end of a promising WBCN career, but months or years later (no one quite remembers) a good friend managed to get a cassette of West to Charles Laquidara, who recalled the “Mel Blanc” boy wonder who played “Mishega
s” that day. Fate, it seemed, had determined that West would get to the station, no matter what.
Dave Wohlman, who bridged the gap in the production department between Tom Couch’s tenure and the arrival of Tom Sandman, mentioned, “I have never worked alongside someone who was so gifted. You had to raise the bar of your own game just to play in Billy’s sandbox. If he was working on a character, like Floyd the Barber from The Andy Griffith Show, he would talk to you as Floyd the Barber all day! Every day it would change: he’d be Mr. Jinks from the Pixie and Dixie cartoons or Larry from the Three Stooges.” West, as a working musician, could play the guitar and sing in a seemingly endless array of mimicking voices, but his lack of dependability got on Laquidara’s nerves. “Billy was just so talented, he was too good,” Oedipus mentioned. “Charles would be all upset, and I’d say, ‘If he shows up, put him to work, if not, that’s just the way it is because we’re not firing him! We’ll do everything we can do to help him, but we’re not getting rid of him.’”
“Oedipus had a very high threshold for my nonsense,” West added. “[Once] I didn’t come in for two days, and he took me to his office and gave me this stern talking to about being professional. When you’re an inebriate, you make whatever excuse [you can]: ‘Uh, my alarm didn’t go off.’ So, at the end of it, I realized he was going to give me a break. He gave me two hundred dollars and said, ‘Go get a [new] alarm clock.’ I’ll never forget it, and we’re friends to this day. He knew I was in trouble.”
But the problems with Billy West were getting worse. One night he showed up at the station, cornered Lisa Traxler in a production studio, and had to be ejected onto WBCN’S front stoop, in the pouring rain. Mark Parenteau, who lived in an apartment across the street and was certainly no stranger to late-night carousing, found West to be a frequent visitor: “Sometimes, he’d get really loud and start knocking pictures off the wall, and eventually even I would have to sleep, so he’d pass out in the lobby of my building. My neighbors would be down there in the morning, stepping around him to get their mail. Billy learned to sleep in the ‘Cardboard-only’ dumpsters: those were a lot cleaner and didn’t have rats.” If that sounds like a joke, Parenteau, who started a professional comedy act with West, wasn’t laughing. The two began doing a stand-up routine in local clubs, even warming up once for Jay Leno at UNH, and their approach was ad-lib, as Parenteau related: “We were going to prepare lines, but we never got around to it. I was Abbot and he was Costello. I was the straight man who talked to the audience and he’d be . . . Billy!” However, the duo’s chemistry failed them at Parenteau’s Celebrity Roast at Stitches comedy club in 1984, with West resorting to lowering his pants and making animal noises and grunts onstage. “Everybody was there: Aerosmith, Peter Wolf, Ken Shelton, Lenny Clarke, various writers, Norma Nathan from the Herald,” Parenteau moaned. “Billy was out of control; it was embarrassing . . . the worst moment.” The curmudgeon of chaos had crashed.
“I was empowered by the fact that I couldn’t be killed. Every time something came close, I survived it,” West remembered. Drug debts loomed, he wasn’t paying his rent, and “everybody was chasing me down.” West ended up in court frequently, but one visit in his seemingly endless parade of legal tangles proved to be the one that changed everything. “I had to go to court for nonpayment of rent, and there was this crotchety, old Italian judge who looked down his specs at me. He said, ‘You never answered a violation from a year ago when you crashed your car on the Mass Pike and left it upside down on the other side of the guardrail. You’re going to Charles Street [Jail].’ Next thing I know I’m in a pissy, smelly, two-hundred-year-old jail, and for the first time in my adult life, I was forced to be sober for seven straight days. Then the radio station was adamant that I go to McLean Hospital, which was rehab. The program was five weeks in-patient.” The cold turkey at Charles Street plus West’s rehab stuck: “I’ve been sober ever since; I got it the first time around and never went back. So, if it hadn’t been for the station, I’d probably be dead.” Upon his return to ’BCN, the dried-out and alert Billy West took all those around him aback: was this really the same person who had clotted up the studios with his dark and drunken presence over the last couple of years? Yes it was, the same man in an astounding transformation, as if a controlling evil spirit had been wrenched from his soul and sent, kicking and screaming, back into Hades. Billy West became an unstoppable force in the WBCN production team, now joined by Tom Sandman, and added significantly to an already amazing body of work.
Tom Sandman (top left) hosts a WBCN alumni show with (top left to right) Sam Kopper, Jim Parry, (bottom left to right) Joe Rogers, Charles Laquidara, and Al Perry. Yes, Jim is using Al as a saddle. Photo by Dan Beach.
Tom Sandman arrived at WBCN in 1982, after working at the legendary WEBN-FM, in Cincinnati, one of only a handful of radio stations that predated WBCN as a free-form rock outlet. “’BCN was on my radar because there were only four or five stations that I knew had really creative production departments. When I heard those parody songs that Lushbaugh and Couch did, I thought they were the best.’” After the job at WBCN opened, Sandman flew into town, had lunch with Oedipus, hit it off immediately with the program director, and was offered the new gig. “People kept saying to me, ‘Wait till you meet Billy!’ I had no idea who Billy West was. As it turned out, he was just the greatest partner you could have on a creative level. He was bouncing off the wall with ideas and funny lines. And you know, Oedipus let us do whatever we wanted, he didn’t tell us how to do it. He just wanted something new and fresh.”
“I hate to use clichés,” West said, “but Tom was like Dan Aykroyd and I was like Belushi. Sandman understood music; he could sing and do voices.”
“Billy was a terrific vocal arranger; he could hear and mimic harmonies that I couldn’t get,” Sandman remembered. “For example, the intricate jazz-type harmonies that the Beach Boys would do; he’d get them and then teach them to me.” After Sandman worked the music bed out on tape, both he and West would layer on the vocals. “I was the McCartney [voice] and Billy was the Lennon. But Billy had a great David Bowie. I did a pretty good Pete Townshend, [but] neither of us could do Roger Daltrey very well. Billy was a great Mick Jagger; I did an okay Bob Dylan. He did Bruce Springsteen and I did Tom Petty!”
Sandman and West chewed into a new era of lunch songs for Ken Shelton, who gleefully debuted them at noon on the “Mighty Lunch Hour.” The lunch song factory turned out spoofs like “Papa Ate a Chicken Bone” (mutated with all its Motown soulfulness from the Temptations’ smash “Papa Was a Rolling Stone”); the Rolling Stones’ “Mother’s Little Helper” became “Hamburger Helper”; and the epic “Flabby Road Medley” was adapted from side 2 of the vinyl Abbey Road album from the Beatles. The duo’s wit and humor invaded everything the station tasked them to create: from a cheerleading anthem for the Super Bowl–bound Patriots in 1986 entitled “We Love the Pats” to on-air announcements for the Rock ’n’ Roll Rumbles or the mountains of commercials assigned by sales—all created in the windowless production studio where Sandman and West barricaded themselves for hours every day. Anyone who visited the station would inevitably find their way to that room to record their station IDS (“Hello, my name is , and you’re listening to WBCN, Boston”).
“Tank would bring in these sports stars, Brooks Robinson and Willie Mays,” Sandman remembered reverently. “James Taylor, Steve Miller and Ric Ocasek came in, and David Byrne [of the Talking Heads], who hated to do radio, but he showed up. Jimmy Carter came through, and all these comics, celebrities, and actors: Henny Youngman, Sam Kinnison, and Professor Irwin Corey. Then one day Oedipus walks in with this guy, and he looks vaguely familiar; he’s got these kinda’ thick glasses and scraggily hair. Oedipus says, ‘Tom, I’d like you to meet Andy Warhol.’ What the fuck? Andy fuckin’ Warhol! How does that happen?” The possibilities in the halls and studios of WBCN seemed endless as the early eighties arrived and advanced. There really was the feeling that anything could, an
d would, happen. In a magical, multicolored, and electrified atmosphere like that, who really needed their MTV?
You’d hang around the station because it was fun. We’d have a fast-pitch, wiffleball game in the hallway between the copy room and Oedipus’s office. Everyone else doing business was expected to go around. The lady answering phones would get whacked in the head and people had to wait to get in the copy room because it was 3 and 2, and the big one was due! BRADLEY JAY
NUMBER 1
ROCK ’N’ ROLL
CONNECTION
Back in 1968, a time that already seemed two thousand light years from home, Ray Riepen’s imaginative leap of faith had birthed the successful experiment of underground, free-form radio in Boston. Joe Rogers, Peter Wolf, Al Perry, Sam Kopper, and the other departed soldiers from ’BCN’S front line could congratulate themselves for significantly marking a place in radio history; that would have been significant enough. But as the station negotiated tumultuous times, surviving the end of the sixties and the retreat of the counterculture through the seventies, it surged into a new decade in a commanding position, like a marathoner suddenly finding himself at the head of the pack, wondering how he’d ever gained the lead, and now, how he was going to stay there. In August 1985, Boston magazine’s annual “Best and Worst” poll not only lauded WBCN as the best station in the city but also pointed out that it had been chosen by the Academy of Rock Music as the best in the entire country, the decision based on a survey of ten thousand tastemakers in the music business. The article went on to document its success in the wake of WCOZ bowing out of the race: “For the past 3 years ’BCN has dominated the prized Boston radio audience between the ages of 18 and 34, while a clutch of other stations struggle in its wake. Only KISS (WXKS) consistently approaches WBCN’S numbers, and it does so with a different, primarily female audience.” In January ’86, the Boston Globe declared, “WBCN remains the station others try to beat,” and “the undisputed king of Boston’s rock radio.” But, although thriving after more than fifteen years of unique evolution through wildly changing times, the station had only just reached the beginning of a whole new role: a prized jewel in a golden corporate crown.