Radio Free Boston

by Carter Alan

  While Tony Berardini and Oedipus focused on running the station and maintaining its fantastic ratings story, Michael Wiener and Gerald Carrus concentrated on building an empire. The pair had begun Infinity Broadcasting in 1972 and then purchased KOME-FM in San Jose and WIVY in Jacksonville before laying out the capital to buy WBCN. Now, they could leverage the tremendous value of their Boston property to finance an expansion of Infinity in earnest. Tony Berardini remembered the moment: “In ’81, Mike and Gerry came to me and said, ‘We’re buying three more stations and we can’t run all six [ourselves], so we’re hiring a president. You’ll like him. He’s really good and really smart.’ And that’s when they hired Mel Karmazin.” The reins of power were transferred very quickly to the new chief, and Berardini began to report almost daily to him: “It was [now] Mel’s company. I could go talk to Mike and Gerry all I wanted, but at the end of the day, what Mel said, went.” A dynamic and intensely energetic thirty-eight-year-old radio sales exec born in Manhattan, Kar-mazin had worked his way up from the bottom, selling radio ads when he was only seventeen. Soon the rising star was managing radio stations for Metromedia, the broadcasting giant based out of New York City, when he came to the attention of Wiener and Carrus, both mightily impressed with his business acumen and stellar track record. Years later, in 2005, when Karmazin had taken over the reins of Sirius Satellite Radio, Devin Leonard at Fortune magazine wrote of the exec’s earliest days: “The joke about him was that he was so pushy that advertisers used to buy airtime from Mel just to get him out of their office.”

  Karmazin became intimately involved in the actions of his small team of Infinity station managers, keeping a tight rein on their bottom line and clearly defining his high expectations. Berardini, at the time only a general manager for a matter of months, vividly remembered the first time Karmazin flew to Boston to meet him. His new boss listened patiently to the endless summary of business data and ratings information presented to him and then issued a simple directive: “Just hit your numbers!” before ending the meeting. Bob Mendelsohn, the general sales manager whom Karmazin appointed to work at WBCN in January 1982, added, “The thing I always remember Mel saying was, ‘This is easy; don’t make it hard; don’t think too much.’” Given absolute authority over Infinity, Karmazin ran the company with a hands-on style, demanding complete honesty, frankness, and performance. “Pain is a great motivator, and one of those phone calls with Mel could be really, really painful if you didn’t have the answers,” Berardini laughed dryly. “It would be 8:30, 8:15 in the morning, your phone ringing—the inside line, and it was Mel’s assistant, Terry, with the four worst words you hated to hear: ‘Tony? Terry. Mel’s calling.’ Your asshole just puckered.” Karmazin watched his stations like a hawk, zeroing in on the regular pacing reports to see if each was on target for its projected earnings, but rarely involved himself with the station’s programming. “Mel’s goals were always based on revenue and profit,” Mendelsohn pointed out. “The endgame for him was not about programming; it was about corporate performance.” Berardini said, “It got to the point where I knew exactly when the phone was going to ring. Eventually I learned, rather than wait for him to call, which would piss him off, I’d pick up the phone and ask him for help, ‘cause if you didn’t, he’d assume you had it all together.”

  “There was lots of pressure on programmers and no slip in the ratings tolerated,” Mark Parenteau commented. “Tony and Oedi had to kiss Karmazin’s ass. They were under a lot of pressure unbeknownst to the jocks, for a long period of time.”

  With Karmazin’s arrival, Infinity began a rocket ride of acquisition that would astonish the radio industry and Wall Street for two decades and, in the process (for better or worse), pull WBCN out of its singularly unique and isolated space, into a buzzing, interlinked, broadcasting community. “Mike and Gerry tapped into us when they escalated the stakes and started to buy other properties,” David Bieber remembered. In November of Karmazin’s first year, Infinity bought out three stations from SJR Communications: former disco powerhouse WKTU-FM and WJIT-AM, both in New York City, and WYSP-FM in Philadelphia. The move created instant headlines since the $16 million bill for ‘KTU, “marked the highest price tag ever paid for a single radio station at that time,” Karmazin told Billboard.

  “They were acquiring beachfront properties and were willing to spend,” Bieber observed. “Then they eclipsed it. Every time they made an acquisition, it exceeded and set a new record [in dollars spent] from the previous time they had made a purchase.” A year and a half later, in June 1983, holding to a policy of only buying in America’s major radio markets, Infinity absorbed KXYZ-AM in Houston and, by July 1984, had officially acquired the underperforming country-music outlet WJEZ-FM and its AM partner WJJD in Chicago.

  Not unlike gunning for Park Place and Boardwalk in a high-stakes game of Monopoly, Karmazin targeted and paid premium prices for A-list radio properties, ones that could be improved (adding little green houses and ultimately a red hotel) and then command the highest returns in airtime sales. Rather than try to breathe life into what was considered a dying dragon, Infinity’s programmers “blew up” New York’s WKTU’S call letters and format in July 1985 and transformed the station into WXRK, known on the air as “92.3 K-Rock.” In the same way, market studies indicated that Chicago’s WJEZ had hit a dead end playing country music, so the company remade the station into oldies-formatted WJMK. In each case, city by city, as Infinity’s empire grew through the eighties, Mel Karmazin’s attention focused, not only on acquiring stations, but then also on allowing his team to cultivate them as efficiently as possible. It was a dangerous word: “efficient”; it could change lives overnight, improving or ruining circumstances for hundreds of people who suddenly found themselves invested in, or ex-employees of, an emergent radio kingdom.

  Meanwhile, back in the jungle at WBCN, Oedipus was adapting to the arrival of the new Infinity president: “’BCN was responsible for half the cash flow of the company; our success kept Infinity afloat.” As long as that success continued, the program director could count on relative noninterference from his corporate mother ship. “He would let us run wild,” Oedipus chuckled. “Mel would usually see the logic in it but never tell you it was a good idea. He would just say, ‘Okay, I gave you all the rope you wanted; you can hang yourself.’” Michael Wiener told Boston magazine in 1985, “They’ve made WBCN the number-one rated station and the number-one billing station in Boston. Owning ’BCN is like riding a horse: you’d rather have a horse that you have to hold back than an old nag. You can’t get anywhere with a dull radio station.” So, with nonspecific permission granted, the hairbrained ideas and cockeyed conceptions dreamt up by an inventive staff were coddled and allowed to proceed. No manager would come running, panic stricken, into the studio if Ken Shelton happened to play “Working Class Hero” by John Lennon (with its resplendent and naked f-bombs) or if an occasional “shit” emerged from someone’s mouth during an on-air interview. The complete irreverence of a Duane Ingalls Glasscock radio show or any typical Mark Parenteau shift, peppered generously with its crusty humor and blue comments (at least, one of his trademark “Lick me!” exclamations), were left alone and not censored into a sort of radio “white bread” deemed appropriate for mass consumption.

  WBCN’S front line of talent—Laquidara, Shelton, and Parenteau—occu-pied the broadcast day, or it might be more appropriate to say that they inhabited the day, because that formidable lineup would remain intact and dominate the working hours from six in the morning to six at night, for thirteen years, until Shelton left in 1993. And even after that, the remaining two veterans would stay in their drive-time slots for several more years. “The nucleus of strength at the station was that you had three very distinct and powerful individuals that had significant connection to the community, and ratings that were in the double digits for years,” David Bieber commented. “This was kind of unheard of in radio, because in terms of contemporary media people, for the most part, i
t’s all about the bucks. ’BCN could have been seen as a way station on route to Los Angeles or New York. But back then, there was a sense of involvement, a tremendous amount of goodwill between the people, and an ingratiating of talents into this one entity, which was WBCN. And I think at the heart of it, if not the face and the voice, was those three jocks.” Certainly, the triumvirate was well compensated for its efforts, and those amounts would only increase over time, but Laquidara, Shelton, and Parenteau clearly wanted to stay in their shifts. As the eighties unfolded, the three jocks remained in place for so long that their shift arrangement, on-air personas, and particulars of how each related to the other became familiar and comfortable to even the most casual ’BCN listeners.

  Ken Shelton told The Tab in 1988 that he considered himself “as the calm between the two knucklehead storms—Charles and Mark.” That was true; the less-cluttered, more music-oriented shift became a relatively peaceful interlude amidst the frequent morning and afternoon mayhem. Shelton’s image became that of a music sage; the majority of his hours were filled by the sounds of records, not talking. Even so, the midday host recalled that on some occasions the show could get a bit wild: “Toots and the Maytals played in the studio once. He had an entourage of people there just to keep rolling giant spliffs! They were [ripping out] pages of the Boston Globe to roll joints and smoke them in the studio. You couldn’t see from the studio to the listener line; that’s how thick the smoke was!” The interview? “I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, and he didn’t know what I was saying, but we were all laughing!” Another high point in all those years, according to Shelton, was Bill Murray’s June 1981 visit to the “Mighty Lunch Hour,” ostensibly to promote his new movie Stripes but turning into a full sixty-minute takeover of the airwaves with the comedian reading commercials, answering phone calls, and picking out the tunes. Murray’s hilarious finale, a tongue-in-cheek vision of his radio host went like this:

  I do I lot of kidding about the way my man Shelton looks, but he’s one of the handsomest men in all of the Boston area. I’ve followed the Red Sox for many years and . . . do you remember when Yastrzemski’s kid was a baby? Do you remember what that baby looked like? This is what Ken looks like; he’s that beautiful. And he can hit with power, he can throw, he can run, and he can field. Anyone who has money to give him, to promote the American look, the American way of life overseas, should give it to him, and a ticket to anywhere in the world to get him out of this town because he’s wasted in this studio, here in this dark room. He just took off his veil and he’s beautiful!

  A bemused Shelton forced out a “thank you” past all the laughter from his studio guests.

  “No, thank you!” Murray replied. “How do you keep your skin so fresh?”

  Shelton demonstrated his wit and sense of humor often, but his main image was as a music authority. Conversely, Mark Parenteau, also a serious music buff, became much more identified with the growing Boston comedy scene. “Mark was very quick and had an affinity for comedy,” Billy West observed. “He didn’t want to let that go just because he was playing music [on the air].” It began with the comic slant he gave most of his interviews, when he’d get a laugh from even the most bad-tempered guests, and continued with a short comedy segment he featured every weekday at 5:05 p.m. “Part of the freedom at WBCN, since the beginning, was playing Monty Python, Fireside Theater, Credibility Gap, and all these culturally hippie-dippy comedy bits; they were always part of the library,” Parenteau mentioned. “But for my own sense of freedom, or excitement, I latched onto and expanded the comedy format, establishing that, at five after five, we’d play something that was funny. My theory was, people just got out of work, got in their cars, and this was a good way to get their attention. Let’s let them know that as they got out of the John Hancock Tower or someplace, and they’ve been looking at black-and-white figures all day, that the world is still crazy.” The daily feature soon gained traction and became a very popular segment, certainly not as famous as “Mishegas,” but instantly recognizable with its introduction snagged from a George Carlin album: “Bing! Bong! Five minutes past the big hour of five o’clock!” The DJ frequently shattered his permitted time window for the segment, expanding from five minutes to as much as triple that, especially when comedians dropped in for a personal visit. This led to occasional head-butting sessions with Oedipus, as Parenteau related: “[He] didn’t love it because he’s a real music guy, but he tolerated it because it got ratings.”

  Mark Parenteau, “The Honorary Dean of Boston Comedy,” with Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Sandler, and unidentified Justin Bieber lookalike. Photo by Roger Gordy.

  Despite the debates over semantics, Oedipus allowed the 5:05 p.m. feature to continue, and the sight of comedians sitting on the front-office couch (laden with its frightening amounts and varieties of DNA), waiting for their cue to perform in the studio, became common. “The Boston comics—Lenny Clarke, Steve Sweeney, Kevin Meaney—a lot of those key guys quickly saw the value of this,” Parenteau pointed out. “Suddenly the audience knew them; it was like a band with a hit record.” Future stand-up stars like Steven Wright, Dennis Leary, Jay Leno, Jimmy Tingle, Paula Poundstone, Anthony Clarke, and Bobcat Goldthwait all paraded through ’BCN’S studio on their way to national fame. The 5:05 p.m. feature became an important catalyst promoting the Boston comedy scene, which now entered a decade of explosive growth, alongside the already-flourishing local music market. “There’d be these little periods where the [music] pickings were slim and comedy was the rock and roll,” Billy West mentioned. “It took off! Soon comedy clubs were the place to go.” DJ Hazzard, one of the performers who rode the eighties comedy wave, told the Boston Globe in 1997, “In the days when things were really good, comedians were like Rock ’n’ Roll stars.” Clearly, Mark Parenteau had uncovered a golden nugget, just as Oedipus had exposed the demimonde of a new music scene just a few years earlier. The Boston area’s existing comedy clubs began to fill up, and new ones, like Stitches and an improved and expanded Comedy Connection, opened their doors. In 1985, in a direct parallel to the success of WBCN’S Rock ’n’ Roll Rumble, the station sponsored the first Comedy Riot at Stitches over a five-night span, raising a champion from the two dozen “open mike” hopefuls. Struggling artist Janeane Garofalo, on her way to a long-lived career as a comedian and actress, was one such Comedy Riot winner, as well as Anthony Clark, a young comic going to Emerson College, who would become a star in his own sitcom, Boston Common, and other network television projects.

  Mark Parenteau, “the honorary dean of Boston comedy,” as he was dubbed in WBCN’S twentieth-anniversary supplement in the Boston Phoenix, developed long-standing friendships with many comics but probably none stronger, or more bizarre, than those with Lenny Clarke and Sam Kinison, both loud and foul-mouthed, type-A performers, who were switched to “On” at birth and never operated below the speed limit. “They could slice you to ribbons,” Billy West observed. “Verbally, they could take out your gall bladder and show it to you before you die.” Lenny Clarke had run into Kinison in Los Angeles and introduced him to Parenteau, who was immediately taken with the brazen, irreverent style of the former Illinois preacher. “There was no one like him, not only the screaming and all the energy, but, like Lenny Bruce, he said things that nobody said,” the DJ remembered. “When there was the world famine going on, and the ‘We Are the World’ thing, Sam did this routine about Ethiopia: ‘Look around you people; what’s on the ground? Sand. A hundred years from now it’s still gonna be sand. Move to where the fuckin’ food is!’ It was so politically incorrect, it was hilarious.” Kinison found a home on WBCN and visited the station so often that it was hard to remember that he actually came from the West Coast. “Sam told me he loved the fact that ’BCN could and would let him go on and ‘say the shit I’m supposed to say!’ Every time he came around, as he got bigger and bigger, Sam would do my show and always get mentioned in the Herald for some outrageous thing he did or said.” The comic became a fa
vorite on MTV for his extreme and very visual persona, also regularly visiting Howard Stern’s syndicated show in New York, releasing comedy albums and turning the 1966 Troggs single, “Wild Thing,” into a revamped heavy-metal hit.

  Smiling, Parenteau remembered,

  Lenny and Sam were in Providence one night, and they called up: “We’re coming over; you got any blow?” So they showed up at my place at 1:30, maybe 2:00 in the morning. Unbeknownst to me, they had this big Lincoln Town Car and couldn’t find anywhere to park, so they decided to pull the car up on the sidewalk, totally in the way of a fire hydrant. Sam had this card that he always traveled with, from when he was a pastor, which you put in the front window by the rearview mirror. Priests use these when making emergency calls, when they’re performing the Last Rites; they say “Clergy on Call,” and police usually give them the benefit of the doubt. So, they left the Town Car running with the flashers on, the “Clergy on Call” sign in the window, and they came up to “just do a line or two.” Five, six hours later, the sun was coming up; we had talked all night, called Robin Williams and woke him up, and it was, like, 8:30 in the morning. Lenny went, “I got to get out of here, and we’ve got to get that rental car back.”