by Carter Alan
“So we hired Les Nessman,” Loprete recalled. “We made it sound like we were dropping turkeys, but they were really just hundreds of paper ‘turkeys’ that my interns and I stapled gift certificates to.” The helicopter hovered loudly over thousands of listeners at North Shore Mall, while Sanders, as Les Nessman, began his on-air report and 1,500 paper turkeys were shoved out of the chopper. The resourceful promotion made holiday headlines all around Boston and prompted David Bieber to schedule a repeat of the event in 1990 at the Channel nightclub in Boston. Once again, Sanders reprised his WKRP role while the small paper packages fluttered slowly down to the parking lot below, although this time, many of the “turkeys” were caught up in the breeze and landed in the oily waters next to the club. Loprete remembered, “I couldn’t believe it, but the Animal Rescue League called to complain that we were dropping live turkeys. Amazing!”
Meanwhile, back at 1265 Boylston Street, the hijinks continued. When Hurricane Gloria roared up the Eastern Seaboard in September 1985, Mark Parenteau could only think about how to use the storm to his advantage. Since the eye of the storm would pass directly over Boston during his shift, he proposed a live broadcast using the wireless microphone out in front of the station. While the winds howled, tossing newspapers about and rolling wine bottles loudly down the street, Parenteau and a small retinue of DJS and station staffers interviewed a cop in his police van, a brave cabbie looking for desperate riders, and the crew at the convenience store across the street (determining which items had been panic bought by residents of the Fenway). At several points, a sudden and bashing eighty-miles-per-hour wind gust would pitch the whole group off its feet. That’s when everyone grabbed onto the weighty Tank, who was, fortunately, a part of the crew. Parenteau might have been the host, “but I was the anchor!” Tank laughed. Not to be outdone, Charles Laquidara, whose colorful life could have gone on privately, instead allowed it to become daily fuel for many of the best bits on “The Big Mattress.” The show received no small amount of mileage from the DJ’S regular battles with technology. Larry Bruce, who served as the station’s custodian and an engineer during the eighties, commented, “Charles embraced technology like no one else I ever knew. He had a full-blown sound system integrated into his house, a backup generator, geothermal wells, the first cell phones, whatever; Charles had it. He gave a shout out on the air to someone one day and ended up with a BMW with a nitrous kit in it. They told him, ‘It’s not like the old days; you don’t pump the gas pedal to start it. Every time you put your foot to the floor, you’ll trip a microswitch that gives the car a burst of nitrous.’ So, after his show, he went down to start the car, pumped it twice and boom! He sent the intake through the hood!” Bruce howled at the memory. “He thought somebody put a bomb in his car!”
“Oh, the humanity!” Les Nessman and Tank look to see if turkeys really do fly. Photo by Roger Gordy.
David Bieber and his department rolled out the two-day Rock ’n’ Roll Expos, held at the Bayside Expo Center for three consecutive years beginning in 1984. “The expos were meant to be a showcase for all things ’BCN, including advertisers in widely divergent booths, sponsors, events, and activities,” mentioned Bieber. “The magnet was ’BCN and the music.” The DJS sat at long tables for autograph and photo sessions with fans; groups including Cheap Trick, Meatloaf, Joe Perry, the Alarm, and Greg Kihn performed, and even marathon cutting sessions by local hairdresser Jan Bell went on for hours. Twenty-five thousand crowded into the building the first year, thirty thousand the next. “They had to shut down the exit from the expressway because there [were] so many people trying to get to the Expo Center,” Loprete recalled.
“That was the point, I think, where ’BCN significantly transitioned from being this music and pop-culture station to [being] lifestyle oriented,” Bieber pointed out. “It was reflective of the audience. People were getting married, having children, buying houses, changing their direction. Not to say they weren’t going out to concerts and clubs, but it was one of those periods of . . . acquisition, where people were also interested in what Jordans Furniture had to show at the Expo.” As such, the scope of station events began to be widened to include all aspects of the listeners’ lives: the annual blood drive with the Red Cross; the WBCN 10K Road Race; fireworks over Boston Harbor with an accompanying soundtrack broadcast live over the air; “Row Row to Revere,” a canoe voyage across Boston Harbor from Nahant to raise money to fight spina bifida; the WBCN ski team; business card drawings for the professional community; and food drives for the homeless.
Bieber found that just about any crackpot scheme his “think tank” came up with was rubber-stamped by the music business: “In the eighties, the record companies were just awash with cash, especially when CDS came along. If you could think of it, you could secure it from the labels, like ‘Have Lunch with The Who in London.’ The effort was made to not repeat ourselves and try to give people something they could not buy, an experience they could brag about.” Whether it was escorting listeners to the LA Forum to see Genesis or living out a Geffen Records–inspired fantasy to meet the Black Crowes backstage in Denver and then ski all day at Keystone Resort, the wallets were open. “WBCN and Atco Records sent me to Australia with [contest] winners to see this band Goanna,” Albert O recalled. “We went all the way to Sydney and stayed there for eight days; it was truly amazing.”
Epic Records brought Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble to Boston in February 1987 and handed over all 1,250 tickets for the Austin rocker’s show at the Metro to WBCN. Since the guitarist had played the much-larger Orpheum Theater the previous year, this was a special, more intimate visit, and all the tickets were given away on the air. Vaughan and his band also dined with the ’BCN jocks at Davio’s Restaurant on Newbury Street, where owner Steve DiFillippo had fostered a reputation for fine Italian food and impeccable service. Ken Shelton sat at the table with Vaughan that night: “He had his manager call over to Davio’s [and ask], ‘I wonder if your chef could whip up some rabbit?’” There was no doubt that the first-rate eating establishment possessed a splendid and well-varied menu, but like most New England restaurants, hare wasn’t on it. To Shelton’s amazement, though, the guitarist’s crew had prepared for such an eventuality: “Vaughan’s roadie had a case of fully skinned, fully cleaned rabbits with him! And the restaurant didn’t even blink; they prepared it! Now that’s a true Italian chef, not just your usual spaghetti and lasagna guy.”
Stevie Ray and Double Trouble digesting with Oedipus and Carter Alan at Davio’s. WBCN displays major mojo by giving away all the tickets for the band’s 1987 show at the Metro. Photo by Ron Pownall/RockRollPhoto.com.
The air staff up close and personal with Aerosmith at the free WBCN show in the Worcester Centrum, 1986. Happy eighteenth birthday to the Rock of Boston! Photo by Ron Pownall/RockRollPhoto.com.
Perhaps the foremost benchmark of this, WBCN’S second age of Camelot, occurred in 1986 when the station celebrated its eighteenth birthday by giving away all thirteen thousand tickets to a free concert with Aerosmith at the Worcester Centrum. The band had gone through some hard times by the end of the seventies as the members split into factions, largely as a result of prolonged (and well-documented) drug abuse, but had reassembled with a new label, a fresh resolve, and an album entitled Done with Mirrors. Now on the comeback trail, Aerosmith had never lost its longtime connection to WBCN, which could be traced all the way back to Maxanne Sartori’s enthusiastic support; plus, Joe Perry and the band’s manager Tim Collins shared a strong personal friendship with Mark Parenteau. “We always had the first link to Aerosmith,” the DJ mentioned. “I would always get the spontaneous interviews with Steven, my name was always in the credits, and ’BCN would get first knowledge of any concerts they were going to do. I know a couple of other stations wanted to be a part of all that, but for sure, we were the favorite.” When the idea materialized for the band to perform a special show to commemorate ’BCN’S long history and legendary status, the group eagerly
agreed.
In the official WBCN press release, Joe Perry stated, “The free WBCN show is another gift to the people from Aerosmith, the people’s band.” Steven Tyler added, “The buzz on this concert is like lending the family parrot to the town crier. The excitement we feel about this show is phenomenal. You can’t buy it or bottle it. It’s a pleasure to be making history with WBCN.” The concert itself was a dizzying peak of excitement for all the ’BCN jocks who assembled onstage before Aerosmith “let their music do the talking.” Once they had received the keys to the city of Worcester in a small official ceremony, each member of the lineup was introduced to the audience and recognized individually by Charles Laquidara; then, a memorable photo shoot caught them all in front of the cheering crowd. Later, during Aerosmith’s set, the band invited everyone back onstage for a rousing version of “Happy Birthday,” while candles spelling out W-B-C-N burned brightly on a gigantic cake. It was a moving moment for everyone gathered on that stage, and even the veterans—Laquidara, Shelton, Parenteau, and Berardini—knew that this moment was as good as it could ever get.
“You never knew [who] you were going to run into in the hallways: Jerry Seinfeld, Aerosmith, chefs, a new group, or the old band. When David Lee Roth came to the station, there were people hiding under cars in the garage trying to get upstairs for an autograph! “METAL MIKE” COLUCCI
FROM
BOYLSTON
STREET TO
WALL STREET
By the mideighties, the Fenway Park–facing, rear garage-door entrance to WBCN had seen thousands of arrivals and departures, carefully timed to avoid the unsportsmanlike panic of Red Sox Nation traffic. Access from the dank garage and up the dangerously pitched stairs to the offices and studios above took one past the graffiti wall, where employees and stars were encouraged to spray paint their names and messages to posterity. “That graffiti said a lot about what ’BCN was,” weekender Lisa Traxler mentioned. “Everybody added to that.” The freedom of expression, whether directed toward a small quadrant of cement-block wall with aerosol paint can in hand or aimed heavenward through a microphone and turntable (or the newfangled compact disc player that had just shown up), were one in the same. “I liked Oedipus’s analogy,” Tami Heide remembered: “All the jocks at ’BCN have the same brushes, the same paint, and they’re given the same canvas. But they all have their own brushstrokes; it’s just how they put it together.” Protected in their studio, the DJS labored over their portraits, even as forces arrived that threatened to limit whatever freedom had been carefully earned during two decades of survival. Challenges loomed from inside the rapidly expanding Infinity empire, as well as outside from a cloud of seasoned competitors and new players in the market.
Infinity Broadcasting had binged on acquiring stations, leaving the company cash poor by 1986. Subsequently, Michael Wiener, Gerald Carrus, and Mel Karmazin took the company public, offering up its common stock to shareholders and raising millions in capital. They used the money primarily to reduce Infinity’s long-term debt, which had been accrued when borrowing to buy stations, and to provide funds for accumulating additional properties. Within a year of the public offering, Karmazin went on to purchase six more stations: KROQ-FM in Los Angeles, WJFK-FM in Washington, D.C., and two AM/FM combos in Tampa and Dallas. Even with the sale of Infinity’s Jacksonville property and a pair of San Diego stations in December 1986, it was a dizzying expansion. By the time of the company’s annual report to its shareholders in spring ’87, the number crunchers could claim that “Infinity is the nation’s largest, publicly traded, radio-only owner and operator of stations.” The report further revealed that Infinity had taken in “$1.4 billion in radio advertising revenues (approximately 20% of the total $7 billion spent for radio advertising in the United States).” Although just one part of a massive and highly valuable corporate entity now stretched coast to coast, WBCN was certainly not a diminished commodity; in June 1988, the Boston Phoenix disclosed, “The station that Infinity picked up for $3.5 million in ’79 is valued today at an estimated $75 million to $80 million.”
“I really didn’t understand the finance part of it and what it meant to be [a publicly traded company],” Tony Berardini recalled. “What it meant on a day-to-day basis at WBCN was that there was a lot more pressure for us to make our numbers; things became more intense. Being a public company that now reported its earnings quarterly, Mel had to stand up in front of the stockholders and answer questions, and God help you if Mel had to defend your sorry ass.”
Bob Mendelsohn remembered, “There were these quick outbursts [from Mel], not necessarily from anger: ‘Here’s what I need and I’m not getting it! How are we going to keep our stock price up? How are going to keep to our acquisition plan without generating revenue?’ It was always a high-wire act.”
Berardini added, “We were in a meeting one time with a general sales manager who wasn’t making his budget, and he was saying, ‘Well the ratings are this and the business cycle is bad . . .’ Mel says, ‘Hey, listen! Don’t sell spots, then. Go stand on the front steps with some pencils. Sell the pencils and book that as revenue. I don’t care how you make it!’”
“Mel Karmazin was never part of the ’BCN culture, never part of the counterculture; he was a money man,” Katy Abel commented. “I mean, nobody said Mel was a teddy bear, but he was a genius at making money, and if that’s what mattered to you, then he was your guy.”
“Once they gave Mel Karmazin the job of making the most money in the shortest amount of time with the fewest amount of people, the bottom line was the bottom line,” Charles Laquidara summarized.
The business world learned to respect Karmazin and his upstart Infinity Broadcasting Corporation, and even though the company still carried an enormous amount of debt with its recent station acquisitions, the amount of revenue its properties generated grew. Tony Berardini revealed that WBCN, the station whose equity had initially financed the growth of the empire, posted 14 percent of Boston’s entire radio market revenues in 1986. It was a phenomenal figure, considering that more than two dozen radio signals crowded the city’s airwaves. With numbers like these, the future of Infinity seemed only positive at the New York Stock Exchange where its shares were traded daily. That rosy outlook held firm until “Black Monday” on 19 October 1987, when the market abruptly crashed, losing over 20 percent of its value and heralding a major U.S. recession. Even so, it was business as usual at Infinity’s corporate headquarters, which meant more pressure on the local level. “Mel wouldn’t accept any of those [excuses] . . . like business cycles, the ‘Crash of ’87,’” Berardini stated. Karmazin’s enormous force of will, though, couldn’t prevent the sluggish economy from pulling down profit margins at most stations and forcing a net loss at others. As Infinity’s stock sagged, the chief remained adamant that the market was undervaluing his company, so with others in the corporate management team, Karmazin borrowed the capital needed to buy back Infinity, taking it private again in 1988. Berardini commented, “His attitude was, ‘Fine . . . the market doesn’t value us? We value us!’ And he went out and bought all the stock back.” Despite the increased debt load, Karmazin’s strategy paid off as he waited out the recession, and his critics, and then took the company public again in 1992 for a huge cash windfall that he used, again, to pay down Infinity’s debt and provide funds for expansion.
During the late eighties, WBCN continued to thrive, though the tough economic situation made the demands from corporate all that much more difficult to address. “[Tony] was the focal point for all that pressure.” Bob Mendelsohn observed. “His whole job had become one of somehow squeezing all the parts together so that nothing would get hurt too badly and he could still give Mel what he wanted.” Even so, Berardini’s responsibilities increased dramatically in February 1987. After being promoted to a company vice presidency and retaining his general manager (GM) duties at WBCN, he was also given the responsibility of heading up KROQ in Los Angeles. Bob Mendelsohn smiled wryly at the memory: �
�Infinity was the land of the two full-time jobs. Tony did it. I did it . . . for a year and a half: general sales manager and national sales manager.” The official WBCN press release stated that “Berardini will now direct the activities of both stations, dividing his time between Infinity’s Boston and Los Angeles affiliates.” This meant that the music geek from the Bay Area who had arrived at ’BCN in 1978 behind the wheel of a VW hippie bus was now going back out to the West Coast, wielding Infinity’s hammer and sickle while still responsible for a station three time zones behind him. The bicoastal GM/VP started logging astronomical frequent-flier miles, jetting to LA for two weeks and then returning to Boston for the rest of the month. “Mel didn’t tell me to do it that way; it was the pattern I established. I had a company car here and one out there [two ‘heavy-metal’ black Pathfinders]; I’d fly in on Monday, get there at noon—LA time, go right to the office and then work until six. Then the next day I’d be in the office at KROQ between 6:00 and 6:30 each morning; I’d deal with ’BCN issues and talk to them first, then KROQ’S people would come in later.”
Despite Berardini’s physical absence half of the time and the world’s economic woes, as WBCN reached its milestone twentieth birthday, morale couldn’t have been higher. Adweek magazine ran a story that month entitled “WBCN Remains Solid as a Rock after 20 Years: Radio Advertisers Find the Boston Station a Sure Bet in a Fickle Market.” The article cited ’BCN’S remarkable ratings consistency: “First among men 18–34 and 18–49 for 22 Arbitron surveys running [four per year]. In the adult categories [men plus women] for those age groups, it has ranked first for 20 surveys.” Governor Michael Dukakis and Mayor Ray Flynn both declared Tuesday, 15 March 1988, “WBCN Day” in the state of Massachusetts and the city of Boston, officially marking a farewell to the teens for “The Rock of Boston” and the opening of its third decade as an FM powerhouse. Peter Wolf returned to the airwaves for his annual “Houseparty” show of R & B hits and rock and roll memories, while Maxanne Sartori, Eddie Gorodetsky, and Danny Schechter also delivered guest spots throughout the day. The station’s twenty-year milestone was underscored by a motor head’s wet dream of a contest, the station giving away a 1988 Pontiac Trans Am as well as a sweet 1968 Pontiac GTO classic. In San Francisco, the annual Gavin Awards and Seminar for Media Professionals feted WBCN as national “Album Radio Station of the Year” for the third consecutive time.