by Carter Alan
After twenty-seven years of harsh imprisonment at the hands of the pro-apartheid South African government, Mandela had been released from prison as internal hostilities and international pressure mounted on the white ruling party to hand over power. Eventually, a multiracial government would be installed with Mandela as its head, but in the immediate afterglow of his newfound freedom, the most famous and revered symbol of racial equality since Martin Luther King Jr. decided to embark on a goodwill tour of America. The important and historic meetings with national leaders and fellow activists would mostly occur in New York City and Washington, D.C., but Mandela planned a one-day, whirlwind visit to Boston, which generated extraordinary excitement from ordinary citizens and local politicians alike. Whitman enthused, “Katy [Abel] was gone by then, but she had done “Commercial Free for a Free South Africa” in 1985, and to think that Mandela himself would come to Boston five years later!”
As the time wound down swiftly to the historic visit, and on the day before the African leader’s 23 June arrival, WBCN was recognized for its role in popularizing the anti-apartheid movement. The Boston City Council surprised Charles Laquidara with an award for “his Commitment to Ending the Apartheid Regime in South Africa,” as a result of the on-air campaign to boycott Shell Oil. This was followed by a second citation from the Massachusetts House of Representatives in acknowledgment of his “Continuous Public Education and Support for a Free South Africa.” A similar award went to Maurice Lewis, as representative of the public affairs department, in recognition of WBCN’S efforts toward these initiatives. While the accolades were being handed out and photos snapped, Sherman Whitman worked feverishly down the hall, making final preparations with the station engineers for WBCN’S in-depth coverage of Mandela and his wife Winnie’s visit.
Maurice Lewis had helped to coordinate a simultaneous playing of the South African national anthem on various Boston radio and television stations at 12:01 on the day Mandela arrived. “It was the first time we got competing stations to go along with each other to do anything!” Lewis laughed. “Also, working with [Urban radio station] WILD, we were involved in organizing a parade launched from Roxbury, which wound its way through Back Bay and over to the Hatch Shell.” After participating in the motorcade, Lewis arrived at the massive tribute concert on the Esplanade where over three hundred thousand adoring citizens waited, part of a visit described by Ebony magazine as “Mandelamania.” “It was a Saturday afternoon when Nelson Mandela came and spoke at the Hatch Shell,” Whitman recalled. “We were there from the start of the day to the finish. We carried it all live: Mandela’s entire speech, the music the artists were playing, and the words of Governor Michael Dukakis and Senator Ted Kennedy. There was a sea of Mandela T-shirts out there . . . like seeing a rock star.” Meanwhile, Lewis, astonished at the size of the crowd that lined both sides of the Charles down to Massachusetts Avenue, appeared several times on the big stage. “I was called back multiple times because the Mandela entourage was late. I received those dreaded instructions: ‘Fill! Fill!’” he laughed. “But because of that I got the chance to ‘fll’ onstage with Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte; those [moments] were great.”
This day, auspicious as it was, would end up being the last big hurrah for WBCN news, signaling the twilight years for the department as 1991 arrived. First, Lewis decided to move on, with no regrets: “It felt great to work on a show that brought opinions, cultures, theater, drama, politics, and diverse people from Boston together; that’s what the ‘Boston Sunday Review’ had always been designed to do.” During the same period, as Whitman described, his role at the station changed: “[Oedipus and Tony] said, ‘We’re going to have you stop doing the news and let Patrick Murray handle things.” Murray, who had started off two years earlier as a news department trainee and Whitman’s intern, was surprised by the move. He mentioned, “I didn’t know about it beforehand; Oedi just called me into his office and told me, ‘You’re the news director.’” Murray had worked his way up to be a well-known morning sidekick on Laquidara’s show, due to his offbeat and free-spirited delivery of news, traffic, ski, and surf reports. “It was a time when you could get your news in other places, so on the Mattress we did it differently. I’d make sure the report was on the pulse of what was going on and then have some fun with it, like a Saturday Night Live sketch.” Though the official title of news director had been conferred upon him, Murray didn’t necessarily see much increase in the scope of his responsibilities, nor a directive from Oedipus to change his style. He continued to gather information for Laquidara and deliver it with his wise-cracking, sardonic slant. “Once, as I was getting ready, I noticed they had the agricultural report up on the AP newswire. So, I did hog slaughters, sheep slaughters, the rye crop, and the wheat crop numbers instead of a business report. We played a little Raising Arizona bit behind it with some sound effects. No biz report, just the cattle kill for the week!”
As Murray churned out his comedic, and more digestible, version of “the news,” Oedipus unveiled his plans for the displaced Whitman, who explained, “With Maurice gone, they needed someone to do the BSR, so I handled that for the rest of my tenure there [till June ’93].” Whitman did not turn bitter over these changes; he realized that the times were changing and that he personally couldn’t stem the tide: “Every music station had begun cutting back on its news commitment, especially on the FM dial. There was specialization: music stations would now be doing music, and news stations would now do just news; ’BCN was no exception to that.” In an ongoing series of deregulation moves in Washington, the FCC granted radio station owners far more latitude to run their businesses as they saw fit. The relaxed state of ownership rules and public affairs requirements set off a wave of layoffs as companies raced to reduce their bottom lines by slashing staffs, consolidating stations, and standardizing formats. By having Murray handle “Big Mattress” duties and also the news, WBCN management eliminated a full-time job and maintained spending on its Sunday newsmagazine show at a part-time level. “I turned out the light in the WBCN news department,” Whitman acknowledged. “And that was one of the saddest things to do, simply because, for me, ’BCN was home [and] all the people there . . . that was my family. All the things we did there together, at 1265 Boylston Street, we did to make radio great. Somewhere down the road, someone made the decision that we don’t want to be great anymore; all they cared about was making fabulous profits. I left because I felt my time had come to an end.” Not to take anything away from Murray, who was given the football, ran with it, and scored points, but from this point on, news “dissecting” on WBCN was a thing of the past.
On 28 February 1993, WBCN’S staff gathered at the Hard Rock Café in Back Bay to celebrate the station’s twenty-fifth birthday. Invitations had gone out to current workers as well as all the former employees who could be found. “It began with Carla Wallace, an original ’BCN person at Stuart Street,” David Bieber explained. “She called me in December ’92 and said that we should do a twenty-ffth-anniversary party.” It seemed like an obvious idea, but Wallace had the additional vision that the party should be open to anyone who had ever worked for ’BCN. The happy result was that four hundred employees jammed into the Hard Rock, their buzzing conversations easily drowning out the blaring music, that is, until the members of the J. Geils Band found their way to the stage and serenaded the crowd with an a cappella version of “Looking for a Love.” It was the band’s first public performance since it had broken up a decade earlier and a symbol of respect, not only for singer Peter Wolf’s former radio home, but also for the long lineage of legendary characters that had inhabited 104.1 FM. Stars from former times arrived in force: J.J. Jackson, Tommy Hadges (now president of Pollack Media Group), Billy West (the voice of the Ren and Stimpy show), WBCN’S founder and original owner Mitch Hastings, Danny Schechter, John Brodey (a general manager at Giant Records in LA), Norm Winer (a program director in Chicago), Maxanne Sartori, Ron Della Chiesa, and Eric Jackson. Aimee Mann, Jame
s Montgomery, and Barry Goudreau of Boston mingled about. Susan Bickelhaupt queried in her Boston Globe article about the anniversary, “25 years later, what has replaced rock station WBCN-FM? Nothing. It’s still ’BCN, 104.1. Sure the jocks are older and drive nicer cars, and you can even buy stock in parent company Infinity Broadcasting, which is traded on the NASDAQ market. But the station that signed on as album rock still plays album rock, and is perennially one of the top-ranking stations and a top biller.”
T. Mitchell Hastings addresses the crowd at the Hard Rock Café in 1993 for WBCN’S twenty-fifth anniversary. Photo by Dan Beach.
A rumor passed about the room that night, given weight since it allegedly came from a WBCN manager: something major was going to happen with one of the station’s primary weekday air shifts. Since lineup changes at the station occurred with the frequency of Halley’s Comet appearances, this warranted front-page news (or, at least, endless speculation). Was a member of the famed daily triumvirate of Laquidara, Shelton, and Parenteau finally bowing out? Oedipus and Tony Berardini weren’t talking, but their conspicuous silence seemed to support that something big was about to happen. Industry analysts caught a whiff of the rumor as well, but it came from a different source: New York, on the nationally syndicated Howard Stern show. In the years since the former Boston University student had attempted to find work at ’BCN, the announcer had made his mark outside of Boston, rapidly rising to become a hurricane force in radio with his undeniable wit, lapses of taste, and incessant sparring with the FCC over established indecency boundaries. The shock-jock had always desired to return to Boston, hinting that this might be a possibility in the near future, but the official confirmation of that did not arrive until 8 March 1993. That night, WBCN began airing Stern’s nationally syndicated morning show, on tape delay, following Mark Parenteau’s afternoon shift.
Tony Berardini told Virtually Alternative in 1998, “Howard Stern was doing extremely well at Infinity’s WXRK, and then at ’YSP, Philly. Oedipus and I kept looking at it, thinking, ‘Wow, the company is going to want to syndicate him in Boston, too, why wouldn’t they?’ It was one of those things we knew we were going to have to deal with, yet Charles Laquidara still had good numbers in the morning. Even Howard used to listen to him when he went to Boston University. With this in mind, we went to Mel with the idea of running his show by tape delay at night. We had an immediate opportunity there, and we decided to take advantage of it.”
“Howard wanted to be on the radio in Boston, and I was able to make that happen because I could put him on at night,” mentioned Oedipus. “Everywhere else [with the exception of KOME in San Jose], he did the mornings, but Mel allowed me to make the decision to tape the show and play it later.” Oedipus did not regret his decision: “Howard is a monumental talent; it just can’t be denied. I remember many a time driving home from work and then just sitting in my garage, not getting out of my car, because I didn’t want to miss a moment.” Listeners tended to react to Stern’s show simply and starkly: they either loved the DJ or hated him. Those who disliked his presence on WBCN found other nighttime options, but those attracted to his brand of radio comedy became riveted . . . for long periods of time. “Nighttime listening to rock stations was really falling off at that time, and we had nothing to lose,” Tony Berardini told Virtually Alternative. Very quickly, as nighttime ratings at WBCN increased dramatically, the gambit, it seemed, had played out to be a shrewd and successful decision.
“Metal Mike” Colucci was one of the part-time employees now called upon to man the studio each weeknight, acting as a board operator during the taped Howard Stern program. Although just a lowly, anonymous worker bee to the mighty Stern, Colucci would be elevated by that jock’s rabid following to the status of infamy. This was one of the secrets of that show’s success: the shock-jock’s ability to whip up drama, creating form and substance out of something that, when examined more closely, really warranted no such time or attention. Who cared? In Stern’s hands, though, it seemed that a lot of people actually did (at least for four or so hours a day). On the evening of 27 July 1993, Reggie Lewis, a twenty-seven-year Boston Celtics rising star, collapsed on the court and died from a heart defect while Howard Stern’s taped program ran on WBCN. Shocked, Mike Colucci phoned Oedipus to ask what to do. “He told me, ‘Fade out Howard, play “Funeral for a Friend” [by Elton John] and announce that Reggie Lewis is dead.’” However, as an inexperienced DJ, Colucci couldn’t handle the wave of emotion that swept over him as he spoke on the air: “I got all choked up; I went into this terrible tailspin before I got back into Stern’s show as fast as I could.” Unbeknownst to the young board op, one or more of Howard Stern’s ardent Boston fans taped the show and overnighted a recording to the shock-jock for his live broadcast the following morning. Stern played the tape on the air relentlessly, downplaying the drama of Lewis’s death to focus on Colucci’s painful on-air gaffe. “It turned out that he did forty-five minutes on me, saying things like, ‘If this guy is acting, he’s a genius.’ Red faced, he endured the episode over and over again, taking a lot of good-natured ribbing from a host of people who never even heard the original episode. “At the time, Howard had the biggest radio antennae going; nobody was going to break in on his broadcast. He could stick it wherever he wanted.”
Many employees and fans of the station disagreed with the strategy of adding Stern to the WBCN lineup, finding the move troubling, at the very least. Bob Mendelsohn, as general sales manager, would work intimately with the new syndicated show, selling airtime to local and national clients: “The first time I heard Howard Stern, I hated it. It just embarrassed me. It wasn’t his sense of humor; it was his complete elimination of standards. These were the boom years; everything was about stock price and profits now.”
“When Howard Stern got [to ’BCN], it was all about how much money he was making [for the company],” Danny Schechter observed. “These were the values of Mel Karmazin. They didn’t really care about Boston, [and] they didn’t really care about the audience; it was the market and getting market share. That’s what mattered to them: it was about the shareholders.”
“I know a lot of people mark Howard Stern as the beginning of the end, and maybe it was,” Tim Montgomery said. “Because, in a way, Ken Shelton and his Lunchtime Salutes [and] the crossovers between Charles, Ken, and Parenteau: that represented the old ’BCN. God, there was some brilliant radio! Then, with Howard Stern and the whole coarsening of the culture, the station took on that mean, macho, sexist [attitude] with eighteen-year-old-boy fart humor and vagina jokes. That’s not what ’BCN was! It was smart; then it became stupid. The dumbing down of the ’BCN audience became the whole new thing.”
“That Mel had this amazing asset in New York and then was able to multiply that asset by putting it on all these stations, as a corporate move, bordered on brilliant,” Bob Mendelsohn admitted. “But it was everything that ’BCN had never been before. WBCN had always been credible and sincere; this was smart-ass radio. As an employee of the station, that’s when my affection and my pride in working there started to go in a different direction.”
A second seismic event that shook WBCN in 1993 had been simmering since the year before, when Infinity Broadcasting, which owned and operated eighteen radio stations at this point, had entered into an agreement to purchase WZLX-FM in Boston. The $100 million deal with Cook Inlet Radio included the acquisition of two other radio properties in Chicago and Atlanta, and was made possible by another relaxed ownership edict from the FCC that increased the number of radio stations a company was permitted to own. Previously, a single operator could only possess a total of twelve AM stations and twelve FMS, but those limits were increased to a total of eighteen AMS and eighteen FMS. Additionally, the previous rule that a single operator could own a maximum of one AM station and one FM in a single market was increased to two each, as long as there were fifteen or more radio properties in the area and that listener share did not exceed 25 percent of the market’s total.
Infinity chomped at the bit to take advantage of these revised, business-friendly rules: although the FCC edict did not go into effect until 16 September 1992, the company proudly trumpeted its pending purchase in an 17 August press release. Obtaining final FCC approval would push Infinity’s official takeover of WZLX into ’93, but when all was said and done, WBCN’S biggest rival had suddenly been made a member of the same family. The two stations had been kicking each other under the table since the mideighties, but Mel Karmazin now demanded that the horseplay stop immediately. “The day that [Infinity] closed on buying WZLX, [Karmazin] got the sales managers from both stations together for a meeting,” Mendelsohn recalled. “His message was, ‘You guys have been out on the street trashing each other for years. As of today, that stops; you’re working together.’”