by Carter Alan
Mel Karmazin made his pitch to the Krafts after that, and as usual, according to Berardini, he kept things simple and direct:
“You should be on FM radio and here’s why. We can do things in stereo; it’s a much cleaner signal and we can mount as good a production as an AM station. If you’re worried about the signal coverage, we will go out, just like we did in Dallas, and get affiliates in every town in New England who would love to have the Patriots broadcast.” Then Mel said, “Let’s talk about the money.” Robert looked at him and said, “Why don’t you tell me what you want to do?” Mel came back with something like, “I don’t believe in going back and forth; I don’t want to get into negotiating against WBZ [which was looking to renew its contract], so you tell me what your number is and then we’ll tell you whether we can do it or not.” Robert still wanted it the other way, but Mel said, “No. If you give me the number, I’m going to turn to Tony and say to him, ‘Tony, you can’t lose money on this deal; can you make this revenue?’ And Tony is either going to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ If he says ‘No,’ then tell ‘BZ I offered twice as much as I did, and then you get it from them.”
I was sitting there going, “Oh shit. What’s this number going to be?” I was trying to calculate everything in my head because I didn’t want to say yes if I couldn’t do it; there would be hell to pay. They went back and forth, but finally, we concluded, “We’d really love to do it, but why don’t you guys think about it.” Mel and I walked out, and he said, “I don’t know; we’ll see what happens.” He got in his car, went to the airport and back to New York. I drove to the station. I knew what money they were paying in Dallas and Philly . . . big money. But I really wanted to do it. So I called Jonathan and said, “Okay, those guys did their thing. Let’s you and I figure out what the number is going to be.” So, we batted back and forth. Then I called up Mel and told him I had talked to Jonathan and had the number.
“Can you do it?”
“Yes.”
Tank related what happened next: “So, then, one day I’m on the air with Charles, and Jonathan walked into the studio with his dad. When they broke the news, I went crazy! I was like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally when I heard we got the rights to broadcast the Patriots. That was so cool; I just went nuts: ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’” Moments later, astonished and exhilarated, Tank called Bill Abbate, who had just put in a long overnight shift leading into “The Big Mattress” and since gone home, missing the surprise announcement. “I started to fall asleep and the phone rings,” he told Virtually Alternative in 1998. “It was Tank, who’s screaming, all excited, ‘I can’t believe it; we got the Patriots.’ Tank and I were ecstatic, ‘cause we were both sports fans; we really had no idea where this was gonna take us, and as it turned out, he and I were cohosts for the pre- and postgame show for the ’95 season, our inaugural season. The team only went six and ten that year; it was kind of rough. But I’ll tell you, being one of only thirty sets of broadcasters working in the United States in the NFL was a lot of fun.”
“The Patriots were a laughing stock at first, and we stepped up big time, paying considerably more than what had been paid in radio rights beforehand,” Berardini summarized. “That was based on a belief that the team was going to be successful because of the type of ownership that existed in Foxboro. I just believed in the Krafts.”
Curtis Raymond, employed at WBCN as retail sales manager, was initially tasked with finding someone to be in charge of selling time for the games but ultimately took the responsibility on himself. The new sales manager for the Patriots broadcasts remembered, “This was the first [time that football was] on a rock and roll radio station; it caught the Boston media totally of guard. I can remember all the agency experts saying it would never work; ‘blah, blah, blah.’ But it did.” Critics thought that WBCN’S trademark music programming would clash with the mostly talk world of sports broadcasting, but Berardini disagreed that a confict existed. “There were some worries about whether or not it would be right for the radio station, but football was compatible with the male demographic.”
“ ‘Nocturnal Emissions’ was on Sunday night; it’s not a popular time for radio listening,” Oedipus observed. “So, Sundays, we figured, ‘let’s give it up; it will generate a lot of revenue and bring our radio station a lot of audience, who will leave their radios tuned to WBCN [after the game]. Then, on Monday mornings, the listeners will be back when they get up and go to work.’ I don’t regret that decision at all.”
“We took a few hours to broadcast something that everyone, at first, wasn’t a part of,” reasoned Bill Abbate, who would now double as a DJ and sports announcer. “But by the time of my last broadcast in February 2004, it was our third Super Bowl, and the people were certainly there!”
WBCN gets the Patriots broadcast rights and Bill Abbate happily does double duty as dJ and weekend sports announcer. Courtesy of WBCN.
“It’s an expensive proposition, but sports, more often than not, are a real benefit to a station, even if you can only break even,” Curtis Raymond explained. “I use the example of television: when FOX got the NFL, nobody had heard of The Simpsons and Married with Children, but they were all promoted on the football broadcasts. The same thing held true for radio. We didn’t break even the first year, but we had some pretty spectacular weeks in the years after. One of the best was the year after they went to the Super Bowl with Drew Bledsoe as quarterback [in the ’96 season, losing to Green Bay]; we were second or third in the country in football revenue that year.” Raymond got to work establishing the “Patriots Rock Radio Network,” extending the reach of the games past the limits of ’BCN’S radio signal, which as an FM transmission, paled next to the range of the AM band. “WBZ, being the predecessor, had that clear channel signal and didn’t need as many affiliates; we had to get a bunch of new ones,” he explained. “In the first year we were in the forties [in stations], as far down as Danbury, Connecticut. I remember Stephen King signing the affiliate agreement for [his station] ‘The Zone’ [WZON] in Bangor, Maine. I hung onto that agreement!”
During the actual games, Gil Santos and Gino Cappelletti, the already well-established team who had worked the booth for WBZ, called the play-by-play, while Oedipus and Berardini eschewed hiring other sportscasters, to work in-house and let Tank and Abbate handle the pre- and postgame segments. The August 1995 debut of WBCN as the flagship station for the Patriots’ radio broadcast marked the end of nearly a year of preparation, yet the first game against the Detroit Lions was not without its hiccups. Veteran Boston Globe sportswriter Jack Craig attacked the station mercilessly in his article entitled “WBCN Drops Ball in Debut,” calling the broadcast “woeful at times” and the two-hour pregame show with Tank and Abbate “like amateur night.” Blatantly unimpressed, the writer also commented that “the pre- and postgame hyperbole and bubbly manner sounded more like a lead-in to a rock concert than a football game.” He even castigated the station for its weaker signal. About the only thing Craig did approve of was the focused chemistry of Santos and Cappelletti, who “kept things in perspective during the game. No foolish praise fell from their lips.” As the play-by-play tag team remained the only element of the broadcast held over from previous years, the writer, not so subtly, gave the radio station a parting “face-mask” in his assessment. WBCN broadcast producer Marc Cappello, then a nineteen-year-old promotions department intern hired to assist Abbate by locating Patriots stats during the games as well as recording press conferences, recalled, “I think a lot of people looked at us and thought, ‘What do these idiots know about putting on a sports broadcast?’ WBCN was a rock station, not a sports station; it was all so new to everybody. But Oedipus didn’t panic; he said, ‘Look, we’re going to do our own thing, and we’ll get better at it,’ and we did.”
If the stodgy Jack Craig represented the view of a typical football traditionalist, then he was going to be in for more surprises. Curtis Raymond remembered,
Oedipus and Tony wanted cutting-edge promot
ions with the football games, so we did one once with a condom company. It was in the two-minute warning at the end of the game: if the Patriots scored in those final two minutes, then whoever entered, won a year’s supply of condoms, plus tickets to the next game. When we presented that to Gil and Gino, there was some real trepidation; they weren’t really comfortable with that. But then, about a month later and unbeknownst to us, that [idea] won the Radio Promotion of the Year [award] at Brand Week [magazine], got written up in the Boston Herald, and suddenly everyone loved it. With us, the promotion kind of made sense, so Gil and Gino did it.
Touchdown!
The production and professionalism of WBCN’S radio broadcasts would advance dramatically, keeping pace with the Patriots’ own improvements to its organization and the inception of a winning spirit. “The Krafts really had a commitment to making the team a success and making them part of the community,” Berardini explained. “That’s why we eventually did a second deal and a third deal, and the third one was for ten years! Who knew that was going to happen?” Although Tank would exit WBCN with Charles Laquidara, regretfully leaving the Patriots Rock Radio Network after one season, Abbate carried on with new cohost Mike Ruth for the ’96 season, one in which the Patriots went all the way to the Super Bowl behind the coaching of Bill Parcells. “Here I am,” Abbate told Virtually Alternative, “two seasons working the National Football League, now I’m broadcasting live from the Louisiana Superdome for Super Bowl XXXI!” Although the team lost that contest, future steps for the Patriots would cement their legendary status. The unit, under the direction of new coach Bill Belichick, advanced to the Super Bowl at the end of the 2001 season and defeated the St. Louis Rams to become NFL champions for the first time.
Hard work pays of: Tony Berardini with Jonathan Kraft and Robert Kraft holding the Super Bowl trophy at WBCN in February 2002.Courtesy of Tony Berardini/New England Patriots.
The Super Bowl in New Orleans became a great moment for the station, not only because of the Patriots victory, but also because the game’s halftime show featured the group that WBCN had stood behind since its fledgling night playing the Paradise Theater in 1980. Performing on entertainment’s most-watched and prestigious stage possible, U2, at the height of its own game, turned in a heartfelt and emotional tribute to the victims of the 9/11 attacks. As part of his assignment, Bill Abbate attended the earlier press conference with the band, hopefully to tape some excerpts to present on his pregame show. “It was in this gigantic room with all these people and I managed to ask U2 a question,” he recalled. Once Abbate’s failing arm had been recognized, he had the floor:
I gave it this big buildup, mentioning ’BCN, kind of like, “We’re from Boston, the city that helped you get your big start here in North America, the city that’s got the largest Irish population outside of Ireland.”
“I know where this is going,” Bono says.
“Do you have a rooting interest in the game?”
“I’m not the guy who knows anything about football; let me pass this one over to the Edge.” So Edge goes, “Well, we really don’t know much about football”; then for the next sixty seconds goes on and on with specific difer-ences between the Patriots’ defenses and the St. Louis offense and defense, how Brady is more of a pocket quarterback while Warner can run around and scramble. The whole crowd was just rolling! “But we don’t know anything about football.” Yeah, right!
WBCN looked and felt a lot different from its Camelot years, with football now a part of the broadcast week, the taped Howard Stern show on every weeknight, Bradley Jay assuming Ken Shelton’s midday dynasty, and the radical transformation of the playlist. Now classified as a “modern rock” station by Billboard and the other music trade publications, ’BCN focused on current alternative music choices like Foo Fighters, Weezer, and Alanis Morissette. Because of, or despite, these significant adjustments, the station continued to maintain the upper hand in ratings and revenue success, focusing on the younger male demographic and mostly abandoning the older twenty-five to fifty-four crowd to ‘ZLX. By the spring of ’96, WBCN stood at a ranking of number 6 (tied with WZLX) for all Boston listeners twelve years and older. By contrast, WAAF took number 14 with a 2.6, and low-power ‘FNX came in at number 19 with a 1.6. Having departed the station by this point, marketing and promotions guru David Bieber later observed, “WAAF was around at that point [the station had moved its studios from Worcester to Westborough], and ‘FNX had its own valid mission, but it was an effort just to get 101.7 [in on the radio]. I think both of those stations deserve respect, but ’BCN was just a behemoth.”
As the reigning patriarch on WBCN, Charles Laquidara could have easily been viewed as an anachronism amid the station’s new fascination with a targeted eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old demographic. But his “Big Mattress,” now in place for over twenty-two years, continued to garner respectable ratings, and his attitude remained as fresh as ever. “I was very aware that times were changing,” he said, “just like I knew the times were changing back in the sixties. I didn’t want to be like my parents or my grandparents and be one of those people who didn’t let go. When the change comes, you got to deal with it.” Laquidara’s long-running music spotlight, “The Big Mattress Song of the Week,” reflected his embrace of the new music, as did the DJ’S efforts to learn about the latest groups he featured. “Oedipus kind of made fun of me because, on one of my trips to Hawaii, I was trying to memorize the names of all these new bands, like Collective Soul and Our Lady Peace, and the names of lead singers and guitar players. I actually had lists of these bands that I was memorizing on the plane. When I came back and told him I had done this, he just laughed at me and said, ‘You don’t have to know the names of these guys; it’s not like Charlie Watts from the Stones or the Edge from U2. All this music and all these groups are disposable.’ Things were changing so fast.”
Despite the cultural box spring shifting beneath it, “The Big Mattress” itself remained firm and inviting to listeners. Laquidara, as was his norm, continued to surround himself with a talented staff: writer, occasional co-host, and resident cynic (the show’s “Bitter Man”) Lance Norris; surfer-dude newsman Patrick Murray; producer Bob Malatesta; writer and voice of reason Don Bertolino; longtime veteran Tank (“The Round Man”); and a herd of others. But “The Big Mattress” did have its detractors, and they emerged largely because of the other morning show that was on WBCN at the time. “I was constantly faced with these people who wanted Stern on in the morning and wanted me out of there. These people really did have an ageist attitude: ‘You’re old; you’re in the way.’ Howard, as nice a guy as he was in real life, and as nice as he always was to me on the radio, never treated me with any disrespect—like he did with other people. I mean, he’d have funerals for jocks when he moved into a town! He never treated me like that. But his listeners were not so kind; they’d go after me, just like in the old days when ’COZ listeners would leave their beer cans in my driveway.”
When Infinity first made Howard Stern available to WBCN, Laquidara had been defended by his managers. “At that point Charles was just killing it,” mentioned Tony Berardini. “We looked at Mel and said it wasn’t going to work with Charles doing so well. So we got Howard to do nights.” Karmazin didn’t push it; he knew how beloved and legendary Laquidara was in Boston, and he had the ratings to prove it. Years later, in a Globe retrospective from 2000, Jim Sullivan would write, “Mel Karmazin lovingly calls him a ‘huge pain in the butt. I met him in 1981 and I’ve been a fan ever since. He’s a character, and I think radio needs more of these.’” In fact, the DJ had always enjoyed a friendship with Karmazin from the earliest days of Infinity. Tickets could have been sold for people to sit courtside and watch Laquidara, the classic liberal, line up against the conservative corporate CEO, to publicly spar on every subject from raising children to apartheid. These good-natured debates, with edgy punch lines zinging left and right, were often fueled by deadly serious concerns, but mutual respect always hel
d the two in close rapport. Nevertheless, as Tony Berardini described, “When [Stern’s] next contract came up, Mel came to Oedipus and I and said, ‘Part of the way I got Howard to resign with Infinity was to promise him mornings in Philadelphia and Boston. So it’s up to you guys; you can have him in the mornings if you want to. If not, Howard is free to negotiate with another station in the market.’ Mel outlined the situation and left it up to us.”
But, it was quite obvious that Tony Berardini and Oedipus had been thrust into a catch-22 situation. To lose Stern would give the ratings star a foothold elsewhere to deflate “The Big Mattress” and ’BCN as a result. “In every market Howard had gone into, he destroyed the competition,” Berar-dini observed, “and Charles would have been his number 1 competition.” The alternative was to keep Stern and move him, live from New York City, into the weekday morning slot. But where would that leave Laquidara? This scenario meant that the market veteran would exit his job and, perhaps, the company. Nobody liked this option; WBCN’S star personality remained on a first-name basis with most of Boston, and to lose that relationship and market recognition because of collateral damage just didn’t make sense.