Radio Free Boston

by Carter Alan

  “I know Oedipus had the pressure of not having Howard Stern on in the morning and not getting those great ratings; I think everyone knew that,” Laquidara admitted. “I was getting good ratings myself, but I had my ups and downs.” Oedipus conceded, “Howard fit with the audience we were going after, plus he dominated the ratings, and it would have dramatically hurt our radio station if he wasn’t there. This would have affected salaries, jobs . . . everybody [at WBCN]. If Howard had gone to ‘ZLX, for example, we would have gotten killed.”

  “We had a meeting,” Berardini described, “Mel, Oedipus, and myself, in my office, for a very long time. We were racking our brains trying to figure out what we could do.”

  “It wasn’t easy,” Oedipus admitted. “I saw Charles every morning, more than I saw my own family. Charles was . . . my big brother.” With every go-around in the discussion, the two fates remained resolute: WBCN would either be crippled or wildly successful, and Laquidara would be hurt either way.

  “I don’t know who made the suggestion,” Berardini said, “but among the three of us, we hatched the idea: what if we put Howard on in the morning at ’BCN and moved Charles over to WZLX because they needed a better morning show?” The thought hung between them for a moment. “I remember Oedipus sitting there; he got a look of relief on his face, and he said, ‘You know, that could work for both WBCN and WZLX, and it could work for Charles.’ But we were really concerned; we didn’t want to move him. How do you talk to a guy who’s been a legend in the market since 1969? ‘By the way, you have to leave the station that you helped start, to go across the street.’ Oedipus said, ‘Let me talk to Charles; I can convince him this is the right move.’”

  “I didn’t see it coming; I wish that I had,” recalled Laquidara. “Oedipus asked me to meet him at the Providence Restaurant [in Brookline]; he wanted to chitchat a bit. So, I thought it was a regular meeting. But when I got there he had three glasses of my drink of favor at the time, single-malt scotch, lined up on the bar waiting for me. Uh-oh. ‘Have a drink,’ he said, and then he laid it on me.”

  “We had an intense talk about where radio, WBCN, and his career were going,” Oedipus continued. “I said, ‘If you don’t move and Howard goes on a different radio station, you’ll go out in a blaze of glory, but you’ll fade quickly.’”

  “I don’t think Oedipus realized he was doing it, but he set me up,” Laquidara added.

  He said, “Now, you don’t have to do this; you don’t have to go to ‘ZLX if you don’t want to. But if you don’t go, Howard will kill you on the radio, and I won’t be able to protect you.” So, what he was saying was, “Charles, you can stay here at WBCN and you have a strong following of listeners who would support you if you took that stand, but you would be going against the company. Howard should be on in the morning and most of the people who like classic rock are over on WZLX; you should take the high road and do what’s right for the company and what’s right for the listeners, and just go.” Logically, he was right, but emotionally, it was devastating to hear. So, I tried to be cool about it and take that high road.

  “Charles ultimately made the right decision; he went to ‘ZLX, took his audience with him, and he was very successful,” Oedipus summarized. “And that was not only Charles’s audience; it was his music and his era, no matter how much he claims to like new music. He made the right move by no longer trying to prolong his career [at ’BCN], and was able to leave on his own terms.” Laquidara came up with the idea of doing [the switch] on 1 April: “Because, you know, every time I got fred, whether it was by Charlie Kendall, Klee Dobra, Arnie Ginsburg, or whoever, it always seemed to be on April Fool’s Day!”

  Bright and early on 1 April 1996, fans of “The Big Mattress” were surprised to hear Howard Stern on WBCN broadcasting loud and clear, live from New York, while their hero sat in for a displaced George Taylor Morris (who had bumped Ken Shelton the year before) over at WZLX. An inspired joke, many would conclude, but most didn’t suspect that, when the next morning dawned, Laquidara would still be absent from his longtime post and ’BCN would actually have its new and permanent morning man in place. Tony Berardini said, “The way we were able to orchestrate it made it good radio, good theater.” The stunt succeeded in generating one of the biggest buzzes in Boston radio history, absolutely focusing the city’s attention on the momentous swap. Susan Bickelhaupt at the Boston Globe broke the news early on 2 April: “The change is expected to be a permanent one, to be announced at a press conference this morning via satellite from Stern’s New York studios.”

  “There were listeners that were outraged,” Oedipus told Virtually Alternative in 1998, “but it was like, if you want Charles Laquidara, you know where to get him; and if you want Howard Stern, you know where to get him.” In his book The More You Watch, the Less You Know, the always-opinionated Danny Schechter gave his own estimation of the switch: “The station’s longtime soul and defining spirit, my former partner in crime, the ‘morning mishegas’ man Charles Laquidara, who invented many of the on-air shticks that Stern, as a BU student and early BCN listener, appropriated, was ordered into exile at another Infinity-owned Boston station. Charles was hurt, but well-compensated.”

  At WBCN, meanwhile, Stern’s move to a timeslot he shared on “25 other stations,” the Globe reported, meant a cash windfall as advertising rates soared and the sheer number of commercials on the air in morning drive increased dramatically. Oedipus said in Virtually Alternative, “It was clear that not only did he belong in the mornings, because that’s what he does, but also he could generate a lot more money in the morning.” So strong was Stern’s appeal, listeners would sit through a hitherto forbidden number of commercial spots while they waited patiently for the programming content to return. How long? The Washington Post reported that “ad breaks on the Stern show have been clocked at as long as 18 minutes, 48 seconds, with as many as 30 separate spots jammed together.” Many advertisers would have nothing to do with the raunchy show, but sales manager Bob Mendelsohn said there were plenty of others more than willing to step up: “It opened a door to a whole other universe of people who kind of came from the same school. Advertisers realized, ‘Hey, those people who listen to Stern because of all the smutty talk? Those are my customers.’” Young, white males, in particular, were attracted in droves to the show. “We sold a lot of Met-Rx!” Mendelsohn laughed, referring to the popular bodybuilding supplement gobbled up by grunting, young weight lifters.

  Bumped by Howard Stern, “The Big Mattress” finds a new bed at WZLX. Charles Laquidara in happier times (circa 1988). Photo by Mim Michelove.

  “For a lot of those advertisers, they would pay any price that you asked, because we had separated ourselves from the pack; we had Howard Stern,” Mendelsohn pointed out. “There were times that if we had sold out and someone really wanted to get on the air badly, we’d get two or three thousand dollars a commercial with Howard. They would pay that.”

  “It was a challenge selling Howard,” Tony Berardini observed, “but we were able to find those sponsors that did buy [him]. It was almost like you had two completely different advertiser lists.”

  “It was very much a split deal,” Mendelsohn agreed. “There were advertisers we had cultivated for years who said, ‘No way!’ to being on the air with Howard. It would drive us crazy mechanically: what do you do when, instead of ending at 10:00 or 10:15, Howard would decide to stay on till 11:30? That was a real problem. But there were others who didn’t care; they just wanted the media value [of Stern] and that was the biggest thing to them.”

  Stern’s presence was a vastly polarizing influence at WBCN: those entertained by the curly-haired and bespectacled radio host became staunch supporters, while detractors simply abhorred his approach. Oedipus had been a fan even before Karmazin offered Stern to ’BCN, and in his mind, the move to mornings did not alter his primary desire for the radio station: “My job was to keep [WBCN] vital, interesting, and exciting; plus, I still wanted to play all this new musi
c. I wasn’t worried about a talk show in the morning because Charles had already done a talk show there. We hadn’t been breaking any new music in the morning; it was all about entertainment. And Howard was entertaining. It prolonged the radio station; ’BCN would have never lasted for as long as it did.”

  “I’m a big Howard Stern fan,” Chachi Loprete confessed. “I enjoyed the content, not the dirty talk; I thought that no one could do an interview like Howard Stern. He could talk to anyone and make it sound interesting. But it was a double-edged sword; I hated to see Charles go. He was the reason that I started in radio.” Others, like Danny Schechter, were worried or convinced that Stern’s presence would forever destroy, or at least significantly alter, the fabric of what WBCN had always been in Boston. “The voice of the angry white man,” he wrote in his book. “His tirades are rife with sexism, race-baiting, and homophobia, which help reinforce prejudices and encourage races and communities to oppose each other. His fans think it’s funny.”

  To be honest, once Howard Stern had displaced Charles in the mornings, I was chagrined at my new, unwilling association with the infamous shock-jock and his supposed outrages over being challenged on the First Amendment right to free speech. I thought that was a thin veil to excuse just about anything that was licentious in his show. Although WBCN’S positive mojo would hold me in place for another two years, from that point on I sought an opportunity to leave, after nearly nineteen years at ’BCN, and would do so in April ’98 to join Charles at WZLX.

  In the years that Stern would be on WBCN, from 1993 till he left Infinity for satellite radio in January 2006, the radio star never traveled to Boston to do a live show or participate in any local promotion, but the station would receive frequent visits from members of Stern’s celebrity staff. Loprete mentioned, “I got to know Gary Dell’Abate [Stern’s producer] very well; I was always hiring him to come in and do an appearance at a strip club or a store. I hired Jackie the Jokeman to do appearances.” Then there was Crackhead Bob. “They called him that because he did too much crack and it made him mentally incapable; he could not communicate at all. We had to pick him up, take him to his hotel, check him in, make sure he had room service and a menu. Then he’d point out what he wanted to eat and I’d have to order for him. Then we’d have to pick him up and take him to his gig.” So what did Crackhead Bob actually do for his pay check? “People would just want to meet him. I hate to say it, but he was sort of a sideshow act; he couldn’t say words properly, so you had to really listen. I remember he did a gig in Quincy at a bar for two hours. There was no act; he just sat around and met people.”

  When Stern’s movie Private Parts was released [in 1997], WBCN held a screening for it at the Nickelodeon Theater. A grand opening of a Blockbuster Video store was tied in to the DVD release of the movie, with Dell ’Abate flying in along with Hank, the Angry Dwarf, another participant in Stern’s cabinet of oddballs. “The Angry Dwarf was a major alcoholic,” Loprete recalled, “and there was a huge line of people waiting to meet him. Then, this woman brought him a long dildo. He started, uh, working on it while people stood in line for autographs of the DVD. He didn’t care. The manager of the store was disturbed about it. Who did she ask to get him to stop? Lucky me.”

  That’s the pool Stern liked to swim in, but despite the blue tone, this was big business. Farid Suleman, Infinity’s chief financial officer, told the New York Times in September 1995 that the shock-jock accounted for $14 million to $22 million of the company’s revenue. Although he also stated that those figures represented, at the most, only eight cents of every dollar of Infinity’s take, that deprecating comment might have had something to do with Karmazin’s negotiating strategy, since Stern’s contract at the time was just about up. But, for one personality to be responsible for that much percentage in any corporation was significant. At least Infinity thought enough of their star to shield him repeatedly against the FCC, which had begun to harass the jock relentlessly on obscenity issues; and that defense was certainly not cheap. Even one questionable on-air comment slipping out of the host studio and multiplied across two dozen affiliate frequencies, each with an accompanying fine, added up to astronomical totals. The Times article pointed out, “The company recently paid the Government $1.7 million to settle indecency charges against Mr. Stern for his comments on a range of topics like incest, masturbation and the unorthodox use of gerbils.”

  Defending Stern was all part of Mel Karmazin’s big picture, and since any future deal would require approval of the FCC, Infinity needed to have its ducks in a row and be as unhindered as possible during any proposed expansion. He knew something that many citizens did not: in 1995 ongoing debate raged in Washington over whether or not to further deregulate the radio, television, and communications industry. Karmazin, a fearless gambler, had bet that the government would end up relaxing ownership rules again, allowing companies to purchase as many radio properties in a city as they wished. The radio boss figured right: President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 into law in February, and Infinity barely caught its breath before unleashing the dogs of commerce from its New York office. Geraldine Fabrikant stated in the 21 June 1996 issue of the New York Times, “In the last three months, Mr. Karmazin has been on an acquisition binge. Just last March, he agreed to buy 12 radio stations from Granum Holdings L.P. for $140 million.” But, this was small potatoes; the article’s main point concerned the stunning announcement that Infinity’s president had masterminded a huge merger with Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which owned the CBS radio and television networks. Still subject to approval by the feds, the action, Fabrikant stated, “would create a radio giant with 83 stations and a constellation of radio stars from Howard Stern and Don Imus to Charles Osgood.”

  By the end of the year, the multi-billion-dollar agreement got its legal stamp of approval. Infinity merged into the CBS Radio Group, and Karmazin was named president of the whole, immensely expanded, shebang. It was not unlike being “kinged” in a game of checkers and then jumping over all of your opponent’s pieces in one master stroke, except that the game board stretched nationwide across dozens of markets. Within just a few years, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 had opened the doors to wild expansion in the industry as most “mom and pop” radio stations were gobbled up and smaller radio chains became food for the hungrier corporate sharks. By 2003, the Associated Press noted, “The bill allowed Clear Channel Communications Inc., now the #1 owner of U.S. radio stations in the country, to grow from 43 radio stations in 1995 to more than 1,200 this year.” The article also revealed that Infinity Broadcasting had enlarged to include more than 180 radio stations and that many of them “are located in the 50 largest radio markets, making them especially lucrative and high-profile.”

  Back in Boston, the station that had financed the initial stages of this empire soldiered on in its new alternative direction, with ratings powerhouse Howard Stern ensconced in AM drive. However, typical of stations that carried the New York shock-jock’s show, WBCN now took on a somewhat bipolar personality. Tony Berardini explained, “Fundamentally, it changed the nature of WBCN. Howard was so unique that primarily it was his audience that listened to him, and then there were the others who listened to whatever else you were doing the rest of the day.” Despite repeated attempts to recycle listeners out of the morning show to sample WBCN in its other day parts, the station soon became a schizophrenic entity with two nearly distinct and opposite audiences. Bruce Mittman, the general manager at WAAF, who had tangled with ’BCN for ascendancy on the radio hill for six years, quickly grasped this: “It was now Howard and WBCN. We saw this as an enormous opportunity, [because] the importance in building ratings is to be able to maintain an audience and recycle them into other day parts. ’BCN wasn’t recycling. If we could further separate ’BCN into ‘two stations’ and attack the rock and roll half, we could win it all. The only way we could attack was to be as local as we could be. We had Greg Hill [WAAF mornings] everywhere that WBCN’S morn
ing show should have gone, thereby reinforcing the fact that Howard, although funny, was not local and that you couldn’t relate to him; you couldn’t touch him; [and] you couldn’t interact with him.”

  The untouchable Stern brought WBCN enormous ratings and revenue success on a daily basis, but his presence had seriously unbalanced the radio station. The schizophrenia in its programming would not improve, at least not until the New York–based shock-jock solved the problem himself by opting out of terrestrial radio years down the road. Tony Berardini would later assess, “If you had to mark the day where WBCN fundamentally changed, beginning it on the path that eventually led to it going out of the format, our decision to put Howard on in the mornings was the turning point.”

  I think Oedipus realized that the station needed a kick in the ass; it felt like a lumbering, sleeping giant. [WBCN] hadn’t really competed in a long time; it didn’t have to. NIK CARTER

  A BAD-BOY

  BUSINESS

  WBCN’S embrace of modern rock scored statistically from the first, but a dramatic visual confirmation of all this ratings hoopla played out in June 1995 when the station presented its first “River Rave,” at Boston’s Esplanade on the bank of the Charles. Four fledgling bands from the ’BCN play-list—Sleeper, Letters to Cleo, General Public, and Better Than Ezra—made up a modest bill barely expected to draw much more than five thousand people. That said, police presence was formidable, and the city was nervous about a repeat of the bloody riot that had occurred the previous year when WFNX presented Green Day at the same location. A beautiful spring day brought the sight of thousands of concertgoers streaming out of Back Bay and across the Storrow Drive pedestrian bridges, stepping off the Red Line at Charles Street and strolling over the river on Massachusetts Avenue. Like the brooms and their water buckets in Fantasia, the people just kept coming, until a crowd of over fifty thousand filtered onto the grounds for the free concert, dwarfing the stage and the small coterie of station staffers standing in amazement behind the security barriers. Worries of another melee could not be suppressed, and the police called in for reinforcements. “We were absolutely overwhelmed with how many people showed up,” Roger Moore, WBCN’S broadcast engineer for that day, related. “But, there were no incidents whatsoever; we were all expecting the worst and nothing bad happened at all.”