by Carter Alan
When Oedipus transferred Carter out of nights to take over for Parenteau, it was talked about almost as much as Stern’s ascension over Laquidara a year and a half earlier. After all, it was the first major change in the station’s afternoon shift since 1978. Oedipus assessed, “The music was changing, the station was staying young; [we] needed an afternoon DJ who could relate to our audience, grow in the position, reestablish afternoons, and carry on the great tradition of unique WBCN air personalities.” The stage was now set for an epic cage match. Opie and Anthony began grappling with Carter the very first day, as he remembered: “They called it ‘Black Monday,’ and they were calling kennels around the city looking for their little black poodle ‘Nik.’” The WBCN disc jockey immediately returned the jabs, with the results making headlines in both Boston dailies. “Over at WAAF, Carter’s competitors have been trying to identify Carter as black, not always subtly, by means of verbal volleys and website postings,” the Boston Globe reported. “On the air, WAAF has called Carter ‘the dark-skinned lover’ and ‘disco boy.’” The Herald mentioned that Oedipus had provided a cassette of an Opie and Anthony show: “Some of the tape’s excerpts include the duo saying: ‘He’s a big brown turd that stinks . . . Disco douche . . . Lionel Ritchie’s love child.’”
Back and forth the battle raged, like artillery barrages over the front lines: inflammatory comments about Carter’s color and then returning allegations of racism from WBCN. “It was probably one of the filthiest battles in rock radio history,” Carter observed. “I was stressed out of my mind and on Paxil as a result.” As the conflict deepened, the Herald commented, “It’s just plain ugly and, at the very least, downright stupid.” But it continued, for months, with Tony Berardini and Oedipus dragged into the fray, accusing WAAF and defending their own, while their counterparts, Bruce Mittman and program director Dave Douglas, did the same. “It stands as the most reprehensible radio experience of my life and appalled me to the core of my being,” Oedipus stated. “This was not art, this was not competition; this was out and out hatred.”
“I never felt there was a racist attack,” Mittman contradicted. “Corporately, no one in WAAF management would have supported that. No one cared if [Carter] was black, white, or orange.” While believing that statement may or may not seem difficult, what is true is that O & A were never actually caught using the n word on the air. But the damage was done, nevertheless, as members of their audience pressed the attack. Carter related, “I’d pick up the phone and there would be some ‘AAF listener there [saying,] ‘Nigger, nigger; nigger, nigger . . . Opie and Anthony rule!’ And I couldn’t really get angry at all these kids because they didn’t really realize what they were saying; they were desensitized.”
“That’s where Opie and Anthony and I differed,” Mittman stated. “ ‘You might not be saying things directly, but you’re encouraging people to do things that you are responsible for’; that was a constant argument. Rock and roll is a bad-boy business but not an irresponsible business.”
The end of the O & A/Carter melee came abruptly, six months later, when the WAAF afternoon team initiated a poorly conceived April Fool’s Day stunt in which they announced that Boston mayor Thomas Menino had been killed in an automobile crash. “The ‘joke’ was not so funny in the homes of the mayor’s distraught relatives who had to field condolence calls,” the Boston Globe reported. When Menino applied intense pressure on the offending station by filing an official complaint with the FCC, the threat raced to the very top of the WAAF ownership hierarchy. “Steven Dodge, chairman of American Radio Systems, met with the mayor to apologize for his disc jockey’s lack of ‘basic human decency,’” the Globe continued. “Their stunt could not have come at a worse time for American Radio Systems. The Boston-based broadcasting company needs FCC approval to be acquired by CBS Corp.” How ironic that during the entire O & A versus Carter bloodbath, the home team’s parent corporation had been negotiating to buy the company that owned WAAF. For a cool $2.6 billion, Mel Karmazin would scoop up American Radio Systems, although the Justice Department required that its four Boston stations, including ‘AAF, be divested. Meanwhile, Menino was no dummy; by refusing to back down, accept an apology, and withdraw his complaint, WAAF had no choice but to fire Opie and Anthony to avoid the possibility of being stripped of its license and possibly derail the gigantic business deal on the table. The infamous tag team moved on; but in another irony, CBS turned right around and hired O & A to go on the air two months later at WNEW-FM in New York City.
Life didn’t get much easier for the ’BCN jocks, despite the absence of WAAF’S stars. The battle orders had already gone out and were received by the station’s eager audience, many of whom gleefully carried on the mission of subverting “The Rock of Boston” whenever they got the chance. “I had no interactions with the ‘AAF jocks,” DJ Melissa related, “but I did have interactions with their fans. And to give ‘AAF credit, they did a good job brainwashing those people.” Bill Abbate mentioned, “It was no longer a matter of their jocks targeting us; they figured out a way to get their audience to do it. So, there was this whole stretch of time where, depending on the band, you knew that there was going to be some riled-up ‘AAF fan who was going to do something stupid.” In July ’98, Juanita received the assignment to do a solo live broadcast from “Ozz-fest” at the Tweeter Center. “Exciting day but difficult,” she remembered. “I did interview a lot of people, like Lemmy [from Motorhead], the guys in Korn, Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit; but it was very much an ‘AAF crowd at the show. There was this point where we were up on the lawn walking; I had a microphone and the engineers had bags with the ’BCN logos on them. People were not happy to see us up there; they started throwing stuff at us. Because there was so much hatred instilled by WAAF toward ’BCN people, I actually felt like we were in a dangerous situation, [so] we just got out of there as fast as we could.”
Scott Weiland at the WBCN River Rave, 1998, with (left to right) Juanita, Nik Carter, Oedipus, Steve Strick (top), Bradley Jay, and Melissa Teper. Courtesy of WBCN.
WBCN wasn’t merely a sitting duck, though; its staff learned to expect some animosity at certain harder rock shows. Mark Calandrello, known as “Cali” to his coworkers, who arrived in early 1998 and became Chachi’s full-time assistant, signed on just as the Opie and Anthony assault reached its peak.
The racial remarks really kicked the rivalry into high gear. No matter what it was, if it fit the audience, we were battling with ‘AAF over everything! I was on the WBCN “Street Team” at that point, and we brought in a bunch of college kids who weren’t afraid of a fight or getting their hands dirty. We would terrorize the other stations, especially ‘AAF, because we were sticking up for Nik. We’d go into their backyard at the Worcester Centrum, where they’d be broadcasting from a bar next door. We’d wait outside for them to go live on the air and run inside with a megaphone, shouting “Rocko [‘AAF night jock], you fat fuck! You suck!” When they would leave their van at concerts on Lansdowne Street, we would wrap them in ’BCN roller banner and put ’BCN stickers all over them; then we’d take pictures and put them on our website.
Despite the bad blood, though, Cali didn’t believe the intense competition was necessarily a bad thing: “We had a hard-core rivalry that lasted for years; other than that Opie and Anthony racial stuff, it made for great radio.” Derek Diedricksen, known on air as “Deek,” joined the WBCN DJ lineup in 2000: “We did a broadcast from a Korn show or something, and they had the radio stations, ‘FNX, ‘AAF, and ’BCN, all together in this tiny room. Everyone was sitting there being awkward and stupid, not talking to each other, like this was some religion by which we must abide! So, I went over and said hi to Jay Ferrara, who was the ‘AAF guy up against me [on the air], and he was nice enough. Two days later, he was back at it, talking crap about me on the air. But, hey, it’s entertainment; it’s a job. I never took any of it seriously.”
In June ’99 the competitive spirit between the two stations became national
news when Limp Bizkit organized an unauthorized show in Boston to promote its forthcoming new album Significant Other. “They were the biggest band at that time; we were playing Limp Bizkit every couple hours,” Juanita recalled. But WAAF had been playing the metal/rap outfit since the very beginning, and the station had an entrenched relationship with the group and its record label. “I was on the air and we knew the show was probably going to be that day, but the band wasn’t going to release the location except on ‘AAF.” Limp Bizkit’s plans to do a rooftop concert, like the historic Beatles ploy in 1969, needed to be clandestine; a surprise attack might buy the group enough time to do a short set before the police moved in to shut it down. Juanita continued, “Shred just happened to be walking through the Fenway, looked up at one of the buildings, and noticed there was a band setting up on top of one. You don’t see that too often! He called and told me. ‘Omigod!’ I said. ‘It’s the Limp Bizkit show!’”
Juanita didn’t hesitate; she shared her precious nugget on the air within moments. “I gave out the location before Limp Bizkit could call it into ‘AAF. As it turned out, MTV [News] was driving in the car with the band [filming for a documentary], listening to ’BCN, and they heard me announce the secret location.” A video of that moment ran on MTV, and in it, Fred Durst (the band’s lead singer) commented, “They got a war going on here,” before hustling to the garage roof right around the corner from WBCN’S studios at Fenway Park. MTV News reported, “The crowd of about 1,500 fans discovered the show’s secret locale through a local radio station; so did the Boston Police, who shut down the illegal concert after a five-song, 20-minute set.” Obviously, Limp Bizkit and WAAF were not pleased, but over at 1265 Boylston Street, the mood was ecstatic. If WBCN ran itself like the military, Oedipus would have held a ceremony and pinned Silver Stars on both Juanita and Shred as members of the staff looked on respectfully, doing their best impressions of standing at attention.
WBCN’S personality began to shift as the new-music epicenter polarized to a harder scene. Playing a wide range of alternative music in ’94—everything from the intensity of Jane’s Addiction to the thoughtful musings of Tori Amos—the overall sound of the station had changed as 1999 arrived, the focus now lingering on a fresh crop of bands playing heavier rock and rap music. To the radio industry, although WBCN was classified as a “modern” station and ‘AAF as “active rock,” the number of artists that had become common to both formats sharply increased, often making the two stations virtually indistinguishable. “When I got there,” Juanita remembered, “’BCN had just started playing Green Day and it was moving to a lighter alternative sound: stuff like the Verve Pipe and a lot of female artists [such as] Sneaker Pimps, Portishead . . . Oedipus’s ‘Women in Pain,’” she laughed. “It definitely took a late nineties left turn into that whole nu-metal, rap-rock thing.” WBCN chased the male eighteen to thirty-four ratings into the heavy-metal rabbit hole, and the playlist now caught up with the edgier tone already in place on the rest of the station. While Howard Stern ruled the mornings with his coarse humor and coterie of impertinent pranksters, Nik Carter held much the same sway in afternoon drive, and (stereo) grunts from the gridiron ruled NFL Sundays. It was abundantly clear that WBCN’S emphasis, in all ways, centered squarely on a battle of (and for) testosterone.
Juanita blew the whistle on the secret WAAF show with Limp Bizkit. Photo by Andrew King.
In 2000, the WBCN River Rave had swelled to colossal proportions, moving fifty thousand tickets to sell out Foxboro Stadium. The top-shelf bands performing included Stone Temple Pilots, Filter, Cypress Hill, Powerman 5000, and local heroes Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Godsmack. The daylong festival included onstage appearances by all the ’BCN jocks; a B stage (where Juanita’s band Heidi performed, among others); a Rave tent in which pulse-pounding techno music reigned nonstop (featuring DJ Bradley Jay, who had returned to ’BCN as a part-timer); an electronic gaming area; and a “cyberpit” with Internet options. “The Raves were great concerts, ‘Chachi’ Loprete observed, “a million moving parts.” The show stood as a towering triumph; five years after the first humble concert (the one actually by a river), the event had grown to fill the largest outdoor entertainment venue in New England. That achievement was overshadowed, for better or worse, by a record 126 arrests and what Dean Johnson labeled in the Herald as “breastapalooza.” During the show, women were encouraged to flash their assets, the images relayed and enlarged on the gigantic onstage screens for all to see. Johnson wrote, “The video expo went on for nearly the entire 12-hour concert. At one point, a ‘best of’ segment was shown in slow motion.” All this liberated activity raised the ire of local police and Foxboro town officials, who voiced their displeasure. Balancing their delight over the bad-boy image of the Rave with a need to assert some damage control over the official reaction, WBCN officials issued a rare apology, blaming the video production company for the displays. Dean Johnson smirked in print, “Considering WBCN’S bawdy programming—and the fact that the station’s disc jockeys joked about it onstage and on the air, the apology is more than a little disingenuous.”
In a surprising development, considering just how much vitriol had been spilled out on the airwaves between Nik Carter and his WAAF tormenters just two years earlier, Opie and Anthony appeared on the massive River Rave stage, wireless microphones in hand, to motivate the WBCN audience. “The two weren’t off the Boston airwaves for long,” the Boston Globe reported a month later. “The difference is that now one of Opie and Anthony’s prerecorded spots invites listeners to make an obscene gesture if they see the WAAF van, because these days, the duo are regulars on WBCN, phoning in their ‘bits’ from their New York base at CBS sister station WNEW.” The Globe article mentioned that the tag team also made “caustic appearances on WBCN’S afternoon show, as guests of the similarly puerile Carter.” To any observer, this represented a vast change of heart.
“People say, ‘How could you forgive them?’” Carter reflected. “Opie and I bumped into each other in New York City and talked. Then they [both] came to Boston on a Saturday afternoon and we drank, and laughed, and fought, and yelled at each other at a bar for like five hours. They said, ‘We went too far’; ‘that’s not who we are’; ‘we were wrong.’ If they were big enough to apologize, I was big enough to say, ‘All right, I got ya.’” That WBCN had learned how to scrap it out on WAAF’S level was quite obvious after the 2000 River Rave. “The battle woke Oedipus up and made him competitive,” Bruce Mittman observed from across the trenches. “It also forced us to be on our game, all the time. If you don’t own the streets in rock and roll, you’re not a rock and roll station.” The Boston Globe commented, “The two stations have nearly switched places, with WBCN abandoning its earlier ethos to co-opt WAAF’S frat-boy sound and attitude.”
Across town in August 2000, Charles Laquidara ended his run at WZLX to move on to retirement in Hawaii. As Boston said goodbye to their legend, the distance between where his former radio home had been and where it was at the moment lay heavy in the minds of many former listeners. This was surely not your father’s ’BCN; aloha to that. Surprisingly, though it now reflected the tastes of those aggressive, disaffected, often sophomoric males it was trying to attract, ’BCN’S grittier image still managed to generate a windfall at the bank. The Boston Herald peeled back the image in May 2000: “WBCN is a master of illusion. It pretends to be a rebellious upstart and enjoys massive street credibility. But in reality it’s a slick, carefully programmed machine that enjoys impressive ratings and sells ad rates that are the envy of corporate radio.” The article revealed that only sister station WBZ-AM grossed more revenue locally, with ’BCN’S take in 1998 (the most recent numbers available at the time) at a whopping $29.2 million. “What a remarkable paradox. The station that plays cutting-edge rock with over-the-top, potty-mouthed personalities rakes in more cash than any other music signal.” This occurred despite the fact that, as the Herald also mentioned, WAAF beat WBCN with men eighteen to thirty-
four in every day part except Howard Stern in the winter 2000 Arbitron ratings. “We kept growing the revenue, and the challenge was to continue finding ways to do that,” Tony Berardini acknowledged. The obvious dividend on ’BCN was still Howard Stern, whose ratings were, in a word, untouchable. “At one point,” the general manager continued in amazement, “we were selling [select] spots on his show for $25,000 apiece. We were getting television rates; that was just insane.”
Even though trash-talking, shock-jocking rants from Howard Stern, Nik Carter, and Opie and Anthony now dominated WBCN’S image, the beating heart of the station was still the music. Juanita remembered one of her favorite moments at the station, which occurred in July 1997:
Joey Ramone was in the studio, guest DJ for “Nocturnal Emissions” on a Sunday night, and Albert O was operating the board for him.” I came in to do the local music show, “Boston Emissions,” right after that. Albert said, “It might go a little late.” I said, “We better check with Oedipus,” so I called him. He told me, “Let Joey go for as long as he wants.”
“Uh, okay. What if it’s a really long time?”
“He can play records for as long as he wants.”
“All right.” So, Albert left, and it was just Joey Ramone and me in the studio; he was in the guest chair, and I was behind the board cueing up his albums. I had a local band that was coming in for an interview on “Boston Emissions”; they got there and were just, “Omigod! It’s Joey Ramone.” So Joey ended up interviewing the band with me on the radio. It was surreal! After that, I said, “Do you want to keep playing music?” He said, “Yeah!” We went on like that for five hours . . . until three in the morning!
Adding his time with Juanita to the two-hour portion with Albert O, the lead singer of the Ramones had put in nearly a full workday on the air. But the privilege of “hijacking” the station had been extended out of loyalty. Considering how long Joey had known Oedipus and had been coming up to ’BCN from New York, he was thought of as part of the radio station’s family. So, in this visit, which would be just a handful of years before his death from lymphoma in 2001, Joey Ramone didn’t show up out of record company obligation or mandate; he was just having fun, “working the counter” at a “family business” that he loved.