Radio Free Boston

by Carter Alan

  Moments like these, when a ’BCN DJ propped open a creative window for an artist, letting convention slide despite the rules or the logic of commerce, had been one of the essential ingredients of WBCN since the beginning. Respecting the artist and the music was always part of the mission.

  Success bought freedom, but this “family business” couldn’t stave off the outside world forever, especially when challenged by its own company. In September 1999, Mel Karmazin, CEO of Infinity and CBS, announced that the already-enormous corporation would be merging with another media giant, Viacom, under the firm (some said, ruthless), guiding hand of seventy-six-year-old Sumner Redstone. Karmazin first proposed buying Viacom, but when Redstone refused, he suggested that Viacom acquire CBS in a complicated merger arrangement. By the time the deal was finalized, then approved by Washington, the arrangement cost Viacom $39.8 billion, one of the largest media transactions on record. The New York Times reported that the merger would create a new company that “makes, distributes and broadcasts television programming, blankets the nation with radio stations and billboard advertising and owns and operates amusement parks.” With Karmazin and Redstone as CO-CEOS of Viacom, and Karmazin retaining his status as president of Infinity, the media conglomerate now included, according to the Times, Infinity’s 160 radio stations, the CBS television network, CBS Sports, Internet properties like cbs.com and marketwatch.com, the country music networks CMT and TNN, MTV, Nickelodeon, Showtime, Comedy Central, Sundance Channel, Paramount Studios, five regional amusement parks through Paramount Parks, 6,400 Blockbuster stores, the Simon & Schuster publishing giant, and billboard advertising through TDI Worldwide and Outdoor Systems. Clearly, this enormous corporate galaxy was light years removed from the tiny world in which Ray Riepen had launched his rock and roll experiment back in 1968. WBCN, with its questing rabble of radio pioneers who had once vowed to “Kill Ugly Radio” in Boston (and did, for decades), was now just another point of light in Viacom’s vast Milky Way.

  Something that went on that long and involved so many talented people is never going to truly go away. So, while ’BCN may be silent, the heart of it is still beating. It’s going to stay with people for a long time. HARDY

  SHINE ON

  YOU CRAZY

  DIAMOND

  Opie and Anthony’s brand of offensive radio gumbo thrived in New York City, proving that mediocre taste amongst radio listeners wasn’t necessarily exclusive to the Boston market. Because of this success, and the previous gold that Infinity had mined by syndicating Howard Stern’s show into multiple markets, CBS pursued a similar deal for O & A’s afternoon show. Tony Berardini and Oedipus were now presented with a situation quite similar to the one that had occurred when Stern bumped Charles Laquidara off his longtime morning perch. If they didn’t pick up Opie and Anthony’s option in Boston, the offer would be made to someone else in the city. “And who was the station going to be?” Berardini posed. “WAAF; the station they started off with.” Of course, everyone in the loop was all too aware of what had happened when the ignoble tag team worked for that competitor three years earlier. Now faced with another catch-22 decision, Oedipus wrestled with his conscience and his duty. “It was awful,” he would say ten years later. “That was the beginning of the end. Radio had ceased to be what I liked, and what I envisioned it to be about in the first place.” Nevertheless, the program director added O & A’s show onto the ’BCN airwaves. Oedipus conceded that he did what he had to do to guard what was left at the station: “It was a collective decision, and I agreed to it as a way to protect my staff. The station was so revenue oriented by then that it was a matter of maintaining jobs.” Yes, the station was certainly revenue oriented: Boston magazine reported that WBCN’S take in 2000 was up to $38 million, only bested in the market by WBZ-AM.

  “Now, all of a sudden,” Berardini pointed out, “we had the two most important day parts on the radio station: morning and afternoon drive, as talk [shows] with Howard Stern and Opie and Anthony; yet we still wanted to be [known as] a music station!”

  “With two talk shows and the Patriots, our music image was smoke and mirrors,” Oedipus admitted. His second-in-command, Steve Strick, said, “I had to justify to the record labels why we were still relevant, and I had to do it every day. When you deemphasize the music, it has a huge effect; your clout with the labels disappears.” O & A’s arrival also disrupted the entire DJ lineup, bouncing Nik Carter to the midday slot, Bill Abbate to weekday overnights, and Albert O out of his full-time shift. Despite all that turmoil and the “talk versus music” fallout, O & A’s show did deliver substantial numbers, ranking number 1 among men eighteen to fifty-four in its first ratings period.

  But Opie and Anthony’s simulcast show from Manhattan thrived in the afternoon slot at WBCN for little more than a year. The witless duo crossed the line again in August 2002 by broadcasting a segment in which a couple attempted sex in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, mere feet from worshippers observing the Holy Feast of the Assumption, initiating a massive public outcry and outrage in the Catholic Church. When the religious hierarchy brought the full weight of its political clout to bear, not only Infinity, but also the entire CBS/Viacom parent, suddenly became vulnerable. The company quickly pulled O & A from the airwaves, an action that appeared to appease the church but not the FCC, which slapped Viacom with massive fines for indecent radio content. While dealing with these legal issues, the company, worried that the offending pair could be hired away to work for any competition if they were fired, paid O & A the balance of their estimated $30 million contract to sit at home for two years and watch TV reruns. To many hardworking employees of Infinity, CBS Radio, and Viacom, this was seen as the ultimate insult as Opie and Anthony laughed all the way to the bank.

  Oedipus went back to ’BCN’S basic playbook, returning music to the mix. Nik Carter returned to the afternoon shift, retaining a good deal of the irreverence its former tenants had spewed but also restoring music to its prominent role. ’BCN also embarked on a nationwide hunt for a new midday DJ by holding live on-air auditions. Adam Chapman, known to his listeners as “Adam 12,” became one of the sixty applicants who traveled to ’BCN for their own tryout. He had begun his professional career as a part-timer at WFNX before leaving the market in 1999 to work full time for Clear Channel in New Mexico, but Chapman relished the idea of coming home to Boston. “Each [prospective] DJ had a sound clip on the website so people could listen to them and vote,” Adam 12 pointed out; “it was very interactive and way ahead of things at the time.” When the people’s choice turned out to be the former ’FNX jock, Oedipus concurred and ratified the vote. “I think the reason he hired me,” Adam 12 laughed, “was that I was the only person he didn’t have to train to say Gloucester or Worcester correctly!” WBCN’S newest DJ (and, incidentally, the last one Oedipus would hire) began his first official midday show on 24 February 2003. “My mom told me a story of when she was in high school. She would come home from school every day and tune in WRKO with Dale Dorman and all those Top 40 guys; then a friend turned her onto WBCN. Now, here I was working for that same station!”

  “There was a fraternal irreverence,” Adam 12 recalled of an institution that was about to turn thirty-five years old as a rock station. “I would see Oedipus riding up and down the hallways on his Razor scooter, talking to record reps through the earpiece on his phone!”

  “When Adam 12 was on ‘FNX, he taped me giggling on the air at ’BCN,” DJ Melissa remembered (she was renowned for her infectious tittering). He looped it on a tape and used it as a sound bed when he would speak at the mike. Then he became the midday DJ at ’BCN, and we had never met.” After Adam 12 encountered Melissa, politely offering up a hello and a compliment, the red-headed veteran purred back, “ ‘I didn’t know you were such a fan. If you want, you can turn on the mike and I’ll just giggle for you!’ He looked back, shocked that I remembered. ‘Oops!’ he said, all embarrassed. I walked away, ‘My work is done!’” she laughed. DJ Melissa would be par
t of the final puzzle piece to be rearranged in the post–O & A lineup as she finally won her full-time shift. Melissa Teper discovered an on-air chemistry with part-timer Deek (Derek Diedricksen) that impressed Oedipus, so he organized the two into an official team and gave them ’BCN’S evening shift in 2003.

  “I escorted winners to the 2002 Super Bowl,” Deek remembered. “We flew down to New Orleans and back in one day! We also went to the Playboy Mansion for a broadcast [promoting] Pete’s Wicked Ale. It was a pointless pissing away of money for them, but a lot of fun for us.”

  Figure 16.1 Adam 12 comes to WBCN in With 2003. WBCN going out of business in 2009, then WFNX sinking in 2012, this unlucky Boston jock has had, not one, but two horses shot out from under him. Photo by Janet King.

  “I was on that Playboy Mansion trip,” mentioned Bill Bracken, chief engineer at WBCN for six years, “but the real event was hiking with Deek up to the ‘H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D’ sign to hang a ’BCN banner! It was silly, because the letters were forty-feet high and our little banner wouldn’t even get noticed. We cut through people’s yards, didn’t know it was a national monument, and at some point we tripped an alarm because a voice came out of a hidden speaker saying something like, ‘You will be prosecuted if you proceed!’ We panicked and ran back down the hill!”

  “I got sent to interview Marilyn Manson in Lowell and he was huge at that point,” recalled Juanita. “I went with Bill Bracken and we were taken into this backstage area with black curtains, lit only by candles. Marilyn Manson was sitting there, all in white, with dark sunglasses on that he obviously didn’t need. I was terrified. But I gave him this present: an eight-foot-long rosary carved out of big chunks of wood. I hoped it would break the ice, and he loved it! We talked for forty, forty-five minutes . . . a long time.”

  “Coldplay played the River Rave,” DJ Melissa recalled. “They were huge in England but not known at all over here. The crowd was there to see Marilyn Manson and they were throwing shit at Coldplay onstage. Bill Abbate and I had to interview Chris Martin right after he got off and we were just trying to joke with him, laugh the whole thing off, but he was having no part of it. He was taking himself way too seriously. So, ha, ha, I suggested he go see a therapist . . .” She let the last word hang in the air for a couple seconds and then added sheepishly, “It was very awkward.”

  “I interviewed the Cure,” Nik Carter remarked. “At one point, Robert Smith was drinking a Sam Adams Cherry Wheat, and I said to him, ‘Hey Smitty? Where’s mine?’ And he just handed me the bottle. I looked at the bottle with his red lipstick all over it and I drank it down. That was the closest thing to a gay experience I ever had!”

  In July 2002, Infinity promoted Oedipus to vice president of alternative programming, overseeing WBCN and fifteen other top-market radio stations. However, the excitement of the appointment didn’t last. “I was not allowed to take risks; everything had to be vetted by corporate. Cutting costs and raising revenues was the mantra.” It’s no wonder that there was an increased degree of anxiety in the CBS/Viacom boardroom. With the worldwide recession of the early 2000s eating into profits for most businesses, companies cut where they could. Subsequently, the amount spent on radio advertising dwindled, and CBS, like all radio companies, hit hard times. Tony Berardini said, “In 2001, after 9/11, everything changed when the revenue in the marketplace was so drastically reduced.” Then it became worse: in 2002 the cost of actually doing business increased. “The Enron scandal sparked the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. What [the feds] were trying to do when that legislation was adopted was provide more transparency for public corporations, but what it meant was that you were constantly audited. Now, you had to provide a trail to track every one of your expenses, and all your revenue had to be accounted for meticulously.” The new law required increased accounting attention, which meant more accountants, sometimes to the detriment of other departments, which had their staffs reduced. Berardini continued, “I remember going up to CBS Radio Corporate, which was in the Viacom Building in New York; I walked out onto the floor and there were twenty or thirty offices and, perhaps, forty cubicles there. Of those, probably two or three were devoted to programming and a few more devoted to sales. The rest of it was all accounting people! Symbolically, it was indicative of how radio was changing at that point.”

  Meanwhile, enormous changes in technology began to affect how people bought or listened to their music and had a major impact, not only on WBCN, but also on every radio station in the country. “It was the era of the Internet onslaught, Napster, and downloading,” Nik Carter said. “I remember thinking that what happens between the songs is even more important, because now the listeners could get the music even before we did!”

  “We wanted to be the new-music station but get an audience too, and it was tough,” Steve Strick added. “The music was becoming portable and customizable to everybody [through] the Internet and the iPod; that had a huge impact on how people used radio. We were never able to get the gangbuster ratings we’d had, maybe, eight years or so previous to that.”

  “You had the radio competition taking a chunk, and now you had the ‘net’ and iPods coming in,” Berardini said. “That was coupled with the station’s need to try and keep big ratings, to keep growing the revenue. We were casting our net wider, but it wasn’t there; it had been chipped away.”

  “’AAF and ’FNX had both managed to carve out niches for themselves, [but] there wasn’t that same audience loyalty or energy revolving around our radio station as before,” Strick said. “It was difficult to keep generating the interest in what we were doing musically. The younger audience that we had hoped to bring up like we had always done previously was abandoning us in droves.”

  By 2004, Tony Berardini had asked to leave his position leading the efforts of CBS Radio/Infinity’s Boston radio cluster, particularly his role as general manager of WBCN and WZLX: he had had enough. The company, loath to lose his talents, however, retained the veteran to work in talent acquisition. No longer would Berardini have hands-on control of WBCN’S course, as he had for over twenty years. Now, Mark Hannon became the new general manager of the station, along with WZLX and WBMX. Meanwhile, in New York, despite achieving one of the most enviable positions in media as chief operating officer of Viacom, Mel Karmazin had become miserable after years of friction with the co-managing Viacom CEO, Sumner Redstone. With Karmazin’s departure in June ’04, rising as the CEO of Sirius Satellite Radio barely five months later, CBS lost its chief advocate for radio in the entire Viacom hierarchy. In WBCN’S first-floor office at 1265 Boylston Street, where Elvis Presley’s handsome ceramic face still gazed out at the Red Sox fans and the street urchins who ambled by, at least one member of that hierarchy grieved that his boss was moving on. “When Mel left the company,” Oedipus reflected, “it was obvious to me that my tenure was coming to an end. The new powers no longer understood what ’BCN stood for; they stifled individuality. Creativity became a carefully defined set of rules.” The porcelain bust took in its last impressions of Back Bay street life before the movers arrived with their boxes and packing tape; Elvis was about to leave the building.

  On 4 June 2004, both the Boston Globe and the Herald announced the inevitable, yet still astounding, news: Oedipus was stepping down after nearly thirty years at WBCN, the last twenty-three of them as program director. He would retain his VP stripes and continue to work for the Infinity/CBS national staff, while staying on at WBCN until a replacement arrived. Dean Johnson at the Herald interviewed Paul Heine, editor of the radio trade journal FMQB, who told him, “It’s the end of an era. Oedipus played a pivotal role in bringing punk rock and new wave to the airwaves. He’s one of the most colorful, controversial, outspoken, and influential program directors in the history of rock radio.”

  “I was downsized like so many others, but at least I was able to ‘retire’ from WBCN,” Oedipus later commented. “They asked me to continue my corporate position as VP of alternative programming, ostensibly out of respect for
my years building the company, [but] my input was too divisive. When I was finally released, I had become just an irritating number on a ledger.”

  “Oedipus left, and it sucked,” Juanita recalled. “I think we all felt it was coming because he wanted to do things that he wasn’t really able to do, and he didn’t like going through all those corporate channels. He lost the love of it.”

  “When he left, it was like somebody popped a balloon for a lot of us, certainly for me. A lot of the spirit was gone,” said Mark Hamilton, who had been hired by Oedipus four years earlier. The weekend, and soon-to-be evening, jock had come from WFNX and immediately bonded with his boss after telling him that, as a kid, he had listened to and taped the program director’s memorable night with Bradley Jay at the David Bowie concert in Sullivan Stadium back in 1983. “We were in his office. Oedipus said, ‘Check this out!’ He rifled through his file cabinet, found an envelope, pulled out a yellow napkin, unfolded it, and the cigarette butts were in the napkin.’” Hamilton stared at the seventeen-year-old Marlboro infused with rock star molecules. As a Bowie fanatic, he could appreciate its significance, even if most would think it was just plain weird. Hamilton lamented the departure of the one who hired him: “We all had a loyalty to Oedipus; he had taken care of his air staff, he always had your back.”

  Steve Strick, in his capacity as assistant program director, became the interim person in charge. Groomed by his former boss to be the successor, Strick hoped he’d be able to slide smoothly into the corner office and use the experience and skills acquired during his twenty-three years at WBCN to solve some of the station’s issues and usher it into a new era. But this was not to be. “When Oedipus announced his retirement, instead of me being offered the job, I was told that I was welcome to apply for it like everybody else.” The press release announcing the new hire came just five weeks later: Dave Wellington, the program director for Infinity-owned KXTE-FM in Las Vegas, would take over at WBCN on 2 August. “The day they made the decision, Mark Hannon took me to Starbucks around the corner and told me the bad news,” Strick recounted. “That was the most devastating thing to hear in my entire career. But he offered me a lot of money to stay around and be APD/MD [assistant program director/music director]; I had nowhere to go at that point, so I accepted the offer.” Hannon was particularly worried about the stampede of listeners away from WBCN after every Howard Stern show and how the station could recycle at least some of them back to its other programming. In Las Vegas, Wellington had been quite successful at solving this problem, as Rob Poole (his on-air handle being “Hardy”), who worked with the program director for six years and would soon be hired at ’BCN, explained: “KXTE was a flamethrower of an alternative radio station. We played what we wanted, we had Stern on in the mornings, and we had monster ratings; I think we were only number 2 to a country station.”