Radio Free Boston

by Carter Alan

  “Who was this person coming in?” Mark Hamilton wondered. “People in Boston don’t like a lot of change. Who was this guy to come in and tell us how to run ‘The Rock of Boston’? Has he even been to Boston? Everybody was deflated.” When Wellington moved into 1265 Boylston Street, one of his first acts was to connect with Strick, who remembered, “He took me out for a beer and we worked together pretty well, but it wasn’t the same. He didn’t know the market; that’s why they wanted me to stick around. But I was powerless, and I realized pretty quickly that he was powerless too. They were calling the shots from New York.”

  “He had big shoes to fill, and I kind of felt sorry for him,” Juanita mused. “But he did cancel ‘Nocturnal Emissions,’ and we were really bummed about that. His reasoning was, ‘Why are you doing two hours of music programming that has nothing to do with the rest of the week?’ Uh, ‘cause it’s cool? But, I’ll always love him because he eventually gave me a full-time shift.”

  The Oedipus dynasty comes to an end. The program director (on the left) declares peace with Dave Grohl. Courtesy of WBCN.

  “I know when somebody comes in, they want to put their own stamp on things,” Hamilton said, “so the new-music show went, then the River Rave, then the Christmas Rave.”

  Strick added, “The brand name of WBCN, the history of the station, didn’t seem to be important anymore.”

  WBCN ends the River Rave series and begins “Band Camp.” New arrival Hardy chats up Perry Farrell with engineer Bill Bracken in the background. Courtesy of WBCN.

  WBCN had already stepped away from heavily playing the “nu metal” of Korn and Limp Bizkit, adding some classic material like Guns N’ Roses and Led Zeppelin back in the mix. With Wellington’s arrival, that process continued; plus, the era of encouraging DJS to perfect their fast-talking, attitude-driven raps between songs formally ended. Now the on-air approach seesawed the other way, as Hamilton confirmed: “The station became music intensive again, to the extreme of almost no talk. At one point we were doing two fifteen-second and one thirty-second break per hour.” With ’BCN adopting Wellington’s “less is more” strategy, the odd person out (other than the untouchable Howard Stern) was the personality-intense afternoon guy, Nik Carter. “There was a new program director and a new general manager; plus, I was making a healthy salary for the time,” said Carter. “I knew my days were numbered.” In January 2005, CBS Radio notified the jock that the company would not be renewing his contract. The split, though disappointing to Carter, worked out cordially enough; he used company connections to find his next job elsewhere under the CBS umbrella. Some of the other ’BCN jocks would also move on at this time: DJ Melissa departed by choice in November ’04 for a radio job in LA, and her former partner in crime, Deek, was ousted just six months later. In April 2005, CBS/Viacom decided to consolidate the physical location of its Boston radio properties. WBCN left its home of twenty-five years in the “crime-free Fenway” and moved to 83 Leo Birmingham Parkway in Brighton, where sister station WODS-FM had already been based for a few years. “The ’BCN move was pretty stressful,” acknowledged Bill Bracken, who masterminded the operation. “I lost fifteen pounds during the process.” Actual construction of the spacious air studio (the former site of the building’s boiler) and three production studios in the basement took four months, and the usable space for the entire station doubled to fourteen thousand square feet. The move allowed Bracken to upgrade ’BCN’S eighties-era equipment and also uncovered bits of the station’s past as the Fenway location was dismantled. Deek, whose final days at the station were counting down rapidly by this point, said, “When they cleared out ’BCN on Boylston Street, there was this beautiful Audubon book on birds that was being thrown out. It said, ‘Property of Charles Laquidara’ in it. [I] never met him, actually, but I’ve had his book on my shelf ever since.” Reaction to WBCN’S new home was mixed. “The new studios were like walking into a dentist office: no bumper stickers on the walls and a notice not to hang stuff up on the walls,” Deek complained. “The old place had been kind of like an ‘Our Gang’ of rock; it was beaten, worn in, and threadbare. If you put a black light on that couch in there, you didn’t want to know what you’d find! That’s what a rock station should be.”

  “It was a very sterile environment,” Juanita concurred; then she brightened and remembered, “but it was great to finally find a place to park during Red Sox games!”

  It’s easy to blame the immediate people in charge, Dave Wellington and Mark Hannon, for ’BCN’S downward spiral after the move. But clearly the station had lost its bearings and wandered off course years earlier. Tony Berardini looked back all the way to 1996 for a signpost: “Stern going on in the mornings was the point of no return. One decision led us down the path that led to all the other ones. We kept going down that road [and it] led to the demise of ’BCN eventually.” The arrival of Stern forever changed the complexion of WBCN, and the swapping of the shock-jock with Charles Laquidara marked an abandonment of the station’s character for many a longtime listener. After that point, there were always two ’BCNs: the rude and often-insulting talk-fest version and the musical side that connected directly to the station’s legacy. As fractured a diamond as it was, ’BCN still made money for the company, but the clock was ticking.

  Soon after Wellington arrived, Stern announced he was abandoning the terrestrial airwaves to follow his former boss, Mel Karmazin, to Sirius. In October ‘04, the shock-jock revealed that his final show for CBS would be in December 2005. “So, then, Howard Stern was on the air for more than a year,” Hardy spat, “prompting people, every day, to switch over to satellite radio because that’s where he was going!” This disheartening unfaithfulness to his CBS coworkers was effective: after the Stern show became a monthslong commercial for his future radio home, the number of Sirius subscribers rocketed from 600,000 to 2.2 million.

  “When Howard left and went to Sirius,” Steve Strick said, “we lost one of the most compelling reasons for people to tune in WBCN. Those listeners were gone.” That story played out on CBS affiliates coast to coast, all of whom would experience a loss of ratings and revenue as Stern’s estimated twelve million daily listeners either struggled to find new morning entertainment or shelled out $12.95 per month to follow him to satellite radio.

  CBS weighed its options during Stern’s protracted fourteen-month goodbye, and one of them led to former Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth. With his performing career, at the time, in the rearview mirror, Roth entertained the idea of being a syndicated radio host. He had the rapid-fire wit and reputation necessary, so serious talks with CBS advanced rapidly. The potential radio hire was slotted in to do an on-air audition, which happened at sister station WZLX in March 2005 during a week of morning shows. Chachi Loprete, now promotions director for both WBCN and WZLX, struggled with Roth during the weeklong audition:

  I found him very hard to work with, and that’s being kind! I got requests from his assistant: “David Lee wants the studio decked out like he’s at the beach [with] palm trees, real ones.” He wanted a red carpet going into the studio with satin stanchions, like the ones at the movie theaters. He wanted a table set up outside the studio with all kinds of breakfast food on it. I said, “Okay, what does he want to eat?”

  “No, no. It’s not to eat,” the guy says. “It gets him in the mindset of breakfast and mornings. He wants Pop-Tarts®, he wants eggs, frozen waffles, McDonald’s breakfast; put them all on the table.” So the food sat out there, and nobody could touch it. One morning after his show, he was supposed to meet all the sales people in the conference room; they were all waiting in there. He came to my office and said, “I’m not going down to the conference room. I’m leaving.”

  “Uh, okay . . .”

  “I don’t go into conference rooms; I’m not meeting anybody.” Then he turned and walked out. He did do an event at the Paradise Theater for us where he came out and met people, but then he wouldn’t sign anything; not even a guitar for charity. />
  Mark Hannon later told Joanna Weiss at the Boston Globe that the WZLX tryout “was raw Dave. It was no guidance, no direction, no producers, no guests, no music. Everyone who listened to that said, ‘Imagine this guy in a setting where he’s going to be surrounded by great radio people.’” But the consensus among the WZLX DJS, including myself, was that David Lee Roth was a born loner, surrounded by acres of ego; he would never succeed as a morning show host unless he learned how to operate as part of a team. Nevertheless, CBS Radio announced that on 3 January 2006, Van Halen’s former singer would begin broadcasting from New York as the new morning show host for WBCN, along with six other stations. Roth told the Boston Globe, “ ‘I’m like a tomahawk missile right in the Cheerios.” When the big day arrived, Juanita had set her alarm clock: “I loved DLR; I wanted to hear that historic moment. I listened to the first break and it was . . . crazy! It went on and on and on; what was he talking about? ‘This is going somewhere, right?’ I knew right then that it wasn’t going to go well.”

  “It’s a tough job [being a morning show host],” said Hardy. “It’s a craft; you can’t just walk in.” Five weeks after Roth’s debut, the Boston Herald confirmed that the program was in trouble: “David Lee Roth’s radio days are numbered. Critics pan him. His ratings are horrendous. He’s difficult to work with and on air he’s dared his CBS bosses to fire him.” The story also revealed that WBCN’S morning ratings had plummeted from first place to twelfth.

  Rumors began swirling that CBS was in secret talks with Opie and Anthony, the tarnished white knights, to replace the failing morning show. It turned out to be true: the company canned David Lee Roth, paying out the remainder of a reported $4 million deal to unload the rock star, and announced a unique arrangement with O & A, who were happily working at premium salary levels for XM Satellite radio. XM would license a three-hour segment of the duo’s show to CBS, which would simulcast it on terrestrial radio and edit out any offensive sections. When O & A returned to the airwaves of CBS Radio in April ’06, one of the duo’s first guests was the chairman of CBS Radio Joel Hollander, who underscored the company’s priorities by mandating simply, ‘Get me ratings. That’s it.’”

  “There were decisions made, like David Lee Roth, that were so monumentally catastrophic that any chance the station had of surviving was killed,” Steve Strick said. By that time, the veteran BCN jock, newsman, and programmer had already exited, leaving the station for a post at Radio and Records magazine in Los Angeles. Wellington promoted overnight jock Dan O’Brien from sister station WBMX to replace Strick as music director. Then, in June ’06, Wellington brought in a new afternoon tag team that Tony Berardini (in his new role as talent head hunter) had located: Fred Toucher and Rich Shertenlieb, whose show emulated O & A’s in its coarse style and subject matter.

  “After Howard left, the Roth experiment, and the change in the mornings to O & A, consistency was the problem,” Hardy observed. “Everybody used to know that Charles was on six to ten in the morning or that Chuck Nowlin was on WZLX in the afternoon. You knew they were on at the same time, at the same station, for years. That consistency breeds the familiarity, and familiarity breeds the partiality, and that gives you your ratings. At ’BCN [in its final years], there was never anything in place for long enough to give out a real sense of what the station was supposed to be.”

  “I disliked how rigid and bland it was getting,” added Mark Hamilton. “The creative brushstrokes attempted were not the first times anybody else had done them; there just wasn’t a lot of risk taking.”

  “[Dave Wellington] took a machete to the music library and cut it in half,” moaned Adam 12, “plus the music became sooooo . . . vanilla.” By the late summer of ’07, Shred had had enough; the ’BCN veteran exited after twenty years on the air and managing thirteen Rock ’n’ Roll Rumbles. On his way out the door, Shred gave Wellington a parting shot: “I sent an e-mail on a Sunday and basically told him to ‘f’ himself. It was an open letter; I cc’d everybody. I torched it, no doubt about that! But then, Wellington was let go, not six months later.”

  Wellington, however, was not without his successes. Juanita pointed out, “He was the one that brought Toucher and Rich to ’BCN and that show was a huge success.” Adam 12 had to agree: “They were responsible for ’BCN lasting another two years. I think corporate would have axed the station if they hadn’t shown up.” Despite the building ratings of the new afternoon team, the sales reports told a grimmer tale. Radio revenue, in general, had taken a huge hit in the post-9/11 advertising world; even so, ’BCN was the number 3 earner in town, taking in $26.5 million in 2005, the last year of Howard Stern’s tenure. But twelve months later, with the shock-jock’s departure, that figure had plummeted to $18 million, dropping the station into seventh place. In 2007, despite all attempts by management to correct its course, WBCN’S annual take fell nearly another half-million dollars. That number sealed Wellington’s fate as he departed amicably in June 2008.

  Just ten days later, the keys to WBCN were handed to Mike Thomas, program director at WZLX, who now had the duty of helming both stations suddenly thrust upon him. That month, the River Rave returned after a four-year absence, and the Christmas Rave would make a comeback as well. These attempts at a local reconnection continued when Opie and Anthony’s syndicated show was dropped at ’BCN in December. Toucher and Rich moved into morning drive, Hardy occupied the afternoons, and Dan O’Brien filled a 7:00 p.m. to midnight slot with music. Amidst the changes and cost reductions, WBCN’S 2008 revenue numbers came in, but the news was still not promising and not without consequence. With a nearly $2.5 million dollar drop from its previous year, total earnings at the once-mighty WBCN were now being surpassed by WZLX, which had always earned less.

  WBCN drive time is all talk: Opie and Anthony meet Toucher and Rich. (From left to right) Rich, Opie, Anthony, Toucher (with sidekick Crash on the right). Photo by Janet King.

  “A great thing that Wellington did do before he left was inviting Charles Laquidara to come back in March 2008 for ’BCN’S fortieth birthday,” Adam 12 recounted. “I didn’t know Charles at all, and having him on was incredible; I was so flattered. He got to pick his own songs, and he sent the last one out to me; it was ‘The Last DJ,’ by Tom Petty.” Laquidara had most of the songs he wanted to play stored in his computer and plugged the laptop into the control room board. “It was funny how it ended,” Adam continued, “because he completely forgot he was playing Petty. He unplugged his computer and the song just stopped, right in the middle of ‘The Last DJ.’ Silence. Was it a foreshadowing of things to come? I guess so.”

  Figure 16.5 Hardy (on the right) backstage at the Boston Garden with Lars Ulrich of Metallica, 18 January 2009. Photo by Rich Shertenlieb.

  “The rumors had been around since Howard Stern was getting ready to leave,” Hardy said.

  “Even so,” added Juanita, “we were still shocked when it actually happened.”

  “Suddenly, one day, some workers came around and took the WBCN letters, stenciled on all the windows and doors, off the glass,” Hardy said. “They replaced them with ‘CBS Radio.’”

  In July 2009, CBS announced that the company would be closing down WBCN on 13 August. Depending on whom you talked to, WBCN’S “American Revolution” had ended for them in a hundred different possible places during the previous four decades, but now it was officially being laid to rest. “It was almost a mercy killing,” Nik Carter observed. “There was def-nitely a sense of, you tuned in and you didn’t know what you were going to get. As much as that might sound inviting, people are creatures of habit and they go for certain things for certain reasons. Unless you have a really well-defined reason for being there, what’s the point?”

  “It was really like your local library closing,” Neal Robert said. “If you asked people when the last time they listened to WBCN was, most would say, ‘Well, I don’t listen to it.’

  ‘But are you sad it’s closing?’

  ‘What!? They’r
e closing ’BCN?’ It had gone from being a necessity to being an afterthought.”

  In a somewhat complicated arrangement, ’BCN would give up its frequency of 104.1 to WBMX-FM, the CBS station at 98.5, giving “MIX” a much better signal in the Boston area. Launching from the same studios as the defunct WBCN would be a brand-new sports talk station dubbed “The Sports Hub,” at WBMX’S old frequency of 98.5. Designed as an FM competitor to long-standing Boston sports station WEEI-AM, “The Sports Hub” (official call letters WBZ-FM) built on the benefits of WBCN’S long association with the three-time Super Bowl–winning Patriots. Toucher and Rich, already a proven success, would continue their run in morning drive with an added emphasis on sports commentary and humor.