Radio Free Boston (18 page)

“[Shannon] looked at me and said, ‘Matt Siegel, how the hell are you?' I was amazed. ‘You know me?' He said, ‘I've been following your career.' I said back to him, ‘I don't have a career; what are you following?'” When Shannon invited Siegel out to lunch, the
DJ
was floored: “I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone; my luck was finally turning.”

“We were having lunch,” Shannon remembered, “I was talking and watching him, and he was
really
funny. Finally I said, ‘How would you like to do mornings on
WBCN
?' He looked at me like I was the craziest person he'd ever met in his whole life.”

“[Shannon] said, ‘I can give you a job today. How's $18,500?' I went, ‘Uhhh, great!'” In moments, the unknown Matt Siegel became
WBCN'S
new morning drive announcer. However, this tale of perfect timing from mid-1977 was not quite over, as Siegel related: “The last part of the story is that three weeks later, Bob Shannon was gone. Gone! You want to talk about luck?”

“I was reasonably smart [about how to fix '
BCN
] when I walked into that situation, but I was in over my head emotionally,” Bob Shannon confessed. “I was always the outsider, working long hours, alone—this red-headed, bearded asshole from Texas.”

“Bob actually did a lot of good things for the station,” Tommy Hadges admitted. “Whatever animosity existed was just a general unease of having somebody from the outside make all these changes; he wasn't considered part of the '
BCN
family.” When Shannon got a job offer for more money back in Dallas, he tendered his resignation. But just before climbing into his escape pod, he completed two more significant hirings, the first being Tracy Roach, a Brown University student and veteran of the campus radio station,
WBRU-FM
. The new jock started working weekends even before her graduation, becoming the youngest member of the
WBCN
air staff, and then bounced around as a full-timer before settling into early evenings.
Roach had no experience with
WBCN'S
rich counterculture heritage, having only been thirteen years old when Joe Rogers dropped the needle on Frank Zappa back in '68. She told
Record World
magazine in 1978, “Danny Schechter did an enormous retrospective on the great and glorious past at '
BCN
, which I surely have a lot of respect for. But those days are over. There are new things to be done now.” As Roach settled into her job, Klee Dobra approved the deal to entice Jerry Goodwin from
WCOZ
. Then, as the ink on Goodwin's contract dried, Bob Shannon disappeared. While his controversial six-month tenancy proved to be critical to ensuring '
BCN'S
future, within a few years, the young Texan's presence would be all but forgotten.

In the summer of 1977, Tommy Hadges stepped in as Shannon's replacement. Although he'd stay less than a year, he was most proud of hiring three significant employees who were destined to shape and guide the station for years to come. The new program director agreed with his predecessor that the playlist needed to be focused and consistent from shift to shift but also believed that some degree of openness had to remain. Staying in touch with the latest artists and the newest trends in music was necessary to serve this latter goal. Hadges remembered asking the staff, “What is this alternative stuff coming out?” He referred to the punk movement building on both sides of the Atlantic, with Boston being one of the point markets for the edgy style. “My roots were folk-rock, so I figured we needed to have a guy on staff who at least had an idea of what was going on, because it was definitely a different scene.” As it turned out, “that guy” already worked for Hadges, writing and producing his one-minute nightlife reports for
WBCN
. Oedipus had been very active in the two years since he'd been brought on board by Charles Laquidara, not making a whole lot of money but diving deeply into the city's developing rock and roll culture. Oedipus explained,

There was a different kind of attitude; songs were passionate and intense. There was no possibility of sitting down to this music. We didn't have time for all those guitar and drum solos! A scene developed with unique looks and black leather jackets. I'd be walking old Beacon Hill with the most intense purple or red hair you could imagine—just flaming! It's nothing today, but back then, no one did it. Plus, I had these big red Elton John–kinda glasses. But it was supposed to be expressive. Just like the hippies with their long hair in the sixties and seventies, this was another statement: you stood apart.

I thought this music should be played [on the air], and it never would be on '
BCN
. Tom Couch told me the
MIT
station,
WTBS
, accepted community volunteers to do programs, so I went down and volunteered—which I was certainly used to doing!

Tommy Hadges,
WBCN'S
new program director, at the Prudential Studios. Photo by Don Sanford.

The radio host welcomed nearly every important up-and-coming rock and roll band to
WTBS'S
sweltering basement studio: the Ramones, the Damned, the Jam, the Talking Heads, and dozens more. When a significant number of listeners mentioned Oedipus's show, “The Demi-Monde,” in their Arbitron ratings responses, Tommy Hadges was mightily impressed; he quickly promoted the pink-haired punk into his own weekend overnight shift at
WBCN
. In 1998, Oedipus recounted the experience of his first show to
Virtually Alternative
magazine: “I was so nervous I stood the entire shift. I started with Willie Alexander, segued into the Clash, and played punk rock all night long. To my amazement, they didn't fire me, which is what I expected. That was going to be my statement. Instead they kept me on midnight to six.”

Hadges's next mission was to convince his old friend, Charles Laquidara,
to return to
WBCN
after nearly two years in exile. The ex-
DJ'S
attitude typified the very rebellion that had fueled '
BCN'S
presence in the past, and his zaniness inspired a spirit of weirdness and humor that always made the station anything but ordinary. “I went to drag him back,” Hadges chuckled. Laquidara, on a steady diet of cocaine, isolation in the woody Massachusetts suburb of Stowe, and deepening introversion, put up stiff resistance. “He was completely happy; it was quite an emotional thing to convince him that he was wasting his life away.” But Hadges finally prevailed on Laquidara to, at least, meet with Klee Dobra to discuss the idea.

“We were all in a room together,” Laquidara recalled, “and I was not serious about coming back. So, I just started throwing out these outrageous numbers . . . and they kept saying ‘yes.' Then I went to the bathroom, did a couple sniffs of cocaine, came back and said, ‘It's got to be tax-free!' They offered me a tremendous amount of money, and I said, ‘My ratings weren't even that good before I left.' And Tommy said, ‘Yeah, but you're a motivator; the station is just dying. We need some pizzazz, and you can do that.'” Laquidara signed back on once Hadges and Dobra agreed to his additional demands: “I got a contract they couldn't break: I asked for eight weeks [of] vacation; I said, ‘No military ads.' I also said I didn't want to use my real name. I had such a great last show; I didn't want to keep coming back.” So, Charles Laquidara returned to the air waves of '
BCN
at the end of '77, doing a weekend show as Charles Faux Pas Bidet. “That only lasted two days; I changed it to Lowell Pinkham, a guy in my school.” Still, the ideal pseudonym eluded him. Laquidara mentioned the nerdy Pinkham to a friend of his, who responded, “We had a guy like that; his name was Duane Glasscock.” Charles loved it. “But I needed something in the middle. D.I.G. . . . dig? Duane Ingalls Glasscock! That was it! He'll talk with a Boston accent and be a guy that exposes all the hypocrisies around him.” Laquidara lurked behind his new character much like he'd hidden himself behind the mounds of coke. Eventually, though, enough of the old self-assurance returned that he was persuaded to return to weekday mornings as himself, and D.I.G. was put on a shelf.

However, Duane would rise again. The mysterious alter ego, known as Laquidara's teenage “Six Dollar Clone” (as opposed to the “Six Million Dollar Man”), allowed the
DJ
to indulge his passion for acting, Duane emerging for the occasional fill-in show and a more frequent Saturday midday shift.
WBCN'S
future music director and producer Marc Miller
attested, “He would not respond to the name Charles on Saturdays, only the name Duane. That was really nuts!” Glasscock was destined to be fired several times but, like a cockroach, always popped up again, shouting his trademark “Hello, Rangoon!” to announce each return. Even though the shows were organized affairs with prerecorded bits and routines from '
BCN'S
inventive production staff, Duane's ad-lib style and
ADHD
personality, along with his (supposed) amateur ability, resulted in a true free-form pandemonium. Duane traveled to places that even his extroverted alter ego wouldn't touch; and the show always championed some specific cause or goal, like ousting Mayor Kevin White from office, giving away a dinner with the Stones (not the band, but a local couple), or taking over '
BCN
to force management's hand in giving the clone more radio time.

In one memorable Duane segment, the excitable host became agitated with Arbitron, as Charlie Kendall, who would replace Tommy Hadges in the program director chair, recalled: “Duane got on the radio and said, ‘We just got the ratings back and they say we have no listeners! Let's prove to them we do. I want you all to send a bag of shit to Arbitron!' I was listening and I go, ‘Did he just say that?' Yes he did! And he said it again and again.”

“Duane told them, ‘Make sure you put it in plastic bags because you don't want the postman knowing,'” Laquidara clarified (referring to himself in third person). “He gave out the exact address of Arbitron in Beltsville, Maryland,
every fifteen minutes
.”

“About two, three days later, I get a call from a friend of mine who works at Arbitron,” Kendall resumed. “He said that they had gotten 14 bags of shit [in the mail] and would I happen to know anything about it. I said, ‘Uh, gee, no.' He said, ‘Look, you've got to stop this from happening anymore.' So, I had to tell the general manager.” Laquidara recalled,

Monday came and I was doing my show. Klee Dobra popped open the studio door and said, “I'd like to see you after your show.” So I went to his office and he was sitting in there with this huge cup of steaming coffee, and he was stirring it with his finger! “Uh-oh.”

He said, “Charles is the consummate radio announcer; he is a professional. But Duane Glasscock is a
FUCKING IDIOT
! And he's fucking over! He's never to step foot in this station again! If we lose our license over that asshole, there's going to be hell to pay!”

“Klee, you can't do that. Duane has huge ratings; he has a huge cult following . . .”

“Stop! You're talking about him like he's another person!”

“But you just fired
him
, and kept
me
!” Anyway, Duane was blown off the air for three or four weeks, but by popular demand, he was back.

Duane Ingalls Glasscock, the Six Dollar Clone, would eventually die, but it didn't happen until 1989. A D.I.G. official armband of mourning. From author's collection.

With Charles on board again and the bespectacled Oedipus rocking out, Tommy Hadges's third major hire, in March 1978, was David Bieber, the promotional maestro who had occasionally worked with
WBCN
as a freelancer in the past. “'
BCN
never had any budget or money for marketing and advertising,” Bieber said. “But Tommy and Klee convinced Mitch Hastings that it was opportune to have a kind of resurgence.” With an actual budget in his hand, the new hire began flooding the local, mostly print, media with
WBCN'S
presence. He not only created ads that focused attention on the heritage that the station had justifiably earned but also heightened awareness of the rebuilt and recharged jock lineup. The station now began to grapple with its radio rival in earnest. Instead of being locked into the self-absorption that had crippled it earlier, '
BCN
now understood the politics and practices of competition and how to do “underground radio” in the brave, new world around it.