Radio Free Boston (26 page)

“Tony took me out to a restaurant to ask me and I totally did not expect it,” Oedipus recalled with a smile. “Why me? I was the black sheep!” He pondered through dinner but finally accepted the job and delighted his boss. “Tony said, ‘Let's celebrate with some Sambuca!'”

“I ordered us two Sambucas with the beans and all, because I'm Italian, right?” Berardini recalled. “I lit the drinks on fire; we did a little toast and I said, ‘Blow out the flame before you drink it.'”

“But when I blew mine out, I blew too hard and it went all over Tony—burning!” Oedipus recounted, laughing. “It was very funny.”

“I look up and I saw a wave of fire coming at me! Thank God it went out. I said, ‘Great, I offer you a job and you try to immolate me!'”

The new general manager and program director had barely accepted their congratulations before turning to face the surprising reality of
WCOZ'S
second coming. It was entirely unexpected, since
WBCN
had wrestled its competitor to the ground immediately before and after the strike. In the
spring of 1980, '
BCN
led in listeners with a 6.2 share to '
COZ'S
4.1. But by that fall's rating period, which ended in December, the month of John Lennon's murder, a dramatic flip-flop had occurred as '
BCN'S
share sagged to a 4.2 and
WCOZ
soared to more than double that with a 9.1. Clearly a great change had occurred at “94 and a half.” When Tommy Hadges decided to move on from
WCOZ
in the summer of 1980, the suits at Blair replaced him with a young programmer out of Phoenix named John Sebastian. During his tenure at KUPD-FM, he had transformed the station from a Top 40 outlet into a full-on rock station. “That was the first station where I used the moniker ‘Kick-Ass Rock and Roll,'” Sebastian recalled. The new format specialized in a concentration of rock hits, rotated relentlessly in Top 40 style, without a great deal of sympathy for the eclectic fringes that
WBCN
so specialized in.

WBCN'S
new location next to Fenway Park at 1265 Boylston Street. The staff greets Yes guitarist Trevor Rabin. Courtesy of
WBCN
.

“When ‘Kick-Ass' radio signed on at '
COZ
, we took a huge hit,” Tony Berardini admitted. “It was two hundred rock songs played over and over and over and over again.” Sebastian's selections included many mainstream, “meat and potatoes” bands that his heritage competitor largely avoided, like REO Speedwagon, Rush, and Kansas, along with a steady diet of cornerstone rock from Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, The Who, and Jimi Hendrix. He also chose unknown talent if the music sounded right for his format, creating massive hits for newcomers Shooting Star, the Tarney Spencer Band, and Sheriff.

“It pounds home the message 24 hours a day with an endless parade of slogans: ‘The Rock 'n' Roll Mother.' ‘THE Led Zeppelin station in Boston.' ‘No Disco.' And the truly hard-sell: ‘All Rock 'n' Roll—no B.S.,'” the
Hartford Courant
reported in 1981. Sebastian ignored criticism and kept up the onslaught. The combination of rock hits with
WCOZ'S
flashy television, billboard, and print ads swept
WBCN
up in a wave it could not counter. Sebastian offered, “In my opinion, '
BCN
believed their press too much, thought they could get away with playing almost anything. They didn't take what I was doing seriously, [so] we caught them unaware.”

“We didn't know the significance of '
COZ
at that point,” Charles Laquidara said. “We just knew that something was wrong.” It got worse: in the summer 1981 rating period, “Kick-Ass Rock and Roll” stomped all the way up to an extraordinary 12.6 share, while body slamming '
BCN
into the mat with a lowly 4.6.

“It was very clear that if we didn't turn it around, the station would cease to exist,” Oedipus stated.

Mike Wiener and Gerry Carrus, who had been involved in plenty of radio battles before this, advised their new general manager and program director to do some music research. Berardini pointed out, “It was the first time that research was ever used at '
BCN
. What we got out of it was that listeners thought our playlist was way too broad; we were playing everything, including Rick James and James Brown!” Plus, the station chronically avoided many of the bands that listeners really wanted to hear, simply because the jocks considered them uncool. REO Speedwagon, which had released
Hi-Infidelity
, one of the year's biggest-selling albums, was the prime example. Oedipus said, “We were very, very elitist. In that whole center-stage theory, we weren't even on the stage; we were up in the boxes! We had the talent, definitely more musical knowledge; we were much more creative, but we had to do it in a more focused manner. I had to eliminate some of the musical choices of the
DJS
because people wanted to hear the hits more often and not hear other songs
too
often. There's a balance there. At the time, I was quoted as saying, ‘I'll play the fuckin' Grateful Dead if that's what it takes to play the Clash!' And we did.”

In the summer of '81 John Sebastian left
WCOZ
to start a programming consultancy company that, at its height, advised over two dozen “Kick-Ass Rock and Roll” stations around the country, including
WCOZ
. Andy Beaubien, the former '
BCN
staffer who had crossed over to the competition four years earlier, was promoted to program director under Sebastian's guidance. Beaubien boasted to
Billboard
magazine in the 8 September 1981 issue, “If the Spring book proved anything, it's that
WCOZ
is here to stay.” But
WBCN'S
revamped approach closed the gap; in the Winter '81 survey, '
BCN
scored a respectable 5.9, while '
COZ
descended from the heights with an assailable 6.7. While much of the reason was
WBCN'S
willingness to adapt its approach to meet the threat head on, the other was that Sebastian rapidly became bored with his achievement, moving on to a new creation he called EOR, Eclectic-Oriented Radio, which would find some success and be a model for the adult alternative radio format. “At the height of [my consulting], I said, ‘I've come up with a new idea and if you want to keep doing [“Kick-Ass”], great. It was probably the worst business decision of my life.” With the founder abandoning the ship, “there was almost no place to
go but down,” Beaubien remembered. “When the narrowness of the format began to burn out the music, there was no rescuing it.”

“'
BCN
got a lot better,” Sebastian pointed out. “Then they took full advantage of what they already had and what they would never lose: that incredible, legendary image that '
COZ
never had. Nothing against Andy, but I think management got too involved and they didn't do the right aggressive moves to stave off '
BCN'S
rise back.”

The tide finally turned in the fall 1982 Arbitron ratings book when
WBCN
slipped ahead with 5.6 share to '
COZ'S
4.9. Not only had the competitor been beaten, but also it would never again rise to challenge '
BCN
. As far as me, I was holding down a regular schedule of three weekend shifts when the ratings came out and we discovered that '
BCN
had beaten '
COZ
. Everyone started yelling and backslapping, hugging, even crying. The tension had been so steady, so complete, for so long that there was this intense rush of jubilation from everyone—jocks to the sales people and even the office staff. The J. Geils Band heard the news and sent over an entire case of Dom Pérignon. Folks were in the hallways swigging the expensive stuff right out of the bottles. This is what victory felt like, and it felt pretty damn good! In 1983, Blair banished the “Kick-Ass Rock and Roll” format, replacing it with an adult contemporary blend of mellower rock sounds. Then, a year after that, even
WCOZ'S
call letters were erased when the station converted to Top 40
WZOU-FM
. The deadly “Kick-Ass” Transformer had been toppled and silenced.

It was a playground, rather than this place you had to go where everything was the same every day, like “Groundhog Day.” It was fun . . . we had permission to play.
BILLY WEST

I ( DON'T )
WANT

MY MTV

The coolest people in the know, the hippest of the hip, the taste makers, and the trendsetters watched the pitched battle between
WBCN
and
WCOZ
unfold with great interest, perhaps even laying the occasional wager on the outcome. But as the boxing match continued through 1981 and into the following year, the attention of these cognoscenti soon dissipated almost entirely. Why bother? To them, the whole radio struggle had suddenly become irrelevant.
MTV'S
debut in New York City on 1 August 1981 represented the opening shot of a brave new world in broadcast media. Even though only a few viewers possessed the cable hardware necessary to receive the twenty-four-hour music-video channel, the prophets anointed the medium as the logical successor to radio, at least the kind of music-oriented radio in which
WBCN
and
WCOZ
specialized. In an obvious nod to that premise, MTV debuted with a video clip for the 1979 hit “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the English duo the Buggles. Recalling an earlier era in 164 which the advent of television sidelined radio as the primary medium for mass communication, the song transposed smartly into its new setting. As the cries of “I want my MTV” echoed across more and more subscribers' living rooms, anxieties in the radio business grew. A worry emerged that the whole armature of support for something even as legendary as
WBCN
would cease to exist, running down like a dying battery, its advertising base vanishing as listeners abandoned the radio dial for their
TV
remote.

It would be realized in following years that the reports of radio's death were greatly exaggerated; it weathered the introduction of its new competition just fine. In fact, MTV became music radio's great ally because the visual medium more effectively exposed new acts and their sounds to the masses. The songs became three- or four-minute video commercials, introducing not only a tune but also an artist's appearance and manner—the whole package. This made it easier for radio stations to “break” these latest singles on the air and parlay them into hits. As a result, rock music underwent a vast diversification of style as the multihued colors of a new wave scene mingled with the library of tunes from classic bands and artists (at least the ones astute enough to shoot videos). The advent of this sweeping promotional tool helped bolster a sagging U.S. record business, which had hit a recession by the end of the decade. Seasoned warriors like the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart now advertised their sharp stage moves on the small screen, and a series of creative videos finally pushed the enduring J. Geils Band to number 1 in February 1982 with
Freeze-Frame
. Regional arena-rockers REO Speedwagon, Styx, and Journey all broke nationally with multimillion sellers, while hard rock blasted a path to platinum with AC/DC and Van Halen. Then there were new arrivals like the Go-Go's and their album
Beauty and the Beat
, which was number 1 for six weeks in '82; Joan Jett's chartbusting single “I Love Rock and Roll”; and Rod Stewart soundalike Kim Carnes with her hit “Betty Davis Eyes.” Artists of all kinds found their careers jump-started by MTV and then aided and abetted by radio, which steadfastly refused to go away.

A huge part of
WBCN'S
mission, from the first drop of Joe Rogers's needle on “I Feel Free” to 1981's “Turning Japanese” by the Vapors, remained its commitment to the broad palette of rock music. Diversity was a tricky thing to present, but with the turning of the tide against '
COZ
, it became evident that Oedipus had gotten a handle on how to do it. He told
Radio
and Records
in May '82, “We allowed ourselves to get too far ahead of our audience and we were losing them. We put together a musical structure; I hesitate to call it a format, because the jocks still have freedom of musical choice. But there are boundaries. It's like a painting where the artist works within the boundaries of his canvas. The
WBCN
canvas covers all the years and types of rock. We play many of the same acts that all
AORS
[album-oriented rock radio] do; we have to. but there's also other great stuff that should be played that the other
AORS
won't, everything from reggae to Ray Parker Jr.”

Here's an example playlist from a Saturday afternoon shift I did on 24 July 1982 that demonstrates how the presence of some research and formatting had effected the height, breadth, and width of the station's music mix.

Jimi Hendrix, “Stone Free”

The Clash, “Magnificent Seven”

Fischer Z, “So Long”

Survivor, “Eye of the Tiger”

Nazareth, “Love Hurts”

Dave Clark Five, “Because”

Van Halen, “Little Guitars”

Patti Smith, “Because the Night”

Gary U.S. Bonds, “Out of Work”

Steve Miller Band, “Living in the U.S.A.”

Ramones, “Do You Remember Rock 'n' Roll Radio?”

Fleetwood Mac, “Hold Me”

Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, “I Don't Want to Go Home”

The Who, “I Can See for Miles”

The Probers (local band from Providence), “Violets Are Blue”

Rolling Stones, “Start Me Up”

Judas Priest, “Electric Eye”

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “I Fought the Law”

By the end of the year, the station would also be featuring the two huge R & B albums of 1982 and '83: Michael Jackson's
Thriller
and
1999
by Prince. We might not have been allowed to play “Flight of the Bumblebee” by
Rimsky-Korsakov, as Charles Laquidara used to, but otherwise, the revamping of '
BCN'S
music policy hadn't become the terrible vise many of us feared. It truly remained “360 degrees of rock and roll.”

Since
WBCN
thrived on new music, the major record labels considered the station a mandatory and essential stop for every band on the road to potential stardom. This early, and often critical, involvement usually endeared '
BCN
and its staff to the artists well before they hit it big. For instance, Oedipus's enthusiasm for the Clash placed the band's first two albums high in
WBCN'S
consciousness even though there was little sales evidence in America to warrant the effort. But early airplay of songs like “Julie's in the Drug Squad,” “Police and Thieves,” and “I Fought the Law” would bear fruit when the band came up with its brilliant double album,
London Calling
, at the end of 1979. Not only did “Lost in the Supermarket,” “Clampdown,” and the title song become
WBCN
staples, but also “Train in Vain” went beyond Boston airplay to become a number 23–charting single in the United States with the album a gold seller. After the Clash's finale a few years later, the members continued their friendship with the station: Joe Strummer as a solo artist and Mick Jones as the leader of Big Audio Dynamite. When an unknown Athens, Georgia, group called the B-52's appeared, as colorful as a circus and sporting two female singers each with massive beehive bouffant, '
BCN'S
airplay of their quirky 1978 independent single, “Rock Lobster,” helped the band land a major Warner Brothers contract. As a trio of English bottle blondes, the Police first arrived in Boston in a station wagon, playing the Rat in October of 1978 and releasing a catchy single about a prostitute named “Roxanne.” The import 45 garnered an instant reaction at '
BCN
, leading to a pair of concert broadcasts from the Paradise Theater in April and the Orpheum Theater on 27 November 1979. The station enjoyed a close association with the Police through the band's demise in 1983, which continued as the members went solo. Over a decade later, the group would chronicle that entire 1979
WBCN
Orpheum broadcast when it was released as one half of the
Police Live!
two-CD set.

Then there was U2: perhaps
WBCN'S
most famous band association, along with Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, and Bruce Springsteen. The legendary story of that group's first appearance at the Paradise Theater on 13 December 1980 has been told and worshipfully retold, each time gaining another layer of mythology, until it hardly seems possible that the tale ever occurred. But,
in fact, it was one of those rare, “A Star Is Born” moments, and combined with other exploits in other places, lots of hard work, and a great deal of luck, the members of U2 rode their fantasy all the way to an international superstar reality. The love affair began, like countless others, in the '
BCN
music room. U2's Irish import single, “A Day Without Me,” had caught my ear in August 1980 at a part-time record store job. I bought the 45, and when I played it for Jimmy Mack, '
BCN'S
music director, he was totally into it, giving me the go-ahead to feature the song on my weekend overnight shift.

So, I get the credit for the first spins, but things wouldn't have gone much further than that unless two other events combined to create a small “perfect storm.” On 20 October, U2 released its first album,
Boy
, in Europe, and one of the few import copies in Boston got into my hands within the week. The album featured U2's brand-new single, “I Will Follow,” which seemed even more accessible than the previous one. At the same time,
WBCN
signed on to host a promotional event for Capitol Records and one of their new acts, a Detroit boogie band named Barooga Bandit, at the Paradise Theater. Capitol would rent the club, and '
BCN
would give away discount tickets on the air or sell them on the night of the show. After only a week or so of promotion for the event, U2 suddenly appeared on the bill as warm-up act, an unexpected development given the total dissimilarity of the young Irish band's musical style. Tony Berardini now wanted to bump up '
BCN'S
exposure of U2 to complement the attention being given Barooga, so I donated my import copy of
Boy
to the station. Within days, the airplay of “I Will Follow,” and another cut, “Out of Control,” ramped up as all the jocks eagerly featured the songs.

When the evening finally arrived, just before showtime, perhaps 150 people stood about the club as Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen Jr., all dressed in black, took the stage for the first time in Boston. None of the members were of legal drinking age yet, an innocent bunch with a raw live attack, yet their fledgling set quite impressed the audience, as Edge related in U2's 2006 autobiography: “Our show in Boston was a real surprise for us because we opened for a band called Barooga Bandit in a cramped little club and noticed we were getting a particularly good reaction. We left the stage feeling incredible because the audience was so enthusiastic. Then we went back down to check out Barooga Bandit, only to find that everyone had left. It was then that we realized that they had come to see us.”

Sharing the love with U2 from 1980 until the end. The '
BCN
staff hangs with the Edge in Foxboro Stadium (1997). Courtesy of
WBCN
.

The remaining forty people, which included U2 and their manager Paul McGuinness, sympathetic '
BCN
staffers, and an embarrassed Capitol Records' representative, stayed to watch Barooga Bandit proceed in an exercise of futility. While that band would soon fade into obscurity, U2's star had just risen above the horizon, leading to many future encounters in Boston, including a pair of headlining sellouts at the Paradise just three months later and the band's first arena show in America at the Worcester Centrum two years after that.

“In the days when we used to come and play the Paradise we made friends with Carter Alan and the folks at
WBCN
who really supported us. Consequently, our rise in the Boston area was very rapid,” Adam Clayton told the
Boston Globe
in 2005.

“
WBCN
, they were banging U2's music from the very beginning,” Larry Mullen Jr. observed in U2's book. “So when we went to Boston, it was a bit like a homecoming. It was a big deal for us. You could say we broke out of Boston.”

Bono was more succinct. In a video clip sent to the station for its twenty-fifth birthday celebration, he filmed himself walking along the beach in
Howth, Ireland, smiling broadly, then blurting, “If it wasn't for '
BCN
, we'd all be fucked!”

U2 visited the station for the first time in May 1981, for an interview that Ken Shelton found to be one of his most memorable. The members were more than willing to be guest
DJS
, and the teenage Larry Mullen sounded hilarious when acting the part of a loudmouth American weatherman giving his report. “My favorite interviews were the new, up-and-coming people,” Shelton commented, “like U2, who were just so happy to be on the radio.” Before their fame had arrived, John Cougar (Mellencamp), R.E.M., Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Patti Smith, the Motels, and Talking Heads, among many others, would arrive at the station during this period as young, virtually untested talents. “From Elvis to Elvis,” commented David Bieber. “That's what the station was all about.”