Radio Free Boston (39 page)

Shelton maintains that his relationship with Oedipus and Tony Berardini had curdled by that point over a union matter concerning insurance coverage: “They hated me and I hated them.” Oedipus, however, saw it as strictly business: “It happened to Shelton: for an eighteen-, nineteen-, or twenty-year-old [listener], he was now their dad's
DJ
.”

“They would have fired me right away if I didn't have the guardian angel, Mel Karmazin, sitting on my shoulder,” Shelton countered. The jock walked away from his long-standing midday home in July of '93 to assume morning drive-time duties at Infinity's new classic rock acquisition. Despite the bad blood that had spread between the players in this episode, the move was strategically sound and mutually beneficial. The older
WBCN
listeners who loved “Captain Ken” for all those years would now follow him over to
WZLX
, where he played the legendary songs they enjoyed, while Oedipus was now free to replace him with someone he saw as a better and younger fit for the station's changing image (currently under construction). The ironic element was that Shelton now competed for listeners in the same time slot as his buddy Laquidara, the radio maniac he had clowned around with during “Mishegas” crossovers for well over a decade.

With Shelton's departure/ouster, Bradley Jay, a veteran of various shifts at
WBCN
since 1982, moved into the midday slot. Although now a twelve-year veteran of the station, the
DJ
possessed the hunger and image of a much younger and savvy new-music-oriented jock. With his unquestioned enthusiasm, Jay had proved to be resilient in whatever role Oedipus asked him to perform, from famously clowning around backstage with David Bowie and hosting Lunchtime Concerts in the eighties to playing a controversial figure in a salacious evening show before Howard Stern replaced him. Jay
had moved into the night shift in '92 with the challenge of trying to head of the slide of listeners, not only from '
BCN
, but also from radio in general, which occurred right after drive time. “Oedipus said to me, ‘I want you to go for it, do things to make people notice,'” the jock remembered. In the quest for ratings, perhaps inspired by the success of Stern's show in other markets,
WBCN
went where it had never gone before: into R-rated territory. “We called the show ‘The Sex Palace'; it was the Howard Stern show, but Howard wasn't there yet. We had strippers dancing in the window on Boylston Street, stopping trafc!” The lascivious spectacle, described on the air in every detail, drew a large crowd of listeners and pedestrians, who might have been stunned at the tawdriness of the moment yet remained to gawk at all the undulation, where, just eleven years earlier, Tony Berar-dini and Marc Miller had solemnly addressed hundreds of John Lennon mourners.

Bradley Jay and Tami Heide get close for the camera. Photo by Roger Gordy.

“ ‘The Sex Palace,' was a little ‘out there,'” Oedipus admitted. “It worked for a while, but Bradley just couldn't make the show broad enough, intriguing and risqué enough, to draw in a large audience like Howard Stern. [He] couldn't quite pull it in.” When the program director and Tony Berardini took the monumental step of importing the actual master of that game, Jay was left without his full-time shift. “I didn't freak out, I didn't get bitter, I didn't burn bridges.” He left for Los Angeles but only stayed away for a
few weeks before returning to do more part-time shifts. But during that brief period away, the jock redefined his radio approach. “I read this book on marketing that said if you have a product, like mouthwash, and there's already a Listerine on the market, don't make another product that ‘kills germs'; make it different. There was already a Howard Stern, so it was pointless to be a shock-jock; I did the exact opposite and went minimal.” As the buffer between the up-tempo mischief of morning and afternoon drive times, the music orientation of the 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. shift had always been the correct recipe for success at '
BCN,
and Jay poured himself willingly into the mold. “That seemed to be attractive [to Oedipus] because that is how I pretty much eased into the midday.”

The next step was the music itself. Never a stranger to presenting the latest records and new bands,
WBCN
by default had always featured an ample variety of new music. By mid-1992, the station regularly played the music set free by Nirvana's hydrogen-bomb-like arrival: Seattle “grunge rock” and its major purveyors, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden. The later, more commercial “postgrunge” bands such as Stone Temple Pilots and Bush found a home at
WBCN
, as did the “Brit pop” groups like Oasis and Blur. These exciting new sounds were featured freely next to mainstream acts like the Rolling Stones, The Who, and Pink Floyd. “We were playing the stuf we loved,” Bill Abbate mentioned, “Pearl Jam instead of the latest from Huey Lewis and the News. It was new, it was fresh, and it was fun.” In 1997, the industry tip sheet,
MQB
—Modern Quarterback,
quoted Oedipus about the change: “'
BCN
had been defending its upper demos from ‘
ZLX
by leaning hard on its classic rock library. ‘It was time to let the classic rock station succeed on its own terms; there was no reason to fight them anymore.'” Steve Strick (who had become assistant music director by this time) agreed: “We already had a classic rock station in town; why go against them and split an audience that was not growing, but perhaps, dwindling in size? Everybody in the room was leaning toward the younger, more modern route. It was a more exciting direction to go, and even Tony went along with it, because he saw it as a way for the station to evolve and grow. We decided to do it gradually: playing the new music and starting to weed out the artists who were incompatible.” Strick smiled and added, “So every week [in the music meeting], there was this fun little exercise of eliminating another artist. One of the first to go was Jethro Tull. Everybody was jumping up and down, ‘Great! Snot dripping down his nose—get that
of!' We stuck with a few, but it took about six months to rid the station of the older stuf.”

Steve Miller in the studio with Mark Parenteau, also producer Jef Myerow. Changing times and a younger-oriented format soon leaves artists like Miller behind at
WBCN
. Photo by Mim Michelove.

A
WBCN
playlist from June 1993 included new music artists—Stone Temple Pilots, Porno for Pyros, Radiohead, Frank Black, Alice in Chains, and Soul Asylum—but was dominated by the latest singles from classic names like Rod Stewart, the Steve Miller Band, Pat Benatar, Donald Fagan, Pete Townshend, Van Morrison, and Neil Young. Nearly two years later, in April 1995, another sample playlist revealed that '
BCN'S
transition had been completed: artists such as Green Day, Live, Offspring, Morphine, Filter, Oasis, Pearl Jam, Belly, and Matthew Sweet completely commanded the roster, the sole classic entrant being Tom Petty and his song “It's Good to Be King.” This development prompted Jim Sullivan in a May 1995
Boston Globe
article entitled “Reinventing the Rock of Boston” to declare, “AOR is dead. Or dying. Or mutating. Oedipus wants nothing to do with those three now-dirty letters. ‘
WBCN
,' he says, ‘is a “modern rock” station.'” Sullivan also pointed out that this shift to play alternative sounds was a national trend, with several of the approximately 175 album-oriented rock (
AOR
) radio
stations making the switch to play alternative music and join the 64 or so modern rock stations on the other side. “ ‘We're redefining the center,' says Oedipus. ‘The center will not hold; it's very askew.'”

In Sullivan's article, Oedipus admitted that the transition from full-on
AOR
to a modern rock entity took well over a year to complete, but the experience of attending Woodstock '94 “gave it a big kick.” That festival, a twenty-ffth-anniversary tribute to the original three days of peace, love, and music that helped mightily to transform a generation, was held 12–14 August 1994 in Saugerties, New York. Santana, Joe Cocker,
CSN
, and John Sebastian returned to encore their now-mythical performances from the first concert, joining other classic rockers like Bob Dylan, the Allman Brothers Band, Trafc, and Aerosmith. The cream of the modern rock movement also mounted the two main stages at Woodstock: Nine Inch Nails, Green Day, Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Cranberries, and many more.

As a player during the original festival and still in business to enjoy the vibes a quarter century later,
WBCN'S
presence in upstate New York was a must. “'
BCN
had the foresight to rent this house, a kind of cheesy ranch house which, for some reason, smelled horribly like fish,” Bradley Jay remembered. “You could hear the bands in the distance, and you could walk there.” The place ended up being called “The Love Shack,” and the crew from
WBCN
used the house as a base for its broadcast operations during the rainy weekend. “I was there early, but the day the show started, people started to roll in. Oedipus had decided that we were a station of the people, and he made sure we broadcast that everyone should stop by ‘The Love Shack' on their way to the festival. So they came all the time, even in the middle of the night, like zombies! They'd be knocking at the door, [saying] ‘We heard on the radio we could stay here.'”

“We got inundated with people,” Albert O agreed. “Parenteau suddenly showed up, John Garabedian was in there, J.J. Jackson, this woman Kat who worked at ‘FNX at the time.”

“It truly was ‘The Love Shack,'” Jay commented. “At one point I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and it was like a Monty Python skit: every room, every bunk, everything, and everywhere: sex was going on.” Vegas rules applied: what happened at “The Love Shack” stayed at “The Love Shack.” Jay added, “It was good times there, till the people from
MTV
came in to use the bathroom and clogged it up!”

Never buoyed by an explosive political undercurrent, nor a joining
of voices against an unjust war, nor a historic gathering of “freaks,” the Woodstock '94 festival nevertheless contained some terrific musical performances and assembled a massive number (over three hundred thousand) of
WBCN'S
revised target demographic: eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds. For Oedipus, the experience proved to be as vital as it was enjoyable, serving as a research project in a gargantuan test market. Thousands stood in what became a muddy mess as the skies constantly hemorrhaged, but the overwhelming preference of the crowd for this new music confirmed to the program director that the fresh direction of the station was the correct one to take. Oedipus marched back from Woodstock all fired up. He was waiting for Steve Strick and me when we got into '
BCN
to begin our workweek. Breathlessly, he described his experience and then began discussing whether we should accelerate the process of removing classic artists and adding modern ones to the playlist. We decided to experiment by going 100 percent modern rock on the weekends, a gutsy move considering that there were no focus groups, no strategic studies, and no call-out research to add to our gut instincts. But, within weeks, the ratings on those Saturdays and Sundays had improved so much, so fast, that we had to look at each and admit, “What were we waiting for?”

“We are definitely the New Woodstock station,” Oedipus told Jim Sullivan in his '95
Boston Globe
piece. “WZLX is the Old Woodstock station.” The article went on to acknowledge that in a half year of programming modern rock,
WBCN
had lost ground to
WZLX
in the 25–54 audience, but (as intended) “in the younger 18–34 male category, [
WBCN
] significantly increased listenership over
WZLX
and
WAAF
.”