Radio Free Boston (47 page)

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 W
BMX
. 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.”

“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 '
BCN
s: 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.