WBCN: The thrill is long gone. Corporate mindlessness proudly kills another iconic radio station. (With a personal look back from Howie)

Onetime WBCN "News Dissector" Danny Schechter is a serious news guy, as you can see from his present-day dissection of the current news business.

by Noah

When I was a kid, I built radios. It started with me rooting around in the attic. My family never threw out books, records, clocks, or radios. I don’t know why. I can conjecture about some sort of emotional attachment for three of the four, but when they got old, these objects got retired to the attic, not to the curb.

As a loner kid, I found hours of entertainment up in what amounted for me to a sort of museum. First it was the clocks. I would bring them to my room and get them all ticking away again, so much so that my dad had to stuff them all in drawers after I went to sleep, just so everyone else in the house could get a decent night’s sleep. Then, ignorant of the danger, I would haul the radios down, taking them apart, rearranging tubes and wires, while I played the records, just to see what would happen. It graduated to safer store-bought kits. Then I built antennas. Fortunately, I knew about ground wires (wasn’t that what the radiators were for?), or the house would have been long gone, blown to bits by lightning on some hot summer night.

The point of all of this inquisitiveness was a desire to hear music and voices from as many places as possible, the farther away the better. In those days, different stations in different towns played different music. Now it’s the same playlists with the same songs everywhere you go. Bill Clinton’s and some total bozo named Newt Gingrich’s horrid Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the biggest and most final nail in the coffin. Before then, true diversity ruled the airwaves. It wasn’t just a word or corporate slogan. DJs didn’t all sound the same. You could actually tell them apart. Hard as it may be to believe today, radio actually employed living, breathing people with real personalities, and our culture was richer for it. Today, you might find a ghostly shadow of such radio style down on the left side of your dial (Not to sound like Andy Rooney or anything, but radios used to also have dials).

Before iPods, there were portable transistor radios. I took mine everywhere, and I mean everywhere. I was obsessive then, and I am obsessive now. Bite me.

The thing is, radio was exciting, and of all the distant exotic lands that I tuned in, no radio was as exciting and entertaining as the radio waves heading my way from Boston. It had a life of its own. New York radio, my home turf, had its high points, but it was more restricted than Boston radio. Boston radio offered a broader selection of music within each format. It was looser. Even the DJs had more freedom. It is out of this tradition that WBCN was launched, almost by mistake, in 1968. It was one of the first truly free-form (anything goes) rock stations that lasted any length of time. It did so on the strength of its DJs' personalities and their honest good sense and musical taste, as reflected in the records that they played. If they liked it, they played it. Evil, destructive, negative entities such as Clear Channel who now program thousands of stations all across the land from some dead pit of a hell called Texas hadn’t yet made their huge “contribution” to the deliberate dumbing down of America.


What set WBCN apart was not just the good taste of the people who worked there; it was its innate irreverence and humor. When I moved to Boston, I got to experience BCN firsthand for many years. Those qualities were a perfect match for the overwhelmingly youthful population (thanks to what seems like hundreds of colleges in the area) it served. Notice the word "served." FCC licenses used to be granted to radio stations so that they could serve the community. Such a notion is still in the bylaws of the FCC charter, but it has been ignored and rendered meaningless by Washington slimebags who hold a different agenda. BCN was inspired radio as opposed to the paint-by-numbers, devoid-of-humanity radio now imposed on us by polyester-draped corporate yahoos who spend their days throwing buzzwords around, somehow convincing themselves that their joke lives have meaning. BCN arrived in the days when you could still tell the makes of the cars on your street apart without having to look for some damn logo that the car company paid someone a million bucks to “design.”

BCN rose out of the ashes of a failed classical station (BCN = Boston Concert Network) whose desperate owner, in a moment of nothing-to-lose, turned his nighttime slot over to some local freaks. Within four months, the station was wall-to-wall hippies, very smart hippies. In 1968, that suited Boston’s youth brigades just fine. They tuned in, and advertisers wanting to reach the several hundred thousand college kids in the city followed. At first their Madison Avenue advertising got rudely and deservedly laughed off the air, but, the people at BCN were a talented lot, and saved the day. They soon convinced would-be advertisers to let them write the ads for their products. With comic minds like BCN’s Michael Fremer creating ads, the audience meant for the advertising could relate to it, and everybody was happy. BCN had its own style.

Listening to BCN in the early '70s was like listening to The Daily Show, with music, and, you never knew who might drop by, often unannounced and unhyped. It could be anyone from David Bowie to guru Baba Ram Dass. It was just peer-to-peer conversation. You could even think of it as a cult. To its audience, BCN was an integral part of the day. To the straights or fearful repugs of the day, it was a vaguely menacing foreign-language station.

Legendary morning DJ Charles Laquidara, with his Big Mattress Show, didn’t need shock to wake up the city. He, like the other BCN DJs, just had to be himself, a witty and passionate purveyor of music, traffic reports, and even astrology forecasts, presented by a mysterious entity known to Boston as the Cosmic Muffin, who admonished listeners, “It is a wise man who follows the stars, but a fool who is ruled by them.”

The news was presented by one Danny Schechter, “Your News Dissector,” and dissect he did. Every Bostonian of a certain age and bent made it a point not to miss what the News Dissector had to say. His dead-on warped interpretations of Richard Nixon and his coverage of the Watergate hearings still resound in my mind, as does his successful effort in helping to stave off the end of rent control in Cambridge despite the City Council’s efforts. It was about strength in numbers and serving the community.

Afternoon DJ Maxanne Sartori simply had what may be the warmest, friendliest, and greatest radio voice of all time. She also had a knack for being first when it came to turning listeners on to music, whether it was Queen, Big Star, or a band then ill-regarded by its record company named Aerosmith. She changed perceptions with her passion. That doesn’t happen on radio anymore, and it hasn’t happened in a very long time. People like Maxanne didn’t care whether the record company believed. She believed, and her show wasn’t being programmed by some asshole in a suit somewhere in San Antonio.

As the years went on and BCN got bigger, the corporate world’s war on style and personality took its toll. It almost happened in the late '70s. By then, even BCN was playing it safe, and they were in danger of getting stale. I personally remember shaming them into playing an artist we were doing well with on just in-store play at the record store where I worked as the rock buyer. The artist was Tom Petty. At the same time, local college stations were playing the onslaught of punk rock from England and places here in the U.S. These stations were even drawing listeners away from BCN. I remember having lunch with BCN’s program director, who asked me what was selling. When I told him how well we were doing with The Clash, The Police, and The Ramones, his demeanor instantly changed, and he told me that if any of his DJs “played that punk shit, it would be their jobs.”

BCN soon had a new program director named Tony Berardini, fresh in from San Francisco, who made a point of being in constant contact with area music retailers and the local music scene. The station even began hiring the top college DJs in the area, who brought a fresh and now-needed younger perspective to the station. It was adapt or die, and BCN adapted. They continued to serve the community and its huge population of teens and 20-somethings. One of them, Carter Alan, championed U2 when no one else gave the band the time of day. An Irish band clicking in Boston; who woulda thunk? Certainly not someone programming the station from Texas.

As for the old program director, he went on to a bigger position in the radio world, working for a corporate consulting company, telling stations what they should play from his cushy office in his new hometown of Los Angeles. He became a suit. Some might say th at he “failed upward.” It is the way of things in today’s radio world.

The tragedy of what has happened to stations like WBCN (which sounds something like what Ken was describing happening at New York classical station WQXR) is the result of a human weakness called greed. Companies can easily become victims of their own success. The staff convinces itself that it hasn’t changed; that they have just made some “improvements” to the product. What I call "The Wet T-shirt Contest Mentality" encroaches. If you get big enough, sooner or later a bigger company thinks about the dollars it can make by charging maximum advertising rates to companies that want to reach the large number of people that you attract. They will get the dollar signs in their eyes and buy you out. How many say no thank you?

In the case of BCN, it was Infinity Broadcasting and then CBS. Money doesn’t just talk, it swears. BCN got bigger and bigger. As it did so, its playlist tightened, and it got safer and blander. The friendly dialog with the community ended. The listener was no long a friend or peer but a target demographic. In its place were generic voices reading generic scripts written for them a thousand miles away. Rather than have personality that appeals to people, corporations worry about offending someone and losing or never having one of their sponsors, as if they didn’t have enough already. It becomes a quarterly numbers game. Quality doesn’t enter into it, no matter how much those polyester-draped clowns rationalize themselves into thinking that it does. The word quality becomes just another slogan, its meaning redefined in some faraway corporate headquarters by people who’ve never walked the streets of the town where your once-favorite radio station lived.

The war on style and personality is a race to find the lowest common denominator, a race that holds the hollow prize of not mattering to people’s lives anymore. In the end, people stop buying it. The corporation wonders what went wrong and unloads it to the next guy, Infinity to CBS. Laquidara to the execrable Opie and whatever-his-name-is or some other mindless Bevis and Butthead pairing. BCN is a far-too-often repeated story, but it is big because BCN rose from nothing and was loved by so many so intently. It became a vital organ for a major city. It had national influence on pop culture for a long time.

It was a station where a DJ once spoke the truth when he uttered the words “This war is being brought to you by Honeywell,” a locally based major defense contractor in the Military Industrial Complex. The DJ got fired but then was rehired, due to both the actions of fellow station DJs and a very involved listening audience. Now Honeywell will probably be a leading sponsor for the station’s new programming: sports talk. Now that’s “new and innovative”!

In the war between art and commerce, commerce usually wins. It’s just business.


UPDATE: A Personal Look Back From Howie

Noah asked me to chime in with my own BCN recollections. They start when I had a small indie label based in San Francisco, 415 Records. WBCN was the first meaningful station-- meaningful in terms of making significant amounts of records sell-- outside of California to play our artists. I remember when they started playing the first RomeoVoid album, Its A Condition, we started shipping cartons of albums to Boston and then to the surrounding areas. The band got booked to play there and Rik Ocasek offered to produce an EP for them (which he did, including the song that launched our label commercially, Never Say Never). The station became a 415 mainstay, helping break all of our bands and giving us our first #1, China, by the Red Rockers.

All of our bands wound up playing in Boston over and over, and everything sold there, and because of BCN our music spread to other stations. I became friends with the punk rock guy on the station, Oedipus, who later became program director, and we used to argue about who started the first punk rock radio show in America. (They started within 2 weeks of each other; his was on a college station, WERS WTBS, I think, and mine was on the mighty KSAN, ironically the WBCN of San Francisco.) I became a regular judge at the finals of the WBCN Rock'n'Roll Rumble and even wound up signing a contest winner to Sire one year, a band called Seka, which was forced by one of David Vitter's girls to change their name to Strip Mind and then went on to spawn Godsmack. WBCN became one of a small handful of stations around America not just willing but eager to discover and break new music that more conservative stations were afraid to test out-- like U2, Talking Heads, Green Day and Depeche Mode. The station became a national cultural force.

When I came to town BCN would have me on as a guest dj. When I discovered some great new song or band, I would call Oedipus and tell him or he would do the same for me. San Francisco DJs went to work at BCN, and WBCN DJs came to work at San Francisco stations. When I discovered how wonderful Thailand was in the late 1970s, I told Oedipus about it, and he wound up loving it as much as I did, buying a house there and finding a wife! I'm going there next week; I hope I run into him.

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