Radio Free Boston Read online

  Broadcast of Canned Heat and friends from Intermedia Sound, March 1972. Photo by Charles Daniels.

  With Riepen gone, Mitch Hastings reclaimed the reins at Stuart Street. But in the aftermath of a debilitating brain operation, the owner’s already-peculiar personality had taken some strange detours. WBCN engineer Bill Spurlin described Hastings like this: “I glimpsed T. Mitch moving rather feebly in and out of his shabby office. He seemed very, very old to me. His mostly bald skull was marked by two shallow depressions about an inch across, surrounded by liver spots, the marks, I was told, of a more-or-less successful brain surgery. Wearing sports jackets that appeared to have been styled in an earlier era, hunched, bespectacled, we could occasionally hear him in his office [talking] in a high whining voice.” Nevertheless, no matter what debilitated state Hastings might have been in, he still managed to accomplish a great deal. The WBCN transmitter was relocated to the top of the fifty-two-story Prudential Tower, eliminating most of the signal issues, and work began to move the entire station into the same prestigious Back Bay facility. When Arnie Ginsburg bailed in 1972, Hastings promoted his sales guru and sometimes-jock Al Perry, to replace him. The choice delighted the staff since “Crazy Al” was one of their own, experiencing the many seismic changes at the station from even before the switch to rock. Perry remembered, “Mitch was back in the picture and probably figured, ‘Whatever I want, Al will go along [with],’ which wasn’t necessarily the case.”

  Charles Laquidara followed his muse on the air, wherever that took him, but since his show was quite popular, he became virtually untouchable. Despite a few instances of being disciplined and fired, he always returned within days. A particular piece of underground radio folklore, one of his infamous best, emerged from this time. It’s a psychedelic fable, and the names may have been changed to protect against flashbacks. “Randy was this beautiful woman and Robert was her boyfriend,” Laquidara remembered. “They lived in this rather famous place in Boston on Storrow Drive where they have the sign ‘If you lived here, you’d be home now.’ They invited me to come over. Robert said, ‘Randy makes the best matzo ball soup—ever!’” Charles would never turn down a meal, a fact corroborated by Kopper: “His appetite blew me away. I couldn’t believe how much he ate and still stayed rail thin.” Along with a friend, Laquidara planned to drop in on the way to do his nightly radio show. “We had some good grass, so we smoked a joint on the way over, parked, and then went upstairs.” Laquidara sat and talked with the couple, eating and breaking out the party favors in return. But even though the smoking continued, Laquidara kept his eyes on the clock, eventually calling an end to the visit so he could get over to WBCN. “In the meantime, Randy kept bringing out this soup and it was so good that I had three bowls of it.”

  “We left in my car and I was really high. I said, ‘Man, that was really good smoke!’” Laquidara chattered abstractedly in marijuana-speak while driving across Back Bay, tossing out ideas for his radio show while sitting at the stoplights. Once he arrived at the station, though, it was time to focus and get organized for the shift.

  I went to the record library and pulled a bunch of albums, got my turntables all cued up and the carts with all the commercials or special ’BCN songs ready. The program started smoothly, but then, about a half hour into the show, I went to make a segue and noticed there was no record on the turntable. I said, “Shit!” I asked whoever was there, “Get me a record, anything!” While that was happening, I put the mike on: “WBCN . . . Charles Laquidara . . . what a beautiful night . . .” I began to read a commercial, and as I started, things began getting a little weird. I said, “You know, I’m reading this commercial, but I have to tell you that all the words are blending together . . . kind of like the words are . . . melting. So, I can’t finish this commercial right now . . . but I will play a song and come back later and finish.” So I started the record, whatever it was, shut off the mike and went, “That is really strong shit you got, man!” My buddy goes, “My shit is not that strong!” And then we both looked at each other and suddenly I knew: Randy and Robert! “She laced the soup!”

  At the moment, Laquidara was keeping it together, but he was drifting higher with every passing second, blubbering details of the evening live on the air, even though, due to FCC paranoia, he didn’t quite admit he had voluntarily gotten high. “You know, we might have had some weed, but I don’t know what happened. We were over at our friends’ place, and they gave us Randy’s matzo ball soup that Robert said was really good and I’m positive she put mescaline in the soup! So, now I’m having some trouble on the radio and I’m going to call someone because I cannot do this alone. We all know the rules here, you know . . . I know it’s far out that she makes good mescaline soup, but you’re supposed to tell people!” A random thought poked its way into his consciousness and fought to be noticed until finally finding voice on the air: “What I’d like to do is meet everybody under the Citgo sign [in Kenmore Square] at midnight. So we’ll talk about this and maybe Randy and Robert will be there to explain. I’ll just hang in here as long as I can and play whatever I can come up with.”

  For a time, Laquidara made a good fight of it, resisting the mental taffy his brain was twisting out. “All I could do was play carts with commercials [on them] from a rack by the [broadcast] board. I couldn’t possibly get up, select an album in the library, and put that delicate needle on a certain spot on the record. I mean, I was definitely going to fuck that up, so I didn’t go near the records!” The DJ played commercial after commercial after commercial, sometimes getting a song that just happened to be on a cartridge. Finally, “Someone came in and said, ‘Okay Charles, you’re okay. We’ll take over now.’ Laquidara managed to compose himself a bit and did, indeed, head over to Kenmore Square. “We went over to the Citgo sign at midnight and there were 250 people there, cheering me on! It got all muddy after that, so I don’t remember the rest . . . but that’s what tripping was about . . . you went on a voyage.”

  Charles Laquidara on three hits of matzo ball soup. Photo by Sam Kopper.

  As the zaniness and candor continued to unfold every day on 104.1, the front office remained busy, too. In June 1973, Mitch Hastings realized his dream to move WBCN out of its funky environs on Stuart Street to literally enter the clouds, occupying plush new digs on the fiftieth floor of Boston’s Prudential Tower. The move heralded another era for the station, still motivated by its hippie dream of community-based integrity, but now boxed in by the mainstream-business perceptions created by stepping up to a high-rent “$200,000 studio,” as reported by the Boston Sunday Globe a month before the move. Al Perry opined, “It wasn’t conducive for us at all. In retrospect, we probably should have been in a three-family [house] in Brighton or the South End. But that was his vision . . . and his vision was always just to sell the place. Ray was gone and Mitch was back in charge and he had the board of directors where he wanted them. I could see him selling them that bill of goods: ‘We’re going to move the station to the Pru; yes we’re going to spend a couple hundred grand to get there, but its going to come back twentyfold when I sell it.’”

  “It didn’t seem like the right thing to do,” Joe Rogers remembered. “We didn’t belong there, and we were aware that this was part of the plan to make ’BCN more marketable.”

  “We had mixed feelings,” Andy Beaubien added. “Stuart Street was really familiar to us . . . it was home, and the overhead was really low. Mitch rationalized it by saying we’d have the transmitter and the studios in one place, but it still didn’t overcome the fact that our operating expenses greatly increased.”

  Taking up one half of the Prudential’s fiftieth floor, the new facility was described by John Brodey as “a little fishbowl” because the building observation deck ran along WBCN’S outside wall. Large windows offered Skywalk visitors a direct view into the daily workings of a radio station if, of course, they chose to look away from the impressive views of Boston in the opposite direction. Sam Kopper scratched his hea
d at the move: “It was such a weird place to be. Why would you want this progressive rock radio station inside a window with all of Middle America to walk by?”

  “It was a little creepy for me,” Joe Rogers laughed. “It always felt like someone was watching me over my shoulder.” Despite the oddities of being in this new, alien place, the staff, at least, grew to enjoy the amenities of the facility. Even Rogers had to admit, “They were better studios and new equipment.”

  “When we moved to the Prudential,” Kate Curran added, “Everyone on the Listener Line was bemoaning the integrity [of the station], and the sellout, but all I thought was, ‘Oh good! It will be clean!’”

  “Nobody minded being in a place where there weren’t holes in the wall and you had the luxury of a big air studio with the library right there in the same room,” Brodey added. “Mitch Hastings walked me through and showed me everything,” including the five-layer-thick glass walls to deaden sound, wall-to-wall carpeted floors “floating” on pads, and a lead shield between the station and the roof. “We all wanted to go up on the roof and take a look [where all the antennas were], so an engineer took us up. He said, ‘Grab that fluorescent tube.’ We went on the roof and held that [tube] up in the air and all of a sudden it lit up—all by itself! [from the radio frequency radiation streaming out of the antennae]. I thought to myself, ‘This can’t be good for you!’ Then we weren’t laughing about that lead shielding. Hastings was a genius.”

  Perhaps so, but the man with a marvel of engineering talent also had questionable skills as a business leader. Five years into WBCN’S mission, Hastings made a high-risk maneuver, placing the station underneath a mountain of debt even as it sat throne-like atop the Boston skyline. While fattening the calf was clearly the intention, could the dream that Ray Riepen had originally fostered survive in such an environment of intense expectation and demand? Even if they could endure under Hastings’s new order, what would happen when the absentminded boss sold his creation? Would the new owners care about the magic of a Joe Rogers segue, an Allman Brother jamming on the air with his friends in the Grateful Dead, or Maxanne introducing a young local outfit named Aerosmith? Would they find the airtime for Danny Schechter interviewing a clandestine FBI informant, someone on the Listener Line talking a late-night caller out of suicide, or Laquidara’s latest escapade. What about “Lockup”—targeting Boston’s prison population—or the special programs championing women’s rights, the dangers of pollution, racial equality, and gay tolerance? But even if the staff felt that sitting on the pinnacle of a skyscraper was inappropriate, WBCN had still become one of Boston’s most successful FM signals. So, perhaps this lofty new environment in the clouds was not completely out of character, even for a formerly ragtag bunch of radio hippies.

  Maxanne would play “Dream On” all the time, maybe twice a show, and we hated her for it. But she absolutely, unequivocally, broke Aerosmith, and we owe her big time. CHARLES LAQUIDARA

  CAMELOT

  Ensconced in their soaring steel and glass castle in the clouds, the scruffy inhabitants of Boston’s hippie radio station now found themselves under-dressed as they arrived at the skyscraper on Boylston Street. There was also the uncomfortable check-in at the security desk before every trip up the high-speed elevator. Flashing the ID became routine, but signing in various and sundry guests in their assorted states of coherency could be awkward. After a rush-inducing rocket ride up to fifty, visitors stepped out onto a floor shared by WBCN’S main entrance and the popular Boston Skywalk, with its panoramic view of the city and surrounding land and sea. Instead of heading toward the inevitable flocks of tourists, station regulars could angle to the unmarked side of the building and slip around a corner through the discreet rear entry. As far as the building management was concerned, that was fine, because the less they saw of WBCN’S employees, the better. Early on in the station’s tenancy, T. Mitchell Hastings approached Norm Winer to discuss the matter.

  He said that he had heard from the people in the Prudential Tower that sometimes our attire was a little uneven, that some of the DJS actually looked a little sloppy, disheveled, and unkempt. So he said, “I was thinking that we should have blazers with a station logo on them [made] for everyone, and it would be very nice.”

  I said, “Well, Mr. Hastings, that’s an interesting idea, but how about something a little less formal. How about a jump suit with people’s names sewn on them? Both men and women could wear them.”

  “Hmmm, interesting.” He wandered off with that thought, and it never came up again. That was a big challenge of those years: just trying to distract him [or] change the subject so it would slip his mind.

  Debbie Ullman had departed again, and Buffalo radio veteran Dinah Vaprin was brought in to replace her in the mornings. Vaprin remembered, “Charles would build the morning show into the empire it became, but during my years it wasn’t like that. We thought no one listened to rock and roll radio then; they got up at noon and went to sleep at five o’clock in the morning.” Vaprin’s personality had an edge. “I was a flaming radical feminist type,” she laughed. “I could make people uncomfortable.” At one of the announcers’ meetings, Norm Winer asked if anyone had questions. Laquidara recalled, “Dinah pipes up, ‘Yeah, I’ve got a question. We’re supposed to be so hip and cool and yet, you have women working the shit shift in the morning.’”

  “Yeah, I probably said ‘shit shift,’” Vaprin admitted. “I said I was tired of getting up at four o’clock in the morning!”

  “I’m at the back of the room,” Laquidara continued, “and I say smarmily, ‘Dinah, there’s no such thing as a shit shift on this station. You should appreciate any shift!’ She yells back, ‘You try getting up at four in the morning and have nobody listening to you!’” Laquidara rose to the bait: “Okay, I don’t care; I’ll take it!”

  “Charles was good for a dare,” Vaprin said. “He took [the shift]—and the rest, of course, is history.”

  As morning DJ, Laquidara introduced a new term to Boston radio: “The Big Mattress,” his medley of comedy bits, social satire, political commentary, wake-up calls, and music. “It was a hippie thing,” he told Virtually Alternative magazine in 1998. “Everybody’s waking up; we’re all brothers and sisters on this big mattress. There was nothing sacred; we’d make fun of the Pope, all the Boston icons, the mayor, the president. We were calling the White House and getting the Secret Service tracing our calls, and the FBI coming in—it was pretty heavy shit. The show just caught on because it was so different and so unique and so sacrilegious.” Although it sounds like Laquidara embraced the up-tempo Top 40 radio style that WBCN had fought against for five years, he really lampooned that approach. “Charles was just doing this off the wall parody of AM radio, for stoners,” summed up his morning editor Steve Crowley, aka, “Mono,” who assembled stories for the show’s regular news reports. Plus, Laquidara certainly never committed the sin of featuring only the top “forty” records in the country. For him, as zany as the presentation and talk became, the music was always a key player: “We could do so much with music; you could grab everybody by their balls by playing The Doors’ ‘Five to One’ and in the background the sound of some kids getting shot at Kent State.”

  A cast of characters formed around the morning show. Sixteen-year-old Tom Couch, who volunteered at the station answering phones and would later grow into the role of WBCN’S production director, saw a slip of paper Laquidara had tacked up in the Listener Line booth one day. “[It] said he was looking for a production assistant that he could pay ten dollars a week to get coffee, help with things, and maybe learn some production,” Couch recalled, laughing. “People had written all over the note, things like ‘Charles, you’re a slave trader!’ ‘How can you pay someone as little as ten dollars?’ ‘What are you, “The Man”?’ But I said, ‘I’ll do it!’” A young temp-agency veteran who had done stints as a substitute teacher and dental clinic worker, who went by the singular moniker of Oedipus, wandered in one day to become a
similar jack of all trades for Laquidara—at worst picking up coffee and at best doing some writing for the show. Michael Fremer, a Boston University law student who had a natural knack for comedy, had been creating commercials for Music City, a local record store. “Charles liked the voices I was doing,” Fremer recalled, so he became a regular contributor, performing impersonations and eventually producing “three- or four-minute political cartoon bits” entitled “Can I Have My Money Back?” which ran on the show for years.

  Another character who developed on the earliest days of the show was “The Cosmic Muffin,” whose daily astrological reports began after Laquidara made a comment on the air, announcing something akin to the moon being in Leo-Virgo. Darrell Martinie, a devoted listener, instantly phoned to correct the DJ. “The moon can be in the sign Leo or in the sign Virgo, but not both at the same time,” he patiently explained. From that initial encounter it was determined that the Milton native had indeed studied the stars and knew what he was talking about. It was proposed that Martinie would write and record daily astrological reports, Laquidara dubbing him “The Cosmic Muffin,” taken from a line in National Lampoon’s album Deteriorata, which declared, “Make peace with your God, be he hairy thunderer or cosmic muffin!” Martinie jumped at the chance, and the timing was perfect: he told the Boston Globe in 1979 that at the time, he had no job and only $38 to his name. From a daily feature on “The Big Mattress” to three reports a day on WBCN, and eventually a regular feature on a network of radio stations, Martinie gauged his astrological predictions like a weatherman forecasting imminent climactic conditions. In 1974, Tommy Hadges suggested rating the day with a number, for example, giving it a “4” for going out or a “9” for staying in. Although Martinie initially resisted, the practice would later give the reports their most distinctive highlight—that plus the famous disclaimer at the end that he discovered in an astrology book: “It’s a wise person who rules the stars, and a fool who is ruled by them.” “A requirement of the FCC,” he told the Globe. “Otherwise I’d have to say, ‘The preceding has been brought to you for your entertainment.’” How bland. And Darrell Martinie was always anything but bland.