Radio Free Boston Page 4

  “He’s absolutely correct,” Tommy Hadges concurred. “I remember [Joe’s] hand shaking so much I might have been the one running the turntable!”

  Don Law also confirmed that the debut occurred in the WBCN studio on Newbury Street. “The very first time the needle dropped on that first record, I remember being in the next room with Riepen, [who was] popping pills and drinking champagne, looking through the glass. Riepen was readably nervous as the calls and the complaints started coming in.” Although WBCN’S previous format had not kept the station in the black, the few classical music listeners who were tuned in at that late hour erupted with dismay, lighting up the phone lines in disbelief. But calls of support from a new audience were just as vocal and would increase dramatically over the next few weeks. “God bless Peter Wolf for many things,” Rogers stated, “but among them, he was the only one who had the presence of mind to instruct listeners that it would be a good idea to send in letters and postcards if they liked what they heard. An awful lot came in too; I saw some 30-gallon barrels of letters. It made a significant impression on the people [in the office] downstairs.” This was important since, as Rogers added, “There were objections to us; we weren’t entirely welcome at 171 Newbury Street. We weren’t . . . uh . . . what they were used to at a classical radio station.”

  “They were from the Nixon conservative era; but the [new] staff was anti-Vietnam, progressive left-wing,” Wolf recalled. “Sandra [Newsom] was this woman that ran the old ’BCN office, sort of like a gal Friday: did all the billing and booking and stuff. She had this huge poster of Barry Goldwater on the wall. Goldwater was Attila the Hun to us! She couldn’t stand these dirty hippies; didn’t want them in the office, even though they were creating this thing.”

  Peter Wolf in 1968. “He had a beautiful understanding of what to do with the radio.” Photo by Charles Daniels.

  “I guess they were afraid we were on acid all the time and we’d steal the records or something,” Riepen chuckled.

  Wolf didn’t just arrive at the station with a box or two of R & B records to play; he arrived with a plan. He had a theme song to start the show: “Mosaic” by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, over which he’d rap introductions for a cast of characters, both real and imagined. He came with an entourage, including neighbor and friend Charles Daniels, who was becoming a celebrity as the Tea Party’s house emcee. Daniels recalled, “The radio was just a reflection of what we were doing at that time. I’d talk about the Tea Party, who I’d hung out with, or if I was wearing some funky new underwear. I’d take my pants off [in the studio] and say, ‘check this out!’” Daniels evolved into a sort of cohost: an Ed McMahon to Wolf’s Johnny Carson. “I started calling him the ‘Woofa-Goofa’ and he started calling me ‘The Master Blaster.’ We’d joke back and forth, than jump right into a song,” Daniels explained. “It wasn’t comedy radio, but a lot of slapstick and jiving, with really, really good music.” One of their favorite bits was an old slice of black folklore called “doing the dozens,” as represented by “Say Man,” one of Wolf’s favorite songs by blues great Bo Diddley. The two would launch into a lengthy and friendly rant based on the “your baby is so ugly” motif that Diddley and colead singer Jerome Green jived over on their 1958 Chess single. Wolf and Master Blaster volleyed, piling on the insults until one or the other, both usually, collapsed in laughter. “It was very funny,” Rogers laughed. “I was into blues, but R & B was [Wolf’s] specialty. It was new material to me, and I’d say, 98% of our listeners, who would have heard nothing like it.”

  “My show was an enigma. Because of my relationship with Ray, I was given carte blanche,” Wolf explained. “I brought all my records and 45’s in; I’d program Billy Stewart, lots of blues, R & B, rock and roll, Van Morrison, deep Bob Dylan tracks, Tim Hardin and a lot of singer/songwriters like Jesse Winchester. I’d play things that were not in the main vein of what ’BCN was going after, which was Country Joe and the Fish, Jethro Tull and the new music that was coming out.” In his husky growl, he’d grant blessings on the “stacks of wax,” “mounds of sound,” and the “platters that matter.” But Wolf still had to learn the basics of radio, as he related:

  I got a call one night from Ron Della Chiesa. In his great, great voice, he said, “Hey man, what’s wrong with you? Where’s the ID?”

  And I went, “What?”

  “The ID!”

  “What’s that?”

  “The station identification!”

  “Well, what’s that?”

  “Don’t you know you’ve got to give an ID every half hour and hour?”

  “Oh!” So, then I said “WBCN” on the air when I was supposed to. He called back and said, “No, no! You’ve got to name the city too; you have to say the whole thing: WBCN, Boston!” [Wolf laughed.] So, you know, he taught me to do that!

  Within a week of his first show on ’BCN, Peter Wolf ran into Jim Parry, a Princeton graduate and self-professed “unregenerate folkie” who had made his way north to the folk music Mecca of Harvard Square. “I was working at Club 47 and I knew Wolf from the music scene,” Parry remembered. “He said, ‘I’m doing this show at this new station,’ which I had vaguely heard about, ‘but I’ve never engineered before and I have no idea how to do that.’ I said, ‘Oh, gee, I did that when I was in school. I’ll do it for you.’” So, as simply as that, Parry joined the cast of characters, manning the controls, pushing the buttons, and cueing up records for his new boss. “[Wolf] was always a total music-head; he had a shit-load of very esoteric records.” As dawn closed in and began to dissipate the nocturnal spell that Wolf had cast during the wee hours, he would launch into a closing rap in which he thanked his cohorts and bid adieu to another long night. “Jim Parry—looking so merry” would get his nod as well as “Master Blaster” and “the Kid from Alabama keeping it all hid” (who was Ed Hood, a friend from the Square who studied at Harvard and had been the star of Andy Warhol’s 1965 film My Hustler). Wolf would also mention the station engineer he dubbed “Sassy John Ten-Thumbs.” Jim Parry explained, “He was an MIT dropout and sort of lived in the back room of the Newbury Street studio. There were cubicles back there and he walled off this area with science-fiction books. He was essentially homeless and lived there for about a year.”

  Also working the board for Wolf on occasion was Al Perry, who had been at WBCN for six months at that point. “Ron Della Chiesa actually hired me when [the station] was still classical. I swept floors; then I got my FCC license and did a little news and weather at the top of the hour. When Ray Riepen came in, I started selling [the station].” This meant that he was working the streets for the sales department by day and jamming on the air most of the night. “T. Mitchell Hastings had actually built a shower and a bathroom downstairs with a roll-out couch,” Perry recalled. “I’d get off at six in the morning, sleep for a while, shower and shave, go to a sales meeting at 8:30, then hit the road. So, yeah, I was pretty tired. Wolf would yell at me because I’d fall asleep and the record would be spinning around . . . ‘Wake up, you sonuvabitch!’”

  “I’d come in and Al would be lying there on the floor,” Jim Parry laughed. “He slept with his eyes half open for some reason, so we were never sure if he was asleep or awake.” Master Blaster added, “If I like you, at some point I’m going to give you a name; that’s just how I am. So, I started calling [him] Crazy Al, because he was always doing something at the station; he never got to go home!”

  Shortly after the initial shows at the Newbury Street studio, the broadcasts from Riepen’s nightclub, the Boston Tea Party, began. “Ray spent the money for a Sparta [control board] and that was put over at the club,” Rogers explained. “Then it became normal for us to broadcast from there on weekends.”

  “I got the board for two or three hundred dollars and put it in the dressing room, and of course, it didn’t hurt us if we could talk to people like The Who, Led Zeppelin, Jeff Beck, or Rod Stewart between sets!”

  “There wasn’t really a backstage dres
sing room,” Tea Party general manager Steve Nelson explained about the layout of the club. “It was originally built as a church, so there was only this one little room, almost like a ready room, where you could go and sit, then jump up on stage. But the big room off of my office on the other side of the building we called the ‘back room’; that was a hangout space and dressing room. Bands would walk right from that room, through the crowd, to the stage, and vice versa. There wasn’t really any privacy; if you were in that room, then you got to hang out with the band.”

  “I remember music coming through the door while we were on the air,” Jim Parry recalled. “Soundproofing? What’s that?”

  “We’d put a blanket over our heads so we couldn’t hear the concert through the microphone when we were trying to talk!” Wolf added. Jim Parry also shivered at the memory of the Tea Party, because after the concerts were over, the staff would clean up the mess, flick off the heat, and leave. “The place was locked down after hours. It was still, basically, winter. [Wolf] was doing all night, and it was cold as hell! I was in a pea coat and gloves, and he was wearing some kind of winter coat for about the first month. He periodically put on a long cut, and we’d break into the ballroom and steal sodas from the concession stand there. He practiced screaming on the stage, [doing] his Howlin’ Wolf imitation.”

  Ray Riepen’s strategy was dependent on showing Mitch Hastings and WBCN’S board of directors some significant sales progress during the experimental hours of free-form rock. “I told [the sales department], ‘Listen, we don’t have any [ratings] numbers. I don’t want you to go into the big agencies and talk to these guys that want to see our numbers. I want you to go into small stores and sell them. I want you to bring in money . . . five dollars at a time.” But, word-of-mouth awareness of Boston’s latest radio format spread at an astonishing pace. When Al Perry and his colleagues hit the streets, they found their potential customers already well aware of what was going on at 104.1. “Back in those days,” Perry related, “the head shops pretty much stretched from Massachusetts Avenue and Boylston Street in Boston to Cambridge. Typically, you’d go in and say, ‘I’d like to talk about radio; I work for WBCN.’

  “Jim Parry, looking so merry.” Photo by Dan Beach.

  ‘You do? Who are you?’

  ‘Al Perry.’

  ‘Al Perry? I was getting laid last night listening to you!’ Then they’d start signing up.”

  Soon the money began trickling in as the sales team mined their fresh vein of paisley- and Nehru-clad clients. These new buyers actually preferred the late night commercials being sold during “The American Revolution,” since most of their customers followed a far more nocturnal lifestyle than the nine to five workers that Mitch Hastings’s team had pursued. Sam Kopper, newly returned to Boston after graduating from Syracuse University, briefly took a job selling for Riepen alongside Al Perry and longtime veteran Jack Kearney, who had also been at BCN during the classical days. “Selling [time on] the station was not hard,” Kopper revealed. “[WBCN] was coming out of every window in Back Bay, so places like head shops and record stores totally got it. By the way, it cost eleven dollars for a 60-second spot!” Though it was easy selling time, Kopper despised doing it, lasting only two days in the department. Fortunately, he got a second shot as a DJ one night in May, filling in for Joe Rogers, who was still in school and had forgotten he had to take an exam. Kopper’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Within a matter of days, Hastings announced that Riepen had proven his point, and ’BCN went on the hunt for full-time jocks to fill out the schedule. Except for some weekly recorded religious programs, “The American Revolution” had gone twenty-four-seven. Rock and roll was here to stay!

  “Traditionally, it’s been difficult to sell FM time during prime periods, let alone after 10 o’clock at night through 5 in the morning,” explained Riepen to the Boston Sunday Globe in early 1969. “We showed Mr. Hastings we could sell ‘spots’ at those ungodly hours, so he figured we should sell even more during prime time. Due to the tremendous community response we went 24 hours a day as of last May 20th [other sources indicate May 17th] with the rock or contemporary music format, and the financial feasibility of such programming has been proven.”

  “We had these pictures of opera singers and conductors on the wall at the old 171 Newbury Street studios, and I’ll never forget taking them all down,” Ron Della Chiesa recollected. “It was the end of an era, and I was tinged with sadness [at] the fact that it couldn’t work.” As Chiesa moved out, Riepen moved his people in. Certainly Joe Rogers, now well known around town as Mississippi Harold Wilson, would remain along with Peter Wolf, whom Rogers labeled “the key to the station,” in a 1972 story in the Real Paper. Sam Kopper, with his experience hosting a folk music show on WAER-FM in Syracuse, actually had more radio experience than any of the others and was tapped to do mornings. That slot, as Kopper related, was not coveted: “It was considered lower than even overnights because hippies and college students didn’t get up that early. I developed a completely different philosophy: whereas most morning shows were about yelling or bells and whistles to wake you up, my idea was to play energized music. I would take people through these changes: a set might begin very gently, as mellow as Nick Drake, but then work its way up to higher and higher energy. One of my favorite compliments was from the first chair violinist of the Boston Symphony who wrote me a letter flipping out over a segue I’d done from Franz Schubert into BB King.”

  Tommy Hadges, Al Perry, and Jim Parry all earned shifts, cashing in on the experience they’d received helping Wolf and Rogers on their initial shows. But Riepen still needed more talent and, in an inspired move, imported underground radio veteran Steve Segal, who had been working for the legendary Tom Donahue at KPPC-FM in Pasadena. Segal flew the coop to arrive in Boston in June 1968. “I remember my first night, landing at Logan Airport; Riepen was waiting for me. He meets me where the passengers and guests were mingling; we shake hands and he says, ‘My Cadillac broke down on the way here and I had to pull it off the road, so we’re going to have to walk back to Cambridge. Don’t worry, it’s not too far.’” Segal laughed at the memory of Riepen’s blatant fib. “I swear to God, I walked all the way from the fuckin’ airport to Cambridge! It took me forever, and all I can remember was him telling me about Peter Wolf, Mississippi, and all these guys. His basic take on them was that they were all nuts; but, of course, he was the craziest of them all.”

  Riepen, crazy or not, knew what he wanted, promptly putting Segal on the air and installing him as the temporary head of programming, although his responsibility was not as official as a modern program director’s. Since every jock at WBCN was encouraged to play their own musical blend, Segal’s taste and greater experience would merely serve as a beacon for the others to follow. “He had been mentored by Tom Donahue and that whole scene out there,” Sam Kopper mentioned. “Whereas we had perfectly good makings for what would become a valid underground rock station, bringing in Steven at that time made a huge difference. He was very much the guru for our station.”

  “It just came naturally to him,” Al Perry added. “He’d play three songs and you were just dying to hear what he’d have to say.”

  “It was 1968. We were all socio-political; we were all involved,” Kopper pointed out. “The commitment to [that] was almost as important as the music, but Steven did it better. I consider him, maybe, the Howard Stern for NPR [or] a left-wing Rush Limbaugh, other than the fact that he made it happen with music.” Charles Laquidara, who was not yet in the picture at WBCN, would summarize years later, “Steven was the most brilliant disc jockey that ever existed; Howard Stern paled next to him.”

  “Everyone treated me with this great respect,” Segal explained, “but as far as me being the big radio veteran from the West Coast, I’d only been on the air for six months in L.A. by that point! I was excited to be [at BCN]; I met [everyone] and they all seemed to be, not professional radio guys, but funny, wacky . . . out of their minds.
I felt like I was home.” Segal noticed a fundamental difference between the underground radio of the East Coast as opposed to his former home.

  The original WBCN jocks out on the town: (from left) sports reporter Bud Collins, Steve Segal, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary, Joe Rogers, Sam Kopper, and Al Perry. Courtesy of the Sam Kopper Archives.

  The West was mostly ex-star disc jockeys who had made a revolutionary change: they realized that albums were going to kill 45s and they better be where the action was. [They were] super-professional guys re-creating radio with plenty of thought about the things they wanted to present. But in Boston we were on our own just trying to figure it out. It was an enormously talented group of people who just didn’t have a whole lot of experience. The creative energy flow was way more intense than Los Angeles, light years ahead in the depth of music played and in sheer insanity. At ’BCN it was like a playground; we were like little kids. We loved it, adored it, and had a passion for it.

  Steve Segal became “the Seagull” on the air. “First I thought that Steve Segal sounded way too Jewish and I wasn’t comfortable being myself on the air yet. So I guess [the name] had something to do with me coming in from California.” Don Law, busy running the Tea Party, became Segal’s first Boston roommate: “Other than Ray Riepen, there is nobody more responsible for what happened at WBCN than Steve. They all followed his lead, everybody. He moved in with me on Beacon Hill and we were the odd couple. He was a really sweet guy, but he had a very tough time keeping it together. He was as disorganized as an adolescent, [with a] kind of arrested development, but he was brilliant, just brilliant.”