I’ve been pretty emotional since the announcement that CBS Radio was shutting down 104.1 FM WBCN, since not only was the station a huge part of Boston’s fabric and history, as well as flat-out radio history, and the radio station that introduced me to rock music as a teenager back in the 1980’s, but it was my station. I worked there as a part-time jock from January 2003 through the last week of December, 2005.
I had cranked myself into a holy, righteous indignation and whipped out an around 3,000 word eulogy for the station… but then I realized that if there’s a eulogy to be written for WBCN, I’m not the guy to write it. After all, I was just a fan and a weekend guy for a short time. I wasn’t privy to the day-to-day operations, I saw none of the decisions made first-hand, and never heard any of the reasons for them.
I don’t know what happened or why after Howard Stern left because I quit in the two weeks between when Stern left for satellite radio and David Lee Roth started. Not because I had some prescient vision of impending doom for WBCN, but because I had decided that Dave, the Program Director, was a dick, that I was never going to advance in any way, and I didn’t need the money, and therefore the headaches, anymore. And to be fair, I probably wasn’t going to advance because I wasn’t all that good a disc jockey. I was a club comedian that Dave’s predecessor, Oedipus, had basically hired off the street. I was probably lucky to be there at all.
So I can’t tell you much about what happened or why. All I can tell you is that, when I started working for Oedipus, it was in a historic radio station in Boston, behind the right field wall of Fenway Park, with what felt like a ton of creative freedom to talk and tell jokes, and even the chance to go into the 20-plus year music library to pick a couple of my own songs per shift (If you think that DJs on commercial radio stations select all their own music, you are stupid). Once I actually played Naked Eye by The Who. You know the last time that song was played on the radio? Probably when I played it in 2003.
When I resigned from under Dave, I was working in a basement studio in Brighton, staring at a computer screen with about 300 total songs on it. The good part about a computer-controlled radio station is that, like an iPod, the jock could set the entire radio station to play automatically, which is awesome if the jock, say, smoked cigarettes, or ever tried to take a dump before the end of Pearl Jam’s Alive (It can be done, but you’ve got to want it more than human companionship).
The bad part was the jocks were reduced to talking in three fifteen or so second bursts per hour. I had become so irrelevant to the programming that one time, during a live radio show, I did my fucking taxes. No one knew. One time, just before I quit, I checked out the entire music catalog in the computer. Let’s just say that, for my Dad’s birthday this year, I gave him an iPod Nano loaded with the entire Eagles and Bob Seger catalogs… meaning my Dad has more songs available to him than a WBCN disc jockey.
But that’s neither here nor there. The fact of the matter is that I’m not the guy to comment on WBCN’s history because I wasn’t there for most of it, even when I was working there. But I was there for one key moment, and it’s the only part I’m gonna salvage from my original screed. Here it is.
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If you read the comments on, say, Charles Laquidara’s Big Mattress blog, or on the news stories in the Boston Globe or Boston Phoenix, you see a recurring theme that the station lost it’s way when they left the studios at 1265 Boylston Street, across the street from the right-field wall at Fenway Park, for the basement of the old TV38 studios on a dead-end side street off of Soldier’s Field Road in Brighton. Danny Schechter, a legendary part of WBCN’s history, said in the Phoenix:
“I was actually in the “new” station in the basement at the old channel 38 building a week or two ago, How low the mighty have fallen…”
I wasn’t with the station for too many of it’s historic moments, but oh, I was there for that one. The transition of broadcasting from Boylston Street to Brighton was scheduled for 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning in March, 2005. I was the broadcasting DJ from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m.
So I was the last guy.
As usual, I arrived at the station at 4 a.m. to give me a couple of hours with the playlist to come up with jokes. I went upstairs, and was immediately struck by how empty the place was. Sales and programming had hauled stakes for the new office space that week, so the offices were empty, the gold and platinum records were off the walls. The worst part was the silence; I couldn’t hear what was being played because they had ripped the monitor speakers out of the hallway walls.
In the air studio, my good friend Sully was working the midnight to 6 shift. Sully’s another local boy who grew up listening to BCN, who was hired in the same set of auditions that I was, who had been as excited as I had been when he got hired to work at the legendary WBCN. However, on this particular morning, he was working in a mostly empty closet with a soundboard. All the memorabilia with any value had already been trucked over to Brighton. Twenty-odd years of CDs and vinyl that had been played over the airwaves were packed and gone, presumably in storage since the core two or three hundred songs that were now our playlist were ripped to WAV files and in the Audiovault server. Except on special occasions, no BCN jock would ever again pick out an actual album, select a track and play it. All that was left were some odds and ends with no value to CBS Radio.
The plan was that around 10 a.m., once the new Brighton studio took over, we would head to the new offices for a staff meeting. So when I took over at 6, I told Sully I would see him there. “I’m gonna hang out if it’s okay with you, Brother,” he said.
“Sure, but don’t you want to catch some sleep before the meeting?”
“Nah, I’m okay. I just want to… be here for it, you know?”
Not too long after my shift started, the hotline rang. It was Dave. “You know the plan, Rob?” he said.
“Yeah, the new studio takes over at 10, then head over for the meeting. Hey Dave… shouldn’t I be talking about this? I mean, when BCN moved from the Prudential Center to here, Mark Parenteau broadcast from the moving truck on the way over. Isn’t this a big deal?”
“Nope,” he said. “We want to be looking forward, not to the past. Don’t talk about it. We’ll celebrate the new studio when we switch over. Got it?”
I got it. He was the boss, so I never mentioned it on the air. Sully and I talked about it instead. Swapping out favorite BCN stories – Parenteau negotiating for the return of the Hilltop Steakhouse fiberglass cow heads, Laquidara’s Duane Glasscock character getting killed by a Russian agent’s poisoned lipstick, Nik Carter burying the hatchet with Opie and Anthony, and a dozen others – all back and forth across the soundboard and microphone from which those stories originated.
At about 9, during a long song, I went outside for a smoke and ran into Steve Strick, the Music Director who’d started as a jock probably before I was even listening. “Just stopped to pick up some stuff,” he said, “How you doing?”
“Not bad, but… I gotta tell you: it’s fucking weird to know that I’m gonna be the last guy to broadcast from this place, you know what I mean?”
Steve smiled. “Yeah. You know who the first guy to broadcast from here was?”
“Wasn’t it Parenteau, after the moving truck stunt?”
“Nope. It was me. I did the news segments from here while they were getting ready to move from the Pru.”
I didn’t have much of a response to that, because it was a massive bummer. We were two guys bookending our own little pieces of WBCN, and therefore radio history… and nobody would ever really know. Shit, I worked there, with the guy, and I had no idea he was the first person to crack a mike at 1265 Boylston; sure as hell that nobody would know that I was the last.
After all, my boss told me not to tell anyone.
When I got back to the air studio there were a few engineers standing around. “As soon as you’re done, we gotta break this shit down,” one of them told me. “We’re on a tight timeline.”
The hotline went off again. “We’re having some trouble on our end. If we’re not ready by 10, just keep playing like nothing’s happening. Don’t talk about it on the air. We don’t anybody to think we’re not in control.”
So I kept playing tracks. At about twenty minutes past ten, whatever song I was playing began to fade, and as I reached to fire the bumper (One of those “WBCN! The ROCK of BOSTON!” things DJs play between songs), I heard a crackle of static, and another song began to play over the monitors. “That was it,” the engineer said.
Sully and I looked at each other, but didn’t say anything. We didn’t have to. The studio had been taken out of our hands.
My song ended (And I wish to God I could tell you what it was), and the trigger button associated with it on the board went dark. I potted down all the volume levels to 0. For the first time, the air studio sound board at 1265 Boylston Street was potted down and dark.
As we walked downstairs toward the garage to head to the airstaff meeting, I noticed some grafitti on the low overhead wall above the stairs: “HOWARD IS A GOLDMINE!” And just beneath that, in different ink and handwriting, “Yeah, but wait until he LEAVES!”
We passed that, into the narrow hallway toward the garage, and the cheerier, brighter SUZI QUATRO, BILLY WEST and all the other twenty-odd years of grafitti. As I got into my car to leave, I heard the engineers’ spinning up power screwdrivers to take down the studio. I don’t know who turned out the lights.
[tags]WBCN, The Rock Of Boston, CBS Radio[/tags]
