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.
