WBCN‘s final farewell party was held last night at the Paradise Rock Club on Commonwealth Avenue in Downtown Boston, culminating at least a month and a half of various and sundry farewell parties that have been held by numerous parties since CBS Radio announced the station’s closing back in July. Meaning that I have seen these people almost as much in the past two months as I did when I was working there, and I have been embarassingly, staggeringly drunk around them, well, at a pretty much one-to-one ratio.
This, however, was the big one: all the legends from when the station was huge and legendary were there, from Charles Laquidara to Mark Parenteau to Ken Shelton… and based on how they look today, apparently the station was huge and legendary a lot longer ago than I thought.
It was interesting to meet some of those guys who were there when WBCN was one of the biggest radio stations in the world because every single one of them felt as proud to be a part of that history as I did, and more importantly: every single one of them was a shitfaced as I was. I spent a few beers and cigarettes with a producer from the old morning show formulating a scheme to glorify the memory of WBCN by promoting the new “Freeform WBCN” streaming radio station with a free liquor and marijuana WBCN cruise in international waters for 2 grand a head. We actually spent ten minutes pitching this idea to Sam Kopper – WBCN’s original program director and current PD of the streaming station – before being kindly told that we should set out sights a little lower. So we spent fifteen seconds formulating a new plan to glorify the memory of WBCN by setting Dan Mason on fire… and gave up after spending five minutes failing to find either of our car keys.
