Radio Free Boston (23 page)

Long after the parade of gray suits had abandoned the Prudential Tower to commute home, the security detail found a very different type of client seeking to wander back into the premises, calling up on the hotline to announce them and wait for Goodwin's approval. “The clubs closed at two, so that meant all the bands and people who were driving home would say, ‘Let's go by and see the “Duke!” ' They just loved coming to the station and laying down on the floor or sitting up against the wall in the [record library], just chillin' and listening to the stuff I was playing. They'd come to help me out, if you get my meaning . . . they'd lay out some stuff that was just nuts!” Occasionally Goodwin would host a personality on the air. “Once, Parenteau brought in Mitch Ryder . . . you know, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels? Mitch was a surly son of a bitch and Parenteau thought that if he brought him to the station while I was on the air, we would reminisce about Detroit radio. [But] Mitch [just] sat there. It kind of went, ‘Mitch, how you doin'?'

‘All right.'

‘Yeah . . . good. You still living in Detroit?'

‘Yeah . . .'

‘Well, thanks a lot, man.'” Goodwin threw up his hands in frustration. “He wouldn't talk! But, Parenteau was brilliant when he got an artist who was reticent, or not forthcoming. He had one question that I loved and I would wait for him to ask it: ‘Well, okay, let's get down to it. What happened to that last album?' That was his question, and whoever it was would just, all of a sudden, spill their guts: ‘We couldn't get rehearsal time' . . . blah, blah, blah and off they'd go. That was the magic question and I would wait for it. Just brilliant, man.”

Since most self-respecting rock stars slept late, Mark Parenteau's 2:00 to 6:00 p.m. shift was the magic one for interviews, with dozens of the most famous artists (and con artists) walking through the studio. Sue Sprecher recalled, “My favorite '
BCN
memory was working at the top of the Pru, and there was a knock on the [back] door. I opened it up and it was John Belushi! He goes, ‘Can I go on the radio?' I said, ‘Let me check, but I think, probably yes!' Parenteau was on the air, and I walked in and told him, ‘John Belushi is outside and wants to go on the air.' He didn't believe me, but then he looked . . .”

“You could see right from the control board, through the Listener Line window, at who was coming in the back door,” Parenteau said.

There's Belushi, and a couple of local cokeheads. He spent a lot of time on Martha's Vineyard and knew the station quite well, was in Boston for the day, and hooked up with all the wrong people. They were wired to the tits and decided to come by unannounced and unexpected to '
BCN
to do an interview. Belushi had become a superstar with
Saturday Night Live
, and [in 1978]
Animal House
came out and he was huger than ever. So, the door opens, and within five seconds I snapped on the microphone, just overreacting: “John Belushi, I don't believe it!” It was like Christ had just walked in the door because he was so big and everybody wanted a piece of him at that time.

During commercials, Parenteau escorted Belushi to the back of the record library, where “treats” awaited him. “It was a memorable day, and I don't even think we have any pictures because it was so unexpected.”

“I'm not Mark Parenteau; I don't know how to do interviews,” Charles Laquidara confessed. “So Frank Zappa was sitting there, on the air, and I was trying to casually make conversation: ‘Why are you wearing these red tights?' He said, ‘To hold up my balls.'”

The Clash and Oedipus got together on
WBCN
after the band's show at the Orpheum in September 1979. They hit it off fabulously. By the end of the interview, the members of England's foremost punk group were singing along uproariously on the air with the Village People's “Y.M.C.A.”

“Jesse Colin Young came in to play on the air and he was famous as a real ‘we're all brothers, we're all water, love, love' kind of guy,” Laquidara recalled. “Tom Couch ran into the studio to give me a tape of something I'd asked for, and he tripped over Jesse's guitar and knocked it over. Jesse called him a fucking asshole and told him to be careful where he was going. I said, ‘You know, I don't really want to talk with you anymore,' and I asked him to leave.”

During an interview with Oedipus, Jean Jacques Burnel from the Stranglers baited the listeners with statements like “The only thing Boston is good for is scrod!” The flood of ensuing on-air phone calls were rife with retaliatory insults and expletives, an alarming number of f-bombs from both sides prompting the
DJ
to close down the lines. Burnel taunted him haughtily: “You're just afraid that your big building will get blown up!”
Oedipus replied with an uneasy laugh, then, “Well, if it hasn't been blown up already . . .”

The Cars share driving tips with Mark Parenteau. Photo by Eli Sherer.

“Hunter S. Thompson came in and he was really pissed off,” Charles Laquidara observed. “He had a new book out and his publicist had set up this morning interview. ‘I've been up all night; let's get this fucking thing over with!' So I said, ‘Hunter? Your, uh . . . coffee is in the other room; go in there with Tom Couch.' So he disappears . . . for an hour! He's doing, uh . . . Columbian coffee, shall we say, in the production studio, making all these promos for us that started with, ‘Hi, I'm Hunter S. Thompson and
WBCN
is the best station I've ever heard in my life . . . but I can't tell you why!'”

Poststrike, Matt Siegel, his brief spat with Laquidara long forgotten, relished each day's opportunity to have fun with the morning jock during their “Mishegas” crossover. “I was the dry one, Charles was the straight guy; we would riff back and forth and I would just take shots at him. I learned a lot about styling back then, taking that pause before you told the punch line. That was the beginning of me actually finding my radio voice; Charles was the one who gave me confidence.” Siegel continued with a smile,

If you mention, even in passing, that somebody needs something, [then] he's on the phone just wheelin' and dealin'; but, by the same token, [Charles] never
bought
anything
when he was [at '
BCN
]. He lived his whole life on this sort of barter system and everything was free at his house. [For the game show segment “Mishegas”] he would book a contestant . . . a category of people, and it was always something for the house! “Hey we're going to play with plumbers today, so call me if you're a plumber.” He'd get a plumber on the phone, and they'd work out some sort of deal . . . then the guy would fix a toilet and get tickets to a Don Law concert!

Siegel was hilarious enough on his own show, working the comedy and pulling pranks as he gained confidence. In September '79,
WBCN
obtained the exclusive early release of Led Zeppelin's first new studio album in three years, and anticipation ran at a fever pitch. Any disc jockey would have been thrilled just to have the opportunity to debut such a long-awaited monster, but Siegel went for the fake instead. When the big moment arrived to play
In Through the Out Door
for the very first time, he substituted a generic disco number, allowing the sinuous rhythms and female “Oooh-Ooohs” to pulse just long enough to panic even the most casual Zeppelin fan. Then, finally turning the microphone on, he wailed, “I can't believe it! That's the last straw—I'm quitting! Led Zeppelin has gone disco! I've had it with rock and roll!” It seemed to be a goof, but for a long uncertain moment, thousands of Zeppelin fans sat paralyzed by their radios, not quite sure. They wouldn't be completely reassured until a minute later when the joker started up the real thing on turntable 2. Talk about timing.

Then, there were the famous Lunch Songs, a tradition begun on Matt Siegel's “Mighty Lunch Hour” at noon, even before the strike. Tom Couch gave credit to Steve Lushbaugh as the studio genius who did the first song parodies on the station. “He was a revelation, had a million voices. I was, like, ‘How did you get rid of the words in the original song [so you can substitute your own]?' He messed around with the plugs in the back [of the control board] and I learned from him.” Soon, noontime spoofs with titles such as “Lunch-itis” (instead of J. Geils's “Love-itis”), “Heard It in a Lunch Song” (adapted from the 1977 Marshall Tucker Band hit “Heard It in a Love Song”), and “Lunchtime at the Oasis” (from Maria Muldaur's “Midnight at the Oasis”) appeared. When Lushbaugh left, Tony Berardini elevated Tom Couch into the production director's chair and a fresh talent named Eddie Gorodetsky appeared. The new hire was brought into the station and put to work as David Bieber's assistant and a voice talent on
Laquidara's show. “I was working at the
Phoenix
, and across the street was the Rainbow Rib Room,” Bieber recalled. “Eddie was a counter guy, a fry cook, and he went to Emerson College. I saw his great wit interacting with the 11:00 p.m. drunks looking for a burger and I said, ‘You're going to learn a lot of things in school, but the reality is you're probably gonna learn a lot more if you start getting up at 4:30 in the morning and you give yourself away for free on Charles's show.'”

Not only did Eddie Gorodetsky assume a difficult morning schedule, but he also truly connected with Couch, the two becoming a powerhouse production team. “He was so funny and so quick; what a difference he made,” Couch commented.

The day after Pope John Paul the First died, I got into work and he was going, “Tom, Tom, we gotta do ‘Popeless!' We'll take ‘Helpless' from Neil Young and cancel out the words. [Sings] There is a town in old Italy, with bishops and cardinals to spare . . . [The chorus was] We are Popeless, Popeless, Popeless, Popeless.” It aired only once, then we had to pull it! We got Gilbert and Sullivan's “H.M.S. Pinafore” and put together a two-minute bit, a '
BCN
opera, called “The Good Ship 104.” Then there was “Wop Music” [created from “Pop Musik” by M]. It ran maybe three times before Senator Lopresti, who represented the North End, called in. He was so upset that we debated him on the “Boston Sunday Review”! Our stance was that it was not racism, we were making fun of people who made fun of Italians.

Couch and Gorodetsky inaugurated a new era of Lunch Songs: the Beach Boys remake of “Catch a Wave” entitled “Eat a Sub (And You're Sitting on Top of the World),” “Another Grilled Cow to Go” (defaced from “Another Brick in the Wall” by Pink Floyd), and a disfigured Go-Go's “Our Lips Are Sealed,” renamed “Our Lips Eat Meals.”

As 1980 arrived and the staff celebrated nearly a year of relative stability, two station stalwarts left for, of all things, local television. Danny Schechter and Matt Siegel became producer and on-air talent, respectively, of a new overnight show on WCVB Channel 5 called
Five All Night/Live at Night
. As a variety concept that combined political guests and human interest stories with live entertainment, the show became a quick favorite with the vampires of Boston, despite its paltry budget and subsequent bare-bones production technique (often the show was shot with only one camera).
Continued success might have prompted
WCVB
to open the cash faucet, but all hopes of that occurring were dashed one night during a dramatic live television blunder.

Enlisting the help of Oedipus to gather local musicians and artists, Schechter assembled an exposé on the international and local punk rock phenomenon, an item that always inspired passionate debate. As the edgy show was nearly wrapped without any major slipups, the producer allowed himself a big sigh of relief. Despite a studio filled with black leather, colored hair, safety-pin earrings, and lots of attitude, there had been no serious decency breaches. The closest moment came when Schechter noticed that two of the models in the punk fashion show had merely
painted
their outfits on, but the camera tightened on the pair's faces in the nick of time. Now, with the show ending a few minutes early, Human Sexual Response, the band that had performed earlier, was asked to fill out the rest of the time. The band members responded gleefully with “Butt Fuck,” an earthy opus, obviously not cleared for the air. This unvarnished display of punk defiance caught everyone by surprise, with most of the vulgar “piece” broadcast live in all of its unexpurgated glory. Schechter freaked out, praying that the 3:00 a.m. gaffe wouldn't be noticed, but a few complaints managed to filter into the front office at Channel 5 the next day. Very quickly, heads were lopped off and the show cancelled. But Schechter and Siegel managed to trade up: the “News Dissector” transitioned into a distinguished career in network and cable television, while the former
WBCN
midday jock ended up on
WXKS-FM
(
KISS
108) in Boston, playing that same dance music he had jested about less than two years earlier during his Led Zeppelin disco spoof.