Radio Free Boston (28 page)

Billy West before Ren and Stimpy, Bugs Bunny, and the Red M&M! Pictured with (from left) Larry “Chachi” Loprete, Tank, and Peter Wolf. Photo by Mim Michelove.

Billy West came to '
BCN
through an impromptu, on-the-air routine. “I was living in Weymouth and a friend called me up and said, ‘Hey, call '
BCN
! They're playing this game, and they want to find somebody who sounds like Mel Blanc.' Charles was up in the Pru, and they were doing “Mishegas,” so I called up. Eddie Gorodetsky, who was just a kid then, an intern, was screening the calls. ‘Hello, '
BCN
. Ya sound like Mel Blanc?' It totally caught me off guard, and I didn't know what to say, so he just hung up on me.” West sat there dumbfounded for a second. “Then I said to myself, ‘Fuck this guy, I'm gonna call back that radio station.' He goes again, ‘Hello, '
BCN
, ya
sound like Mel Blanc?' And I laid into him with a litany of [Blanc] voices, one after the other, like asteroids hitting him!

“‘Wait, hold on.' And he went and got Charles, so I ended up getting on the radio that day.” But that was not enough to clinch an on-air berth for West, who was far more into partying than pursuing the opportunity most hopefuls would die for. “I was drunk later that day; I didn't even remember it.” As a guitar player, he submerged back into his world of selling instruments and amplifiers in Harvard Square. That might have been the beginning and end of a promising
WBCN
career, but months or years later (no one quite remembers) a good friend managed to get a cassette of West to Charles Laquidara, who recalled the “Mel Blanc” boy wonder who played “Mishegas” that day. Fate, it seemed, had determined that West would get to the station, no matter what.

Dave Wohlman, who bridged the gap in the production department between Tom Couch's tenure and the arrival of Tom Sandman, mentioned, “I have never worked alongside someone who was so gifted. You had to raise the bar of your own game just to play in Billy's sandbox. If he was working on a character, like Floyd the Barber from
The Andy Griffith Show
, he would talk to you as Floyd the Barber all day! Every day it would change: he'd be Mr. Jinks from the
Pixie and Dixie
cartoons or Larry from the
Three Stooges
.” West, as a working musician, could play the guitar and sing in a seemingly endless array of mimicking voices, but his lack of dependability got on Laquidara's nerves. “Billy was just so talented, he was too good,” Oedipus mentioned. “Charles would be all upset, and I'd say, ‘If he shows up, put him to work, if not, that's just the way it is because we're not firing him! We'll do everything we can do to help him, but we're not getting rid of him.'”

“Oedipus had a very high threshold for my nonsense,” West added. “[Once] I didn't come in for two days, and he took me to his office and gave me this stern talking to about being professional. When you're an inebriate, you make whatever excuse [you can]: ‘Uh, my alarm didn't go off.' So, at the end of it, I realized he was going to give me a break. He gave me two hundred dollars and said, ‘Go get a [new] alarm clock.' I'll never forget it, and we're friends to this day. He knew I was in trouble.”

But the problems with Billy West were getting worse. One night he showed up at the station, cornered Lisa Traxler in a production studio, and had to be ejected onto
WBCN'S
front stoop, in the pouring rain. Mark Parenteau, who lived in an apartment across the street and was certainly
no stranger to late-night carousing, found West to be a frequent visitor: “Sometimes, he'd get really loud and start knocking pictures off the wall, and eventually even I would have to sleep, so he'd pass out in the lobby of my building. My neighbors would be down there in the morning, stepping around him to get their mail. Billy learned to sleep in the ‘Cardboard-only' dumpsters: those were a lot cleaner and didn't have rats.” If that sounds like a joke, Parenteau, who started a professional comedy act with West, wasn't laughing. The two began doing a stand-up routine in local clubs, even warming up once for Jay Leno at UNH, and their approach was ad-lib, as Parenteau related: “We were going to prepare lines, but we never got around to it. I was Abbot and he was Costello. I was the straight man who talked to the audience and he'd be . . . Billy!” However, the duo's chemistry failed them at Parenteau's Celebrity Roast at Stitches comedy club in 1984, with West resorting to lowering his pants and making animal noises and grunts onstage. “Everybody was there: Aerosmith, Peter Wolf, Ken Shelton, Lenny Clarke, various writers, Norma Nathan from the
Herald
,” Parenteau moaned. “Billy was out of control; it was embarrassing . . . the worst moment.” The curmudgeon of chaos had crashed.

“I was empowered by the fact that I couldn't be killed. Every time something came close, I survived it,” West remembered. Drug debts loomed, he wasn't paying his rent, and “everybody was chasing me down.” West ended up in court frequently, but one visit in his seemingly endless parade of legal tangles proved to be the one that changed everything. “I had to go to court for nonpayment of rent, and there was this crotchety, old Italian judge who looked down his specs at me. He said, ‘You never answered a violation from a year ago when you crashed your car on the Mass Pike and left it upside down on the
other side
of the guardrail. You're going to Charles Street [Jail].' Next thing I know I'm in a pissy, smelly, two-hundred-year-old jail, and for the first time in my adult life, I was forced to be sober for seven straight days. Then the radio station was adamant that I go to McLean Hospital, which was rehab. The program was five weeks in-patient.” The cold turkey at Charles Street plus West's rehab stuck: “I've been sober ever since; I got it the first time around and never went back. So, if it hadn't been for the station, I'd probably be dead.” Upon his return to '
BCN
, the dried-out and alert Billy West took all those around him aback: was this really the same person who had clotted up the studios with his dark and drunken presence over the last couple of years? Yes it was, the same man in an astounding transformation, as if a controlling evil spirit had been wrenched from his
soul and sent, kicking and screaming, back into Hades. Billy West became an unstoppable force in the
WBCN
production team, now joined by Tom Sandman, and added significantly to an already amazing body of work.

Tom Sandman (top left) hosts a
WBCN
alumni show with (top left to right) Sam Kopper, Jim Parry, (bottom left to right) Joe Rogers, Charles Laquidara, and Al Perry. Yes, Jim is using Al as a saddle. Photo by Dan Beach.

Tom Sandman arrived at
WBCN
in 1982, after working at the legendary WEBN-FM, in Cincinnati, one of only a handful of radio stations that predated
WBCN
as a free-form rock outlet. “'
BCN
was on my radar because there were only four or five stations that I knew had really creative production departments. When I heard those parody songs that Lushbaugh and Couch did, I thought they were the best.'” After the job at
WBCN
opened, Sandman flew into town, had lunch with Oedipus, hit it off immediately with the program director, and was offered the new gig. “People kept saying to me, ‘Wait till you meet Billy!' I had no idea who Billy West was. As it turned out, he was just the greatest partner you could have on a creative level. He was bouncing off the wall with ideas and funny lines. And you know, Oedipus let us do whatever we wanted, he didn't tell us how to do it. He just wanted something new and fresh.”

“I hate to use clichés,” West said, “but Tom was like Dan Aykroyd and I was like Belushi. Sandman understood music; he could sing and do voices.”

“Billy was a terrific vocal arranger; he could hear and mimic harmonies
that I couldn't get,” Sandman remembered. “For example, the intricate jazz-type harmonies that the Beach Boys would do; he'd get them and then teach them to me.” After Sandman worked the music bed out on tape, both he and West would layer on the vocals. “I was the McCartney [voice] and Billy was the Lennon. But Billy had a great David Bowie. I did a pretty good Pete Townshend, [but] neither of us could do Roger Daltrey very well. Billy was a great Mick Jagger; I did an okay Bob Dylan. He did Bruce Springsteen and I did Tom Petty!”

Sandman and West chewed into a new era of lunch songs for Ken Shelton, who gleefully debuted them at noon on the “Mighty Lunch Hour.” The lunch song factory turned out spoofs like “Papa Ate a Chicken Bone” (mutated with all its Motown soulfulness from the Temptations' smash “Papa Was a Rolling Stone”); the Rolling Stones' “Mother's Little Helper” became “Hamburger Helper”; and the epic “Flabby Road Medley” was adapted from side 2 of the vinyl
Abbey Road
album from the Beatles. The duo's wit and humor invaded everything the station tasked them to create: from a cheerleading anthem for the Super Bowl–bound Patriots in 1986 entitled “We Love the Pats” to on-air announcements for the Rock 'n' Roll Rumbles or the mountains of commercials assigned by sales—all created in the windowless production studio where Sandman and West barricaded themselves for hours every day. Anyone who visited the station would inevitably find their way to that room to record their station
IDS
(“Hello, my name is , and you're listening to
WBCN
, Boston”).

“Tank would bring in these sports stars, Brooks Robinson and Willie Mays,” Sandman remembered reverently. “James Taylor, Steve Miller and Ric Ocasek came in, and David Byrne [of the Talking Heads], who hated to do radio, but he showed up. Jimmy Carter came through, and all these comics, celebrities, and actors: Henny Youngman, Sam Kinnison, and Professor Irwin Corey. Then one day Oedipus walks in with this guy, and he looks vaguely familiar; he's got these kinda' thick glasses and scraggily hair. Oedipus says, ‘Tom, I'd like you to meet Andy Warhol.' What the fuck? Andy fuckin' Warhol! How does that happen?” The possibilities in the halls and studios of
WBCN
seemed endless as the early eighties arrived and advanced. There really was the feeling that anything could, and would, happen. In a magical, multicolored, and electrified atmosphere like that, who really needed their
MTV
?

You'd hang around the station because it was fun. We'd have a fast-pitch, wiffleball game in the hallway between the copy room and Oedipus's office. Everyone else doing business was expected to go around. The lady answering phones would get whacked in the head and people had to wait to get in the copy room because it was 3 and 2, and the big one was due!
BRADLEY JAY

NUMBER 1
ROCK 'N' ROLL

CONNECTION

Back in 1968, a time that already seemed two thousand light years from home, Ray Riepen's imaginative leap of faith had birthed the successful experiment of underground, free-form radio in Boston. Joe Rogers, Peter Wolf, Al Perry, Sam Kopper, and the other departed soldiers from '
BCN'S
front line could congratulate themselves for significantly marking a place in radio history; that would have been significant enough. But as the station negotiated tumultuous times, surviving the end of the sixties and the retreat of the counterculture through the seventies, it surged into a new decade in a commanding position, like a marathoner suddenly finding himself at the head of the pack, wondering how he'd ever gained the lead, and now, how he was going to stay there. In August 1985,
Boston
magazine's annual “Best and Worst” poll not only lauded
WBCN
as the best station in the city but also pointed out that it had been chosen by the Academy of Rock Music as the best in the entire
country
, the decision based on a survey
of ten thousand tastemakers in the music business. The article went on to document its success in the wake of
WCOZ
bowing out of the race: “For the past 3 years '
BCN
has dominated the prized Boston radio audience between the ages of 18 and 34, while a clutch of other stations struggle in its wake. Only
KISS
(
WXKS
) consistently approaches
WBCN'S
numbers, and it does so with a different, primarily female audience.” In January '86, the
Boston Globe
declared, “
WBCN
remains the station others try to beat,” and “the undisputed king of Boston's rock radio.” But, although thriving after more than fifteen years of unique evolution through wildly changing times, the station had only just reached the beginning of a whole new role: a prized jewel in a golden corporate crown.

While Tony Berardini and Oedipus focused on running the station and maintaining its fantastic ratings story, Michael Wiener and Gerald Carrus concentrated on building an empire. The pair had begun Infinity Broadcasting in 1972 and then purchased
KOME-FM
in San Jose and
WIVY
in Jacksonville before laying out the capital to buy
WBCN
. Now, they could leverage the tremendous value of their Boston property to finance an expansion of Infinity in earnest. Tony Berardini remembered the moment: “In '81, Mike and Gerry came to me and said, ‘We're buying three more stations and we can't run all six [ourselves], so we're hiring a president. You'll like him. He's really good and really smart.' And that's when they hired Mel Karmazin.” The reins of power were transferred very quickly to the new chief, and Berardini began to report almost daily to him: “It was [now] Mel's company. I could go talk to Mike and Gerry all I wanted, but at the end of the day, what Mel said, went.” A dynamic and intensely energetic thirty-eight-year-old radio sales exec born in Manhattan, Kar-mazin had worked his way up from the bottom, selling radio ads when he was only seventeen. Soon the rising star was managing radio stations for Metromedia, the broadcasting giant based out of New York City, when he came to the attention of Wiener and Carrus, both mightily impressed with his business acumen and stellar track record. Years later, in 2005, when Karmazin had taken over the reins of Sirius Satellite Radio, Devin Leonard at
Fortune
magazine wrote of the exec's earliest days: “The joke about him was that he was so pushy that advertisers used to buy airtime from Mel just to get him out of their office.”

Karmazin became intimately involved in the actions of his small team of Infinity station managers, keeping a tight rein on their bottom line and
clearly defining his high expectations. Berardini, at the time only a general manager for a matter of months, vividly remembered the first time Karmazin flew to Boston to meet him. His new boss listened patiently to the endless summary of business data and ratings information presented to him and then issued a simple directive: “Just hit your numbers!” before ending the meeting. Bob Mendelsohn, the general sales manager whom Karmazin appointed to work at
WBCN
in January 1982, added, “The thing I always remember Mel saying was, ‘This is easy; don't make it hard; don't think too much.'” Given absolute authority over Infinity, Karmazin ran the company with a hands-on style, demanding complete honesty, frankness, and performance. “Pain is a great motivator, and one of those phone calls with Mel could be really, really painful if you didn't have the answers,” Berardini laughed dryly. “It would be 8:30, 8:15 in the morning, your phone ringing—the inside line, and it was Mel's assistant, Terry, with the four worst words you hated to hear: ‘Tony? Terry. Mel's calling.' Your asshole just puckered.” Karmazin watched his stations like a hawk, zeroing in on the regular pacing reports to see if each was on target for its projected earnings, but rarely involved himself with the station's programming. “Mel's goals were always based on revenue and profit,” Mendelsohn pointed out. “The endgame for him was not about programming; it was about corporate performance.” Berardini said, “It got to the point where I knew exactly when the phone was going to ring. Eventually I learned, rather than wait for him to call, which would piss him off, I'd pick up the phone and ask him for help, ‘cause if you didn't, he'd assume you had it all together.”

“There was lots of pressure on programmers and no slip in the ratings tolerated,” Mark Parenteau commented. “Tony and Oedi had to kiss Karmazin's ass. They were under a lot of pressure unbeknownst to the jocks, for a long period of time.”

With Karmazin's arrival, Infinity began a rocket ride of acquisition that would astonish the radio industry and Wall Street for two decades and, in the process (for better or worse), pull
WBCN
out of its singularly unique and isolated space, into a buzzing, interlinked, broadcasting community. “Mike and Gerry tapped into us when they escalated the stakes and started to buy other properties,” David Bieber remembered. In November of Karmazin's first year, Infinity bought out three stations from
SJR
Communications: former disco powerhouse
WKTU-FM
and
WJIT-AM
, both in New York City, and
WYSP-FM
in Philadelphia. The move created instant headlines since
the $16 million bill for ‘
KTU
, “marked the highest price tag ever paid for a single radio station at that time,” Karmazin told
Billboard
.

“They were acquiring beachfront properties and were willing to spend,” Bieber observed. “Then they eclipsed it. Every time they made an acquisition, it exceeded and set a new record [in dollars spent] from the previous time they had made a purchase.” A year and a half later, in June 1983, holding to a policy of only buying in America's major radio markets, Infinity absorbed
KXYZ-AM
in Houston and, by July 1984, had officially acquired the underperforming country-music outlet
WJEZ-FM
and its
AM
partner
WJJD
in Chicago.

Not unlike gunning for Park Place and Boardwalk in a high-stakes game of Monopoly, Karmazin targeted and paid premium prices for A-list radio properties, ones that could be improved (adding little green houses and ultimately a red hotel) and then command the highest returns in airtime sales. Rather than try to breathe life into what was considered a dying dragon, Infinity's programmers “blew up” New York's
WKTU'S
call letters and format in July 1985 and transformed the station into
WXRK
, known on the air as “92.3 K-Rock.” In the same way, market studies indicated that Chicago's
WJEZ
had hit a dead end playing country music, so the company remade the station into oldies-formatted
WJMK
. In each case, city by city, as Infinity's empire grew through the eighties, Mel Karmazin's attention focused, not only on acquiring stations, but then also on allowing his team to cultivate them as efficiently as possible. It was a dangerous word: “efficient”; it could change lives overnight, improving or ruining circumstances for hundreds of people who suddenly found themselves invested in, or ex-employees of, an emergent radio kingdom.

Meanwhile, back in the jungle at
WBCN
, Oedipus was adapting to the arrival of the new Infinity president: “'
BCN
was responsible for half the cash flow of the company; our success kept Infinity afloat.” As long as that success continued, the program director could count on relative noninterference from his corporate mother ship. “He would let us run wild,” Oedipus chuckled. “Mel would usually see the logic in it but never tell you it was a good idea. He would just say, ‘Okay, I gave you all the rope you wanted; you can hang yourself.'” Michael Wiener told
Boston
magazine in 1985, “They've made
WBCN
the number-one rated station and the number-one billing station in Boston. Owning '
BCN
is like riding a horse: you'd rather have a horse that you have to hold back than an old nag. You can't
get anywhere with a dull radio station.” So, with nonspecific permission granted, the hairbrained ideas and cockeyed conceptions dreamt up by an inventive staff were coddled and allowed to proceed. No manager would come running, panic stricken, into the studio if Ken Shelton happened to play “Working Class Hero” by John Lennon (with its resplendent and naked f-bombs) or if an occasional “shit” emerged from someone's mouth during an on-air interview. The complete irreverence of a Duane Ingalls Glasscock radio show or any typical Mark Parenteau shift, peppered generously with its crusty humor and blue comments (at least, one of his trademark “Lick me!” exclamations), were left alone and not censored into a sort of radio “white bread” deemed appropriate for mass consumption.

WBCN'S
front line of talent—Laquidara, Shelton, and Parenteau—occu-pied the broadcast day, or it might be more appropriate to say that they
inhabited
the day, because that formidable lineup would remain intact and dominate the working hours from six in the morning to six at night, for thirteen years, until Shelton left in 1993. And even after that, the remaining two veterans would stay in their drive-time slots for several more years. “The nucleus of strength at the station was that you had three very distinct and powerful individuals that had significant connection to the community, and ratings that were in the double digits for years,” David Bieber commented. “This was kind of unheard of in radio, because in terms of contemporary media people, for the most part, it's all about the bucks. '
BCN
could have been seen as a way station on route to Los Angeles or New York. But back then, there was a sense of involvement, a tremendous amount of goodwill between the people, and an ingratiating of talents into this one entity, which was
WBCN
. And I think at the heart of it, if not the face and the voice, was those three jocks.” Certainly, the triumvirate was well compensated for its efforts, and those amounts would only increase over time, but Laquidara, Shelton, and Parenteau clearly
wanted
to stay in their shifts. As the eighties unfolded, the three jocks remained in place for so long that their shift arrangement, on-air personas, and particulars of how each related to the other became familiar and comfortable to even the most casual '
BCN
listeners.

Ken Shelton told
The Tab
in 1988 that he considered himself “as the calm between the two knucklehead storms—Charles and Mark.” That was true; the less-cluttered, more music-oriented shift became a relatively peaceful interlude amidst the frequent morning and afternoon mayhem. Shelton's
image became that of a music sage; the majority of his hours were filled by the sounds of records, not talking. Even so, the midday host recalled that on some occasions the show could get a bit wild: “Toots and the Maytals played in the studio once. He had an entourage of people there just to keep rolling giant spliffs! They were [ripping out] pages of the
Boston Globe
to roll joints and smoke them in the studio. You couldn't see from the studio to the listener line; that's how thick the smoke was!” The interview? “I couldn't understand a word he was saying, and he didn't know what I was saying, but we were all laughing!” Another high point in all those years, according to Shelton, was Bill Murray's June 1981 visit to the “Mighty Lunch Hour,” ostensibly to promote his new movie
Stripes
but turning into a full sixty-minute takeover of the airwaves with the comedian reading commercials, answering phone calls, and picking out the tunes. Murray's hilarious finale, a tongue-in-cheek vision of his radio host went like this:

I do I lot of kidding about the way my man Shelton looks, but he's one of the handsomest men in all of the Boston area. I've followed the Red Sox for many years and . . . do you remember when Yastrzemski's kid was a baby? Do you remember what that baby looked like? This is what Ken looks like; he's that beautiful. And he can hit with power, he can throw, he can run, and he can field. Anyone who has money to give him, to promote the American look, the American way of life overseas, should give it to him, and a ticket to anywhere in the world to get him out of this town because he's wasted in this studio, here in this dark room. He just took off his veil and he's beautiful!