Radio Free Boston (40 page)

With Ken Shelton gone, Bradley Jay in the midday seat, Howard Stern on at night, and modern rock the format, '
BCN
headed into 1995 as a rein-vigorated fighting machine. But the new music, as refreshing as it might be to the air staff, came to the station with a price. Because it was key to create hits out of these new songs, anchoring the format with the most powerful and coveted tracks,
WBCN
began playing its strongest music in a rotation of five to six “spins” a day. With that, the opportunities for the
DJS
to add their own optional songs (a tradition of varying freedom over the years) had ended completely. Now, the only musical freedom that could be exercised by an individual member of the air staff was if he or she attended the music meeting and voiced an opinion. “It was a slow evolving of complete freedom to gradual acceptance, and by '95 it was really tight,”
acknowledged Mark Parenteau. “I had started out way back making no money with 100 percent freedom; now I was making a quarter-million dollars [a year] and I had
no
freedom. But, it was a trade-of I gladly gave them.” Most of the jocks, though not making anything near Parenteau's pay scale, had to agree that it was much more fun playing the music they enjoyed the most, even if the ability to choose individual tracks during their shifts had been curtailed. “Lots of people, from U2 to the new artists, were turning out great records,” Steve Strick said. “It was a no-brainer to tap into that youthful energy.” It also resonated with
WBCN'S
past, which had always embraced the new and revolutionary, the up-and-coming, and the future trendsetters. “A roster once clogged with Classic Rock bands (Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd) now churns out a steady diet of new-rock acts such as Belly, Liz Phair, Oasis and Bush,” Dean Johnson wrote in the
Boston Herald
in May '95. He concluded, “There was a hole in the Boston market for a new-rock/alternative music station with a major
FM
signal. There is no hole anymore—and
WBCN
will reap the rewards.”

It was Mel who pointed out, “Guys, it's only twenty days out of 365. And, by the way, it's on Sundays. What do your ratings look like on Sundays? They suck! It can't hurt.”
TONY BERARDINI

ANY GIVEN
SUNDAY,

ANY GIVEN
WEEKDAY

The
WBCN
press release dated 17 November 1994 announced the startling news, but the local media was already buzzing excitedly about it:
WBCN
and the New England Patriots had signed a three-year deal for the radio broadcast rights beginning in the 1995–1996 season, ending the football team's previous relationship with
WBZ-AM
. The release stated, “Infinity's latest addition will mark the first time a major league sports team will be broadcast on an
FM
station in stereo in the Boston market.” The news broke on “The Big Mattress” as Robert Kraft, who had recently become owner, president, and chief executive of the Patriots, and
WBCN
general manager/ vice president Tony Berardini shared the announcement over the air.

The Kraft family, which had made a fortune in the paper and packaging materials business, had purchased the team early in 1994, and it was an association with Robert's son, Jonathan, that eventually led to his family's involvement with
WBCN
. Tank remembered, “On Fridays I would broadcast
my sports reports from outside the station on the sidewalk. We had clients involved, restaurants coming down, caterers, bicycle tune-ups; I knew Jonathan because he'd come down too. Once day, I introduced him to Berardini and suggested (ha, ha) that they talk about getting the Patriots on '
BCN
, not that that was ever going to happen, of course!”

“Jonathan used to come in and sit in on Charles's show all the time,” Be-rardini recalled. “He loved '
BCN
. One day Tank introduced us and we talked. We went out to dinner, and Jonathan made it very clear to me that they wanted the Patriots to be a success. They had been season ticketholders since Jonathan was a little kid, all those years when the Patriots couldn't even get fifteen thousand fans in the stands—sitting on those metal benches. And you have to remember that after '86, the Patriots just sucked; they were bad after they got blown out by Chicago [in the Super Bowl].”

With the ink barely dry on the new owner's contract to purchase the team, Berardini initiated a meeting with Mel Karmazin, Jonathan, and his father Robert Kraft. Berardini explained,

We had it in Robert's office, and I was shaking like a leaf, totally excited, but nervous. It was supposed to be an hour meeting, and Jonathan and I actually said very little the whole time. Mel and Robert started talking, and it got into, “Hey, do you know this guy?” They were talking about different investment bankers, because by this time the Krafts had a huge business, so Mel and Robert knew a lot of the same people. I was looking at my watch; we were forty-five minutes into this, and they were still playing “What banker do you know?” But then Robert started asking Mel about the radio business. It wasn't negotiating or anything; he just wanted to know about the business. Mel started telling him about how you make money in radio, the performance of Infinity over the years, that we were a growth company, the expectations, this and that. All of a sudden, Robert told us, “I want you to meet somebody.” He picked up the phone and said, “Hey, can you come up here?” He introduced us to this guy who was in charge of investing funds for the Kraft group, and then told him, “This is Mel Karmazin, the CEO of Infinity. I want you to buy stock in his company.” Mel looked at Robert and said, “I came here to do a deal for the radio rights to the Patriots, not to sell stock!” But it struck me that this was Robert's way of saying, “I like your business, and I like the way you
do
business.”

Mel Karmazin made his pitch to the Krafts after that, and as usual, according to Berardini, he kept things simple and direct:

“You should be on
FM
radio and here's why. We can do things in stereo; it's a much cleaner signal and we can mount as good a production as an
AM
station. If you're worried about the signal coverage, we will go out, just like we did in Dallas, and get affiliates in every town in New England who would love to have the Patriots broadcast.” Then Mel said, “Let's talk about the money.” Robert looked at him and said, “Why don't
you
tell me what
you
want to do?” Mel came back with something like, “I don't believe in going back and forth; I don't want to get into negotiating against WBZ [which was looking to renew its contract], so you tell me what your number is and then we'll tell you whether we can do it or not.” Robert still wanted it the other way, but Mel said, “No. If you give me the number, I'm going to turn to Tony and say to him, ‘Tony, you can't lose money on this deal; can you make this revenue?' And Tony is either going to say ‘Yes' or ‘No.' If he says ‘No,' then tell ‘BZ I offered twice as much as I did, and then you get it from them.”

I was sitting there going, “Oh shit. What's this number going to be?” I was trying to calculate everything in my head because I didn't want to say yes if I couldn't do it; there would be hell to pay. They went back and forth, but finally, we concluded, “We'd really love to do it, but why don't you guys think about it.” Mel and I walked out, and he said, “I don't know; we'll see what happens.” He got in his car, went to the airport and back to New York. I drove to the station. I knew what money they were paying in Dallas and Philly . . . big money. But I really wanted to do it. So I called Jonathan and said, “Okay, those guys did their thing. Let's you and I figure out what the number is going to be.” So, we batted back and forth. Then I called up Mel and told him I had talked to Jonathan and had the number.

“Can you do it?”

“Yes.”

Tank related what happened next: “So, then, one day I'm on the air with Charles, and Jonathan walked into the studio with his dad. When they broke the news, I went crazy! I was like Meg Ryan in
When Harry Met Sally
when I heard we got the rights to broadcast the Patriots. That was so cool; I just went nuts: ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!'” Moments later, astonished and
exhilarated, Tank called Bill Abbate, who had just put in a long overnight shift leading into “The Big Mattress” and since gone home, missing the surprise announcement. “I started to fall asleep and the phone rings,” he told
Virtually Alternative
in 1998. “It was Tank, who's screaming, all excited, ‘I can't believe it; we got the Patriots.' Tank and I were ecstatic, ‘cause we were both sports fans; we really had no idea where this was gonna take us, and as it turned out, he and I were cohosts for the pre- and postgame show for the '95 season, our inaugural season. The team only went six and ten that year; it was kind of rough. But I'll tell you, being one of only thirty sets of broadcasters working in the United States in the NFL was a lot of fun.”

“The Patriots were a laughing stock at first, and we stepped up big time, paying considerably more than what had been paid in radio rights beforehand,” Berardini summarized. “That was based on a belief that the team was going to be successful because of the type of ownership that existed in Foxboro. I just believed in the Krafts.”

Curtis Raymond, employed at
WBCN
as retail sales manager, was initially tasked with finding someone to be in charge of selling time for the games but ultimately took the responsibility on himself. The new sales manager for the Patriots broadcasts remembered, “This was the first [time that football was] on a rock and roll radio station; it caught the Boston media totally of guard. I can remember all the agency experts saying it would never work; ‘blah, blah, blah.' But it did.” Critics thought that
WBCN'S
trademark music programming would clash with the mostly talk world of sports broadcasting, but Berardini disagreed that a confict existed. “There were some worries about whether or not it would be right for the radio station, but football was compatible with the male demographic.”

“ ‘Nocturnal Emissions' was on Sunday night; it's not a popular time for radio listening,” Oedipus observed. “So, Sundays, we figured, ‘let's give it up; it will generate a lot of revenue and bring our radio station a lot of audience, who will leave their radios tuned to
WBCN
[after the game]. Then, on Monday mornings, the listeners will be back when they get up and go to work.' I don't regret that decision at all.”

“We took a few hours to broadcast something that everyone, at first, wasn't a part of,” reasoned Bill Abbate, who would now double as a DJ and sports announcer. “But by the time of my last broadcast in February 2004, it was our third Super Bowl, and the people were certainly there!”

WBCN
gets the Patriots broadcast rights and Bill Abbate happily does double duty as dJ and weekend sports announcer. Courtesy of
WBCN
.

“It's an expensive proposition, but sports, more often than not, are a real benefit to a station, even if you can only break even,” Curtis Raymond explained. “I use the example of television: when
FOX
got the
NFL
, nobody had heard of
The Simpsons
and
Married with Children
, but they were all promoted on the football broadcasts. The same thing held true for radio. We didn't break even the first year, but we had some pretty spectacular weeks in the years after. One of the best was the year after they went to the Super Bowl with Drew Bledsoe as quarterback [in the '96 season, losing to Green Bay]; we were second or third in the country in football revenue that year.” Raymond got to work establishing the “Patriots Rock Radio Network,” extending the reach of the games past the limits of '
BCN'S
radio signal, which as an
FM
transmission, paled next to the range of the
AM
band. “WBZ, being the predecessor, had that clear channel signal and didn't need as many affiliates; we had to get a bunch of new ones,” he explained. “In the first year we were in the forties [in stations], as far down as Danbury, Connecticut. I remember Stephen King signing the affiliate agreement for [his station] ‘The Zone' [WZON] in Bangor, Maine. I hung onto that agreement!”

During the actual games, Gil Santos and Gino Cappelletti, the already well-established team who had worked the booth for
WBZ
, called the play-by-play, while Oedipus and Berardini eschewed hiring other sportscasters, to work in-house and let Tank and Abbate handle the pre- and postgame segments. The August 1995 debut of
WBCN
as the flagship station for the Patriots' radio broadcast marked the end of nearly a year of preparation, yet the first game against the Detroit Lions was not without its hiccups. Veteran
Boston Globe
sportswriter Jack Craig attacked the station mercilessly in his article entitled “
WBCN
Drops Ball in Debut,” calling the broadcast “woeful at times” and the two-hour pregame show with Tank and Abbate “like amateur night.” Blatantly unimpressed, the writer also commented that “the pre- and postgame hyperbole and bubbly manner sounded more like a lead-in to a rock concert than a football game.” He even castigated the station for its weaker signal. About the only thing Craig did approve of was the focused chemistry of Santos and Cappelletti, who “kept things in perspective during the game. No foolish praise fell from their lips.” As the play-by-play tag team remained the only element of the broadcast held over from previous years, the writer, not so subtly, gave the radio station a parting “face-mask” in his assessment.
WBCN
broadcast producer
Marc Cappello, then a nineteen-year-old promotions department intern hired to assist Abbate by locating Patriots stats during the games as well as recording press conferences, recalled, “I think a lot of people looked at us and thought, ‘What do these idiots know about putting on a sports broadcast?'
WBCN
was a rock station, not a sports station; it was all so new to everybody. But Oedipus didn't panic; he said, ‘Look, we're going to do our own thing, and we'll get better at it,' and we did.”

If the stodgy Jack Craig represented the view of a typical football traditionalist, then he was going to be in for more surprises. Curtis Raymond remembered,

Oedipus and Tony wanted cutting-edge promotions with the football games, so we did one once with a condom company. It was in the two-minute warning at the end of the game: if the Patriots
scored
in those final two minutes, then whoever
entered
, won a year's supply of condoms, plus tickets to the next game. When we presented that to Gil and Gino, there was some real trepidation; they weren't really comfortable with that. But then, about a month later and unbeknownst to us, that [idea] won the Radio Promotion of the Year [award] at
Brand Week
[magazine], got written up in the
Boston Herald
, and suddenly everyone loved it. With us, the promotion kind of made sense, so Gil and Gino did it.