Radio Free Boston (44 page)

Dean Johnson announced the startling news in the
Boston Herald
, also making clear that he didn't believe '
BCN'S
press release for a minute. “He's the last of the station's longtime jocks to go, the final member of a gang that once included Charles Laquidara, Matt Siegel and Ken Shelton. Here's the real deal: Parenteau got older (he's in his mid-40's),
WBCN'S
audience got younger (its prime demographic is now men 18–34), and in these bottomline times, he's just too expensive.” The writer was also curious that the station hadn't announced a suitable goodbye celebration for the legendary jock: “Waiting for the big Parenteau farewell bash? Don't hold your
breath. Rather than a loud, kissy-huggy farewell week,
WBCN
is opting for a low-profile finale. And anyone who's listened to Parenteau over the years knows that, given the choice, he never does anything quietly.” Johnson proved to be a prophet as his prediction of a mischievous outcome came true the very same day his
Boston Herald
article hit the streets.

On that 5 November, the soon-to-be-unemployed disc jockey honored a promise to appear at the prestigious Achievement in Radio (
AIR
) Awards being presented at the Marriot Long Wharf in Boston. Tom Bergeron hosted the glittering affair while Mayor Thomas Menino attended to present
WBZ-AM'S
morning anchor, Gary LaPierre, with a Lifetime Achievement Award. “But while Bergeron got a lot of laughs and LaPierre got a standing ovation, the real attraction in the crowd was
DJ
Mark Parenteau, who was just cut from
WBCN-FM
after 20 years at the station,” Susan Bickelhaupt reported the next morning in the
Boston Globe
. “Parenteau showed he was a trouper and filled his commitment to present an award. And he managed to use his air time at the mike to get some barbs in, noting that, ‘I feel like I have shaken baby syndrome . . . but hey, life goes on,' and that the
CBS
[Television] ‘Welcome Home' slogan should be ‘Welcome Homeless.'”

“It was just the right line at the right time,” Parenteau chuckled. “Everybody woke up to headlines about me in the
Globe
and the
Herald
; it really embarrassed
CBS
, and Oedipus banned me from the station. I was quickly excommunicated and not allowed to do a final, farewell show.”

Amid the daily drama of Parenteau's battle with Opie and Anthony, it barely registered that there were some other lineup changes that had occurred. In June '97, Matt Schaffer returned to
WBCN
to reassume his duties as host of the “Boston Sunday Review.” “Sometimes you
can
go home again,” he told the
Boston Globe
after Oedipus hired his good friend back on a part-time basis to host the public affairs show, now on Sundays 7:00–9:00 a.m. The same week Schaffer went back on the payroll, Bradley Jay announced he was leaving to pursue his quest of being a talk-radio jock, vacating the midday slot he had filled after Ken Shelton departed. Oedipus told the
Globe
, “He wants to do something different, he wants to be a hip Larry King.” Just before leaving, the jock hosted an intimate gathering of 104
WBCN
listeners in a Q & A session and performance with his hero David Bowie, live on the air at Fort Apache Studios in Cambridge. As Jay exited on this personal high note, Bill Abbate, who would also burn the midnight oil preparing for his weekly role during Patriots season, moved in.
“It was a long transition for me to get to middays; I would do that shift up until September 2001.” Like his two predecessors, Abbate loved the show for the many opportunities it afforded him to interview artists: “Lenny Kravitz came in, multiple times; that was always fun. Green Day showed up to be guest jocks once, and at the end of that visit, Tre Cool lit up this huge joint, right in the studio where the guests would sit . . . underneath the giant vent for the air conditioning!” Abbate watched in amusement as the smoke sauntered slowly upwards to be whisked into the opening and channeled to some distant part of the station. “Then, wouldn't you know it, all the sales people suddenly showed up in the studio!”

Oedipus had another pair of big shoes to fill once Mark Parenteau had been bumped from his afternoon radio home after two decades. The program director found his replacement in-house with a jock he had hired the year before to stake out the night shift when Stern moved off tape delay and into the mornings. “We had all been trying out for that evening shift,” Neal Robert remembered, “but I felt my chances were diminishing. My forte was being a music person: a guy who was not bigger than the songs, but a companion on your journey with the music. But at that point, Oedipus really wanted another shock-jock on at night; he wanted ‘the talk.'” The program director hired the vociferous and outspoken Nik Carter, who had worked with Robert at
WFNX
for seven years before landing a gig on the morning show at “The Edge” (
WDGE
) in Providence. “I was very familiar with Nik from his days at
WFNX
,” Oedipus related. “A natural talent, he was one of those rare individuals who spontaneously always had something to say that was both interesting and entertaining. Plus, he was a contemporary music aficionado, the future of
WBCN
.”

“I came out of the ‘alternative radio' culture, and even though '
BCN
was now ‘alternative,' it hadn't yet developed into what it said it was. Being the heritage station, [it] had jocks who had been there forever, but for want of a better term, they weren't living the ‘lifestyle.' It was like you were listening to the greatest basketball players ever, and now they were being asked to play baseball.” Oedipus encouraged Carter not to hold back but unloose his raucous and unfiltered style in a radio show dubbed “Nik at Night,” upping the ante of Bradley Jay's previous “Sex Palace” and adding music to a Howard Stern–like attitude.

Once again, not everybody welcomed the new hire at '
BCN
, nor the attitude he brought with him; Bob Mendelsohn, for example, thought Carter
was “not a mature talent” but “a smart-ass punk.” The new jock, however, pointed out that he felt he was carrying on the station's longtime mission: “I grew up in Cambridge listening to '
BCN
; you were going to hear Stevie Ray Vaughan and Don Henley, but you were also going to hear some weird new band. More importantly, it was a cultural beacon: that's where my friends and I heard that Bob Marley had died; we were just devastated. And it was a station with a conscience: whether it was Charles railing against Shell Oil for apartheid or whatever crusade it went on, you always felt that '
BCN
was going to come down on the side of right.” Influenced as he was by the station's past, the new
DJ
ran with the crowd of eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old males that '
BCN
now had to win. Accepted as one of their own, he was a representative who played the music of their generation. What a lot of them didn't realize, at first anyway, was his skin color. Jim Sullivan wrote in the
Boston Globe
in November '97: “Carter is a black man swimming in an ocean populated by a lot of very white men. Most of the
DJS
and most of the bands in his world are Caucasian. Black
DJS
? They're over at the urban dance or contemporary hit stations.”

Nik Carter (center bottom) poses with Green Day. Also pictured from
WBCN
(left to right) Carter Alan, John Reilly, and Steve Strick. Courtesy of
WBCN
.

When Oedipus transferred Carter out of nights to take over for Parenteau,
it was talked about almost as much as Stern's ascension over Laquidara a year and a half earlier. After all, it was the first major change in the station's afternoon shift since 1978. Oedipus assessed, “The music was changing, the station was staying young; [we] needed an afternoon
DJ
who could relate to our audience, grow in the position, reestablish afternoons, and carry on the great tradition of unique
WBCN
air personalities.” The stage was now set for an epic cage match. Opie and Anthony began grappling with Carter the very first day, as he remembered: “They called it ‘Black Monday,' and they were calling kennels around the city looking for their little black poodle ‘Nik.'” The
WBCN
disc jockey immediately returned the jabs, with the results making headlines in both Boston dailies. “Over at
WAAF
, Carter's competitors have been trying to identify Carter as black, not always subtly, by means of verbal volleys and website postings,” the
Boston Globe
reported. “On the air,
WAAF
has called Carter ‘the dark-skinned lover' and ‘disco boy.'” The
Herald
mentioned that Oedipus had provided a cassette of an Opie and Anthony show: “Some of the tape's excerpts include the duo saying: ‘He's a big brown turd that stinks . . . Disco douche . . . Lionel Ritchie's love child.'”

Back and forth the battle raged, like artillery barrages over the front lines: inflammatory comments about Carter's color and then returning allegations of racism from
WBCN
. “It was probably one of the filthiest battles in rock radio history,” Carter observed. “I was stressed out of my mind and on Paxil as a result.” As the conflict deepened, the
Herald
commented, “It's just plain ugly and, at the very least, downright stupid.” But it continued, for months, with Tony Berardini and Oedipus dragged into the fray, accusing
WAAF
and defending their own, while their counterparts, Bruce Mittman and program director Dave Douglas, did the same. “It stands as the most reprehensible radio experience of my life and appalled me to the core of my being,” Oedipus stated. “This was not art, this was not competition; this was out and out hatred.”

“I never felt there was a racist attack,” Mittman contradicted. “Corporately, no one in
WAAF
management would have supported that. No one cared if [Carter] was black, white, or orange.” While believing that statement may or may not seem difficult, what is true is that O & A were never actually caught using the
n
word on the air. But the damage was done, nevertheless, as members of their audience pressed the attack. Carter related, “I'd pick up the phone and there would be some ‘AAF listener there [saying,] ‘Nigger, nigger; nigger, nigger . . . Opie and Anthony rule!' And I
couldn't really get angry at all these kids because they didn't really realize what they were saying; they were desensitized.”

“That's where Opie and Anthony and I differed,” Mittman stated. “ ‘You might not be saying things directly, but you're encouraging people to do things that you are responsible for'; that was a constant argument. Rock and roll is a bad-boy business but not an irresponsible business.”

The end of the O & A/Carter melee came abruptly, six months later, when the
WAAF
afternoon team initiated a poorly conceived April Fool's Day stunt in which they announced that Boston mayor Thomas Menino had been killed in an automobile crash. “The ‘joke' was not so funny in the homes of the mayor's distraught relatives who had to field condolence calls,” the
Boston Globe
reported. When Menino applied intense pressure on the offending station by filing an official complaint with the
FCC
, the threat raced to the very top of the
WAAF
ownership hierarchy. “Steven Dodge, chairman of American Radio Systems, met with the mayor to apologize for his disc jockey's lack of ‘basic human decency,'” the
Globe
continued. “Their stunt could not have come at a worse time for American Radio Systems. The Boston-based broadcasting company needs
FCC
approval to be acquired by
CBS
Corp.” How ironic that during the entire O & A versus Carter bloodbath, the home team's parent corporation had been negotiating to buy the company that owned
WAAF
. For a cool $2.6 billion, Mel Karmazin would scoop up American Radio Systems, although the Justice Department required that its four Boston stations, including ‘AAF, be divested. Meanwhile, Menino was no dummy; by refusing to back down, accept an apology, and withdraw his complaint,
WAAF
had no choice but to fire Opie and Anthony to avoid the possibility of being stripped of its license and possibly derail the gigantic business deal on the table. The infamous tag team moved on; but in another irony,
CBS
turned right around and hired O & A to go on the air two months later at
WNEW-FM
in New York City.

Life didn't get much easier for the '
BCN
jocks, despite the absence of
WAAF'S
stars. The battle orders had already gone out and were received by the station's eager audience, many of whom gleefully carried on the mission of subverting “The Rock of Boston” whenever they got the chance. “I had no interactions with the ‘AAF jocks,”
DJ
Melissa related, “but I did have interactions with their fans. And to give ‘AAF credit, they did a good job brainwashing those people.” Bill Abbate mentioned, “It was no longer a matter of their jocks targeting us; they figured out a way to get their audience to do
it. So, there was this whole stretch of time where, depending on the band, you knew that there was going to be some riled-up ‘AAF fan who was going to do something stupid.” In July '98, Juanita received the assignment to do a solo live broadcast from “Ozz-fest” at the Tweeter Center. “Exciting day but difficult,” she remembered. “I did interview a lot of people, like Lemmy [from Motorhead], the guys in Korn, Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit; but it was very much an ‘AAF crowd at the show. There was this point where we were up on the lawn walking; I had a microphone and the engineers had bags with the '
BCN
logos on them. People were not happy to see us up there; they started throwing stuff at us. Because there was so much hatred instilled by
WAAF
toward '
BCN
people, I actually felt like we were in a dangerous situation, [so] we just got out of there as fast as we could.”