Radio Free Boston (12 page)

“I've got nothing against Charles,” Riepen protested, “but he has always tried to give this image himself of being this really hip guy who always had to fight to create his terribly important show on
WBCN
. I mean, Charles Laquidara wasn't the morning king when he worked for me; he was just another disc jockey. I probably said five things to him in the whole time [we] were there.” In regard to the drum solo incident, Riepen said, “I might have had discussions with some of the guys at times, but I didn't care what they played. I never was on anybody's back.” Nevertheless, things quickly went from bad to worse when Riepen brought in Arnie Ginsburg to act as
WBCN'S
general manager. As the legendary
AM
radio king who had ruled the Boston airwaves for ten years, Ginsburg was not necessarily a bad choice for boss since he knew the many aspects of radio business and engineering intimately. But because he embodied the hyperactive, pimple-cream-selling, screaming and “teening”
AM
Top 40 style—the very antithesis of what
WBCN
represented—this appointment was viewed by the staff as an enormous slap in the face and a potential threat. “When Arnie Ginsburg came in we were all flipped out. Here was the guy that was the enemy,” Sam Kopper remembered. “We were fearful Ray and Arnie would tighten us up and turn us into Top 40.”

Desperate for information about Arnie Ginsburg's plans, and paranoid enough to do something about it, several members of the staff hatched a scheme. “That was the time that Ray felt threatened by Charles,” Norm Winer noted. “There was concern to make sure we knew what was going on.”

“We bugged his office,” Kopper revealed gleefully. “We took a microphone and ran a cable above the ceiling from Arnie's office to the engineering room.”

“The engineer was Mike Ward,” Winer added, “who also used to do the occasional Sunday morning shift until we realized he was just tracking Savoy Brown album sides and playing boogies at 7:00 a.m. But, he was a great hippie engineer. From [his] office in the opposite side of the building,
we could hear every meeting, phone call, everything going on in Arnie Ginsburg's office.”

“I set it up, but it was not all my idea; we had meetings and voted on things,” Mike Ward recalled. “It was a full-size broadcast microphone on a stand sitting up in his hung ceiling, pointing down through a vent screen [over] his desk. If you looked close, you could see the chrome gleam.” Nevertheless, Ginsburg never had cause to glance upward, and the apparatus remained undiscovered, “for weeks, possibly months,” Winer figured. This small example of pre-Watergate espionage much resembled some of the government's underhanded activities that '
BCN
so often railed against, but in the interests of the “revolution,” the bugging was seen as justified.

Arnie Ginsburg tightened up the rules around the place, but his main concern was transferring and upgrading
WBCN'S
transmitter from the (old) Hancock Building to the top of the Prudential Tower (the new Hancock Tower, then rising on the Boston skyline, was significantly impairing the station's signal). While this went on, the staff knew his every move, even being forewarned and given time to scatter when the general manager decided to inspect the premises. Ward remembered, “He was one to interrupt a reefer break in the production studio, causing us to hastily vacate via the back staircase. Then, casually wrecked, [we'd] come back up the elevator,” like nothing happened. Ward attached a tape deck to the mike and was able to record anything the conspirators wished. Kopper laughed, “But we were idiots, the Three Stooges of espionage!”

“One day the cleaning lady left a chair on his desk while doing the floor and did not return it,” Ward elaborated. Ginsburg came in to work the next morning and was greeted by the unusual sight. “So, being suspicious, he looked up from the chair.”

“The sun, perhaps, glinted off the metal,” Winer supplied. “So, he followed the wire and tracked it down to the engineer's office . . .”

“. . . to the tape recorder,” Ward finished. “I got word from a secretary out in front just in time to remove the tape . . . I denied everything.” The engineer didn't get fired for the incident, probably because he had a lot of complicated transmitter work to accomplish for Ginsburg, but as Ward pointed out, “Let's just say I was on Woo-Woo's list to replace!”

With Ginsburg threatening to fire conspirators in the wake of Stuart-gate and the frequent skirmishes with Laquidara over the content of his show
(he once asked everyone in Boston to flush their toilets at the same time, a request the
DJ
had to rescind once too many people phoned in to warn him that the system couldn't handle it), the mood at the station seesawed between uncertainty and outright paranoia. Laquidara was actually fired by both Riepen and Ginsburg but quickly rehired because of staff dissent and listener response. The members of the
WBCN
collective discussed ways it could protect itself, and the best way to do that, according to Danny Schechter, who had studied at the School of Industry and Labor Relations at Cornell, was to form a union. He continued, “Instead of a normal broadcast union like
AFTRA
(American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), which is just for on-air personalities, we wanted to find [one] where everybody could be a member, as part of the whole spirit of '
BCN
. So I researched it and found the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America union (
UE
), which had been a progressive [labor organization] in
GE
plants. It was sort of left wing and had ‘radio' in the title, even though they were referring to manufacturing radios.” The
UE
accepted their new shop, and after the '
BCN
staff took a “yes” vote and signed the official papers, Danny Schechter was elected first shop steward. At the time, the employees at
WBCN
had no way of knowing that this union would play a historic part in the station's survival just eight years later.

The establishment of
WBCN'S
union was the final straw for Riepen, the station's largest shareholder. “It broke my heart that [Danny Schechter], who I gave a job to, organized my station. What could they complain about? It was just a deal to be hip for them.” The power struggle just wasn't worth it to Riepen, who had also been dealing with similar staff disagreements at the Boston Tea Party and the
Phoenix
. Those disputes had resulted in the hippie entrepreneur selling his interest in the concert hall in late 1970 and bailing out of the newspaper the following May. Don Law, who picked up the remains of the Tea Party, marveled, “It was amazing that [the Tea Party, Phoenix, and
WBCN
] all unraveled at the same time. I don't think any of us saw that coming.”

“The reason I sold '
BCN
was that they stabbed me in the back,” Riepen remembered with sadness. “I walked away from it.” The
Boston Globe
reported in its 12 September 1971 edition that he sold his interest for “for $238,000 and some change” and “officially extricated himself from
WBCN-FM
, where he had been persona non grata ever since the station's staff had rebelled over what it thought was his ‘artistic interference' in running the station.”
Within days Riepen would vanish from a scene that he had significantly influenced.

WBCN'S
yearlong power struggle was unknown to most of the station's listeners, who could still call up the Listener Line and report a missing pet, request “Room to Move” by John Mayall, or ask one of the eager staffers how many ounces made up a “key.” Joe Rogers returned to the station in '72 after some disheartening experiences with the underground radio scene in California. The somewhat cynical prodigal son told James Isaacs at the
Real Paper
that
WBCN
featured “the most tasteful radio in the country. You'll hear less shitty stuff on it than anywhere else.” The station pushed the boundaries with Jimmy Byrd's gospel program Sunday through Friday from 6:00 to 7:00 a.m. and Little Walter's oldies show on Sunday nights. Starting in 1972, Eric Jackson, widely referred to years later as the “Dean of Boston jazz radio,” spent five years at
WBCN
. The station began broadcasting many shows from the newly opened Intermedia Sound recording studio on Newbury Street, including Jerry Garcia and Howard Wales, the New York Rock Ensemble, and Loggins and Messina. Winer recalled that “Jim Messina, from Buffalo Springfield and then Poco, was a good friend of Charles. His album with Kenny Loggins had been out on Columbia for six months and it did nothing . . . just sat there on the shelf. We had them come in and do a broadcast with some people watching on a Friday night and it was incredible! Literally, the record took off [after that]. They sold out of it for multiple weeks at the Harvard Coop. It really got the project going.”

A similar Intermedia broadcast in March 1972 featured Canned Heat on a snowy winter's night. “We all got stuck inside,” Winer laughed, “so what was supposed to be an hourlong show turned into multiple reels of tape. Some members of the J. Geils Band had nothing to do and were hanging around, [so] Peter Wolf sat in. The singer, Bob ‘The Bear' Hite, assumed that Peter Wolf, being the singer of a well-known band, was J. Geils. So he kept calling him Jay all night and Peter never corrected him!”

“Plus, he kept saying Jay ‘Jiels,' not Giels,” laughed Charles Laquidara.
WBCN
also instituted a live broadcast series from the Jazz Workshop nightclub on Tuesday nights, thanks to the engineering prowess of Sam Kopper, who was now heavily involved in the production of live performances for the station. Winer remembered broadcasting such icons as Chick Corea, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Stan Getz, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, although nothing much, if anything, remains of that series on tape. “In those
days,” Kopper remembered unhappily, “there were shows I didn't even record because I had so little money. I couldn't afford the tape!”

Broadcast of Canned Heat and friends from Intermedia Sound, March 1972. Photo by Charles Daniels.

With Riepen gone, Mitch Hastings reclaimed the reins at Stuart Street. But in the aftermath of a debilitating brain operation, the owner's already-peculiar personality had taken some strange detours.
WBCN
engineer Bill Spurlin described Hastings like this: “I glimpsed T. Mitch moving rather feebly in and out of his shabby office. He seemed very, very old to me. His mostly bald skull was marked by two shallow depressions about an inch across, surrounded by liver spots, the marks, I was told, of a more-or-less successful brain surgery. Wearing sports jackets that appeared to have been styled in an earlier era, hunched, bespectacled, we could occasionally hear him in his office [talking] in a high whining voice.” Nevertheless, no matter what debilitated state Hastings might have been in, he still managed to accomplish a great deal. The
WBCN
transmitter was relocated to the top of the fifty-two-story Prudential Tower, eliminating most of the signal issues, and work began to move the entire station into the same prestigious Back
Bay facility. When Arnie Ginsburg bailed in 1972, Hastings promoted his sales guru and sometimes-jock Al Perry, to replace him. The choice delighted the staff since “Crazy Al” was one of their own, experiencing the many seismic changes at the station from even before the switch to rock. Perry remembered, “Mitch was back in the picture and probably figured, ‘Whatever I want, Al will go along [with],' which wasn't necessarily the case.”

Charles Laquidara followed his muse on the air, wherever that took him, but since his show was quite popular, he became virtually untouchable. Despite a few instances of being disciplined and fired, he always returned within days. A particular piece of underground radio folklore, one of his infamous best, emerged from this time. It's a psychedelic fable, and the names may have been changed to protect against flashbacks. “Randy was this beautiful woman and Robert was her boyfriend,” Laquidara remembered. “They lived in this rather famous place in Boston on Storrow Drive where they have the sign ‘If you lived here, you'd be home now.' They invited me to come over. Robert said, ‘Randy makes the best matzo ball soup—ever!'” Charles would never turn down a meal, a fact corroborated by Kopper: “His appetite blew me away. I couldn't believe how much he ate and still stayed rail thin.” Along with a friend, Laquidara planned to drop in on the way to do his nightly radio show. “We had some good grass, so we smoked a joint on the way over, parked, and then went upstairs.” Laquidara sat and talked with the couple, eating and breaking out the party favors in return. But even though the smoking continued, Laquidara kept his eyes on the clock, eventually calling an end to the visit so he could get over to
WBCN
. “In the meantime, Randy kept bringing out this soup and it was so good that I had three bowls of it.”