Radio Free Boston (41 page)

Touchdown!

The production and professionalism of
WBCN'S
radio broadcasts would advance dramatically, keeping pace with the Patriots' own improvements to its organization and the inception of a winning spirit. “The Krafts really had a commitment to making the team a success and making them part of the community,” Berardini explained. “That's why we eventually did a second deal and a third deal, and the third one was for ten years! Who knew that was going to happen?” Although Tank would exit
WBCN
with Charles Laquidara, regretfully leaving the Patriots Rock Radio Network after one season, Abbate carried on with new cohost Mike Ruth for the '96 season, one in which the Patriots went all the way to the Super Bowl behind the coaching of Bill Parcells. “Here I am,” Abbate told
Virtually Alternative
, “two seasons working the National Football League, now I'm broadcasting live from the Louisiana Superdome for Super Bowl XXXI!” Although the team lost that contest, future steps for the Patriots would cement their legendary
status. The unit, under the direction of new coach Bill Belichick, advanced to the Super Bowl at the end of the 2001 season and defeated the St. Louis Rams to become NFL champions for the first time.

Hard work pays of: Tony Berardini with Jonathan Kraft and Robert Kraft holding the Super Bowl trophy at
WBCN
in February 2002.Courtesy of Tony Berardini/New England Patriots.

The Super Bowl in New Orleans became a great moment for the station, not only because of the Patriots victory, but also because the game's halftime show featured the group that
WBCN
had stood behind since its fledgling night playing the Paradise Theater in 1980. Performing on entertainment's most-watched and prestigious stage possible, U2, at the height of its own game, turned in a heartfelt and emotional tribute to the victims of the 9/11 attacks. As part of his assignment, Bill Abbate attended the earlier press conference with the band, hopefully to tape some excerpts to present on his pregame show. “It was in this gigantic room with all these people and I managed to ask U2 a question,” he recalled. Once Abbate's failing arm had been recognized, he had the floor:

I gave it this big buildup, mentioning '
BCN
, kind of like, “We're from Boston, the city that helped you get your big start here in North America, the city that's got the largest Irish population outside of Ireland.”

“I know where this is going,” Bono says.

“Do you have a rooting interest in the game?”

“I'm not the guy who knows anything about football; let me pass this one over to the Edge.” So Edge goes, “Well, we really don't know much about football”; then for the next sixty seconds goes on and on with specific difer-ences between the Patriots' defenses and the St. Louis offense and defense, how Brady is more of a pocket quarterback while Warner can run around and scramble. The whole crowd was just rolling! “But we don't know anything about football.” Yeah, right!

WBCN
looked and felt a lot different from its Camelot years, with football now a part of the broadcast week, the taped Howard Stern show on every weeknight, Bradley Jay assuming Ken Shelton's midday dynasty, and the radical transformation of the playlist. Now classified as a “modern rock” station by
Billboard
and the other music trade publications, '
BCN
focused on current alternative music choices like Foo Fighters, Weezer, and Alanis Morissette. Because of, or despite, these significant adjustments, the station continued to maintain the upper hand in ratings and revenue success, focusing on the younger male demographic and mostly abandoning the older twenty-five to fifty-four crowd to ‘ZLX. By the spring of '96,
WBCN
stood at a ranking of number 6 (tied with WZLX) for all Boston listeners twelve years and older. By contrast, WAAF took number 14 with a 2.6, and low-power ‘FNX came in at number 19 with a 1.6. Having departed the station by this point, marketing and promotions guru David Bieber later observed, “WAAF was around at that point [the station had moved its studios from Worcester to Westborough], and ‘FNX had its own valid mission, but it was an effort just to get 101.7 [in on the radio]. I think both of those stations deserve respect, but '
BCN
was just a behemoth.”

As the reigning patriarch on
WBCN
, Charles Laquidara could have easily been viewed as an anachronism amid the station's new fascination with a targeted eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old demographic. But his “Big Mattress,” now in place for over twenty-two years, continued to garner respectable ratings, and his attitude remained as fresh as ever. “I was very aware that times were changing,” he said, “just like I knew the times were changing back in the sixties. I didn't want to be like my parents or my grandparents and be one of those people who didn't let go. When the change comes, you got to deal with it.” Laquidara's long-running music
spotlight, “The Big Mattress Song of the Week,” reflected his embrace of the new music, as did the
DJ'S
efforts to learn about the latest groups he featured. “Oedipus kind of made fun of me because, on one of my trips to Hawaii, I was trying to memorize the names of all these new bands, like Collective Soul and Our Lady Peace, and the names of lead singers and guitar players. I actually had lists of these bands that I was memorizing on the plane. When I came back and told him I had done this, he just laughed at me and said, ‘You don't have to know the names of these guys; it's not like Charlie Watts from the Stones or the Edge from U2. All this music and all these groups are disposable.' Things were changing so fast.”

Despite the cultural box spring shifting beneath it, “The Big Mattress” itself remained firm and inviting to listeners. Laquidara, as was his norm, continued to surround himself with a talented staff: writer, occasional co-host, and resident cynic (the show's “Bitter Man”) Lance Norris; surfer-dude newsman Patrick Murray; producer Bob Malatesta; writer and voice of reason Don Bertolino; longtime veteran Tank (“The Round Man”); and a herd of others. But “The Big Mattress” did have its detractors, and they emerged largely because of the
other
morning show that was on
WBCN
at the time. “I was constantly faced with these people who wanted Stern on in the morning and wanted me out of there. These people really did have an ageist attitude: ‘You're old; you're in the way.' Howard, as nice a guy as he was in real life, and as nice as he always was to me on the radio, never treated me with any disrespect—like he did with other people. I mean, he'd have funerals for jocks when he moved into a town! He never treated me like that. But his listeners were not so kind; they'd go after me, just like in the old days when '
COZ
listeners would leave their beer cans in my driveway.”

When Infinity first made Howard Stern available to
WBCN
, Laquidara had been defended by his managers. “At that point Charles was just killing it,” mentioned Tony Berardini. “We looked at Mel and said it wasn't going to work with Charles doing so well. So we got Howard to do nights.” Karmazin didn't push it; he knew how beloved and legendary Laquidara was in Boston, and he had the ratings to prove it. Years later, in a
Globe
retrospective from 2000, Jim Sullivan would write, “Mel Karmazin lovingly calls him a ‘huge pain in the butt. I met him in 1981 and I've been a fan ever since. He's a character, and I think radio needs more of these.'” In fact, the
DJ
had always enjoyed a friendship with Karmazin from the earliest days of Infinity. Tickets could have been sold for people to sit courtside and watch
Laquidara, the classic liberal, line up against the conservative corporate
CEO
, to publicly spar on every subject from raising children to apartheid. These good-natured debates, with edgy punch lines zinging left and right, were often fueled by deadly serious concerns, but mutual respect always held the two in close rapport. Nevertheless, as Tony Berardini described, “When [Stern's] next contract came up, Mel came to Oedipus and I and said, ‘Part of the way I got Howard to resign with Infinity was to promise him mornings in Philadelphia and Boston. So it's up to you guys; you can have him in the mornings if you want to. If not, Howard is free to negotiate with another station in the market.' Mel outlined the situation and left it up to us.”

But, it was quite obvious that Tony Berardini and Oedipus had been thrust into a catch-22 situation. To lose Stern would give the ratings star a foothold elsewhere to deflate “The Big Mattress” and '
BCN
as a result. “In every market Howard had gone into, he destroyed the competition,” Berar-dini observed, “and Charles would have been his number 1 competition.” The alternative was to keep Stern and move him, live from New York City, into the weekday morning slot. But where would that leave Laquidara? This scenario meant that the market veteran would exit his job and, perhaps, the company. Nobody liked this option;
WBCN'S
star personality remained on a first-name basis with most of Boston, and to lose that relationship and market recognition because of collateral damage just didn't make sense.

“I know Oedipus had the pressure of not having Howard Stern on in the morning and not getting those great ratings; I think everyone knew that,” Laquidara admitted. “I was getting good ratings myself, but I had my ups and downs.” Oedipus conceded, “Howard fit with the audience we were going after, plus he dominated the ratings, and it would have
dramatically
hurt our radio station if he wasn't there. This would have affected salaries, jobs . . . everybody [at
WBCN
]. If Howard had gone to ‘ZLX, for example, we would have gotten killed.”

“We had a meeting,” Berardini described, “Mel, Oedipus, and myself, in my office, for a very long time. We were racking our brains trying to figure out what we could do.”

“It wasn't easy,” Oedipus admitted. “I saw Charles every morning, more than I saw my own family. Charles was . . . my big brother.” With every go-around in the discussion, the two fates remained resolute:
WBCN
would either be crippled or wildly successful, and Laquidara would be hurt either way.

“I don't know who made the suggestion,” Berardini said, “but among the three of us, we hatched the idea: what if we put Howard on in the morning at '
BCN
and moved Charles over to
WZLX
because they needed a better morning show?” The thought hung between them for a moment. “I remember Oedipus sitting there; he got a look of relief on his face, and he said, ‘You know, that could work for both
WBCN
and
WZLX
, and it could work for Charles.' But we were really concerned; we didn't want to move him. How do you talk to a guy who's been a legend in the market since 1969? ‘By the way, you have to leave the station that you helped start, to go across the street.' Oedipus said, ‘Let me talk to Charles; I can convince him this is the right move.'”

“I didn't see it coming; I wish that I had,” recalled Laquidara. “Oedipus asked me to meet him at the Providence Restaurant [in Brookline]; he wanted to chitchat a bit. So, I thought it was a regular meeting. But when I got there he had three glasses of my drink of favor at the time, single-malt scotch, lined up on the bar waiting for me. Uh-oh. ‘Have a drink,' he said, and then he laid it on me.”

“We had an intense talk about where radio,
WBCN
, and his career were going,” Oedipus continued. “I said, ‘If you don't move and Howard goes on a different radio station, you'll go out in a blaze of glory, but you'll fade quickly.'”

“I don't think Oedipus realized he was doing it, but he set me up,” Laquidara added.

He said, “Now, you don't have to do this; you don't have to go to ‘ZLX if you don't want to. But if you don't go, Howard will kill you on the radio, and I won't be able to protect you.” So, what he was saying was, “Charles, you can stay here at
WBCN
and you have a strong following of listeners who would support you if you took that stand, but you would be going against the company. Howard should be on in the morning and most of the people who like classic rock are over on
WZLX
; you should take the high road and do what's right for the company and what's right for the listeners, and just go.” Logically, he was right, but emotionally, it was devastating to hear. So, I tried to be cool about it and take that high road.

“Charles ultimately made the right decision; he went to ‘ZLX, took his audience with him, and he was very successful,” Oedipus summarized. “And that was not only Charles's audience; it was his music and his era, no
matter how much he claims to like new music. He made the right move by no longer trying to prolong his career [at '
BCN
], and was able to leave on his own terms.” Laquidara came up with the idea of doing [the switch] on 1 April: “Because, you know, every time I got fred, whether it was by Charlie Kendall, Klee Dobra, Arnie Ginsburg, or whoever, it always seemed to be on April Fool's Day!”