Radio Free Boston: The Rise and Fall of WBCN

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 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 182 radio free boston 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, Karmazin 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 nUmber 1 roCk ’n’ roll ConneCtion 183 clearly defining his high expectations. Berardini, at the time only...