Radio Free Boston: The Rise and Fall of WBCN

A Bad-Boy Business

WBCN’s embrace of modern rock scored statistically from the first, but a dramatic visual confirmation of all this ratings hoopla played out in June 1995 when the station presented its first “River Rave,” at Boston’s Esplanade on the bank of the Charles. Four fledgling bands from the ’BCN playlist —Sleeper, Letters to Cleo, General Public, and Better Than Ezra—made up a modest bill barely expected to draw much more than five thousand people. That said, police presence was formidable, and the city was nervous about a repeat of the bloody riot that had occurred the previous year when WFNX presented Green Day at the same location. A beautiful spring day brought the sight of thousands of concertgoers streaming out of Back Bay and across the Storrow Drive pedestrian bridges, stepping off the Red Line at Charles Street and strolling over the river on Massachusetts Avenue. Like the brooms and their water buckets in Fantasia, the people just kept coming, until a crowd of over fifty thousand filtered onto the grounds for A BAD-BOY BUSINESS I think Oedipus realized that the station needed a kick in the ass; it felt like a lumbering, sleeping giant. [wbCn] hadn’t really competed in a long time; it didn’t have to. nik Carter 278 radio free boston the free concert, dwarfing the stage and the small coterie of station staffers standing in amazement behind the security barriers. Worries of another melee could not be suppressed, and the police called in for reinforcements. “We were absolutely overwhelmed with how many people showed up,” Roger Moore, WBCN’s broadcast engineer for that day, related. “But, there were no incidents whatsoever; we were all expecting the worst and nothing bad happened at all.” The success of this first River Rave would inspire a new tradition to go along with WBCN’s fresh direction, with the concert growing into an annual event. Oedipus commented, “The first one, at the Hatch Shell, was good, but the great Raves occurred later, the ones at Great Woods and then Foxboro.” In future years, despite moving to these new locations that were nowhere near any river (if anything, only dirty culverts or muddy drainage ditches), the name stuck, and the River Rave became an annual expectation. Injected with steroids, the 1996 festival expanded to seventeen bands and relocated to Great Woods in Mansfield; the following year it morphed into a two-day extravaganza of thirty groups; and by 2000 the enormous digs of Foxboro Stadium were required to house the now-gargantuan affair. The unexpected success of the first event also emboldened Oedipus to create a Boston adaptation of LA sister station KROQ’s “Almost Acoustic Christmas Show,” calling it the WBCN “Christmas Rave.” Two dozen groups and artists, showcased in eight venues, from tiny T.T. the Bears in Cambridge to the Orpheum Theater downtown, performed on one night in December 1995. There had been a precedent set when ’BCN staged Peter Wolf in an unplugged holiday party in the Middle East the year before, but the Christmas Rave was a full-blown electric event featuring future household names like the Dave Matthews Band, Goo Goo Dolls, 311, Jewel, and Ben Folds Five. The Raves of 1995 underscored WBCN’s format realignment, as did the presence of a new school of young DJs, like Shred, who had been at the station since 1988 but blossomed with the station’s concentration on new groups and alternative sounds: “’BCN was always about breaking new bands; we made the hits. And it didn’t have to be rock; even if it was a pop song and it sounded good, we’d play it anyway.” Shred’s favorite moments were meeting Damon Albarn of Blur; talking to Green Day in the ’BCN conference room; and speaking in awe backstage at Avalon with a personal hero, Johnny Cash. In ’93 Oedipus hired petite redhead Melissa Teper for the a bad-boy bUsiness 279 weekends and fill-ins from a small station in Marshfield where she performed as the coquettish “Siobhan,” playing tunes from the Emerald Isle. “DJ Melissa,” as she became known, answered an ad looking for Listener Line volunteers on Charles Laquidara’s show and, like so many before her, grabbed onto that dangling radio lifeline. “’BCN was great about that: giving the little guy a shot. That’s what the station was all about: finding and nurturing...