Babson College - Babsonian Yearbook (Wellesley, MA)

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Clones In June 1978, WBCN, the once-proud flagship of counter- cultural rock and roll, had run aground. In fact, following the peculiar logic of ' BCN ' s progress, the rambunctious symbol of alternative radio in Boston had been reduced to someone who didn ' t exist. Duane Glasscock, an eighteen-year-old from Leominster, a student at Nabisco Junior College, was trying to make it as a deejay, and failing badly. Unlike ' BCN ' s star of yesteryear, Charles Laquidara (whom Glasscock considers a burnt-out case), he had no compunctions about treading on the sensibili- ties of his listeners. Laquidara had to call girls women, but not Duane. Laquidara had become Boston ' s answer to Miss Lone- lyhearts, a status whose pitfalls he recognized and he estab- lished long ago a policy of refusing to answer his mail. Not so Glasscock. Glasscock loved being a star. Duane Glasscock, with his brittle, delicate, suggestive name, could do many things that some with Laquidara ' s reputation would never do. He was punk. He was openly ambitious. He was openly con- temptuous of other deejays. He mispronounced WBCN ' s call letters. He was throughly Seventies. Although Duane only broadcast on Saturdays, he quickly garnered a loyal following. ' BCN ' jumped in the ratings from fourteenth to eight among Boston ' s FM stations. A softball team in Pembroke dubbed itself the Glasscocks. A fan club started and certificates were mailed to those who requested them. WBCN seemed revitalized. It was reborn like it used to be, remembers Glasscock. Music is always a reflection of time, commented Laqui- dara in reference to his youthful colleague. Punk music is a statement of how useless everything is. That rock ' n ' roll is fucked. They ' ve reduced songs to their barest. There ' s no more fancy shit. If I had to listen to radio I ' d listen to Duane, not me. But then the June ratings were issued, showing ' BCN ' in another slump. Glasscock was livid. But no one expected his broadcast of June 17, the most direct challenge to the radio ratings system ever mounted. This is what Duane said: Speaking of bad Kharma . . . I ' m Duane Glasscock. This is WBCN. Most of you know about the rating period where they send ratings books out. There are a whole bunch of ratings corporations and companies who make their bread by conducting surveys, minisurveys or maxisurveys, tele- phone surveys or on-the-street surveys. The big one, the presti- gious one, the major one, the not-so-usually reliable one, but the one that everyone really relies on because it ' s the Cadillac of ratings systems is the Arbitron Research Bureau — ARB. They send out what they call diaries to different selected places around the city and the suburbs and they leave them with the family and they ask you to fill out the diary. You know how it is. They do it in TV too. You who are listening to this right now probably have never gotten a diary. But the diaries do exist. But I don ' t know how they do it. With diaries you can just make anything say anything. I been look- ing for a full time gig with this station. And this was going to be my ace in the hole. The ARB ' s were going to come out and show that Duane Glasscock was listened to all over America. Anyway, the ARB has said, ' No, no. ' The figures came out and I guess on a one to fifty score I got a two, which means that according to this research bureau there are eleven people listening to me. This is total bush. You know it ' s not true. Look, here ' s what I have to say. I ' m angry. I don ' t want to be sour grapes or anything. So please, I know there are more than ten of you. So as many of you as possible, and do it neatly and with class, would you all take down this address: Arbitron Research Bu- reau, 4320 Ammendale Road, Beltsville, Maryland 20705. Wrap it up very carefully because I don ' t want you t : offend the mailman, or anybody who touches the package between the time it gets from where you are to Arbitron. But please wrap it up in little baggies. You can spare one. Send them a bag of shit. Okay? Do that for Duane. The response was more than Duane hoped for. All during his show listeners called in requesting Arbitrons address. One listener volunteered to cart piles of manure in his truck to ARB ' s entrance. Other listeners explained in detail precisely what variety of excrement they planned to send to Arbitron. Apparently, ARB did receive many surprise packages. The company may not have understood why it was the beneficiary of these odoriferous mailings. They failed to protest to WBCN, to Duane Glasscock or to the FCC about the matter, so the sudden appearance of wrapped dookies on their door- step may have remained a mystery. The management at WBCN, however, knew who was re- sponsible. A month earlier, T. Mitchell Hastings had sold the station to a New York - based firm called Progressive Com- munications Inc. for $3.5 million, an equitable sum given the prices of radio stations today. Although Progressive Commu- nications won ' t assume onwership until sometime after the FCC approves the sale in the late fall, they demanded Duane ' s head. They wanted to use me to fill Boston ' s potholes, Glasscock says. Laquidara was invited by station manager Klee Dobra to a meeting about Duane ' s future. Everyone wants your ass, Dobra informed him. Duane is a total asshole. He ' s fired. Can ' t you just suspend him? Charles pleaded. Duane is more popular than Charles. Are you schizoid? Debra asked. You ' re the one who fucking fired him and not me, Charles countered. 142

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iffe Strikes And that was the abrupt end of Duane. Charles told Duane ' s loyal listeners that he had been in a motorcycle crash and was being retooled at the National Recloning Institute in Butte, Montana. What a way to go, Charles says. No one can fill Duane ' s shoes. He never could get a break. The Strike At 4:30 Friday afternoon, February 16 — Black Friday as it would soon be known in the local radio world — an emotional- ly distraught man phoned The Real Paper from WBCN. He said a slaughter was under way there. The new owners of the station had just arrived and they ' re calling everybody in one by one and firing them. Right now Boston is losing its best radio siation. When it was over, nineteen of WBCN ' s staff of thirty-six had been dismissed. The next afternoon all the remaining employees went on strike in protest. They have been out on strike ever since. As Danny Schechter, Charles Laquidara, Jimmy Parry, Tracy Roach, Matt Seigel, and other announcers and staff circled with picket signs on the sidewalk below the Prudential Building, WBCN ' s new owner, Michael A. Weiner of New York, interrupted the music at intervals to broadcast an expla- nation. On Friday, February 16, Hemisphere Broadcasting completed the purchase of WBCN radio, Weiner announced. As experienced broadcaster, a complete evaluation of the air staff and office staff was made. As a result of this complete and detailed evaluation, it was determined that the high qual- ity of the WBCN air staff was, in the main, a professional and valuable asset to the stations commitment to serve the Boston community. It was also regretfully determined that other em- ployees were either not up to the high standard which the new management felt should be maintained, nor could the financial resources of the company support the number of people em- ployed at takeover .... Hemisphere Broadcasting has offered to maintain as a nucleus the professional on-the-air staff, your favorite on-the-air talents. We hope they will return to work. In any description of WBCN the word unique usually comes up, and so does the word historic . The station was born in March 1968 as one of the first radio exponents of the musical and social upheavals of the time. It was a leader of the original underground or free-form stations, as they were called then — the first stations to put the new rock music of ' the counterculture on the air, stations with real people for announcers who felt part of the antiwar, antidraft, and other political movements. Previously the FM band had been a largely ignored repository for highbrow music; with WBCN on the air, buying an FM radio became as much a cultural state- ment as wearing a peace button. Their sound was imitated by similar new stations nationwide. Eventually commercial broadcasters realized there was territory to be claimed on the FM band. FM radios became commonplace and lost their cultural symbolism. Like most else born in the Sixties, WBCN did not age gracefully. The passing of the counterculture left it high and dry, hemmed in by competitors and searching for a definable audience as its ratings slid. In just the last year or so, however, the station seemed to find itself again. It seemed like it had a conscious turnaround in attitude, says David Bieber, creative services director until he was fired Friday. A lot of things happened — Charles Laquidara coming back, Oedipus coming on and his develop- ment at the station — everybody was excited. We were going places again. Ratings nearly doubled from spring to fall of last year and advertising revenues reached an all time high. By Monday the picket lines were up. Shifts of a couple of dozen people at a time are circling with signs on the Boylston Street sidewalk below the Pru every day from nine to six. Support for the strike seems unanimous among the staff of every department despit e suggestions by Weiner to the con- trary. They have vowed to stay out until Hemisphere Broad- casting recognizes the union and a contract resolving all the disputed issues is agreed upon by both sides. Weiner refuses to take the first step of recognizing the union. But he may soon be forced to. The union filed an unfair labor practice charge about the firings with the National Labor Relations Board on Tuesday. Weiner may be forced to negotiate even before the Labor Board comes back with its ruling. The strike has already been extremely effective. As of Thursday, the staff had contacted all of WBCN ' s advertisers, both local and national, and claimed to have convinced approximately 90 percent of them to pull their ads off WBCN. It ' s a matter of personal rela- tionships, says Bieber. Many of the salespeople are friends with their clients. It ' s truly calamitous for Michael Weiner not to be able to sell commercials. He totally misjudged the situa- tion. The strikers are gaining support everywhere else they turn as well. As of Thrusday facilities for benefit concerts and movies were being donated around Boston and Cambridge. Staff were making announcements and winning support in all the rock and new wave clubs in the city, approaching the Clamshell Alliance and other political groups the station has aided in the past, organizing a Duane Glasscock Motorcade to Save WBCN through Boston, and calling on friends at other stations in other cities. Because of ' BCN ' s stature in the indus- try a lot of people coast to coast are very aware of us, says Susan Sprecher, fired producer and cohost of the Boston Sun- day Review and union shop steward. And they are very upset about what ' s happening. NBC News and The New York Times were said to be interested in doing stories on the latest turn of events at the pioneer station of FM rock. We ' re incredibly strong and they don ' t understand that, says Sprecher. They think they can appeal to some of us stars, divide us and get them back, but that ' s so wrong. Weiner has this idea there are just a few ringleaders and the rest of us want to go back. He just doesn ' t understand. 143