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About WBCN, et al
To Lou, et al I was brought in to WBCN in 1978 to help the station find itself. WCOZ had come along and siezed the majority of WBCN's listenership with a carefully honed playlist, and a warmer attitude toward the station's audience. WBCN, while by all means the Rock'n'Roll "Legacy Station" in the area, had gotten tired and sort of self-reverential. Laquidera had been gone (one of many absences over the years), Maxanne was playing music known mostly to no one but herself and a dwindling group of ardent fans. The rest of the station was, to be blunt, in disarray. It was resting on laurels. But that meant the ratings had gone way downhill, the ad revenues were plummeting, and the owner, a wonderful and visionary man named T. Mitchell Hastings, wondered how could he keep the staff on salary and maintain the level of employment and benefits if the revenues were dwindling? This was a man who cared deeply for his employees. The feeling, sadly, was not mutual. He was perceived as a doddering old fuddy-duddy by many (dare I say, most?) on the staff. They felt that they'd built 'BCN, and they knew what to do, and Mitch was just the old man in the office who owned the place. Little did most of them know that Mitch developed the concept of vertical and horizontal polarization...that which enables FM to be portable, to be heard in a car. That Mitch worked with Armstong, the so-called "father of FM," that Mitch was a fearless renegade who allowed his beloved Concert Network station to go the route of "Progressive Rock" because he was touched by the sensitivty of the children of the sixties, the music that had passion and was inventive and not the norm, and because he was no stranger to what many others might have considered, well, rather strange. Mitch was a colleague of Edgar Cayce, among others. He'd had an offer to become the Head of the Occult Studies Department at McGill. He was a bohemian, a beatnik, even a hippie of sorts. But Mitch wore a Harris Tweed and was a gentleman from an earlier era. The staff at WBCN was largely a bunch of spoiled brats, wallowing in the riches of their lavish "alternative lifestyle." THey lived high, got high, and were high on themselves. And the station suffered. Along came a competitor, and WBCN went to second in the category, and then became an also-ran, and then became a pretty poor excuse for a radio station. I did a study of the listenership, of their likes and dislkies, and it became clear that the incredibly broad array of all sorts of music made it easy for a station with more focus (WCOZ) to be the leader. WBCN received more "legacy mentions" than actual listenership. We found that those who had once cherished what it had been were unable to spend any real time with what it had become. So we made a number of changes, including bringing back Laquidera. We put in a policy of having the deejays select a quote of tunes from current popular albums. We gave the unstructured asylum a semblance of structure. We returned the station to a stronger position and made it competitive with WCOZ. We also maintained the 'cachet' of what it had once been. It was a long struggle, and we were successful. Mitch then sold the station to the nascent entity known as Infinity Broadcasting. That group is now the second largest broadcast chain in the country. I worked with a number of early "album rock" or free form stations. It was a wonderful moment in time. The memories of then are often stronger and more durable than the actual "on air product" those stations broadcast. The egos of many of the air personalities, the, ahem, "favors" the deejays received from record companies...back in the day when a deejay could actually pick the tunes....were the downfall of many of these stations. Of course, a good thing in the electronic media will always fall victim to some sort of commercialization and dilution. A consultant with a pretty simple forumla came up with the "Elton John is hipper than anything" format and a slew of radio stations adopted his format. The result: a ton of "corporate rock" stations, with minimal creativity, highly defined, similar, and comparitively tight playlists (when compared with the free form or progressive rockers, with no limits), with almost no personality among the disc jockeys. Sure, morning shows could be cute, but the rest of the day the jocks merely had to sound laid-back and cool. They had no say in the music, they were more like cue-card readers. So free form went corporate. End of a special time in radio for that music, that pop culture's listenership. Later on the AAA stations sprang up (Adult Album Alternative) but few were successful for any enduring period of time. Some college stations, KPIG, and a scant few commercial stations hold the mantle, but there were a good many nails in the overall coffin of the genre. Ah, the memories of the good old days... --Dean There are responses to this message:
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