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Has anyone been in the building for Kiss 108?

S

ssetta

I just discovered I know exactly where it is. It's in Medford right near the Wellington station on the Orange Line. Like can you just walk in off the street? Has anyone here ever been inside it? If so, what's it like?
 
I took a tour in 1988, when I was 15 years old. My mom went to high school with Lisa Fell (Billy Costa's wife and then-GSM at Kiss), so I used the connection to break the ice. I'm sure that much of the building's interior has changed since then, but at the time it was amazing. Even if you only get as far as the lobby, there's a great hand-painted mural on the wall that was put up in the 80s- it's got dozens of faces on it, including some of the biggest superstars of that era as well as the Kiss DJs.

I have a few pictures that I took that day, including shots of the studio (with J.J. Wright and what looks like a half-dozen huge cart racks). I'll try to get them scanned and uploaded somewhere.
 
I interned there back in 1997, and stopped by to visit their CE (Steve Riggs) around 2003. It's a very nice facility. There's four main "studios" for Kiss108 (one of which is really more of an office) and another three smaller studios for WXKS-AM. The studios are all VERY well-built...they have to be because of WXKS-AM's transmitter being about 100ft from the building. Each studio is literally "wrapped" in a wire mesh (copper, I assume) to make a Faraday cage.

The basement has a largish kitchen/meeting room, and there's a fair amount of space for production and engineering. Steve has done an incredible job wiring up the place as Prophet moved in and networked all the studios together. It's a hard-core rig.

There's also a lot of business/sales space that's very nice looking, but I never really hung out over there so I barely remember what it looks like. The lobby is VERY nice, though.
 
Well, if there's a famous celebrity in the studio, and someone walked in, do you think they'd get to see the celebrity?
 
I doubt very much you'd get anywhere past the lobby. There have been too many cases of crazy people invading radio stations.

Did you know JAMN's studios are right across the street on Cabot Rd... just the other side of Rt 16?

I bet there is some shielding... I work at Wellington and our phones are always picking up WXKS AM... I have not heard 1090 getting into our phone system though and they are di-plexed on the XKS AM tower since 1090 lost thier tower site as part of that great Telecom City project Ed " I screwed cable subscribers forever" Markey and friends decided to make Commercial St/Corporation Way the magnet for Telecom ventures.
 
Neggy said:
There have been too many cases of crazy people invading radio stations.
Click to expand...

I think you're referring to the jocks, Neggy.
 
ssetta said:
I just discovered I know exactly where it is. It's in Medford right near the Wellington station on the Orange Line. Like can you just walk in off the street? Has anyone here ever been inside it? If so, what's it like?
Click to expand...

Walked in off the street a couple times in 2000, they were friendly, let me take a bumper sticker, and turn in paperwork. And that's nicer than WHDH, wihch has a glass window, an intercom and a security gaurd.
 
I've been in WHDH a few times... The setup makes you think you're going to visit somebody on death row. You would think that station would hope for crazy people to charge the newsroom to get cheap ratings out of it! :D
 
I worked there from 95 to 98 and as stations go it is rather prehistoric. The main studio is small and Billy Costa has to sit across on the other side of the controle board and has a hard time seeing Matt Seigal. As of 1998 they were still using Cart machines and reel to reel decks.

The on air traffic person sits in a small studio with just a microphone.

They built a new studio for the AM station a few years ago and it was mainly used for production. There is also a very small 3rd studio Ed Mcmann used to do his voice tracking in.

The rest of the offices on the first floor are small including the sales area. Three traffic people use one rather small office. The GM's office on the 1st floor is small by major market standards. The 2nd floor that was added on years ago has offices and a large conference room.

If you would like to check it out you should do it sooner than later because the word is CC is going to sell the building and move everything into the WJMN studio on Cabot Road.
 
I worked there from 95 to 98 and as stations go it is rather prehistoric. The main studio is small and Billy Costa has to sit across on the other side of the controle board and has a hard time seeing Matt Seigal. As of 1998 they were still using Cart machines and reel to reel decks.
Click to expand...

One of my jobs as an intern (1996) was to answer the listener line phones (that sucked) but also to pull the carts for commercials and the CD's for each hour. They had those "cartridge" style CD players, the ones where each CD lived inside a shell kinda like a big 1.44MB floppy disk...worked great for preventing CD scratches. But yeah, it made for a VERY crowded studio with racks and racks of carts and CD's filling every nook and cranny. At the time they still had some reel to reels and had just installed a computer audio editing system dedicated to recording and playback of listener calls.

When I visited in 2003 or so, ALL of that was just GONE. All music was played off the Prophet NexGen computer system with one flatscreen LCD monitor, and there was a second LCD monitor dedicated for the Prophet's quick record/edit/playback for listener calls. All the CD racks were gone, the carts (and cart machines) were gone, and the reels (and reel machines) were gone. CD players were still in the rack, though. Still...there was a LOT more open space in there then! ;D

However, the layout of the place is such that you could not sit in the front lobby and see anywhere near the studios, much less into them. Although if someone let you back in that area...you could easily stand in the central hallway the four main studios are off of and look right in...there were big-ass windows into each studio. About four feet high and six feet across IIRC. And they kept the glass very clean...I remember I kept thinking I could sit in the windowsill area (it's about a foot deep and roughly butt-high off the floor) and I'd bang my ass into the window. ::)
 
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