WBCN's Farewell

[Eli Polonsky]

Short answer: BCN hasn't been "so good" since at LEAST 1993.

Longer answer: (Steps to suckdom)

Step One: BCN stopped letting the jocks pick songs in the late 80's.
Step Two: Too much classic rock in the early 90's.
Step Three: Putting Stern on at night - no more nighttime music at all.
Step Four: Forcing out Charles so Stern could be on in the morning. (Stern's demand? Most likely.)
Step Five: (This is when BCN effectively died, almost fifteen years ago!): Junking all the old jocks and heritage in a quest for younger demos.
Step Six: Putting on shock jocks in the afternoon, and of course the football games. You can't be the rock station of record if you don't play rock most of the day.

But basically it was corporate greed.

As I remember it, WBCN and WZLX were competitors before they were co-owned. In the late '80s and early '90s, WZLX was challenging WBCN with a very focused classic rock format, and WBCN was responding to their challenge with the slogan "The station that made the classics classic" and was still competing by playing a lot of classic rock (from their heritage), as well as trying to hang on to playing new rock at the same time.

When both stations became owned by CBS in the mid-'90s, they no longer wanted them to compete with one another for a good portion of the same audience. CBS wanted them both to focus on separate audience demos, making WBCN "new rock" (and unfortunately shock-talk IMO) for a younger demo, and moving most of their older jocks to WZLX to identify with the older classic rock audience. That was what, in my opinion, secured that WBCN was, from then on, going to slide down in a long, painful decline, though the competition from both sides had already started it...

It's important that BCN's FreeForm station have a livestream to atract more listeners, so all CBS stations have livestreams and FreeForm not yet. Also no website up for this station.

Turned on my HD radio last night, and it doesn't even seem to be on the air at the moment. It had been on 104.1 HD-2 before, but I got nothing there, and I got WZLX's "Radio Mojo" (blues) on 100.7 HD-2, but no 100.7 HD-3.

 

[Signpost]

Adam 12 hosting Jerry Goodwin today was amazing. Those brilliant bits still sound fresh.

Once i requested a song when Jerry was on. Listener line person said my request was at the end of the list and she was bringing into him right away - I said my request would "sound good" after the song that was on. 45 seconds later - my request was on, with Jerry talking it up extolling "another fine fine request from BCN listening audience". The song was "Sufficiently Breathless" by Captain Beyond. I think that at no other time in the history of radio could that ever have happened..

 

[scooty430]

Was nice to hear Charles list many of the people he worked with, and when he got to the Ps said something like "if you have radio in the mornings you must have radio in the afternoons..." and let it hung without saying the dirty P name and moved on. Very nice.

Right. Then Carter or someone revisited it a few minutes later, saying, "You kind of got hung up around the P's." Charles responded with something like, "Ya, it's hard to say, kind of like "humuna humuna humuna..... I can't say it. But I guess whoever the guy is he made his MARK somewhere...."

Was Mark on this morning with Sam Kopper? I turned it on right at the end of that segment.

Loved the story of Charles doing exercises in an empty theater in London on vacation with Oedipus.

 

[scooty430]

Short answer: BCN hasn't been "so good" since at LEAST 1993.

Longer answer: (Steps to suckdom)

Step One: BCN stopped letting the jocks pick songs in the late 80's.
Step Two: Too much classic rock in the early 90's.
Step Three: Putting Stern on at night - no more nighttime music at all.
Step Four: Forcing out Charles so Stern could be on in the morning. (Stern's demand? Most likely.)
Step Five: (This is when BCN effectively died, almost fifteen years ago!): Junking all the old jocks and heritage in a quest for younger demos.
Step Six: Putting on shock jocks in the afternoon, and of course the football games. You can't be the rock station of record if you don't play rock most of the day.

But basically it was corporate greed.

As I remember it, WBCN and WZLX were competitors before they were co-owned. In the late '80s and early '90s, WZLX was challenging WBCN with a very focused classic rock format, and WBCN was responding to their challenge with the slogan "The station that made the classics classic" and was still competing by playing a lot of classic rock (from their heritage), as well as trying to hang on to playing new rock at the same time.

When both stations became owned by CBS in the mid-'90s, they no longer wanted them to compete with one another for a good portion of the same audience. CBS wanted them both to focus on separate audience demos, making WBCN "new rock" (and unfortunately shock-talk IMO) for a younger demo, and moving most of their older jocks to WZLX to identify with the older classic rock audience. That was what, in my opinion, secured that WBCN was, from then on, going to slide down in a long, painful decline, though the competition from both sides had already started it...

It's important that BCN's FreeForm station have a livestream to atract more listeners, so all CBS stations have livestreams and FreeForm not yet. Also no website up for this station.

Turned on my HD radio last night, and it doesn't even seem to be on the air at the moment. It had been on 104.1 HD-2 before, but I got nothing there, and I got WZLX's "Radio Mojo" (blues) on 100.7 HD-2, but no 100.7 HD-3.

Right. The ownership rules really changed radio by eliminating competition, and attracting larger players who could not afford to take any chances.

'BCN and KROQ were probably the last two big market stations to have any DJ input at all. For that they deserve some credit. They were indeed the last holdouts. What KROQ did that was smarter was they never abandoned music, and they GRADUALLY evolved, always keeping a toe in their past. BCN, on the other hand, basically flipped to a new format in 94....and then as you say devolved into a loudmouthed talk station.

Regarding the ZLX rivalry, here's a funny story. When ZLX and BCN were competitors, at one point BCN somehow got a hold of ZLX's playlist on a Saturday. They then proceeded to play whatever ZLX was about to play - every single song....about 2 minutes before ZLX did. At the same time, they also inserted NEW music. (I'm not sure how they managed this, other than doing little talking and airing few ads.) So to those switching back and forth on presets (as everyone did) the effect was that ZLX was copying BCN, but with less variety. Hilarious. This went on for hours.

 

[scooty430]

This guy Adam 12 is excruciating. Just yelling into the mike, and a waste of an interview with Jay Leno. Get him off BCN's last day!

 

[ESH1980]

Adam 12 is WBCN's best jock by far, and is the best rock jock in Boston. He is very talented at what he does.

There is a lot of talk of people speculating when WBCN "died" or turned sour, and people are suggesting maybe it was the end of the free form era, or maybe when they took brought Howard Stern aboard, putting the Pats on, or maybe if they could compete better with WBOS with less jocks, and so on and so forth...

As charming a free form radio is, and Big Mattress in the morning was, the evolution of WBCN and its need to reach a young rock audience caused it to change. The fact of the matter remains that WBCN dies today. If they had stuck with the old formula, they would have died in 1969, not 2009. This is one of the things that made WBCN so special. For so long, it reached multiple generations of people... but now radio as we know it is going away as it is becoming more and more evident that young people are not tuning into the radio. Having a tighter playlist and more strategically placed stop sets are not going to change this. The loss of WBCN isnt just the end of an era, its the begining of a new era.

The radio industry needs to re learn how to reach an audience with a realevant product the way it did in the past. Playing music with commercials just wont cut it anymore. Young men with disposable income are the earliest adaptors of new technology, and most are getting their entertainment elsewhere from other electronic devices.

As we are going right now, there are simply too many radio stations and an every shrinking pool of listeners that are leaving the medium for literally dozens of reasons...

Im sad by the loss of WBCN and I would like to think that radio will snap back to its feet and reinvent itself, but more than likely, it will probably just slowly wither away and die a slow death.

 

[scooty430]

I guess different strokes for different folks. I find Adam 12 to be a guy who speaks too forcefully and loudly. Then again, that is how many broadcasters speak these days, whether it's Fox News, WEEI, CNN, all the shock jocks... I think it's all a certain generation knows. Obviously some people like hearing it, or Rush, Bill O Reilly, etc would not be so popular.

Give me the smooth tones of Ken Shelton or Carter Alan. They spoke to you, not at you.

Agree that BCN did a good job of evolving with the times, up until the last decade or so. Nobody expects (or wants) to hear sitar solos, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, or other dated stuff in 2009 (or even 1975.) But I do think the concensus is that they stopped being "BCN" at some point. When was that point? I'm sure for some it is 1971, others 1981, and others 2001. I would firmly say it was when they went alternative - they cut all links to the past, and especially in Boston, tradition is so important. But that's just my opinion.

 

[dsturdy5]

Scooty, I think you bring up an interesting point. For everyone, BCN stopped being BCN at different times. It is a generational thing, I think. For me, one who started listening religiously during the "New Rock Revolution" of the mid 1990's, it changed in 2001 or so when the format went to more aggressive rock like Korn and away from the stuff like Pearl Jam, STP, Smashing Pumpkins etc. The stuff I grew up with. Similarly, if you grew up with the rock of the 1970's-1980's, the BCN I know and love is not the one you did. In the end, it was not one moment. It was a change in the times more than anything else.

BCN is unique in that it is one of the stations in Boston that evolved, did not flip, over the last 15-20 years. 92.5, 93.7, 94.5, 99.5, etc, etc, etc are playing very different formats today than they were 15 years ago. BCN was able to re-brand themselves and keep a strong core of listeners, as is evident from a lot of the calls, e-mails, tweets, etc over the last month or so.

As for Adam12, I agree with ESH. He was a link to the mid 1990's BCN due to the fact that he grew up WITH BCN in that era. He was one of "us". I did not find his tone condescending, nor did I ever feel like I was being talked "at". Was he the same as Carter Allen? Albert O? No. Nor do I put him in the Rush/shock-jock category. I think he is his own jock, he has his own style and is more knowledgeable about the music he plays than many I hear on local and national radio. IMO, he embodies everything that BCN strived to be since day 1, he is a rock jock with a vested interest in the music, especially the local music and he should catch on somewhere sometime soon.

Even though I have not listened as much lately as I once did, I will miss WBCN. It was the station my car stereo would never change from. It was the station I had on in the background when I did my homework through high school. It was the station that brought so many live shows I paid so many dollars to see. I think the ad I heard this weekend where it said, "how do you say good-bye to a friend after 41 years?" is right on. For all of us who have listened for any extended time, BCN is a friend, a part of our fabric and Boston radio won't be the same.

 

[Sibilant]

this thread has been great. Bradley just played "Thank You For Letting Me Be Myself Again".. almost like a nod to CBS for allowing WBCN to show its roots. It's been strange being so glued to radio, reliving fond memories of a time when WBCN was a fairly constant accompaniment that I took for granted. I didn't realize how much I missed the old WBCN. It was nice to sort of have it back for a few days, they could have just let it fade away. Really nice to be able to share thoughts about the whole thing here.

 

[chrisradioanimal]

Is Someone Recording Jay's Show I Started To But Then My Computer Froze Up So From 7-9 pm Got Erased.

 

[pqgeorge]

I'm proud to say that I have been listening to WBCN ever since the days of "The American Revolution" back in March of 1968. It's sad to see that 41 years of WBCN as a rock station (and during its' entire existance on 104.1) have come to a close. But like "The American Revolution" days, the time has come. We also can't forget the VERY early days of WBCN back from 1958-1968, during the days of "The Concert Network". Those unique call-letters (WBCN) go back to 1958 when T. Mitchell Hastings took a long dormant frequency of 104.1 Megacycles and put it back to operation as a full-time Classical music station. One of Boston's first FM Stereo stations as well as WCOP-FM, WCRB-FM, WUPI and WKOX-FM, WBCN somehow survived in spite of virtually NO commercial income for nearly the first 10 years of its' existance. Who can forget "Little Walter's Time Machine" and the "ABC In Concert Series" simulcast in Stereo back in the mid 1970's. R.I.P., WBCN-104.1 .

 

[scooty430]

this thread has been great. Bradley just played "Thank You For Letting Me Be Myself Again".. almost like a nod to CBS for allowing WBCN to show its roots. It's been strange being so glued to radio, reliving fond memories of a time when WBCN was a fairly constant accompaniment that I took for granted. I didn't realize how much I missed the old WBCN. It was nice to sort of have it back for a few days, they could have just let it fade away. Really nice to be able to share thoughts about the whole thing here.

I think that was a reference to Oedipus, because Bradley (and the other airstaff) felt like he let the jocks be themselves on the air. However, it is indeed very cool and unusual that CBS allowed this four day tribute, and clearly with very little in the way of rules.

Hearing some of the production immediately takes you back - you are right. What BCN had back then was being part of a community. That's why it still touches a nerve even after 15 years of basically being gone.

 

[sportsradioweei1037]

well its very sad to see a well known station like wbcn go by the waste side. i have listened for 10years when stern was there and all the pats games and such, nik carter. its intersting to hear what radio was like way back when, im enjoying all the old liners and such. rip wbcn!!!!

 

[Eli Polonsky]

Bradley just played "Thank You For Letting Me Be Myself Again".. almost like a nod to CBS for allowing WBCN to show its roots.

He even played the original "fake" stereo (rechanneled from mono) version, not the digitally remastered true stereo version that's recently become available on CD. That's an authentic tribute.

 

[scranton]

heard the harder they come and Jonathan Richman's Roadrunner in the same set this afternoon

 

[Bos79]

Don't forget, tomorrow will be the last day of WBCN, besute to get your airchecks ready. Maybe tomorrow I will record it until WBCN will be gone by midnight. Besute to make a note of it.

BCN is gone at midnight tonight my friend. 90 minutes and it's no more.

 

[disney fanatic]

Don't forget, tomorrow will be the last day of WBCN, besute to get your airchecks ready. Maybe tomorrow I will record it until WBCN will be gone by midnight. Besute to make a note of it.

 

[scranton]

live version of sweet jane--a MArk parenteau fave

 

[PaulRAnderson]

Listening to WBCN tonight reminds me why radio used to be so good and how bad it sucks now. No wonder I haven't listened to music on FM radio for years.

Paul

 

[magnadan]

The music they're choosing tonight is not only nod to the heritage of WBCN, but a tribute to the artists/bands themselves.

Apparently the Sex Pistols and Journey along with the others tonight are 'BCN-worthy.