A Piece of the Rock

I'm stuck in deadline week, but I do want to throw my $0.02 on the WBCN story, even though it's now a couple of days old. For those of you who are not in the immediate Boston area or who may not have heard for some other reason, CBS Radio has decided to pull the plug on "The Rock of Boston" after 41 years, replacing it with a sports-talk station as of August 13th.

(The situation is actually slightly more complex than that: the new station will take over the 98.5 FM frequency, and the CBS-owned "Mix" station currently at that spot on the dial, the one that plays music for people who don't really care that much about music, will assume WBCN's 104.1 frequency. Why they couldn't just put the new station at 104.1 is best left unasked, I guess.)

I first became aware of WBCN around 1979, and it was responsible for a significant degree of my adolescent musical awakening. As a bored teenager growing up in suburban Rhode Island, after seeing artists like Elvis Costello and Talking Heads on Saturday Night Live, and then discovering a syndicated show called Rock World, a late-1970s precursor to MTV that showed the early video work of groups like Devo and The Vapors, I was eager for an outlet that would expose me to this sort of new music for more than an hour or so per week (and, since Rock World aired after SNL at 1 AM Sundays, one that would allow me a little more sleep).

One afternoon after school, I was idly fiddling with the radio in my room, searching for something interesting. I have to be honest: given that it was 30 years ago, I can't remember what song was playing when I first stumbled across WBCN on the dial, but I am fairly certain it had to be something adventurous that other radio stations would not have been playing at the time. At first, I was actually a little more impressed with the fact that I was pulling in a Boston radio station from 50-some miles away.

I quickly realized that WBCN was just the sort of station I'd been looking for. There was a Providence station, WBRU, that played much of the same music, but what they were missing and 'BCN had in abundance was attitude: young, brash, rebellious, alluringly cool. Not only did I feel like it was my station, that it belonged to me, but I felt like I belonged to it, that I was part of a club, and cooler for being part of that club. When I decided soon after to go to college in Boston, I felt that listening to 'BCN gave me an advantage over the other incoming freshmen, because I was already tapped into the cultural landscape of the city that I was about to become a part of.

Back then WBCN was considered cutting-edge, and other stations around the country followed their lead. They were early supporters of acts that went on to become worldwide stars, including The Cars and U2. In the spring of 1981 I was one of three people in my high school senior class of about 260 who had heard of U2; I'd heard them played on 'BCN and rushed out to buy Boy.

I stuck with the station through college and the rest of the '80s. I remember they used to sponsor free lunchtime concerts. I went to quite a few of these, back when it was still legal, normal, and cool to do stuff like give away free drinks. You'd get free music, free hot dogs, and one free beer. I recall going to one such concert--the Del Fuegos, I think--before an afternoon final exam in December of 1984, and I went into that exam feeling like the beer had put me in a suitably relaxed frame of mind to properly focus on the test. It did.

Later on, under corporate ownership, WBCN tried being less alternative and more like a competitor to WAAF, the hard-rock station. That's about the time I moved on to WFNX. These days I hardly listen to radio at all. Perhaps if I commuted by car I might behave differently, but at work I'm more likely to open iTunes and fire up an internet streaming radio station. WBCN will continue to exist online in this form, so I'll give them another listen, but it will be more for the sake of nostalgia than anything else.

Radio has become much more of a business than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Everything is so packaged and focus-grouped, which may increase profits but also has the unfortunate effect of making it less interesting and appealing to listen to. I understand the business side of the decision, but emotionally it doesn't make the loss any easier to take. The WBCN I loved ceased to exist a long time ago, which is why I haven't listened in a long time.

Life is about change, and as we get older, the people, places, and things that mattered to us tend to go away, and usually they don't come back. But I'll always have great memories of the years when The Rock of Boston ruled the local airwaves.