WKRP in Boston
In 1981 WCOZ was the most listened to radio station in Boston , thanks to its “Kick Ass Rock and Roll” format. John Sebastian was the program director and I was the music director. I recently found a copy of an old music log I’d scheduled. Here’s what we played on May 12, 1981, beginning at 6 am.
That’s the note Rob Lipshutz left below a Spotify playlist he posted this month. “What a time capsule,” I thought, though the music was just what you’d think it would be: the Stones, Clapton, then CSNY; forgotten bands (no offense, Sniff ‘n’ the Tears!). Lots of the Beatles, Boston, and Journey. Jefferson Airplane, April Wine, Loggins & Messina, more Clapton. Very occasionally, women (Pat Benatar; Heart) and artists of color (Santana; Jon Butcher, who opened for the J. Geils Band back in the day). There’s no Bob Marley, or Hendrix till very late in the day, sandwiched between Phil Collins (that day’s third airing of “In the Air Tonight”) and Clapton. Bowie (“Rebel, Rebel”) and the Talking Heads (“Take Me to the River”) are as close as we get to more interesting stuff.
Like I said, what you’d expect from 16 hours of Kick Ass Rock and Roll.
I asked Roger Miller, who was playing in Boston’s most interesting band at the time, if he remembered the station. “Honestly, I don’t recall WCOZ at all!!” he said. “But I didn’t pay much attention to anything above ground.”
“College radio all the way?”
“Yeah. TBS/MBR… ZBC… HRB… MFO”
“They’ll never play us, so why even try?”
“I just didn’t care. BCN sometimes played Burma, which always amazed me. But I never listened to the station.”
That gives a sense of the yawning divide between the Mass. audience, punk, and post-punk. But like I also said, the playlist itself is quite a time capsule. I would have posted it here, anyway, and was about to start writing when Lipshutz (fun fact: the first person to play “Jesse’s GIrl” on the air) put up another playlist:
As transcribed from the program log, here’s what played on WCOZ Boston on February 25, 1980, The music was selected and hosted by DJ’s Cindy Bailen, Tom Doyle, Lesley Palmiter, Steven Clean, myself, and Andy Beaubain. That day we premiered Bob Seger’s new LP “Against the Wind.”
As you’ll see, the Beatles are still here, along with Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Eagles, and CSNY. But there’s a bit more going on: Blondie, the Jam, Chuck Berry, the Clash, Elvis Costello, Jimmy Cliff, Patti Smith, the Flying Lizards, Nick Lowe, VU (“Sweet Jane,” but still), and Mission of Burma’s label-mates, the Neighborhoods (their single, “The Prettiest Girl” gets played a couple of times). It’s more eclectic (the Bowie track that jumps out here’s off Lodger), reaches further back in the music’s history, includes more women, makes occasional forays into soul (Aretha Franklin, Sam & Dave). Somehow, it just feels more personal—and, it turns out, there’s a reason for that.
In February, 1980, COZ was still working off the 1970s AOR format. DJs saw lists of approved songs scrawled on the front of each record they played—it was far from free-form, but Cindy, Tom, Lesley, Steven, Rob, and Andy were still picking the records. The difference is, a couple of months later, the station hired John Sebastian (not that John Sebastian) to tighten the playlists. Focus groups were convened: the station called listeners, or brought them into an auditorium, played them seven or ten second hooks, and had them rate every record on some sort of scale. It was more democratic, in a sense, but also less artful. It took the DJs’ autonomy away.
I reached out to one of the DJs.
“Sebastian was hired in May of 1980,” Lesley Palmiter told me.
“It took him a while to get to know the staff and implement what he knew would get him ratings. It was his calling card: to rely on heavy research, focus groups, and reduce the record library to only 500 cuts. Not only was it the death knell of progressive, or AOR, for ‘COZ, the insult on injury was that our new slug lines were ‘The Rock and Roll Muth'a,’ and ‘Kick Ass Rock and Roll,’ which we were required to inject several times an hour. [Other slug lines at the time included: ‘THE Led Zeppelin Station in Boston,’ ‘All Rock and Roll no B.S.,’ and ‘No Disco.’] It was demoralizing, insulting and infuriating because he turned 'COZ into a version of Top 40 on the FM dial. Sebastian got his numbers, alright, then he exited soon after; I believe his entire tenure was about 18-20 months. I quit in '82, shortly before he left, because I felt irreparable damage had been done and I was no longer proud of working there.”
Palmiter spent seven years at the station, became a real-estate broker for several years, and now works as a voice-over artist (she’s also writing a book). “I arrived in mid-August of 1975 and was one of three initial on-air personalities when WCOZ went on the air,” she says.
“Clark Smidt, myself and Ken Shelton. I’m not sure exactly when the original owners filed for their FM licenses, but it was July 1, 1964 when the Non-Duplication Rule was adopted by the FCC, which meant stations could no longer play on the FM band what they were programming on their AM bands (which had been the practice in early radio). So, for perhaps that long, they’d been auto-programming some rock. Then they switched to the Easy Listening format and changed their slug line to ‘COZY.’”
(I checked the history; it’s right. The station dates back to 1948, when it signed on as WHDH-FM 94.5, sister station to WHDH 850, run by Boston’s Herald-Traveler newspaper. )
“On August 15th, I believe, Clark created a weekend of automated rock to send the message out that something on 94.5 FM was going on. He called it ‘Fantasy Park.’ Three of us cut IDs, introducing ourselves and the station, doing song intros, and teasing that more was to come, so ‘stay tuned.’ That Monday, Clark was the first to go live, me next and then Ken. ‘Brown Sugar’ by The Rolling Stones was the first song of the new AOR format on WCOZ. We continued auto programming through the evenings and overnights until Clark could staff-up. It took about 5 or 6 months before we went ‘live,’ 24/7. (This link shows the full staff by Spring of 1976.)
“We played whatever we wanted, what we felt was important for people to get ‘hip’ to, just as long as we got our station IDs in and played the spots on time. I personally broke several national acts into the Boston market—we all had the most fun of our lives. But our mandate was to beat BCN and by the first ratings book (the Fall Arbitron of 1975), we DID by a full point, 2.9 to 1.9, in the all-important 18-34 demographic.”
These days, Sebastian’s in Scottsdale, trying to get another new format to fly. When he arrived in Boston, in ‘80, BCN (Oedipus and Nocturnal Emissions at night; Charles Laquidara and the Big Mattress in the mornings) and COZ were neck-in-neck, once again. in the ratings. In ‘81, with Sebastian’s focus-group format in place, COZ’s ratings tripled.
“Well, before there was WCOZ, I was at KUPD in Phoenix for a very short time,” he has said.
“But long enough to move the station from Top 40 to AOR. It's the first place we used the term Kick Ass Rock and Roll. I was formulating the hybrid format I had conceived in my head marrying the best vestiges of AOR and CHR/Top 40. It worked immediately beating the very strong Top 40 KOPA and the legendary AOR station, KDKB first rating book. That attracted the attention of WCOZ. How did we turnaround the fortunes of that station that was traditionally second fiddle to WBCN? By playing a great list of Classics from the 60s and 70s and a select few currents. We were highly researched too. And we had legendary DJs like Steven Clean, Andy Beaubien, Tom Doyle and other greats. We had a completely unique idea that had never been done before and perhaps most importantly we had the 100% backing of management! What we did there, rising in the ratings from a 4 share to a 12.6 was the precursor to Classic Rock today. In fact, our researched top ten way back then is the exact same top ten on Classic Rock stations today!”
This, too, is what you’d expect it to be, couched in layers of corporate blah blah. Boston listeners had other options: WZBC, WMBR, WHRB, WERS. But college radio was something you had to discover while stations like COZ and BCN were all over the place, advertising on TV and billboards. Whether or not they played songs like "Academy Fight Song” or “Sweet Jane” made a bit of a difference. If you were a kid, that small difference could mean the whole world.
As it was, WCOZ trounced BCN for a while but ended up losing the battle. Listeners burned out on the small set of songs the station’s DJs were forced to play over and over again. Managers at BCN made their own adjustments, and by 1983, BCN had beaten COZ back in the ratings. That year, COZ’s management studied the demographics, decided to go after an older audience, and changed the format to adult contemporary. The year after that, they switched the call letters (to WZOU) and programmed the Top 40, trying to compete with Boston’s Kiss-FM station, WXKS. This didn’t work out too well, either—until WZOU switched to the (kid you not) “rhythmic crossover” format, and became WJMN: “Jam'n 94.5” on your radio dial. Rhythmic crossover kicked Kiss-FM’s ass—at which point Kiss-FM’s owners, Pyramid Broadcasting, simply bought up the competing station.
In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Telecom Act into law. Pyramid sold that year to Evergreen Media, which soon merged with Chancellor Broadcasting, then merged with Capstar and became AMFM, which merged with Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia), etc. Wikipedia has a long list of the company’s holdings: 855 radio stations in America, along with a global network of ad agencies, news organizations, and info-mill firms, down to the bike-sharing systems it operates in Spain, France, and Italy, Norway, and Sweden. (Clear Channel’s also the company that yanked any number of songs—everything from “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” to Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”—off the air, in the wake of 9/11.)
“Where previously, the FCC only allowed minimal ownership in any given market,” Palmiter says, “the Telecom Act deregulated the industry. The intention was to create more competition, but from my perspective it did the exact opposite by allowing corporate ownership to gobble up as many stations as possible. If WCOZ died in 1980, the funeral for local radio came in 1996, when the industry became rife with mergers and acquisitions, followed by massive layoffs in favor of nationally syndicated programming. Radio has never been the same.”
