All Good Things Must Pass

There's one that occurred this week that touched me and a lot of my Beantown homies a hell of a lot more than we thought it would. My old alma mater, The Rock Of Boston, a.k.a WBCN, went off the air after 41 years of revolutionizing rock radio. For many a Boston music lover, Tuesday marked the day the music died.

Feel free to file your nails while I wax nostalgic: 'BCN came on the air just two weeks before I was born and nurtured my passion for music since I could snap on a radio.  Those jocks read the liner notes. They knew who produced what, who sang back up on what and who was doing who, all the while paying proper reverence to album-making as the true art form it once was. 

I worked there for three of my formative years. To say I was depressed when domestic events forced me to preternaturally drop out of Parsons to toil over receipts in a suburban office park is a vast understatement. But while driving home from my rung in purgatory one day, I heard an ad scouting for interns for my favorite radio station, I answered it, and my life changed forever.

During my tenure, I learned the ins and outs of radio --  how to produce a show, how to program an airshift, how to find something redeeming in a song I might loathe and how to wax poetic about it with gusto --  from the very best in radio. Peter Wolf was a DJ there before forming J. Geils. Its Pied Piper, program director Oedipus. Charles Laquidara and The Big Mattress. Mentors and buds like Ken Shelton, Carter Alan, Steve Strick, Bradley Jay and Tami Heide. Marc Parenteau. Albert O. Bill Abbate. Those renegades were MAD in the way I aspire to be.  And thanks to them, you have bands like U2. The Clash. The Sugarcubes. You have comedians like Lenny Clarke and Denis Leary.

Back then, there were no degrees that qualified you to work in radio. You kept your head down and your eyes peeled. The shit that went down within the confines of those walls could fuel a dozen pithy cable comidramas. Among the rich, complex conflama, I realized I liked to flex my big mouth, and not necessarily in the Lubriderm and skin-like-vinyl kind of way. 

I'd finally found a place where I was encouraged to run amok. I'm sure many of my Facebook buddies from the intern stable share the same fond memories of us rolling off the conference table choking on laughter and tears, interacting with the very artists we'd once worshipped from afar and inhaling spliffs as big as my head in the garage.

Eventually, I moved to LA and moved on. And years later, the station fell victim to corporate takeover, as many great things do -- as many of us do when we have to pay the mortgage.  I think my Masshole contemporaries are feeling the void because it's a gong that marks the inevitable death knell of radio. 'BCN, you've been running on fumes for a few years now, but your call letters raised a generation of kindred spirits who could give a flying fuck about the status quo. 

Today, riffs on the zeitgeist are largely devoid of human voice, confined to the silently anonymous clickety-click of the blogosphere. Depending on why you do it, it can be a pure form of communication devoid of big-brother stipulations and regulations. Seriously - who gonna check me, Boo?