Free Radio Free Boston by Carter Alan

Charles, who had moved in to replace Peter Wolf, now assumed an earlier time slot, while Uncle T and Jim Parry handled the late shifts. As of April 1969, the weekday lineup had shaken out to 7:00 to 10:00 a.m.: Sam Kopper; 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.: J. J. Jackson; 2:00 to 6:00 p.m.: Mississippi Harold Wilson;6:00 to 10:00 p.m.: Charles Laquidara; 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.: Uncle T; and 2:00 to 5:00 a.m. (until the smattering of taped religious broadcasting began) was handled by cleanup man Jim Parry.
    Al Perry, who still managed to avoid a good night’s sleep by jocking on the weekends and doing overnight fill-ins, was now out on the streets selling ad spots most of the time. Perry, who had become sales manager, recalled that “in the beginning there was me and Jack [Kearney]—couldn’t have done it without him. He was one of the financial cinderblocks of that place, as was Kenny [Greenblatt], who was a real character.” Tim Montgomery, who joined the station two years later and eventually became a sales manager, remembered Greenblatt fondly.
    Kenny’s job was to interface with the record companies, so his job, to tell you the truth, was almost as important as the program director. He lived in the heart of Harvard Square next door to Peter Wolf, and the only thing he did was hang out with [record company] promo people. He was out and about every night, seven nights a week . . . which is, unfortunately, why he’s not with us anymore! He wore moccasins, had long hair, was fond of saying that everything was “far out.” He would twirl his handlebar moustache and say, “Timmy, Timmy, you’ve got to hear this! It’s heavy, it’s far out !”
    The members of the fledgling WBCN sales department, as sleepless or as consciousness altered as they might have been, were kicking butt. Ernie Santosuosso noted that fact in his 1969 Boston Globe article: “The station now has almost $25,000 in ad billings a month, the second-highest for an FM station in this area. WJIB-FM , an ‘easy-listening’ station, is first.” Al Perry and his crew achieved this despite the rule set by Ray Riepen that ’ BCN’S commercial load was not to exceed eight ads an hour. Perry noted, “No one believed we could make it; we were the underdogs, not just from a radio standpoint, but a musical one too. All of FM radio only had a 10 [percent] share [of the Boston audience]; WRKO-AM was the king.” That AM Top 40 giant alone often pulled in twice the ratings of the entire FM band. But even if WRKO possessed massive numbers, WBCN still had the guns. Al Perry elaborated, “Jack Kearney, J. J. Jeffries—who was a jock at ’ RKO , and I, we’d all go out drinking, and J.J. would say, ‘I was getting laid last night [while] listening to ’ BCN !’ No one cool listened to ’ RKO .”
    Apparently, though, there were a lot of cool people listening in to ’ BCN ,many of them college students whom the Arbitron ratings service did not survey because of their transient nature. Charles Laquidara recalled, “You could walk from one end of Boston to the other, from Stuart Street all the way to Cambridge, and you wouldn’t need a radio because every dormitory, every apartment, all the stores, would have ’ BCN blasting out the windows.” If the station featured a brand-new group or a song that hadn’t been released as a single yet, chances were that people were hearing it first on WBCN . Sam Kopper told Boston magazine in 1970 that over a year earlier, he had witnessed clear evidence of the station’s influence with two releases. “The distributor brought us a tape of Traffic’s second album four weeks before the record came out. We were the only station playing Traffic, and when the album was released, it completely sold out locally in a few days. After similar prerelease play of Led Zeppelin’s first album, the local stores