Read Online Radio Free Boston by Carter Alan - Free Book Online Page B

at one point, was fired because he was too ‘rocky.’ That lasted a couple of days and then he was back,” he laughed. “We all pretty much winged it.” Tom Gamache (known as “Uncle T”), who eventually got on the air at ’ BCN in March 1969, thrived on the spontaneity: “I decide what I’m going to play about two minutes before I put it on the turntable,” he told the Boston Globe that same month. A lot of Gamache’s choices were “the most bizarre,” according to Laquidara. “He blew our minds with Frank Zappa and the Mothers; he turned us all onto ‘Witchi Tai To’; he was the guy that played Captain Beefheart, John Coltrane, and Roland Kirk. If every station has that guy that pulls the most brilliant songs out of his ass, he was that guy.” J.J. Jackson told Record World magazine in 1978, “The jock was allowed to show his personality on the air, and lay out the show the way they wanted. You could play everything from Stockhausen to Alvin Lee; the only record you knew you were going to play was the first one.”
    â€œIt was a very mellow presentation,” Sam Kopper described. “A lot of times we were stoned on the air and we came across very gently, very conversationally; that’s one hallmark of that time. The other thing I really give due credit to Steven [Segal] and then Charles, was the madness that lasted at ’ BCN into the early nineties. That was laid down at the very beginning.” Segal found the on-air lunacy to be quite normal because “there was so much bizarre stuff happening in real life! For me, I’d just kind of start theengine and see what came up. It was almost always spontaneous; I never knew what I was going to say on the next break.” As good as he was, “the Seagull” was still inspired by the DJ who became one of his best friends, Joe Rogers (as Mississippi Harold Wilson on the air). “Joe did things with nuance, things that came in from completely out in left field. He was a soft-spoken guy who didn’t have a mean bone in his body.” He laughed as he recalled an example:
    Mississippi had Ian Anderson on; [Jethro Tull] was at the Tea Party and he had to come to ’ BCN for an interview. Ian was a totally unlikable person, an unbelievably arrogant human being, and he was really nasty to Joe. I heard them going on for a few minutes and I remember coming in after Ian had finished being sarcastic and smarmy, and over Joe’s shoulder I said something into the mike like, “Are you this nasty to all of the disc jockeys who play your music so people will know what you’re doing? Could you ever come in and just answer a question straight without any attitude or acting superior?” For a moment I think he had the starch taken out of him! To this day I know Joe would say that’s the way a lot of musicians were, and it’s true, but it didn’t make it a good thing to do. That was my favorite: basically calling Ian Anderson an asshole.
    He added with a snicker, “Did I get that one right or what!”
    Early in 1969, the fledgling WBCN air staff lost two of its own. A founding rock and roll father in “The American Revolution,” Tommy Hadges, became an absentee jock, only showing occasionally for fill-in shifts, now that he had decided to concentrate on his studies at Tufts Dental School. “Yeah, going back to Dental School, that was a great idea,” Steve Segal kidded glibly. “I said to him, ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this!’” But shortly after Hadges’s exit, the West Coast guru himself defected, heading back to Los Angeles to be a pioneer on the new underground outlet KMET-FM . That promising experience would prove to be so unsatisfying and “corporate,” according to the jock, that he left after only a few months and ended up back on KPPC in Pasadena. With Segal’s sudden absence,