Sam

Copyright 1971, 2010 William J. Spurlin

Copyright 1971, 2010 William J. Spurlin

Charles Laquidara is being fired

Charles had been fired, or was in danger of being fired. Where were Charles, Al Perry and Carla?  Nobody would tell me what was going on.  Had Charles not showed up?  Or had he been there for only part of his show? One of the subs had evidently worked part of his show. Meryl, the bookkeeper, told me that T. Mitch, Arnie Woo-Woo Ginsburg and Ray Riepen were in the office, had been there since she got in, and had not come out except to use the bathroom.  Woo-Woo was grim, she told me.

I asked Kate, the Head of Volunteers.  She could not tell me.  She wanted to know what I knew.  Her great, romantic, hidden, unconfessed Love for Charles, combined with the fear that the object of her love might me taken from her,  had twisted her lovely, supple body into a knot in the corner by Carla’s desk.  Kate was Irish.  She mustered the phalanx of volunteers with efficiency and wit, except when Charles was around, when she retreated as it were into one of those transparent Santa balls, and was without speech.  Only an enormous blush was left behind.

I asked Danny Schechter, the News Dissector.  Danny hammered on the same message every day.  The National Liberation Front was our ally (he never once used the phrase “Viet Cong”).  Imperialism must and will lose the war in Vietnam.  I hope he has not mellowed.  Danny had a lot of stories about Corporate America, about minority and women’s issues; a lot of sources; but today he had nothing.  “I don’t know, man”. he told me in his New York accent.  “Do you know anything about unions, man”?  He was not changing the subject.  I told him that I did not, but wanted to know.

Little Bill darted out of the record library with a couple of albums.  Little Bill was supposedly only 14. He claimed to be in the ninth grade at Newton South High School, and was the only volunteer to have had air time.  Woo-Woo Ginsburg, impressed with Little Bill’s unbelievably frenetic delivery and knowledge of the hits, had put him on the air a couple of times on the weekend overnight shifts when nobody else wanted to work.  Bill was called “little” because he was about five feet six. I was the other Bill at six feet two.  He didn’t know anything either, although it was hard to tell what he knew, if anything, because of his supercharged state.

Max was not in yet, so I couldn’t ask her.  Sam Kopper was just coming in the door, and I turned to ask him, but just then Arnie, Mitch and Ray Riepen emerged from the office and brushed past me on the way out the door.  Sam and I stepped aside. Arnie Ginsburg’s head was down, a cigarette in his mouth, his complexion a light brownish green. The three executives went into the elevator.

Sam had nothing, either.  He was a short timer anyway, having accepted a gig on the West Coast.  His farewell party was to be in Littleton the next weekend, and he was mellow, with not much invested in the politics of WBCN at this point.  He perched on Carla’s desk, fiddling with some rolling papers and the contents of a baggy.  “Don’t get too excited,” he said.  “It’ll all work itself out.”  And he gave me that unforgettable grin.

I went into the studio. Charles’s license was still there. with the crossed-out, substituted “3″ in “1938″.  Jim Parry was in the middle of a set and gave me a dirty look, so I went through the back door into my small domain with the limiter, compressor, wires and a bucket full of screws.  Nothing doing back there. I was nervous, on edge about Charles.  If Arnie Woo-Woo Ginsburg could fire Charles he could do anything.  He could destroy WBCN.  I’d be working for a top 40 station.  I might as well be dead.

I didn’t feel like fixing anything (although I knew that a potentiometer in the Sparta board needed replacement) so I went into the production studio instead, cued up an old 50’s hit “I Couldn’t Sleep at All” by Joey Ramone, and recorded a spot.  I had to make a couple of splices, but it turned out pretty well, a spot for Slak Shax, one of WBCN’s larger advertisers.  Personally, I had never worn a pair of slacks, or at least would not admit to having done so.  But our advertisers at WBCN were often incongruous.  It didn’t seem to matter much.  We could sell anything.  We had the listeners, the ratings, T. Mitch was selling some time for the first time in his life. Charles was our biggest star and all the advertisers wanted their spots on his show.  Woo-Woo had tolerated Charles up to this point, but evidently things had been driven to a breaking point and Woo-Woo was prepared to sacrifice Charles, and ruin my life.    I was just as infatuated as Kate, although less tongue-tied when it counted, and not as repressed.  I wanted secretly to be a DJ, but it was no secret to Woo-Woo, who had seen it all before, and he let me record the occasional spot.

State of the art at the WBCN Transmitter

Copyright 1971, 2010 William J. Spurlin

The transmitter room atop the John Hancock Building; spring, 1971.  Scanned from the Panatomic-X 35mm negative.  I wished I had used a higher speed film.  Camera motion blurs the details of the equipment, including the tube-type exciter in the left equipment rack.

Zapped

I reached inside the Western electric to adjust the coil I had placed in the final stage to replace the silver plated transmission line resonator that had been there.  The next thing I knew I was lying among some empty nitrogen cylinders in the corner about six feet away, a metallic taste in my mouth.  My head hurt.  Apparently the convulsion of the electric shock had thrown me against the cylinders in such a way that my head struck first.

The Western Electric was still on the air.  Its final stage tube glowed almost as brightly as an incandescent bulb.  It was hissing. The phone, a dial unit mounted on the side of an equipment rack, was ringing.  I got up and answered.  “This is … at WBZ”, the voice said loudly. “What the Hell are you doing over there?  You’re all over the band!”

I shut the Western Electric down quickly and switched back to the Visual.  How long had WBCN been off the air?  Or were we off the air?  I only knew that I had nearly pulled a Mitch Hastings.  134 people had died in that one.  Mitch’s little radio had emitted spurious radiation right next to the FM broadcast band, spilling over just enough into the frequencies reserved for aerial navigation.  My experiments were at a power level 100,000 times higher, all over the band, three miles from Logan Airport.  But I did not cause the disaster of July 31, 1973.  I could not have.  It was more than two years later.  Thank God for the reassurance provided by Wikipedia.  Give Wikipedia money.  I do.  And remember the courage of Leopold Chouinard.

I headed back to the studio.  My friend Maxanne Sartori was there, broadcasting serenely amidst her incense and herbs. I needed to talk to her. Had she noticed what had happened?  I would have to apologize. As I hurried down the sidewalk to 312 Stuart Street I looked over my shoulder more than once at the black steel skeleton of the new John Hancock Tower.  Its steel bones were rising.  We didn’t have much time.  Soon our signal would be shadowed to the West.

In the dingy lobby of 312 Stuart Strreet I debated taking the stairs rather than the elevator.  Somebody might be smoking pot in the stairwell (Woo-Woo enforced a ban on pot when he was around) and I could grab a quick toke; calm myself.  But the elevator came so I just took it to the third floor. Woo-Woo was sitting on the corner of Carla’s desk in the reception area as I entered the studio.  It was obvious that he knew something was up; just not exactly what.  “Have you been reading the meters?” he asked me, looking at me closely.  I was supposed to read the transmitter meters five days a week.  This was the main part of my job.  My predecessor had been fired for not reading the meters.  “Yes,” I lied.  “I’ve been reading the meters”.

WBCN On the Way to Work

Taking the T to Work Copyright (c) 1971, 2009 William J. Spurlin

WBCN interference

The transmitter room on the 29th floor of the John Hancock Building was littered with empty nitrogen tanks, old racks containing dead tube equipment from another age, sections of burned out three inch transmission line and haywire circuitry representing the failed experiments of my unknown and unsung predecessors.  Fluorescents lighting the whole sorry collection flickered aimlessly.

WBCN’s transmitting equipment amounted to a collection of junk.  Woo-Woo had ordered a new transmitter to be installed atop the Prudential Tower, and it was my job to nurse along the old machines until the new equipment arrived and we could make the move.  We had a 25 kilowatt Visual main transmitter and an ancient 10 kW Western Electric as backup.

This was high powered broadcast equipment operating at several thousand volts and around ten amperes; badly maintained and extremely dangerous.  When I think how lucky I am to be alive I tend to remember surviving various alcohol and drug induced disasters rather than the intimate contact I maintained with these creaking, arcing, dying high voltage behemoths.

Woo-Woo showed me the clip leads bypassing the safety circuits of the Visual and told me to take them off.  You were not supposed to be able to tinker with the insides while it was running.  I removed the clip leads, but soon put them back after I realized there was no way to really tune the Visual without reaching inside the car-sized cabinet with a stick to bend things around.

The Visual was prone to “chicken-scratching”, a reference to the plot of its output power on the studio chart recorder.  There was supposed to be a steady line traced on the paper chart as it ticked slowly along.  Instead, a dense collection of dots appeared in a band, as if chickens were feeding on the chart, showing that the automatic power correction circuits of the Visual were seeking and hunting constantly, never able to stabilize the power.

When the Visual failed, after chicken-scratching for a few hours, perhaps once a week, it was possible by remote control from the studio to activate the Western Electric.  I say “possible”, because only about one attempt in four was successful. Mostly there was just dead air. Ask radio station management how much they like dead air.  To cope with the frequent outages Woo-Woo had gotten me an early beeper, a squarish object about the size of a large dildo.  I enjoyed showing it off in the bars.

The Western Electric had been built around 1950. Replacement tubes for it had not been available for years.  Probably it had never worked very well.  It had a glass door through which, when I was able to coax it into running, blue filamentary sparks were visible running up and down mysterious plumbing in the final amplifier stage .  These sparks were also audible on the air as a kind of grating noise in the background of Max’s show, which was when I usually played with the W. E.

One day I decided I was going to fix the Western Electric.  But first I had better explain the mental state that led to that decision. The night before I had been to a record party put on by some record-turkeys at the Orson Welles.  I forget which label.  Kenny Greenblatt and Max had encouraged me to go, as if I needed any encouragement.

I took the T to Central Square and walked to the Orson Welles. It was a March night and I still didn’t have a winter coat. I got there early because I was hungry and the spread did not disappoint, consisting of tables laden with choice meats and fish, tastefully and freshly prepared, with hors d’oeuvres, fruits, vegetables and salads to match.  There was also, of course, an open bar.  A band was setting up, and the record-turkeys circulated among the employees of WBCN.  A friendly record-turkey woman approached me.  She stood very close.  She was probably about 22, with brown hair falling in ringlets over her bare shoulders.  I noticed that although it was winter she was wearing a dress that would have been appropriate for cocktails on the veranda at Maui.  (I had not been to the Hawaiian Islands at that time, but I had been to the Yacht Club at Acapulco – close enough).  I am quite tall, and thus usually have to look down, (in a literal sense, Jamaica Plain Jane!) when a woman stands that close to me, and so I was able to notice, by peering through the top of her dress, the record-turkey’s lack of undergarments.  I delayed as long as possible telling her I was not a D. J. She went to the bar and came back with a drink for herself and another one for me.  Although there were plenty of joints, in little bowls on each table, enough for everybody, we passed them from person to person, mouth to mouth, as was the fashion, rather than smoking them individually like cigarettes.  Then I blacked out.

It must have been about four hours later. The Orson Welles was dim.  The party was ending.  I was in love.  I cannot remember her name.  Her boy friend, Steve N., stood across the room, watching us, muscles flexing under the Superman shirt that he habitually wore. He believed that this costume would aid him in his perpetual campaign to become Mayor of Cambridge. Her hair was auburn, profuse, accenting her robust yet slender mammalian physique.  “Will you go home with me.” I asked, forgetting that I had no car.  “I would like to,” she said, “but Steve would not like it”.  I was crushed.

So I went out on Mass. Ave., alone.  It was two in the morning and the T had stopped running.  The temperature was about 15 degrees F.  I pulled up my denim jacket around my neck and headed for home through the back streets of Cambridge.  It was fucking freezing and I didn’t know where I was and I was drunk.

Somewhere around Hancock or Lee Street I noticed a brownish ‘62 Chevy parked under a street light in front of a 3-decker.  Something clicked inside me … could it be?  My hand was on the driver’s side door…locked…around to the passenger side…open!  Quickly inside sliding across the cold vinyl bench front seat, I grasped the empty ignition switch and it turned!  One of GM’s biggest blunders of the era, only eclipsed by the deadly front suspension of the 1959-62 Corvair, was the ability to remove the key from a Chevrolet while the switch was still in the On position. I turned it a notch further and the engine turned over and started.  Slowly, now, no reason to attract attention..no lights until I get around the corner..this thing feels like a six-cylinder…good! It’ll warm up faster.  What is that stuff in the back seat? Ahhh, here comes the heat.  Turn it up, turn the fan up a notch.  Where the Hell am I?  Ancient twisted streets of Cambridge and Somerville, a labyrinth…

Hangover. Sunshine came through the dirty window onto the day bed. 7:30. I would never have gotten up this early had it not been for the headache.  I remembered way too much of the night before – the Superman shirt, the Chevy.  Creeping toward the kitchenette, hoping for coffee, I noticed something I had never seen before, or didn’t remember seeing:  A brown, soft plastic box about twice the size of a shoe box.  I picked it up – heavy.  I put it down and opened the clasp.  It folded open into two displays containing row after row of little brass cylinders and small disc-like cases.  I extracted one of the cylinders and pulled off the cap, revealing a tiny purplish lipstick.  The small cases contained make-up: Avon make-up samples.  I had stolen the Avon Lady’s car.

I called the Cambridge Police to report a stolen car.  “Where was it stolen from”?  “I don’t know.  Near the Orson Welles”.  “Whaddya mean you don’t know?  You don’t know where your own car was”?  “No, no, you don’t get it – it’s not my car – I’m telling you where a stolen car is. It’s in Somerville …”.  “Call the Somerville Police”.  I called the Somerville Police, who told me to call the Cambridge Police.  I gave up and decided to go to work.

Al and Carla

Copyright 1971, 2009 William J. Spurlin

Copyright 1971, 2009 William J. Spurlin

WBCN Beautiful

Saturday night, April 3.   Elton John was playing at the Orpheum theater.  I was backstage listening, entranced.  We were broadcasting the concert live on WBCN.  Al Perry, the Program Manager, had set it up. Elton John’s band had not showed up, and, as he briefly explained, neither had his luggage, but the Steinway grand on stage was in tune, and that was all he needed.  He sat down at the piano, on time, and began his performance in a soft, powerful voice.  I scarcely felt any emotions at that time.  I did not want what feelings resulting from pain, loss and disillusionment I occasionally had. I smoked pot, after all.  But Elton John , playing entirely his own material, was able to project, even to me, and, as I hope and believe, to all youth up and down the North and South Shores and to the West for many miles, both sadness and hope.

Al  had told me more than a week earlier to order the 15 kc stereo pair from the Orpheum to the studio, but I had of course forgotten to do it until the last minute. I was smoking joints, you see.  The day before when Al asked me if the lines were ready I hastily called the Radio Board and was able to convince the technicians there to put the circuits in.

A 15 kHz – I MEAN kc – stereo pair was a beautiful thing, as long as the phase shift could be minimized between the two pairs at the higher frequencies: very low noise, no artifacts.  Good analog will always be better than good digital, all other factors being equal, as Steve Colby demonstrated to me long ago.  The compact disk brought uniform, very good audio to the masses, and displaced the vinyl record for economic reasons, not because of any inherent superiority in fidelity.  Vinyl played on the best equipment has no quantization noise, has less overshoot and degrades before clipping more gracefully than a CD, particularly an early, 16-bit CD.  Even better is 1/4 inch tape recorded at 15 inches per second.  But play your tapes now, dear readers, because they are not immortal like digital.  Mp3’s, avi’s, even these posts all have the potential to be duplicated endlessly, error-free, forever.  But your tapes are deteriorating.  The oxide is separating from the Mylar.  Print-through is steadily increasing.  Even if you can find a functioning 1/4 inch machine, when you mount the tape you may find that it crumbles before it can be heard or digitized.  Bake it in an oven at 180 degrees F for 12 hours.  That will cause the oxide to temporarily re-bond with the backing so that you may be able to play it once – just once, maybe.

Besides being Program Directory Al was a disk jockey, but his real love was the live broadcasts he was continually setting up.  He had a good relationship with the owners of Newbury Studios, and we were able to broadcast Canned heat from there when that very loud and up tempo band was recording a session.  I was first exposed to then-state-of-the-art recording technology at Newbury Studios – 16 track Ampex recorders, a Neve console, real soundproofing, a large sudio, decent microphones, etc.

Al would sometimes bring live talent to WBCN for a broadcast.  We didn’t have enough room for a band in either of the announcing studios so we had to set up in the front office where the beautiful and efficient Carla Epple worked scheduling the announcers and performing every other kind of support function.  We would push the desks out of the way and cram in a band.  A recording exists of a Youngbloods session from March, 1971.  It is not of particularly high quality, reinforcing my memory of the occasion.  Hound Dog Taylor and his band somehow squeezed himself in.  Hound Dog did not want to stop playing.  Max pleaded with him during commercials to stop, but he would not, and played on and on from the afternoon into the night.  Woo-Woo was not pleased.

I stll regret an an incident that occurred after Gary Burton came into the studio one early summer night to broadcast, solo.  I set up the best microphone we had and he payed eerily for about half an hour, talked to Charles quietly for a few minutes, and left.  The next day I grabbed Al – “Come into the production studio, Al, I want you to listen to something”.  Al was busy and annoyed, but came in to listen.  I was proud of the Burton recording  I had made the night before and wanted to share it with Al.  I hope it still exists somewhere.  Unfortunately Al’s reaction was”What’s the matter?  Are you trying to show me we need a new microphone”?  It was tough being Program Manager under Woo-Woo, who would not spend a dime.

Now it was summer and I felt a little better than I had when I first started working for WBCN.  I was eating better and had gained a pound.  One Friday I asked Carla where to go to the beach, and she told me where, but I will not tell you where exactly, dear readers, because the place is as unspoiled today as it was in 1971, and I do not wish to share it with a crowd.  She laid out accurate directions, giving the location of some radio towers (clue: a 4-tower directional array) as a landmark, and suggested that I might see her and Al there.

Svetlana Alliluyeva wrote “Do you think it odd that I talk all the time about everybody’s being beautiful or handsome?  It was a different age — people really were good-looking then”.  I’ve already shared my impressions of Max’s beauty and I was also quite good looking in those days, in an emaciated way.  Debbie was beautiful; Tommy, Andy, Charles and John were quite handsome, and you will be able, discerning reader, to see for yourself when I post two photographs of Al and Carla from a summer day in 1971, how well they looked.  We did go to the beach that Saturday, as cloudless a day as that corner of New England can be, where the tide retreats quickly leaving behind pools teeming with life, the simple forms of kelp, tiny fishes and hermit crabs.  Late in the afternoon when the sun had warmed the pristine waters we swam, close to the shore. Further out it was still too cold.  Finally we retreated up the bluff into the shadows, Al and Carla to get into their car and I into mine, to drive back to Boston.

1968, 1969, 1970 and 1971 in my country were violent years of protests, assassinations and bombings. Most of the beauty we had, created and experienced in those days has been destroyed, some at the time, some later, probably forever, perhaps not.  On October 14, 1970 there was a bombing in the library of the Henry Kissinger – created Center for International Relations in a building at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge. (later, in 1972, when my drinking and incessant pot smoking landed me in a mental hospital, my room mate suffered from a paranoid delusion that the FBI was spying on him for having perpetrated this very bombing).  When the damage was being assessed the next day (no one was injured; the bombers, allegedly among them Bill Ayres, had set the bomb to go off at midnight) the managers of the Center discovered, behind a bomb-shattered partition, a large trove of tens of thousands of priceless nineteenth century photographic prints and glass negatives that had been accidentally walled off, lost and forgotten for about seventy years.

In my later career, when I was working at Harvard as an electronics engineer, I was asked to consult on the Millman F. Parry collection of approximately ten thousand aluminum 78 RPM discs recorded by Dr. Parry in Yugoslavia in the 1930’s, folk songs that Dr. Parry analyzed and used to prove his theory of the folk origin of, among other things, the Homeric poems.  I set the Collection up with the necessary equipment to transcribe the discs to digital format, but aluminum corrodes,  unfortunately, faster than the transcriptions can take place.

Maxanne Sartori, WBCN, 1971 Copyright (c) 1971, 2009 William J. Spurlin

WBCN – Charles Laquidara

The night man, Charles, had his Third Class Radiotelephone License in the air studio on the wall next to the others.  It was a blue paper rectangle about half the size of my first class ticket, posted nearby.  Somebody had altered the birth year on Charles’s ticket from 1938 to 1948, in ball point pen.  When I asked Max why Charles didn’t get a new copy from the FCC with the “right” date, 1948, she only rolled her eyes.

Arnie Woo-Woo Ginsburg did not like Charles Laquidara.  To anyone who would listen Woo-Woo would repeat “A twenty minute drum solo! A twenty minute drum solo!”.  And I guess Charles did play a long drum solo, probably while he was talking on the phone.

Charles played a lot of peculiar stuff.  Woo-Woo, always threatening overtly or otherwise to fire Charles, shifted him from the evenings to the afternoon, back and forth several times, trying to find the slot where he would do the least harm. Woo-Woo wanted to sell time and follow through on his commitments to WBCN’s advertisers, and Charles’s experiments not only tended to alienate potential Slack Shack customers, his insensitivity to commercials resulted in their being delayed or not played at all.

There was a lot of classical music around, in the record library and on 1/4″ tape, and one day, for some reason, I mounted a ten inch reel, containing some Rachmaninoff, that had not been rewound.  Rachmaninoff played backwards is not very interesting, but when I began to rewind it I discovered that by depressing the tape lifter I was able to play it in the right direction, and wildly vary its speed by dragging my thumb up against one of the reels.  This sounded pretty good – like motion sickness for symphony orchestra, and it got Charles’s attention.  He put it on the air for about ten minutes.  We got a lot of calls (this was mystifying for 1971 – the techies out there couldn’t figure out how we were doing it), but when Woo-Woo found out there was more trouble, and Charles was shifted back to the night.

I didn’t blame Charles for not letting me into the studio to watch him cue up records, operate the “board” or control console, and talk on mike, even if the other announcers did let me in, because I was somewhat in awe of his talent, or at least his bravura.  I recognized that DJ’ing required a lot of concentration and that I would distract him.  On the other hand, others were let in, especially  20 year old DJ’s from the local college stations, whom Charles needed in the same way that Alcoholics Anonymous needs new alcoholics.

I enjoyed Charles on any shift.  I listened to him at nights from home.  By this time I had moved in with the News Dissector, and Danny had a real stereo, transistorized – it even had a stereo indicator light.  One night about 10 as I listened to Charles’s rather hypnotic delivery between sets there was a sudden change in tone.  First a clunking noise, and then in Charles’s normal or non-radio-persona voice:  “Oh my God. I just knocked a cup of coffee over right on the board”.  Then a muted hum.  Then a very loud hum.  Then silence.  There was probably five minutes of silence or “dead air” before Charles, with my help over the telephone, was able to get back on the air from the production studio.

In 1971 all across America small station radio managers with blond bowl haircuts and dark glasses, sport jacketed and tassel-shoed, had parked their Cadillacs outside the Rotary Club and were slapping backs inside, trying to sell radio spots:  “Whatt’y say – any time you want, buddy, eleven bucks a holler”.  Dead air was anathema.  What was a listener supposed to do who turned the dial to a station and heard nothing?  Nothing at all, not even static?

Through this incident I discovered the potency of coffee with cream and six sugars to destroy electronic equipment.  The only more powerful method is to use Coca-Cola.  Try it sometime. If you need to disable your boy friend’s cell phone, dip it in Classic Coke (the kind with the corn syrup) for about 15 seconds.  A quick rinse with tap water and dry with a paper towel, and he will not be the wiser.

Somewhere out there Charles’s broadcasts still exist.  And I don’t necessarily mean in John Voci’s collection of five inch reels or other moldering air checks scattered around.  These signals were radiated, and 100 MHz radio signals are not attenuated appreciably by the atmosphere, so they are still expanding outward, as I write, 38 light years away, and have already passed several nearby stars.  And even if the beings on those stars were not tuned to 104.1 it possible that we still have a chance to hear WBCN live, assuming a reflector out there in interstellar space of sufficient dimensions and appropriate geometry, perhaps an unusually intense burst of solar wind from millenia ago, a spherical pulse of expanding, reflective ionization, just the right size and shape to reflect WBCN back at us.  Let us go to the far side of the moon with large antennae and listen to 104.1.

In my collection I have a cassette tape that I recorded when I was living in Cambridge in the 70’s, off-air from WQXR AM 1540 in New York, sky wave, at night, of Hindemith’s Mathis der Mahler. I don’t want to put down Hindemith or the Mathis, which I love, but I have to say that it is vastly improved by the fading, distortion, and random, swelling unpredictable noise.  Listen to your radios at night, when you are driving down the road, lonely and bored.  Use your steering-wheel mounted frequency selector carefully, to select one AM channel at a time. Listened to what is buried there. You will be suprised, comforted and delighted.