Radio

A legend leaves

by Jon Garelick

It was typical Charles Laquidara fare. The 30-year veteran of Boston's FM rock scene -- indeed, a guy who you could say helped invent Boston's FM rock scene -- had begun the countdown for his August 4 signoff from WZLX-FM, which will mark his departure from Boston and from rock radio. He was in the midst of hyping an upcoming Boston Globe Magazine farewell profile of him when he launched into a mini-tirade about the way "the liberal Boston Globe" is screwing its freelancers in current wrangles over copyright.

Leave it to Laquidara, who's leaving radio to join his family in Maui, to bite the hand that's trying to feed him. "Can you believe that shit?" Laquidara asks me later in a phone interview when I mention the Globe situation. "That's so fucked up!" Laquidara's irreverent, maverick style comes from a time when commercial FM rock radio was considered "underground." When Laquidara began in LA outlet KPPC, FM was almost universally reserved for classical music and "middle-of-the-road elevator shit."

"I remember one time, probably in '69, I was looking at Volvos and the brochure said something like, 'Don't listen to that noisy rock music on AM, we have FM radios in these cars' -- and they were bragging," he says.

Laquidara joined Boston's WBCN in the heady days of free-form radio, when DJs created their own playlists as they went along and when political activism was a standard part of the mix. Laquidara remembers getting a call from a BU student in the wake of the US bombing of Cambodia -- the student union was taking a poll on whether to strike and was monitoring news reports. "So I go on the air and announce, 'Well, we just found out now that every major college and university in America has voted to go on strike except for Boston University -- it's the last one, as you might expect, Boston University, the only school not on strike.' And they voted to strike."

Other examples of Laquidara's on-air activism: a boycott of apartheid-supporting Shell Oil, swipes at camera and arms manufacturers (and 'BCN advertiser) Honeywell, and a strike against new station ownership that had fired a chunk of the staff.

In the late '70s, Laquidara created the alter ego of Duane Ingalls Glasscock, a puerile aspiring DJ who was always threatening to take over the station. ("I swear to God, the majority of the audience didn't know it was me," he says.) Duane was part of an elaborate mix of music and original on-air sketch comedy that eventually became The Big Mattress, a style that's driven the airwaves ever since. But the format Laquidara helped create has devolved: whereas Charles brought personality to the rock-music format, Howard Stern, his heir in 'BCN's morning slot (and everywhere else, it seems), is all personality and no music, and without the social conscience that Laquidara has held onto right to the end. The brilliance in Laquidara's presentation was always in that implied tension between Charles and Duane. These days on FM radio, sadly, it often sounds as though Duane has won.

Charles Laquidara broadcasts his final show this Friday, August 4, from 5:30 to 10 a.m., on WZLX, 100.7 FM.