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[SPEAKER_01]: Hello, and welcome to Learning Defline, a podcast about what it takes to win.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The path to success is never a straight line, and there's always a story behind it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Each episode will host leaders in business, music, sports and entertainment, and will discuss the obstacles they overcame to compete, triumph, and eventually dominate.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm your host, Bruce Midman, CEO of Midcom, a full-service ad agency in Boston, and also co-founder of Community Broadcasters, a network of 36 radio stations along these coasts.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Over the last 40-plus years, I've traveled to more than 40 countries, and I've seen firsthand what drives the best of the best.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So join me on a journey as we learn together what it takes to fly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Today, I'm excited to welcome David Bieber, a Boston music, and media veteran and friend.
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[SPEAKER_01]: David has worked at some of the city's most iconic radio stations and contributed to publications like the Rolling Stones Illustrated History Rock and Roll, the Boston Globe and the Smithsonian.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Over 50-plus years, David has built an archive of more than one million artifacts, preserving pieces of pop culture, music, and media, for vintage vinyl and movie member billionaire to original Andy Warhol Art.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He earned his master's degree in journalism for Boston University.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and got to start the college reporting for Billboard magazine in everyone's legends like Ray Charles, Louis Armstrong, and Johnny Carson.
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[SPEAKER_01]: His story career includes roles at WBCN, the Boston Phoenix, WFNX, and WBUR.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Today David continues his impressive work at his company, David Bieber Archives, collecting and preserving culture guided by the belief that today's transitory creations are treasures of the future.
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[SPEAKER_01]: David, welcome, nice to have you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Good seeing you the other night at my son's little event and thank you for joining us and making your presence known.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's a pleasure to be with you Bruce, we have a long and rich history and a very delightful future ahead of us as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, let's hope so.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, it was great seeing you and I'm really excited to kind of get into this today.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you have a unique experience in the pop culture world as well as the media world and music world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I've been in and out of that a couple of times with you in life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so we can cheer a little bit of
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[SPEAKER_01]: But where did it all begin?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Where did the David Bieber story start?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Begin in Cleveland, Ohio.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know you were from Cleveland.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I am.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it's best to say that you're from Cleveland, rather than still being stuck there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know, Cleveland is a good city.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It really is.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think that people, you know, have a kind of image from 60s and 70s.
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[SPEAKER_00]: little disparaging, you know, the mayor said his hair on fire, doing a ceremonial event.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I would expect that to be in Providence, you know, but, well, especially with the mayor of Seattle, that mayor is wearing a toothpaste, but, you know, not only into the mayor's hair, you catch on fire, but Lake Erie apparently caught on fire as well.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No, it was a Kyoga River.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you quote from Chrissy Heinz, Pretender's lyrics,
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[SPEAKER_00]: So, it was a good place to be from, a good place, I came to ask you to go up there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I grew up there, and when did you come to college and Boston, who's up there?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I came to, well actually, my undergraduate days were spent initially at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was a business major, I began there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And while I was there, in my sophomore year, when you had the opportunity to do electives, I took a couple of classes in the journalism department.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I discovered that I really, really enjoyed that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was also at age 18.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When I went to the Miami University Library, I was reading Billboard Magazine, which was back then the cost prohibited subscription annual price was $15 a year.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Right, I think this pandemic was a library.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's absolutely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I saw about a two paragraph article in the magazine that said we're starting up a billboard campus correspondence department and send us a reason why you might want to be a campus correspondence and I
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[SPEAKER_00]: wrote and got the gig and I think I was paid for every interview or feature that I wrote $10 and $5 albums So now you go to Ford's a subscription.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well actually that was a compliment your subscription was Oh, they did so there's there's another 15 bucks exactly and I saved every issue of course So that was your entry point.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That one through billboard really and I and tell us something about that experience
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, it was just incredible to be a teenager getting a buy line in a national publication.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that was a turning point that convinced me that unfortunately, I love being at Miami University, but they had only select journalism courses in the English Department.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You couldn't get a degree.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And this was during the Vietnam War that was... What you were supposed to...
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[SPEAKER_00]: This was 64, 65.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I realized that I had to make a seamless transition to go from Miami and I transferred to Kent State, which was in Northern Ohio about 35 miles south of Italy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We knew at Kent State during the shooting of the students.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I graduated in your afternoon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And a year before that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so it was 72.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was the 70s.
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[SPEAKER_00]: 70s.
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[SPEAKER_00]: May 4th, 1970.
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[SPEAKER_00]: OK, oh, thank you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We don't know our facts and figures, but that's all.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Soldiers and victims come out of it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And there's nothing more impactful and seeing nearly young actually do that live.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I saw them with the Wang Bach Center theater maybe five, six years ago.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I saw a new young at in New York in 1969 with a new young in crazy words.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Just incredible.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Very stoned evening.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You've got stoned just being there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I've had those experiences by Marley in the way.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's a pause mall.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Nice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A pause mall was great.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was like 1973.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was in the early reggae days.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, music was very cool and it still has this very cool.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, so basically because of the war, I had just a couple of months to make that transition to go from Miami to Kent and they did have a total of journalism department where I
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[SPEAKER_00]: was glad to be there and kind of my journalism and writing career flourish there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote a number of pieces for the Kent Stateer, which was the daily newspaper.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was covering things like I did a five-part series on drugs on campus.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I did another extended series on Seth Duncampus.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And these were picked up by the Akwin Beacon Journal.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you were a journalist.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, even as a student, I was an active journalist.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I won a National Herst Writing Achievement Award.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was published in a book called Story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it was just very heartening to not just go through the paces of the courses, but to see an externalization of the things that I was writing in the
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[SPEAKER_00]: just being able to directly connect with all the performers who came to campus and kind of be an eyewitness to the transition of, you know, initially the student boards that book talent would bring people that or, you know, stand gets in the jazz category.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But moving over into more rock category, I can remember interviewing everyone from the temptations to the Johnson bastion and 11 spoonful, Frankie Valley in the four seasons.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Chad and Jeremy, the list goes on.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We could just do the laundry.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Then they were probably excited to get interviewed because there wasn't the internet.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You were the internet.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You had a lot of power.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The pen was
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[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly and there wasn't even a Rolling Stone magazine at that point so that you know getting some national press in the so-called Bible of the music business billboard It was a big deal.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it really was and like I say just you know being able to show my parents a by-line in a magazine They're figuring their investment to get off exactly you're you're there down that was the 70s Yeah, what was your next move
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[SPEAKER_00]: I came to Boston because once again, the war was still ongoing and as having a student deferment was the best way to have your life, yes I remember that period.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So what was your number?
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[SPEAKER_01]: What was your lottery now?
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[SPEAKER_00]: The funny thing was that for some reason, this was something that people today can't appreciate.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But
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[SPEAKER_00]: you know there was a draft going on and then to make everything equal it was determined that you were no longer going to be vulnerable based on whether you were married or not or had a student deferment it was everybody's birthday was you know 366 numbers were placed into a ball and randomly pick
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[SPEAKER_00]: and it was a national television and radio event.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody was glued.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I remember it well.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And for some reason, I was at home in Cleveland with my parents.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was sitting in the kitchen.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think we had a phone call on something that happened.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I missed the first 10 numbers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then you're on edge on a continuous basis as to where's my number called in the first 10.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It turned out that I was in the high hundreds, and, well, you know, interesting similar story for myself, I was waiting in with friends, of course, and I knew my number would be ugly because that's just the kind of luck I have.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Sure enough, it was 99.
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[SPEAKER_01]: For me, which was interesting, is that they got up to 98.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I got up my physical notice.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and I split the U.S. for a year and traveled to Europe, Africa, and Asia, overland.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was frankly a positive experience because it allowed me at the age of 21, 22 to see the world travel on my own around the world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And because I wasn't going to Vietnam, I mean, Vietnam is unlike the wars today, or any other, it was just ludicrous, so we're killing Vietnamese for no reason.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But how did you experience knowing your,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what's his man?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So here's here's the this is the definition of Bruce Okay, they're up to 98.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I get a note in grease.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'd been gone for eight months my mother I'd back then when you traveled you could leave Mail at American Express offices.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, so I would check in every city.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I was in to see what was if my parents were sending me notes
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[SPEAKER_01]: And my mom said, oh, they stopped at 98.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You can come home.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Which you talk about.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Living on the razor's head.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Which is the story of my life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It hasn't changed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, I remember the period.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, so you're now in Boston.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Boston was kind of a fun environment in the 70s.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Having been here.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I was at Northeastern.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was a Boston University, I was going for my master's degree, and you guys were, well, were you, you guys were beating us up in being part and we couldn't win a game if you beg for it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But what was your, I was, I was a marketing major, but I went, I had my co-op job was at Arnold's company, so I got into advertising in the 60s, believe it or not, and 69 to 72.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I was at Arnold and ended up coming back.
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[SPEAKER_01]: back in the 70s to 80s as a senior VP of the company for 10 years, so it was a great way to get into the business, but we're here for you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, thank you for interviewing me though.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I'm one hand washing down.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now we're in the 70s and what are we doing?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I got my other, you're getting your graduate.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I got my master's degree in Journal and Journal and Boston University.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then I thought that Boston is too small city with too many talented people and I'm probably going to have to leave, you know, and I literally came to Boston with one suitcase.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know anything about Boston.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I just knew that the segue from undergraduate to graduate was was vital for my own life preservation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And getting the degree was quite wonderful.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I did a Massachusetts that was about 160 pages on the underground media in the country.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And how, well, that was your focus for the next 40 years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a prelude to this pretty much, who is my life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But it was a housing period for so much in the so-called underground when it's underground pressed like Boston after dark in the Cambridge Phoenix and the publications like broadside and evidence even on Boston after dark back then oh yeah, that was and that we that was what 74
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[SPEAKER_00]: Even earlier, you know, I mean, Steven was in charge probably in 69 70 step when I was in graduate school.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We had case studies and one of the case studies was on Steve Mendesch I'm really and and the experience that he had when he was buying
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[SPEAKER_01]: Boston after dark.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and how he lost all the money the night before he was supposed to close and had a fine money And yeah, we buy it so it just shows the kind of spirit and entrepreneur and and as we both know Stephen was an amazing character in Boston and an amazing leader We wasn't who we miss dear.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly and
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[SPEAKER_00]: one of the most resilient, resilient teamwork, yeah, I mean, and he was determined either joyously or grimly to achieve whatever his mission was and, you know, not to be denied.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, and for decades, he played whack-a-mo with his competitor as either putting them on a business buying them emerging with them and it was always another one that thought they could eat his lunch and then he ate there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And he ate all of ours.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was one of the first people that I met in Boston and you worked for Steve back then.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No, actually I was a freelance writer, initially, but I imagine he used mostly freelance back then anyway.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, he had dedicated department hints, so there was a music editor and there was an arts editor.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So for people that don't know, we should, you know, who are listening to this, describe the Boston after dark.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, as I started to say about the underground media that I was covering, and really the thrust of my thesis was how the underground media, whether it was the press or underground radio and body by WBCN, which started on March 15, 1968, or underground films, all of these different media were impacting and changing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, not only counter, but the traditional media, which really had a stranglehold on readership, eyeballs, attention, ears, everything.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm perspective.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it was really a totally turbulent time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I often say that 60s began.
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[SPEAKER_00]: with the Kennedy assassination November 22, 1963, and ended in Nixon's resignation in August 1974.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So it doesn't actually fit the calendar per se, but that was on 11-year stretch, where there was so much turmoil, so much transition, so much change,
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[SPEAKER_00]: in the world, in the culture, and it was not just even a domestic situation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you had, you know, after Kennedy, the British invasion, the Beatles coming on board, and subsequent, you know, just you could use almost music as the embodiment of the transition from month to month.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That was an incredible period to grow up.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, things like that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And experience.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and there was no road map, you know, everything was on the map.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's similar in many ways to today's explosion and chaos created by AI and the internet and social media and things are changing as dramatically and as quickly as they did, I believe.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, if history would be really, yeah, and I agree with you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And if history repeats itself when we took point, I think as we did probably in the early
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[SPEAKER_00]: The citizen, where you will reach a point collectively of exhaustion, they won't be able to take it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm exhausted right now.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that was a period of disruptors.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: No different than the disruptors now.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I agree with you.
17:18.141 --> 17:24.613
[SPEAKER_01]: That period probably, you know, for me it was more like 60, six to about,
17:24.593 --> 17:33.682
[SPEAKER_01]: That's 75, 74, 75 things started to change and it was pretty much a disco kind of a movement.
17:33.782 --> 17:43.272
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the nature of the economics of the country, the famous New York tabloid front page headline for it to New York City drop dead.
17:43.652 --> 17:47.116
[SPEAKER_00]: It was about, you know, don't depend on the federal government for it.
17:47.136 --> 17:48.217
[SPEAKER_00]: New York was going bankrupt.
17:48.277 --> 17:49.498
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
17:49.558 --> 17:54.583
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so New York was looking for funding from the federal government for, you know,
17:54.563 --> 18:05.160
[SPEAKER_01]: Boston back then, I have a much warmer feeling for Boston of that period because it was small, manageable, everybody knew everybody and you could really make an impact in town.
18:05.841 --> 18:10.008
[SPEAKER_01]: Less opportunity, but made for a much more entrepreneurial environment.
18:10.048 --> 18:14.715
[SPEAKER_01]: Boston now is not as accessible as city,
18:14.695 --> 18:19.280
[SPEAKER_01]: in terms of people and interactions that it once was.
18:19.541 --> 18:28.631
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what I kind of addressed earlier in terms of thinking I had to leave the city because it was small and all the good jobs and all the good opportunities were kind of taken.
18:28.651 --> 18:41.125
[SPEAKER_00]: But in reality, I connected very fortuitously with a person who had just become the assistant general manager at WBU, RADO and a guy named Clark Smith who was a clerk.
18:41.105 --> 18:56.438
[SPEAKER_00]: I never knew Clark was up here, he just started there, he had built his college radio station from the ground up, he knew engineering, Clark has a very amazing background, a great broadcast, and still active still out there if you haven't.
18:56.899 --> 18:58.523
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyhow, let's me know
18:58.503 --> 19:05.335
[SPEAKER_00]: Clarke, Clarke, Clarke gave Clarke a copy of my thesis on the Underground Media.
19:05.675 --> 19:11.345
[SPEAKER_00]: He read it and he said, you know, I graduated in August of 70.
19:11.365 --> 19:19.179
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, which would like to be the music director of WBWR, which at that point, the station played all kinds of music, very eclectic.
19:19.920 --> 19:21.743
[SPEAKER_00]: They played,
19:21.723 --> 19:23.265
[SPEAKER_00]: classical music in the mornings.
19:23.285 --> 19:27.891
[SPEAKER_00]: They had what the term hadn't even been applied yet, but it was world music in the afternoon.
19:28.952 --> 19:31.035
[SPEAKER_00]: On weekends, they were heavy with jazz.
19:32.116 --> 19:44.772
[SPEAKER_00]: From midnight to six, they had a guy named John Hawkeheimer, aka Hawke, who played underground music with eyes shut as far as the FCC was concerned.
19:44.792 --> 19:44.912
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
19:44.892 --> 19:48.540
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was no same harbor midnight to six back then.
19:49.261 --> 19:51.707
[SPEAKER_00]: So he jeopardized the license every night.
19:51.827 --> 19:54.292
[SPEAKER_00]: That was truly experimental reading.
19:54.312 --> 19:55.074
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it really was.
19:55.114 --> 20:02.029
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was responsible for bringing acts to the station, dealing with the record companies.
20:02.831 --> 20:05.196
[SPEAKER_01]: Among that, then there was a very active.
20:05.176 --> 20:18.388
[SPEAKER_01]: record promotion of their system of adding records of supporting records, which is missing frankly from radio, even though they believe, I think incorrectly, that digital is their pathway.
20:18.428 --> 20:20.890
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not digital is their distribution point.
20:20.910 --> 20:22.051
[SPEAKER_01]: They haven't figured that out.
20:22.071 --> 20:26.035
[SPEAKER_01]: Radio is still very much a deliverer of new music.
20:26.435 --> 20:27.176
[SPEAKER_00]: I agree.
20:27.296 --> 20:34.963
[SPEAKER_01]: It's certainly a vital component of it's
20:34.943 --> 20:45.073
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, back then, radio was the dumbest and the people that we had, what happened is that we were flourishing doing quite well.
20:45.173 --> 20:57.046
[SPEAKER_00]: John Silver came on board as the president of Boston University and he decided that unlike other college radio stations generally, which were 10 watts or on the left-hand side of the dial, which, you know, B.R.
20:57.086 --> 20:59.348
[SPEAKER_00]: was at 90.9, you know, he up the power.
20:59.328 --> 21:14.350
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and it became a 50,000 watt flame thrower and basically he wanted control of it so by the end of 71, he turned his staff 32 into three and took control any house on that jump sober.
21:14.330 --> 21:23.093
[SPEAKER_00]: And in that period, we accomplished a lot and the people who came through that I interviewed range from Paul Cantner from the Jefferson Airplane.
21:23.795 --> 21:28.687
[SPEAKER_00]: He did a five hour stint with the great promotion person from RCA Don Delacy.
21:29.650 --> 21:30.853
[SPEAKER_00]: Don Delacy, I know that man.
21:30.833 --> 21:50.558
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and done was such a trooper because Cantner came on and run 12 30 AM and he was the first person I ever saw using cocaine and he stayed until five in the morning on the air playing music being interviewed and Not surprising about two years later.
21:50.578 --> 21:55.264
[SPEAKER_00]: He had a significant heart attack when he was still very young, but he had a good rug.
21:55.364 --> 21:55.845
[SPEAKER_00]: He did.
21:55.825 --> 22:02.156
[SPEAKER_00]: And he had a daughter with a great slick name, China, and a great life until he passed.
22:02.236 --> 22:07.164
[SPEAKER_00]: And she's still out there in her 80s in California with a career as an artist.
22:07.545 --> 22:08.987
[SPEAKER_00]: But we had David Bowie.
22:09.107 --> 22:11.591
[SPEAKER_00]: Bowie did not even have a character.
22:12.052 --> 22:17.421
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not even have working papers to perform back in that era.
22:17.501 --> 22:19.084
[SPEAKER_01]: Which band was he with at that point?
22:19.104 --> 22:19.825
[SPEAKER_01]: Which album?
22:19.805 --> 22:23.092
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, he was still on Mercury.
22:23.192 --> 22:37.925
[SPEAKER_00]: He was before the big Ziggy and before he really conquered America and when I met him, I mean, the backstory to that little encounter was Bill Coleman was the promotion person for Mercury Records.
22:38.245 --> 22:39.889
[SPEAKER_00]: He was driving Bowie.
22:39.869 --> 22:53.642
[SPEAKER_00]: And John Landau, who was not only a writer, later became Bruce Springsteen's manager in producer, but at that point he was local and he was writing for the Cambridge Phoenix, and he was also the album reviews editor for Rolling Stone.
22:53.682 --> 22:54.925
[SPEAKER_00]: He lived in Cambridge.
22:54.905 --> 23:02.435
[SPEAKER_00]: Bill Coleman, black promotion guys, driving David Bowie in a dress in that dress period of his and John Landau.
23:02.455 --> 23:04.557
[SPEAKER_00]: The car is going down.
23:04.798 --> 23:05.739
[SPEAKER_00]: The car breaks down.
23:06.700 --> 23:12.808
[SPEAKER_00]: So the three of them start walking towards 640, 630 Commonwealth Avenue.
23:13.429 --> 23:17.154
[SPEAKER_00]: And Landau, it's after midnight Landau said I had enough of this.
23:17.194 --> 23:22.060
[SPEAKER_00]: He walked home because he lived in Cambridge, Port and he just had to go across the
23:22.040 --> 23:31.219
[SPEAKER_00]: Bowie and Coleman come up to the station and Santa say a two-hour interview was not captured because B.U.R.
23:31.239 --> 23:41.500
[SPEAKER_00]: was so impoverished we didn't even have tape and record the interview so you believe that words are flying somebody has the universe so many has it that we're listening at home.
23:41.480 --> 23:54.479
[SPEAKER_00]: hopefully but it was it was really quite spectacular and I knew who Boeing was because I read the British press melody maker and NME and sounds all kinds of publications.
23:54.499 --> 24:03.252
[SPEAKER_01]: I was a big listener to BBC back then I saw a short wave radio with my passion and discovered a lot of the British rock stars.
24:03.232 --> 24:03.733
[SPEAKER_01]: that way.
24:03.773 --> 24:08.302
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it was kind of a second wave, you know, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
24:08.322 --> 24:13.212
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but yeah, then you had all these acts that were playing the Boston Tea Party, you know, so you had Tea Party.
24:13.232 --> 24:15.096
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, Stuart, Jeff Ray's right in here.
24:15.116 --> 24:15.456
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
24:15.476 --> 24:17.340
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, let's definitely.
24:17.360 --> 24:18.262
[SPEAKER_01]: The who played there.
24:18.482 --> 24:21.128
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was, you know, I'm, I'm never going to keep party with you.
24:21.208 --> 24:21.308
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
24:21.288 --> 24:22.569
[SPEAKER_01]: just phenomenal.
24:22.590 --> 24:29.978
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, in my archives, I have a number of Boston Tea Party posters, you know, because every show that they did had his own unique poster.
24:30.218 --> 24:31.320
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was one poster.
24:32.161 --> 24:34.143
[SPEAKER_00]: They did two calendar posters.
24:34.443 --> 24:36.105
[SPEAKER_00]: One was in April of 1969.
24:36.726 --> 24:38.428
[SPEAKER_00]: The other was in May of 1969.
24:39.029 --> 24:43.534
[SPEAKER_00]: The main one is so saturated with talent, particularly British talent.
24:43.594 --> 24:45.456
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's overwhelming to think,
24:45.436 --> 25:03.901
[SPEAKER_00]: that shows like the who with Rassan, Roland Kirk, the great multi-instrumental jazz performer opened for them and they were doing Tommy, that Jeff Bech group with Rod Stewart on lead welcomes all of these acts, Led Zeppelin all of these acts were doing three nights.
25:04.442 --> 25:10.971
[SPEAKER_00]: The velvet underground was the underbill, the underbill from the velvet underground show was the almond brothers.
25:10.951 --> 25:13.855
[SPEAKER_00]: And all of these were available for 350 and 450.
25:14.356 --> 25:15.237
[SPEAKER_00]: And you have to remind me.
25:15.257 --> 25:17.741
[SPEAKER_00]: Do my people there was a decimal point in there?
25:17.761 --> 25:19.564
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it was in 350 hours in the past.
25:19.924 --> 25:22.628
[SPEAKER_01]: The access to that music back then was extraordinary.
25:22.769 --> 25:23.750
[SPEAKER_01]: Totally.
25:23.770 --> 25:26.114
[SPEAKER_01]: And you could see great stars.
25:26.134 --> 25:26.234
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
25:26.254 --> 25:28.177
[SPEAKER_01]: And A, they didn't think they were great stars.
25:28.597 --> 25:30.360
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were still struggling off of them.
25:30.380 --> 25:32.042
[SPEAKER_01]: And they weren't making the big bucks.
25:32.062 --> 25:32.163
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
25:32.183 --> 25:35.247
[SPEAKER_01]: So they were willing to go out and play every venue.
25:35.307 --> 25:35.828
[SPEAKER_01]: They could get
25:35.808 --> 25:47.801
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and there was a circuit in there and this basket had a great circuit, you know, of rock, well, you had this collection of colleges and collection of young people, so it was a natural destination for everybody.
25:47.841 --> 25:53.007
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and that in this city was kind of a taste maker at that point, you know, if you, if you.
25:53.027 --> 25:58.913
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like the first landing place either New York or Boston will wear all these British New York still is.
25:58.893 --> 26:05.365
[SPEAKER_01]: pretty much dominating, but Boston was becoming sort of the underground alternative destination.
26:05.385 --> 26:05.866
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
26:05.926 --> 26:14.061
[SPEAKER_00]: And had, you know, the publications like the boss came from Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge, Phoenix, Boston, and David Dark, which began the boss.
26:14.081 --> 26:14.863
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
26:14.983 --> 26:17.989
[SPEAKER_00]: And WBCN, which was really a radio platform.
26:18.991 --> 26:20.293
[SPEAKER_01]: Was that a radio station?
26:20.273 --> 26:39.666
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
26:39.764 --> 27:01.131
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, post termination, I was one of the 29 people in the John Silver Fired, not, not not to be walkin' personally and say, David, you're gone, no, no, we did not get a handshake and a check and a go and watch, no, it was very abrupt and people were very heartbroken because it worked so hard in that year.
27:01.111 --> 27:13.668
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, the great thing was the segue that I made was meeting all the record company promotion people and we bonded and it was back in that era as very social as well as professional interaction.
27:14.710 --> 27:17.994
[SPEAKER_01]: And because you have to live this lifestyle.
27:18.074 --> 27:18.996
[SPEAKER_00]: Totally successful.
27:19.136 --> 27:19.797
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't trust.
27:19.837 --> 27:20.618
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not just work.
27:20.678 --> 27:21.499
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a whole lifestyle.
27:21.479 --> 27:29.291
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not nine to five, it's probably more like 11 to two a.m. That's right, on occasion five a.m.
27:29.311 --> 27:29.832
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
27:30.193 --> 27:37.364
[SPEAKER_00]: But so a couple of the promotion people connected me with a company called Music Promotions.
27:37.765 --> 27:40.549
[SPEAKER_00]: And the guy who worked there was a guy named Danny Lipman.
27:40.930 --> 27:43.133
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a record veteran himself.
27:43.113 --> 27:59.867
[SPEAKER_00]: He represented, he kind of had a boutique advertising agency in the accounts that we had, and then I did all the creative work for, or the Wii A group of labels, Warner, Electric, Lannick, the Orson Welles, Cinema Complex, which I lived right down the street from.
28:00.148 --> 28:00.789
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Massette.
28:00.809 --> 28:01.771
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Massette.
28:01.791 --> 28:02.573
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
28:02.553 --> 28:08.981
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, that was a complex, it was a great complex, yeah, it was a restaurant, it was a restaurant, and also a performance area.
28:09.001 --> 28:10.883
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I saw some great bands.
28:10.903 --> 28:21.896
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, one of the magical nights, you know, one of the fixture films, you know, Don Laugh started his concerts right down the street from there in the mid 70s, like 75ish.
28:21.916 --> 28:25.700
[SPEAKER_00]: I do remember there was a place for writing in Harvard Square and Call of the Performance Center.
28:25.901 --> 28:28.864
[SPEAKER_00]: But one of the great moments,
28:28.844 --> 28:42.509
[SPEAKER_00]: The Orson Welles Cinema was famous for probably having a two or three year run of the Reggae oriented film that How did they come and that was probably very much instrumental in reggae blossoming and getting great movies It's a great alternative.
28:42.709 --> 28:43.671
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
28:43.691 --> 28:45.013
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I started easy ride over there
28:44.993 --> 28:45.854
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, exactly.
28:45.954 --> 28:46.194
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
28:46.214 --> 28:46.635
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
28:46.655 --> 28:47.095
[SPEAKER_00]: Great film.
28:47.115 --> 28:56.085
[SPEAKER_00]: And I mean, they did all kinds of, you know, once again going back to the underground sensibility, films like John Arowsky's El Tobo.
28:57.226 --> 28:57.346
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
28:57.426 --> 28:57.707
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyhow.
28:58.488 --> 29:03.593
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that was, you know, I lived in Cambridge show, like 72 to like 76.
29:03.673 --> 29:05.315
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a great area.
29:05.335 --> 29:06.376
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a great area.
29:06.556 --> 29:14.545
[SPEAKER_01]: And right down the street for more semester, I literally go every night to have some because, you know, a single guy and wasn't
29:14.525 --> 29:19.471
[SPEAKER_01]: So I would go there and listen in bands and a lot of great jazz.
29:19.491 --> 29:20.292
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
29:21.093 --> 29:21.313
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
29:21.353 --> 29:25.798
[SPEAKER_01]: It was really a leading edge kind of music experience.
29:25.938 --> 29:26.419
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
29:26.439 --> 29:40.195
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the nights that the harder they come was featured and Sam Copper, who was a DJ on WBCN, had come from the Orphium Theatre and he
29:40.175 --> 29:42.539
[SPEAKER_00]: came out after the film.
29:42.559 --> 29:44.362
[SPEAKER_00]: He said everybody's staying in seats.
29:44.402 --> 29:45.624
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got special surprise.
29:45.704 --> 29:48.869
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course people have been smoking and dope and then the whole deal.
29:48.949 --> 29:52.355
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they're kind of ruined and wasted at that point.
29:52.956 --> 29:54.959
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, guys, special surprise for you.
29:55.440 --> 29:55.500
[SPEAKER_00]: And
29:55.480 --> 30:01.266
[SPEAKER_00]: From side to the stage, it just took over everyone's mind, blew it away.
30:01.306 --> 30:06.711
[SPEAKER_00]: He brought a Jimmy Clip, the star of the film, who had just done a show at the Orphan Cools.
30:06.731 --> 30:07.031
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
30:07.152 --> 30:13.698
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was almost like a Woody Allen thing where they step off of the screen and walk into the crowd.
30:13.718 --> 30:14.399
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
30:14.419 --> 30:16.521
[SPEAKER_00]: And everybody's stone, so they're like, they couldn't believe it.
30:16.541 --> 30:17.702
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, they couldn't believe it.
30:17.762 --> 30:18.523
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
30:18.543 --> 30:19.063
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, sure.
30:19.083 --> 30:20.605
[SPEAKER_00]: So you live for those kinds of moments.
30:20.725 --> 30:24.829
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyhow, I was working at music promotions
30:24.809 --> 30:25.971
[SPEAKER_00]: No, not from BCN.
30:26.091 --> 30:35.785
[SPEAKER_00]: I was also freelancing for BCN at that point, writing articles, probably the first major local and national press that BCN got.
30:36.325 --> 30:40.031
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote about them for Billboard magazine.
30:40.091 --> 30:46.480
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote about BCN, a very extensive piece, which is still available up online for Boston Magazine.
30:46.460 --> 31:08.805
[SPEAKER_00]: uh for uh fusion magazine which at the time was the East Coast counterpart to Rolling Stone based at 909 Beacon Street uh uh Barry Globsky was the publisher and Robert Selma, the editor and they gave me the editorial real estate space to scratch out and do long features and among them was on BCN
31:08.785 --> 31:23.976
[SPEAKER_00]: Concurrent when I was doing the music promotions gig and one of the clients that was managed by music promotions was this new group called the modern lovers that included Jonathan Richmond
31:23.956 --> 31:36.191
[SPEAKER_00]: who later went on to great summer fame and now the issue is to want to make a roadrunner or dream on as the official state song of Massachusetts.
31:36.691 --> 31:42.839
[SPEAKER_00]: It hasn't been resolved yet, it's settled, but Joyce Linahan, a good friend of ours, is a petitioning for roadrunner.
31:42.939 --> 31:44.460
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyhow, Jonathan was in the band.
31:45.422 --> 31:49.947
[SPEAKER_00]: David Robinson, a leader, became the drummer for the modern up for the cars.
31:49.927 --> 32:01.608
[SPEAKER_00]: And Jerry Harrison, who joined the Talking Heads, or as they say it, Talking Heads, Noga, and Ernie Brooks, who was doing some work in New York as well.
32:01.669 --> 32:05.936
[SPEAKER_00]: But that was, you know, I wrote the band bio for the press kit.
32:06.017 --> 32:07.599
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that was one of my assignments.
32:07.720 --> 32:08.982
[SPEAKER_00]: When did you start at BCM?
32:08.962 --> 32:13.710
[SPEAKER_00]: I started BC, I freelance for about four or five years after a music promotion is closed down.
32:13.730 --> 32:21.743
[SPEAKER_00]: I started at BC in 1978 and what was your day-to-day responsibility?
32:21.783 --> 32:25.890
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure, it was a multitude of things, but what specifically were you focused on?
32:25.870 --> 32:31.678
[SPEAKER_00]: We all grew multiple heads and had multiple hats in those days back then you had to do everything Yeah, exactly.
32:31.698 --> 32:49.903
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was creative services director and that meant handling all the promotions with all the record companies, the film companies, any external promotions came just back then everybody came through BCN if you had something cool to talk about because it was the place to be heard.
32:49.883 --> 32:55.189
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, actually, what happened initially was from that period when it started in 68 until about 73, 74.
32:56.270 --> 33:03.299
[SPEAKER_00]: And then it went on a slow and steady decline in the aforementioned Clarke Smith became program director of a new station called CLZ.
33:03.319 --> 33:06.382
[SPEAKER_01]: CLZ, you know, and did an amazing introduction.
33:06.402 --> 33:08.745
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, they did a concert from fantasy.
33:08.765 --> 33:13.571
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and he started, you know, that was one of the best intros of a new format in Boston.
33:14.071 --> 33:15.553
[SPEAKER_01]: He sort of led the way there.
33:15.533 --> 33:19.740
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he picked the appropriate time when everyone else students come back September 1st.
33:20.221 --> 33:22.705
[SPEAKER_00]: He did on Labor Day weekend.
33:22.886 --> 33:23.707
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember I believe.
33:23.807 --> 33:24.408
[SPEAKER_00]: It's happening.
33:24.789 --> 33:24.889
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
33:24.909 --> 33:25.831
[SPEAKER_01]: You got to listen here.
33:25.851 --> 33:25.991
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
33:26.251 --> 33:27.053
[SPEAKER_01]: All the new music.
33:27.293 --> 33:28.295
[SPEAKER_01]: Just stay with us.
33:28.595 --> 33:35.427
[SPEAKER_00]: And what he did, if he created this whole illusion about the illusion is the perfect effort.
33:35.507 --> 33:35.708
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
33:35.728 --> 33:40.596
[SPEAKER_00]: Because basically he took all the live recordings of all the
33:40.576 --> 33:49.030
[SPEAKER_00]: popular acts of that era, you know, whether it was the Rolling Stones or Bob Seagre, and everything that had been glued to the radio in the whole weekend.
33:49.230 --> 33:58.365
[SPEAKER_00]: And he created this mythical event called Concert from Fantasy Island, and he introduced all these new DJs included Kent Shelton, and
33:58.345 --> 34:00.289
[SPEAKER_01]: My parental spasana work there.
34:00.309 --> 34:01.651
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if you remember spasana.
34:01.691 --> 34:07.662
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, his brother is my morning DJ at and more to time for 20s Just great person.
34:07.682 --> 34:11.990
[SPEAKER_01]: I the other spasana who used to work at CSE is in Rochester now.
34:12.010 --> 34:12.471
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, excellent.
34:12.491 --> 34:14.375
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, okay See them all the time.
34:14.395 --> 34:14.896
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
34:14.916 --> 34:15.337
[SPEAKER_00]: You're good.
34:15.357 --> 34:17.581
[SPEAKER_01]: I will send you I will send you best.
34:17.641 --> 34:17.721
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay
34:17.701 --> 34:19.143
[SPEAKER_00]: very good, very good.
34:19.163 --> 34:35.608
[SPEAKER_00]: So anyhow, I think what happened in 1975-76-77, BCN was on the decline, and their teammates were Hastings, who was the owner, who was kind of letting everything flow away, and he fortunately got a general manager named Cleedobra.
34:35.588 --> 34:39.832
[SPEAKER_00]: who and also a great program director named Tommy Hages.
34:40.333 --> 34:42.295
[SPEAKER_00]: And Tommy and Clea member, Tommy.
34:42.315 --> 34:42.475
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
34:42.595 --> 34:44.798
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was a woman that worked there.
34:45.639 --> 34:48.722
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I date, I dated her.
34:49.803 --> 34:53.066
[SPEAKER_01]: She was telling me, I just felt like I remember her as I am so sorry.
34:53.086 --> 34:56.870
[SPEAKER_01]: I never forgot what she said, but what's her name?
34:56.890 --> 34:59.453
[SPEAKER_01]: And she took me a concert to see the King's.
34:59.433 --> 35:18.345
[SPEAKER_01]: And then after we went and met Ray Davies and the band and here I am first time ever being associated with a rock band and a concert and we go to their hotel room and they're watching the baseball game and sitting having a beer and that was it.
35:18.385 --> 35:21.711
[SPEAKER_01]: That was that was that was my first rock experience.
35:21.691 --> 35:23.533
[SPEAKER_00]: Fill in the blanks if this is life.
35:23.553 --> 35:25.555
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, hello.
35:25.575 --> 35:26.556
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, so let's keep going.
35:26.777 --> 35:33.984
[SPEAKER_00]: So anyhow, that BCN under time he has this and Kleidoba were kind of reacting to the challenge.
35:34.004 --> 35:47.479
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the first moves that they made, Charles Lacmandera, by his own admission to taking a year off in 1977, and took a year off to explore the world of cocaine.
35:47.459 --> 35:49.902
[SPEAKER_00]: And he enjoyed that interesting world.
35:49.922 --> 35:50.964
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
35:51.444 --> 35:57.172
[SPEAKER_00]: And when he reaches breaking point, he agreed to Tommy's request that Charles come back.
35:57.232 --> 36:06.444
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been on WBCN and he just kind of gave it up and after his Europe indulgence, he still wasn't convinced that he and his broadcasting C-leg.
36:06.484 --> 36:14.013
[SPEAKER_00]: So he came back as a kind of no nuclear plume personality named Dwayne Ingles Glasscock.
36:14.354 --> 36:16.116
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, it is weekend shows.
36:16.096 --> 36:17.098
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
36:17.118 --> 36:21.868
[SPEAKER_00]: And that gave him the confidence to actually come back and do the morning mattress show.
36:22.288 --> 36:23.912
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that was one of the first hires.
36:23.932 --> 36:25.254
[SPEAKER_00]: I was one of the hires.
36:25.896 --> 36:38.020
[SPEAKER_00]: I for once words was kind of helpful in rating WC OZ and hiring Mark Parento and Ken Shelton who worked there and they came on board and that became
36:38.000 --> 36:46.273
[SPEAKER_00]: a formidable dominant, you know, team of broadcasters who held together for probably 15 years.
36:47.215 --> 36:48.056
[SPEAKER_00]: The same team.
36:48.216 --> 36:49.859
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a great sound, great.
36:49.879 --> 36:50.460
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
36:50.480 --> 36:57.751
[SPEAKER_00]: And usually, as you know, Bruce is a broadcaster, one year in radio is seven years in life.
36:57.932 --> 36:58.793
[SPEAKER_00]: And life in life.
36:58.773 --> 37:01.978
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, you know, it's like dog years to it's a real life.
37:02.519 --> 37:08.449
[SPEAKER_00]: And just to hold together these people, trials in the morning, can it mid days and mark in the afternoon?
37:08.469 --> 37:08.930
[SPEAKER_00]: God bless.
37:08.950 --> 37:10.252
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just so potent.
37:10.452 --> 37:12.115
[SPEAKER_00]: And we were off to the races.
37:12.135 --> 37:14.479
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, never challenges and speed bumps along the way.
37:14.960 --> 37:24.696
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, at a certain point where things just can keep getting better and better by the mid to late 80s, it was always in the
37:24.676 --> 37:33.188
[SPEAKER_00]: ratings in the 12 years old and over raw numbers, it was either WBCN was number one or kiss 108 was number one.
37:33.208 --> 37:38.616
[SPEAKER_00]: And such an impact on the culture and the city of Austin overall.
37:38.876 --> 37:43.964
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, we did a lot of giving back to blood drives and food drives.
37:44.064 --> 37:49.772
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, when Rishi created kiss, that was a major departure in the city as well.
37:49.752 --> 37:50.613
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly.
37:50.713 --> 38:07.778
[SPEAKER_01]: And so how these two Mammoth stations, but talking to two different communities, you know, the rock alternative world was a completely, you know, different humanity than the kiss world, which was clubbie, Dancy, but both captured probably
38:07.758 --> 38:20.153
[SPEAKER_00]: 80% of everyone 18, 49% exactly, amazing, amazing period, yeah, and very, you know, cultural dominance during that era.
38:20.173 --> 38:25.220
[SPEAKER_00]: And the theory was that, you know, everyone is your competitor.
38:25.280 --> 38:30.506
[SPEAKER_00]: If you look at one dollar as the financial pie that everyone carves up.
38:30.787 --> 38:33.630
[SPEAKER_01]: So you had Charles versus Maddie.
38:33.610 --> 38:39.440
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's a winning series, but you great winning personality is killing each other, trying to kill each other.
38:39.460 --> 38:43.667
[SPEAKER_00]: But in reality, good friends, because I'm at it actually work at BCN.
38:43.687 --> 38:43.808
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
38:43.828 --> 38:45.470
[SPEAKER_00]: That was an accelerating period.
38:45.751 --> 38:52.563
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, I think, you know, what happened, it was some kind of strange program.
38:52.583 --> 38:54.466
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, decisions made at BCN.
38:54.486 --> 38:55.548
[SPEAKER_00]: It was kind of weird.
38:56.369 --> 38:58.032
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like I went to the end of this camera.
38:58.079 --> 38:59.601
[SPEAKER_00]: No, he was on, he was on board.
38:59.661 --> 39:06.609
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, he started as Charles's kind of Quincy producer, one of the many producers.
39:06.629 --> 39:07.470
[SPEAKER_00]: Charles was smart.
39:07.891 --> 39:09.012
[SPEAKER_00]: He surrounded himself.
39:09.132 --> 39:21.707
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think, ultimately, out of his salary, he got very, you know, Mel Carmesan who was... Well, Mel did a great job making sure of the people that built that place, made money.
39:21.687 --> 39:43.813
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, and not only the history gave Charles enough money that he could use his salary as a budget to surround himself with talented producers and writers and at one point I think Charles had a team of more than a dozen people who are all contributing, you know, people would show up at five in the morning for the six a.m. shows.
39:43.793 --> 39:51.962
[SPEAKER_01]: missing from radios, that spontaneity, that excitement, that leading edge kind of intensity, that rarely exists.
39:52.222 --> 40:03.074
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it exists, but rarely exists in radios now, where you could try different stuff, and you can cross, pollinate across many different disciplines, but still make it work.
40:03.455 --> 40:03.555
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
40:03.575 --> 40:04.957
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not the way it is anymore.
40:05.017 --> 40:10.763
[SPEAKER_01]: Very channeled and very narrowly distributed in terms
40:10.743 --> 40:29.562
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and you can't do it if you're voice tracking, and you know, somebody in Denver is doing a show that does vocal, you know, or announcement drop in for a station, it in theapolis or, you know, is spending, you know, so four hour show, they can do it in, uh,
40:29.542 --> 40:35.770
[SPEAKER_00]: 42 minutes because they're just voice tracking the local information and the music is playing.
40:36.130 --> 40:38.774
[SPEAKER_00]: And the other thing is, you know, they're always looking at the clock.
40:38.794 --> 40:54.874
[SPEAKER_00]: They want to do more music less talk and there's the absence of the personality, you know, which, you know, I think it happened in the big league, so to speak, the major markets that, you know, the accident we're developing in the
40:54.854 --> 41:04.915
[SPEAKER_00]: They had no place to go, you know, they may have been talented, but they were then as they hit the big leagues, they were repressed, don't cock, don't be joking around, you know.
41:05.096 --> 41:09.145
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, they're worrying about their licenses, they're worrying about corporate.
41:09.385 --> 41:09.706
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
41:09.726 --> 41:10.327
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
41:10.668 --> 41:11.469
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was the difference.
41:11.610 --> 41:12.031
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
41:12.051 --> 41:13.133
[SPEAKER_01]: BCN was not corporate radio.
41:13.113 --> 41:15.376
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know, the mail was not court right.
41:15.556 --> 41:22.044
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean granted we did focus groups, but we only use that as a springboard to what we did.
41:22.125 --> 41:23.466
[SPEAKER_00]: We were not 10 or 10.
41:23.486 --> 41:24.608
[SPEAKER_00]: It was okay to use focus.
41:24.668 --> 41:26.410
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you can get information.
41:26.430 --> 41:27.672
[SPEAKER_00]: You can meet your audience.
41:27.692 --> 41:28.413
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah.
41:28.573 --> 41:30.055
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, strategies.
41:30.075 --> 41:31.897
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you're creative.
41:31.997 --> 41:36.703
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but, but there was still it's still allowed for improvisational radio.
41:36.723 --> 41:38.125
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was so critical.
41:38.105 --> 41:39.227
[SPEAKER_00]: Afrodex.
41:39.247 --> 41:39.707
[SPEAKER_01]: What did that?
41:39.907 --> 41:51.283
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, so anyhow, in 94, you know, I kind of saw that, you know, BCN was heading in a kind of more corporate direction and Steven Mendedch had been a lifelong adult friend.
41:51.723 --> 41:53.666
[SPEAKER_01]: And let's define this for everyone.
41:53.726 --> 41:59.895
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, let's think Steven Mendedch, you owned the Boston Phoenix and also WF and put FNX on the air.
42:00.115 --> 42:00.435
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
42:00.455 --> 42:03.259
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a player in the community in the alternative space.
42:03.760 --> 42:07.605
[SPEAKER_01]: In the 90s, making some very big inroads in terms of
42:07.585 --> 42:12.793
[SPEAKER_01]: alternative lifestyle, music, culture, and journalism.
42:12.813 --> 42:15.797
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, and he was working both sides of the street.
42:15.877 --> 42:20.104
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, there's he appreciated the editorial side of the Boston Phoenix.
42:20.464 --> 42:31.180
[SPEAKER_00]: He appreciated the programming content of WFNX, but he also had an eye towards the finances and the budgets and the economics of running
42:31.160 --> 42:32.402
[SPEAKER_00]: big city properties.
42:32.883 --> 42:41.279
[SPEAKER_00]: And at one point, I think there were more than a dozen individual companies under the umbrella of the Phoenix Media Communications Group.
42:41.299 --> 42:53.341
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, he, he had his trade division, he had his magazine division, you know, having, having worked for Steve, I was, I was president, remember the FNX video network.
42:53.421 --> 42:54.062
[SPEAKER_00]: We have five.
42:54.042 --> 42:56.506
[SPEAKER_01]: 2002, 2003.
42:56.606 --> 43:02.115
[SPEAKER_01]: That's where we met at the Phoenix Group.
43:02.716 --> 43:07.884
[SPEAKER_01]: But Stephen was intellectually incredibly bright guy.
43:08.164 --> 43:13.232
[SPEAKER_01]: Not only a great entrepreneur, but a really smart man.
43:13.212 --> 43:17.580
[SPEAKER_00]: Feisty and never never ran from a bad and Jewish boy.
43:18.101 --> 43:23.591
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I was fostered together But he made changes that are impactful even today.
43:23.891 --> 43:26.376
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, he really loved his imprint.
43:26.396 --> 43:28.740
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and and anyhow he
43:28.720 --> 43:38.004
[SPEAKER_00]: And at it's zenith, I think the Phoenix organization was doing $45-50 million a year that there were four Phoenixes.
43:38.064 --> 43:43.678
[SPEAKER_00]: There was Portland Providence, Worcester, and obviously Boston.
43:43.699 --> 43:45.463
[SPEAKER_00]: There were three or four.
43:45.443 --> 43:47.566
[SPEAKER_00]: FNX, there were four stations.
43:47.586 --> 43:48.367
[SPEAKER_01]: There was Portland.
43:48.407 --> 43:49.368
[SPEAKER_01]: There was Manchester.
43:49.448 --> 43:50.689
[SPEAKER_01]: There was Boston.
43:50.790 --> 43:52.091
[SPEAKER_01]: And then there was a problem.
43:52.131 --> 43:52.512
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
43:52.532 --> 43:52.772
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
43:52.792 --> 43:53.192
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
43:53.212 --> 43:54.494
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was the FNX network.
43:54.514 --> 43:55.075
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the network.
43:55.095 --> 43:55.495
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
43:55.515 --> 43:55.776
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
43:55.916 --> 44:02.564
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he also bought from your originator, uh, Don Levy and Robert Bernbaum.
44:02.584 --> 44:03.946
[SPEAKER_00]: He bought stuff magazine.
44:04.466 --> 44:10.894
[SPEAKER_00]: That morphed into
44:10.874 --> 44:22.885
[SPEAKER_00]: telephone interactions, and he was really a pioneer when it came to new technology and Brad Middleton's son was very pivotal in all of that as well.
44:22.925 --> 44:26.554
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he was also very much a big believer in the web at the time.
44:26.534 --> 44:27.656
[SPEAKER_01]: The web was growing.
44:28.056 --> 44:31.522
[SPEAKER_01]: The website at Phoenix was stated the art.
44:31.542 --> 44:36.751
[SPEAKER_01]: He was experimenting on not only interactivity around the web, but also e-commerce.
44:37.151 --> 44:40.337
[SPEAKER_01]: He was jumping into that back in the 90s.
44:40.377 --> 44:43.682
[SPEAKER_01]: People hadn't even figured out what a website was at all time.
44:43.662 --> 44:44.643
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, totally totally.
44:44.663 --> 44:51.649
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the 900 numbers that were made, that's where you made this money is on the sex lines.
44:51.769 --> 44:53.271
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and God bless.
44:53.291 --> 44:55.613
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no.
44:55.633 --> 44:56.454
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
44:56.474 --> 45:13.669
[SPEAKER_00]: That the Phoenix under Stephen's direction developed along this proprietary information, strategies and approaches that became worldwide in the sense of you license the ability
45:13.649 --> 45:26.720
[SPEAKER_00]: And right in the Phoenix and Steven's own backyard, even though culturally, they would lock horns, but he licensed what he had accomplished to the Boston Herald.
45:26.740 --> 45:29.623
[SPEAKER_00]: But it became so big that it was international.
45:29.683 --> 45:31.945
[SPEAKER_00]: It was licensed in newspapers all around the country.
45:32.305 --> 45:35.768
[SPEAKER_01]: There was even... We were running, he was running ads all over the country.
45:36.009 --> 45:37.830
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and it was, it was bilingual.
45:37.890 --> 45:41.213
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know, there was Spanish, and well, there was millions of dollars.
45:41.233 --> 45:43.335
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
45:43.315 --> 45:50.647
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, quite frankly, when I started there in April of 94, I had never sat in front of a computer before.
45:51.027 --> 45:53.892
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't even know what I was doing.
45:54.032 --> 46:04.429
[SPEAKER_00]: And quite frankly, it was kind of as you look back on and it's kind of sad that they didn't have, you know, an HR department that acclimated you to the gave me the first week of what's just new.
46:04.409 --> 46:06.592
[SPEAKER_01]: Sit down and do your job, whatever that was.
46:06.652 --> 46:08.656
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, just like throw you in the team.
46:08.776 --> 46:21.996
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember walking by your desk and there would be like and this is probably the precursor to your your your company now and I could I could see why you you have the largest collection of pop culture on earth
46:21.976 --> 46:29.523
[SPEAKER_01]: You've been accumulating it from all these jobs, but I remember walking by your desk and seeing piles of stuff, piles.
46:30.023 --> 46:32.946
[SPEAKER_01]: And you couldn't see you because you would be behind the pile.
46:32.966 --> 46:36.869
[SPEAKER_00]: But I always tell people that I know where everything is.
46:37.129 --> 46:40.632
[SPEAKER_00]: If you give me the challenge, I can extricate whatever it isn't you need.
46:40.893 --> 46:41.653
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't believe you.
46:42.094 --> 46:42.774
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, yeah, that's all.
46:42.794 --> 46:44.195
[SPEAKER_00]: It's bigger than the Pepsi challenge.
46:44.636 --> 46:46.017
[SPEAKER_01]: It was bigger than the Pepsi challenge.
46:46.057 --> 46:49.120
[SPEAKER_01]: But if anybody ever saw it, there wouldn't believe what your desk looked like.
46:49.140 --> 46:51.662
[SPEAKER_01]: Today, you know, the story you had to work for.
46:51.642 --> 46:53.324
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd be a fire hazard.
46:54.025 --> 46:55.547
[SPEAKER_01]: You'd be a pink slope.
46:55.567 --> 46:56.247
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
46:56.267 --> 47:06.319
[SPEAKER_00]: That was another thing interesting enough when I moved through my current location at the Norwood Space Center in Norwood, where I've got 10,000 square feet for my archives.
47:06.640 --> 47:17.953
[SPEAKER_00]: Opening the boxes, I found one box that had, and this was a little project that I did back in, I think it was late 80s.
47:17.933 --> 47:22.539
[SPEAKER_00]: I saved for about six months every pink slip that I got.
47:22.659 --> 47:29.188
[SPEAKER_00]: And back then, we didn't have any phone access or any messages that were left for you.
47:29.549 --> 47:34.956
[SPEAKER_00]: Basically, there was a air quotes secretary who would write down the phone calls.
47:34.996 --> 47:38.581
[SPEAKER_00]: You got exactly with a message and the date and the time.
47:38.601 --> 47:40.884
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm probably saying about a thousand of these.
47:40.904 --> 47:44.709
[SPEAKER_01]: I believe it was a good segue into David Bieber archives.
47:45.129 --> 47:47.873
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got 10,000 square feet.
47:47.853 --> 47:59.589
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, of cultural schmutz, all right, and that's what the cabinet last year, and that you've collected over this century of work.
47:59.609 --> 48:10.704
[SPEAKER_01]: Tell us about how you thought about putting this together, why you thought about putting this together, and tell us about what you're doing with it, because it's really kind of a unique and extraordinary destination.
48:10.744 --> 48:15.430
[SPEAKER_01]: If people want to live some pop culture, it's a great place to hang out.
48:15.410 --> 48:17.814
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I appreciate your perspective on that.
48:18.014 --> 48:24.385
[SPEAKER_00]: And basically, I will not claim to have any strategy.
48:25.146 --> 48:26.929
[SPEAKER_00]: Basically, I could see that when I went in.
48:28.372 --> 48:32.679
[SPEAKER_00]: But, well, I can still remember when your first came in and I was at a very primitive state.
48:33.080 --> 48:37.107
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, I had just moved in and earned me a drug meal.
48:37.127 --> 48:37.367
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
48:37.347 --> 48:54.748
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's nothing exciting about seeing 8500 brown boxes and sometimes white boxes that you have no idea what the content is you're just looking at the I remember walking and saying myself who in God's name would collect all of this crap
48:54.728 --> 49:04.703
[SPEAKER_01]: which wasn't crap, which was me, which, which turned out to be some extraordinary stuff, and who would actually keep it somewhere and pay to store it exactly.
49:04.923 --> 49:06.786
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was what I was most amazed about.
49:06.806 --> 49:09.690
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, how much you'd stored over those years?
49:09.851 --> 49:20.787
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the story is that, yes, I love my day jobs, you know, whether it's WBCN and Boston Phoenix and WFNX music promotions before that,
49:20.885 --> 49:28.878
[SPEAKER_00]: But, uh, caching the check was fine, you know, and I kept me afloat and I bought a house in West Roxbury and everything's fine.
49:29.319 --> 49:36.090
[SPEAKER_00]: But, what was, uh, the side benefit were all the promotional items and all the great creations.
49:36.170 --> 49:38.033
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you have to remember in that period,
49:38.013 --> 49:51.992
[SPEAKER_00]: From the late sixties all the way into the current century, the record companies, the movie companies, the book publishers, they were competitive with each other, not just in terms of the releases that they were making.
49:52.612 --> 49:57.899
[SPEAKER_00]: What is new albums or new novels or new, you know, anything that, you know, new films.
49:58.300 --> 50:07.412
[SPEAKER_00]: But all the ancillary surround promotional marketing tools that they created were so inventive.
50:07.392 --> 50:19.104
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were very generous with the media because they were all trying to capture our attention which would then be a springboard to us giving them bigger attention to our audiences.
50:19.825 --> 50:36.943
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I saved all this with not having any purpose or mission never knowing what I was going to do with it, but I felt the urge to preserve.
50:36.923 --> 50:40.071
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, talk about some of the stuff that's in there.
50:40.091 --> 50:41.033
[SPEAKER_01]: How it's curated.
50:41.053 --> 50:53.785
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that your company does curate at many different places with some of this pop culture right for years for not only years decades that I could it all couldn't have been a myth.
50:53.765 --> 51:03.056
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, then I would talk about my, I'm going to save it, I'm going to put in the archives, and I, I grew my capacity to live with the things that I own at my house.
51:03.476 --> 51:07.501
[SPEAKER_00]: So I basically took outside storage, which kept growing and growing.
51:08.101 --> 51:14.108
[SPEAKER_00]: I had a place that was in Avon, Mass, and it was totally non-accessible.
51:14.329 --> 51:17.292
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, I would bring content home,
51:17.272 --> 51:23.638
[SPEAKER_00]: Every night I would go through it and I didn't just throw everything in a box and it became a gentleman with a time capsule.
51:23.698 --> 51:27.482
[SPEAKER_00]: I would have maybe 40 different categories going concurrently.
51:27.562 --> 51:36.391
[SPEAKER_00]: So there'd be a box for cassettes, a box for 12-inch records, a box for books, a box for t-shirts, and on and on.
51:36.992 --> 51:43.498
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I get maybe between 75 and 100 boxes together, rent a small van,
51:43.478 --> 51:55.331
[SPEAKER_00]: taking out the avon, everything would be put on a pallet, maybe 30, 40 boxes on a pallet, they'd be shrink wrap, fourth lift would come along, put it in box heaven on industrial shelving.
51:55.871 --> 52:06.803
[SPEAKER_00]: And with safe, I had the mental security of knowing that I had my things in a clean, and temperature control place, but this went on for 25 years.
52:06.783 --> 52:09.427
[SPEAKER_00]: And I probably bought the building over two or three times.
52:09.547 --> 52:11.250
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure you know, and I mailed a check.
52:11.610 --> 52:23.608
[SPEAKER_00]: And everybody would say, when can we go visit the archives or, you know, and I was so horribly frustrated because I would do things just out of friendship if the Boston Globe said we're doing a piece on, you know, retro posters.
52:23.848 --> 52:29.917
[SPEAKER_00]: I would, you know, find, uh, I kept one percent of my favorite things at home.
52:30.098 --> 52:33.803
[SPEAKER_01]: What are some of your favorite things, tell us what really turns you on from your collection?
52:33.783 --> 52:39.843
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, for example, with friend of mine, not the neighbor, I've heard him and Peter won't live here.
52:39.883 --> 52:46.425
[SPEAKER_00]: We've been friends for 40 plus years, you know, something that I work a project maybe he'll talk to me one day.
52:47.080 --> 52:49.364
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, okay Peter doesn't talk to me.
52:49.465 --> 52:50.747
[SPEAKER_01]: I need to be the facilitator.
52:50.847 --> 53:02.089
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, Peter when I was running W AF and wanted some of his music played in rotation and we were a current rock station and weren't playing classic any classic rock.
53:02.109 --> 53:04.654
[SPEAKER_01]: So a classic artist didn't have a home there.
53:04.794 --> 53:05.876
[SPEAKER_01]: He still hasn't forgiven me.
53:06.117 --> 53:08.542
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, maybe one day Peter will forgive me.
53:08.562 --> 53:08.802
[SPEAKER_01]: All right
53:08.782 --> 53:25.997
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyhow, you know, something that, you know, a project that we have made have worked on together that, you know, he signed, you know, gave me a very endearing, you know, signature and other things are, you know,
53:25.977 --> 53:35.175
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't pay attention to the dollar value of things other than the monitor and the marketplace.
53:35.576 --> 53:42.349
[SPEAKER_01]: So I have is your dollar value you think that your collection is worth.
53:43.679 --> 53:55.266
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how many zeros to put to the first number, but I'm sure it's easily six, but I have not collected with an eye towards dollar value.
53:55.427 --> 53:59.055
[SPEAKER_00]: I've really collected because I just a hoarder.
53:59.035 --> 54:25.212
[SPEAKER_00]: No, because I think that my toys and treasures work for me, you know, so it's a lot of things are externalized, you know, the verb hotel, this is an interesting story about, you know, Steven Mendes, you know, when I found myself out of a job because in 2012, Steven abruptly sold WFNX and 2013, he abruptly closed down the Boston Phoenix and I was a little bit of a drift I worked with Steven,
54:25.192 --> 54:29.960
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, for eight months after that, you know, is the placement of all the archives.
54:29.980 --> 54:34.186
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I tried to, uh, I met Steve for lunch.
54:34.206 --> 54:35.689
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to buy the Phoenix for him.
54:36.350 --> 54:41.057
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I wanted to buy, especially the his online portal because I thought,
54:41.037 --> 54:49.670
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, this is a great way to communicate with a young community, active build a community, sell them, you know.
54:50.011 --> 54:54.258
[SPEAKER_01]: And we had some conversations and he decided just to close it down.
54:54.458 --> 54:54.598
[SPEAKER_00]: Really.
54:54.738 --> 54:54.979
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
54:54.999 --> 54:55.319
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
54:55.339 --> 54:57.763
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I think he had just kind of,
54:57.743 --> 54:59.204
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it runs course.
54:59.224 --> 55:04.949
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that he got battered in the 2008 financial meltdown.
55:04.970 --> 55:06.211
[SPEAKER_00]: I think everybody knows.
55:06.231 --> 55:16.300
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but I mean, he is one of those classic stories of, you know, in March of 2009, and it's lowest point, he sold everything.
55:16.880 --> 55:22.665
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, granted, it didn't affect the quality of his life going flowing.
55:22.685 --> 55:27.750
[SPEAKER_00]: No, he had already made his money.
55:27.730 --> 55:29.893
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, he was exhausted.
55:29.913 --> 55:30.573
[SPEAKER_00]: He was exhausted.
55:30.934 --> 55:32.716
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, he tried to keep it afloat.
55:32.736 --> 55:35.820
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, Barry I think was sort of leaving at that point.
55:35.840 --> 55:36.421
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
55:36.441 --> 55:39.605
[SPEAKER_01]: And that Barry was his revenue engine in many ways.
55:39.965 --> 55:53.822
[SPEAKER_00]: But so I worked with him just, I had a friendship for about eight months and, you know, throughout 2013 transferring all of the archival material where it currently resides at Northeastern University.
55:53.802 --> 55:55.124
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know this.
55:55.144 --> 55:55.244
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
55:55.425 --> 56:01.294
[SPEAKER_00]: And the beauty and Steven's mandate is it in the snow library.
56:01.314 --> 56:02.276
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, it is.
56:02.296 --> 56:02.516
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
56:02.736 --> 56:02.997
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
56:03.017 --> 56:03.638
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll have to go there.
56:03.738 --> 56:04.219
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
56:04.239 --> 56:09.767
[SPEAKER_00]: And the beauty of it by Steven's mandate is that it's not just content available to scholars.
56:10.028 --> 56:18.882
[SPEAKER_00]: If you make an appointment, if you say hi and you call up and say hi and Bruce Mittman, I have a history with the Phoenix and Steven's mandate, but you didn't even have to.
56:18.862 --> 56:25.150
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, Bruce Mittman Pedestrian citizen, you know, that they would make the bound volumes available to you.
56:25.190 --> 56:30.458
[SPEAKER_00]: If you said I want to check out the ad that I placed from Arnold and company in 1973.
56:31.259 --> 56:32.300
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure we did.
56:32.480 --> 56:33.482
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
56:33.502 --> 56:33.602
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
56:33.622 --> 56:33.722
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
56:33.742 --> 56:36.105
[SPEAKER_01]: And that they would give Martin Leonard in 1973.
56:36.125 --> 56:38.168
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, okay.
56:38.188 --> 56:38.288
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
56:38.268 --> 56:40.370
[SPEAKER_00]: You work with Howard Tempkin with you.
56:40.390 --> 56:42.432
[SPEAKER_01]: What now Howard was had just left.
56:42.572 --> 56:43.193
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
56:43.713 --> 56:44.874
[SPEAKER_01]: Another name from the past.
56:44.894 --> 56:45.575
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, absolutely.
56:45.595 --> 56:46.816
[SPEAKER_00]: Another Phoenix store.
56:47.016 --> 56:47.857
[SPEAKER_01]: A good map.
56:47.877 --> 56:48.358
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
56:48.378 --> 56:54.103
[SPEAKER_00]: So anyhow, but that's the beauty is you could not just walk in off the street, but you can make an appointment.
56:54.323 --> 56:59.669
[SPEAKER_00]: And whatever your mission, whatever your purpose is, you could access the Phoenix market.
56:59.689 --> 57:00.389
[SPEAKER_00]: I had no idea.
57:00.409 --> 57:00.710
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
57:00.730 --> 57:07.296
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think Stephen wanted it that way because what had been created for the public still belongs to the public.
57:07.276 --> 57:09.699
[SPEAKER_01]: That's just a great great like us.
57:09.719 --> 57:24.715
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and so I worked with him and then I don't know where in I guess it was like February of 2014 I got a phone call from him and he's still acting like a boss and say okay David a Demon a meeting has been set up.
57:24.976 --> 57:28.600
[SPEAKER_00]: You're gonna go to 3333 Newbury Street next Tuesday at two o'clock.
57:28.620 --> 57:30.362
[SPEAKER_00]: You're gonna meet a guy named Steve Samuels.
57:30.382 --> 57:36.068
[SPEAKER_00]: He's got a great idea for taking the Howard Johnson's hotel which is
57:36.048 --> 57:58.833
[SPEAKER_00]: Basically, 1271, Boyleston Street, right next door to where WB, where I'd worked at WBCN at 1265, he's buying the Howard Johnson, where he'd actually bought it, you know, the deal closed on December 31, 2013, and now he wants to turn it into kind of a celebration of music and media and pop culture that came out of the Fenway in by extension in the Greater Boston area.
57:59.233 --> 58:03.658
[SPEAKER_00]: And Steven, who knew that I had
58:03.638 --> 58:15.383
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, fabled, but imaginary archives because they didn't have hands on access, but I had to play along this even it presolved me to Steve Sandwell since this guy was got warehouses full and great content.
58:15.503 --> 58:18.008
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, I had no hands on access to it all.
58:19.451 --> 58:20.854
[SPEAKER_00]: We did.
58:20.834 --> 58:36.126
[SPEAKER_00]: a quick turnaround that I started with Steve Shamil's in February of 2014, the verb hotel, which the Howard Johnson's was renamed as, and that opened in July of 2014.
58:36.106 --> 58:51.769
[SPEAKER_00]: and retaining the bones of the architecture and the structure of the hotel and the Mondrian design and the art look, but surrounded with all things from my archives, both in the lobby, the corridors,
58:51.749 --> 58:57.758
[SPEAKER_01]: and what you've done in a number of places at the Wank Center for the Museum as well.
58:57.878 --> 59:08.134
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a full-comeraconda in the world, and working with Joe Spalding, which has been a terrific experience and Joe retired in Casey Sword, who's now the CEO.
59:08.194 --> 59:08.895
[SPEAKER_00]: I worked with him.
59:09.075 --> 59:10.998
[SPEAKER_01]: We interviewed Casey just recently.
59:11.018 --> 59:11.599
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, terrific.
59:11.619 --> 59:11.839
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
59:11.859 --> 59:14.603
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure he's got some great, well, he's got some great strength.
59:14.624 --> 59:14.784
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
59:14.964 --> 59:16.947
[SPEAKER_00]: Because Casey basically,
59:16.927 --> 59:34.783
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I worked with him and did, you know, dozens of installations at the Candidate or in Beverly, Casey basically did the same thing Joe did only later, Joe in the 1980s in conjunction with Anne Wang and his family, saved, uh, was then, um,
59:34.763 --> 59:38.607
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess it was the musical, the Metropolitan Center.
59:39.588 --> 59:50.619
[SPEAKER_00]: It became the Wang Theatre, but Joe through his efforts in fundraising and bringing on a board of sympathetic directors saved that theater from the wrecking ball.
59:50.879 --> 59:57.887
[SPEAKER_00]: And Casey did the same thing at the cabin because that had been just kind of in a downhill swirl.
59:57.947 --> 01:00:04.213
[SPEAKER_00]: It was your known for magic shows primarily, there was a resident magician,
01:00:04.193 --> 01:00:05.875
[SPEAKER_00]: but tell us the same story.
01:00:05.955 --> 01:00:06.555
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, interesting.
01:00:06.575 --> 01:00:07.917
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, no, that's great.
01:00:08.057 --> 01:00:10.640
[SPEAKER_01]: That's great, that it's a hearing it for me as well.
01:00:10.680 --> 01:00:10.900
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
01:00:11.220 --> 01:00:18.488
[SPEAKER_01]: Tell people here that are listening and hopefully there'll be plenty because David Bieber's on the air here.
01:00:18.508 --> 01:00:21.190
[SPEAKER_01]: Tell us about David Bieber archives.
01:00:21.330 --> 01:00:29.779
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, where it is, what to do to get there, how to interact with you, because it's truly an iconic destination in this town.
01:00:29.759 --> 01:00:42.280
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and you need to come back to see what happened, almost concurrent to doing the verb hotel, which I dressed from my favorite things at home.
01:00:42.360 --> 01:00:49.793
[SPEAKER_00]: I never confessed until much later to Stephen Minnich and Steve Samuels that basically all
01:00:49.773 --> 01:01:10.482
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... warehouses full of content were inaccessible to me at the time and it basically and maybe to the verbs benefit i drew upon my favorite things that i kept at home but that was the only resource center that i had then uh... in 2016 i got the word that the place that i had been
01:01:10.462 --> 01:01:13.766
[SPEAKER_00]: paying sending, you know, rent checks off to an avon.
01:01:14.407 --> 01:01:15.128
[SPEAKER_00]: I was being sold.
01:01:15.228 --> 01:01:18.653
[SPEAKER_00]: The new owner was in he didn't want to be in a warehousing business.
01:01:18.693 --> 01:01:30.208
[SPEAKER_00]: He wanted the space because he was in the air conditioning and heating unit business and he needed these space availability for these big units that he had that was basically storage for himself.
01:01:30.188 --> 01:01:33.116
[SPEAKER_00]: So we said, listen, you know, we've been here a long time.
01:01:33.136 --> 01:01:34.520
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not going to kick you to the curb.
01:01:34.720 --> 01:01:40.516
[SPEAKER_00]: You got to leave, you know, you know, that began the APB to everybody I knew I need a space.
01:01:40.997 --> 01:01:43.343
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to move anytime soon.
01:01:43.423 --> 01:01:44.486
[SPEAKER_00]: I need a long lease.
01:01:44.586 --> 01:01:46.712
[SPEAKER_00]: I need a large amount of space.
01:01:46.692 --> 01:02:16.581
[SPEAKER_00]: And a guy named Peter Gold, who was one of the co-founders of the Boston Music Awards in the 1980s, came up with this place that had formerly been a multi-building complex manufacturing the Nolium, and basically David Dupri and his kind of fellow developers were on a mission to change the nature of these dozen plus buildings.
01:02:16.561 --> 01:02:20.387
[SPEAKER_00]: I committed to 20 years and 10,000 square feet.
01:02:21.269 --> 01:02:26.658
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the brigade of the movement started Mark Silverman from Mark's Movers.
01:02:27.980 --> 01:02:32.508
[SPEAKER_00]: I enlisted 12 and half tractor trailers to move the content.
01:02:32.528 --> 01:02:34.832
[SPEAKER_00]: We estimated 8,500 boxes.
01:02:35.733 --> 01:02:42.805
[SPEAKER_00]: And basically what happened was David Dupree, one of the co-owners of the Norwood Space Center,
01:02:42.785 --> 01:03:00.102
[SPEAKER_00]: Listen, we're not quite ready for you, but, you know, you're going to land on the second floor of building eight in building two, we it's unoccupied now, but it's safe, you can land everything there and what we give you ultimately a year later is a clean white box.
01:03:00.082 --> 01:03:01.304
[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't charge me rent.
01:03:01.484 --> 01:03:03.166
[SPEAKER_00]: They put a new roof on the building.
01:03:03.426 --> 01:03:04.308
[SPEAKER_00]: They cleaned it up.
01:03:04.548 --> 01:03:05.970
[SPEAKER_00]: It's beautiful, immaculate.
01:03:06.370 --> 01:03:08.694
[SPEAKER_00]: And they said, what you do with that space is yours.
01:03:09.174 --> 01:03:11.918
[SPEAKER_00]: So finally, it was available.
01:03:12.038 --> 01:03:16.063
[SPEAKER_00]: And then everything landed in building too, but then had to be hand carried.
01:03:16.084 --> 01:03:18.767
[SPEAKER_00]: 8500 boxes from building two to building eight.
01:03:19.188 --> 01:03:22.772
[SPEAKER_00]: In my least, they said that there is a lift.
01:03:22.793 --> 01:03:24.655
[SPEAKER_00]: The lift never got activated.
01:03:24.635 --> 01:03:31.212
[SPEAKER_00]: So what what we did and I call it a billion Brazilians handcarrying everything upstairs.
01:03:31.873 --> 01:03:32.054
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
01:03:32.675 --> 01:03:34.620
[SPEAKER_00]: And it made it safely.
01:03:34.921 --> 01:03:40.956
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what you saw, you know, maybe seven years ago, eight years ago, whatever it was.
01:03:40.936 --> 01:03:58.830
[SPEAKER_00]: And basically, then the unpacking began, and very fortuitously, a good friend of mine, John Strymesh, his family owned a new mobile book fair in Newton, and they had sold a book business, and the book business, and they retained ownership of the building.
01:03:58.930 --> 01:04:00.373
[SPEAKER_00]: The book business moved down the street.
01:04:00.653 --> 01:04:03.619
[SPEAKER_00]: John and his family were selling the building.
01:04:03.599 --> 01:04:12.412
[SPEAKER_00]: he said you need shelves because you're doing me a favor because I'm going to have to pay to have the shelves and all the debris in the building home the way I said this is perfect.
01:04:12.853 --> 01:04:26.493
[SPEAKER_00]: So next began that process of moving hundreds of shelves they had to be because they were constructed out there at the bookstore they had to be broke unscrewed and the nails taken out and then struck how long was this process?
01:04:26.513 --> 01:04:26.974
[SPEAKER_00]: What was
01:04:26.954 --> 01:04:39.436
[SPEAKER_00]: uh that only took about two months uh but moving the show but that was so perfect because the versatility and the different sizes of the shelves accommodated 175,000 albums that I have.
01:04:39.596 --> 01:04:47.531
[SPEAKER_01]: How is it set up now so that a visitor can come in and and if they want to kind of look for something is it by category?
01:04:47.611 --> 01:04:47.811
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
01:04:48.112 --> 01:04:48.372
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
01:04:48.352 --> 01:05:15.102
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there are categories and interesting that you bring that up because just yesterday I spent about four hours with a couple of people from the bird regarding the next installation, which is going to be rock and roll fashion and I spent, you know, maybe two weeks working on extricating content that is appropriate for that subject and that display and installation is going to be in the bird for probably four or five months.
01:05:15.082 --> 01:05:16.364
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, I don't know.
01:05:16.484 --> 01:05:17.426
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, here's the critical thing.
01:05:17.446 --> 01:05:18.307
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't sell anything.
01:05:18.448 --> 01:05:19.970
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't know this for sale.
01:05:19.990 --> 01:05:20.251
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
01:05:20.271 --> 01:05:23.216
[SPEAKER_00]: Funny thing is in the early days of the Norwegian Space Center.
01:05:23.236 --> 01:05:25.139
[SPEAKER_00]: It was an open house for all the tenants.
01:05:25.840 --> 01:05:27.803
[SPEAKER_00]: And I let some people come in.
01:05:28.184 --> 01:05:31.349
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was a woman who came from the back of the area towards the front.
01:05:31.449 --> 01:05:36.077
[SPEAKER_00]: Their arms were full and she said to me, who do I pay exclusively for curating?
01:05:36.057 --> 01:05:36.638
[SPEAKER_00]: exactly.
01:05:36.718 --> 01:05:41.647
[SPEAKER_00]: I do installations, everything I retain ownership of everything, everything, however, is for lease.
01:05:41.667 --> 01:05:45.534
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's nothing that I keep on the sidelines that are so precious that I wouldn't put out there.
01:05:45.554 --> 01:05:49.101
[SPEAKER_01]: And you have no intention whatsoever, selling individuals.
01:05:49.581 --> 01:05:54.370
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been corded by people, including hedge fund, you know, money,
01:05:54.350 --> 01:06:06.125
[SPEAKER_00]: But, and I've watched with some starkness of seeing the value of things, you know, that a make-in-manel baseball rookie card can go for $12.6 million.
01:06:06.285 --> 01:06:11.052
[SPEAKER_00]: And David Gilmore Pink Floyd guitar can go for $14 million.
01:06:11.092 --> 01:06:12.754
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember, Billious worth a lot of money now?
01:06:12.774 --> 01:06:13.675
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly, yeah.
01:06:13.655 --> 01:06:14.176
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
01:06:14.196 --> 01:06:19.524
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, so it's the trash of yesterday or the treasures of today.
01:06:19.684 --> 01:06:20.245
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
01:06:20.385 --> 01:06:22.909
[SPEAKER_01]: And on that note, I appreciate the time.
01:06:23.249 --> 01:06:24.431
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for coming by.
01:06:24.471 --> 01:06:28.577
[SPEAKER_01]: It's obvious that David Bieber archives is in front of me.
01:06:29.859 --> 01:06:32.944
[SPEAKER_01]: I appreciate you taking me through and back in time.
01:06:33.325 --> 01:06:35.287
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's just an amazing place.
01:06:35.848 --> 01:06:41.637
[SPEAKER_01]: And people should participate in David Bieber's archives because it's an extraordinary walk through time.
01:06:41.617 --> 01:06:42.999
[SPEAKER_00]: Well I appreciate all those words.
01:06:43.099 --> 01:06:49.549
[SPEAKER_00]: I work with some great people like Chuck White and Joe Packard and Lance Salimo and Kevin Rutan.
01:06:49.629 --> 01:06:51.992
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, it's not just singularly me.
01:06:52.072 --> 01:06:59.162
[SPEAKER_00]: I've saved these things, but you know, we are a good force of nature to externalize everything that I have.
01:06:59.223 --> 01:07:03.909
[SPEAKER_00]: Anybody wants to find me, you can go to Davidbeberarchives.com.
01:07:03.929 --> 01:07:05.311
[SPEAKER_00]: Beber's phone like Justin.
01:07:05.532 --> 01:07:09.177
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't get his checks
01:07:09.157 --> 01:07:19.158
[SPEAKER_00]: None of the less in archives with an S so you know I'm not open to the public but by special arrangement if you contact me I would be glad to provide a tour.
01:07:19.418 --> 01:07:25.030
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's leave it on that note and thanks for joining us today and I learned to fly with you.
01:07:25.291 --> 01:07:28.397
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm like it was a great experience you hit all the high notes.
01:07:35.060 --> 01:07:35.841
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for joining.
01:07:36.362 --> 01:07:42.289
[SPEAKER_01]: We hope you listen to our next episode as we continue to bring an extraordinary people willing to tell their stories.
01:07:42.950 --> 01:07:48.397
[SPEAKER_01]: And remember, no matter the odds, no matter the circumstances, no matter what life may bring.
01:07:48.998 --> 01:07:58.350
[SPEAKER_02]: There's an opportunity for greatness within each of us when we learn to fly.
00:08.283 --> 00:13.712
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello, and welcome to Learning Defline, a podcast about what it takes to win.
00:14.373 --> 00:19.762
[SPEAKER_01]: The path to success is never a straight line, and there's always a story behind it.
00:20.563 --> 00:31.000
[SPEAKER_01]: Each episode will host leaders in business, music, sports and entertainment, and will discuss the obstacles they overcame to compete, triumph, and eventually dominate.
00:30.980 --> 00:42.793
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm your host, Bruce Midman, CEO of Midcom, a full-service ad agency in Boston, and also co-founder of Community Broadcasters, a network of 36 radio stations along these coasts.
00:42.813 --> 00:51.002
[SPEAKER_01]: Over the last 40-plus years, I've traveled to more than 40 countries, and I've seen firsthand what drives the best of the best.
00:51.723 --> 00:56.228
[SPEAKER_01]: So join me on a journey as we learn together what it takes to fly.
00:58.975 --> 01:04.685
[SPEAKER_01]: Today, I'm excited to welcome David Bieber, a Boston music, and media veteran and friend.
01:05.206 --> 01:15.364
[SPEAKER_01]: David has worked at some of the city's most iconic radio stations and contributed to publications like the Rolling Stones Illustrated History Rock and Roll, the Boston Globe and the Smithsonian.
01:15.344 --> 01:28.484
[SPEAKER_01]: Over 50-plus years, David has built an archive of more than one million artifacts, preserving pieces of pop culture, music, and media, for vintage vinyl and movie member billionaire to original Andy Warhol Art.
01:28.884 --> 01:32.830
[SPEAKER_01]: He earned his master's degree in journalism for Boston University.
01:32.810 --> 01:40.322
[SPEAKER_01]: and got to start the college reporting for Billboard magazine in everyone's legends like Ray Charles, Louis Armstrong, and Johnny Carson.
01:40.642 --> 01:47.393
[SPEAKER_01]: His story career includes roles at WBCN, the Boston Phoenix, WFNX, and WBUR.
01:47.713 --> 02:00.032
[SPEAKER_01]: Today David continues his impressive work at his company, David Bieber Archives, collecting and preserving culture guided by the belief that today's transitory creations are treasures of the future.
02:01.919 --> 02:04.908
[SPEAKER_01]: David, welcome, nice to have you.
02:04.948 --> 02:11.507
[SPEAKER_01]: Good seeing you the other night at my son's little event and thank you for joining us and making your presence known.
02:11.572 --> 02:18.378
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a pleasure to be with you Bruce, we have a long and rich history and a very delightful future ahead of us as well.
02:18.398 --> 02:19.179
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, let's hope so.
02:19.379 --> 02:20.400
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
02:20.560 --> 02:25.664
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, it was great seeing you and I'm really excited to kind of get into this today.
02:25.684 --> 02:35.573
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you have a unique experience in the pop culture world as well as the media world and music world.
02:35.653 --> 02:38.936
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've been in and out of that a couple of times with you in life.
02:39.136 --> 02:41.578
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we can cheer a little bit of
02:41.558 --> 02:43.340
[SPEAKER_01]: But where did it all begin?
02:43.480 --> 02:46.564
[SPEAKER_01]: Where did the David Bieber story start?
02:46.645 --> 02:48.347
[SPEAKER_00]: Begin in Cleveland, Ohio.
02:48.367 --> 02:50.029
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know you were from Cleveland.
02:50.049 --> 02:50.570
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I am.
02:51.050 --> 02:54.975
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's best to say that you're from Cleveland, rather than still being stuck there.
02:55.236 --> 02:56.758
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know, Cleveland is a good city.
02:56.858 --> 02:57.599
[SPEAKER_00]: It really is.
02:58.280 --> 03:04.107
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that people, you know, have a kind of image from 60s and 70s.
03:04.087 --> 03:10.793
[SPEAKER_00]: little disparaging, you know, the mayor said his hair on fire, doing a ceremonial event.
03:10.813 --> 03:25.706
[SPEAKER_00]: I would expect that to be in Providence, you know, but, well, especially with the mayor of Seattle, that mayor is wearing a toothpaste, but, you know, not only into the mayor's hair, you catch on fire, but Lake Erie apparently caught on fire as well.
03:26.007 --> 03:27.568
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it was a Kyoga River.
03:27.588 --> 03:27.928
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
03:27.988 --> 03:32.052
[SPEAKER_00]: If you quote from Chrissy Heinz, Pretender's lyrics,
03:32.032 --> 03:37.624
[SPEAKER_00]: So, it was a good place to be from, a good place, I came to ask you to go up there.
03:37.764 --> 03:40.951
[SPEAKER_01]: I grew up there, and when did you come to college and Boston, who's up there?
03:40.971 --> 03:48.707
[SPEAKER_00]: I came to, well actually, my undergraduate days were spent initially at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
03:48.847 --> 03:51.272
[SPEAKER_00]: I was a business major, I began there.
03:51.252 --> 03:59.859
[SPEAKER_00]: And while I was there, in my sophomore year, when you had the opportunity to do electives, I took a couple of classes in the journalism department.
04:00.320 --> 04:02.842
[SPEAKER_00]: And I discovered that I really, really enjoyed that.
04:03.082 --> 04:05.744
[SPEAKER_00]: I was also at age 18.
04:06.925 --> 04:17.434
[SPEAKER_00]: When I went to the Miami University Library, I was reading Billboard Magazine, which was back then the cost prohibited subscription annual price was $15 a year.
04:17.494 --> 04:19.516
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, I think this pandemic was a library.
04:19.556 --> 04:20.837
[SPEAKER_00]: That's absolutely.
04:20.817 --> 04:37.645
[SPEAKER_00]: And I saw about a two paragraph article in the magazine that said we're starting up a billboard campus correspondence department and send us a reason why you might want to be a campus correspondence and I
04:37.625 --> 04:46.255
[SPEAKER_00]: wrote and got the gig and I think I was paid for every interview or feature that I wrote $10 and $5 albums So now you go to Ford's a subscription.
04:46.275 --> 04:55.205
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well actually that was a compliment your subscription was Oh, they did so there's there's another 15 bucks exactly and I saved every issue of course So that was your entry point.
04:55.305 --> 05:00.291
[SPEAKER_01]: That one through billboard really and I and tell us something about that experience
05:00.271 --> 05:07.923
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, it was just incredible to be a teenager getting a buy line in a national publication.
05:08.224 --> 05:18.680
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that was a turning point that convinced me that unfortunately, I love being at Miami University, but they had only select journalism courses in the English Department.
05:18.700 --> 05:19.862
[SPEAKER_00]: You couldn't get a degree.
05:20.483 --> 05:24.870
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was during the Vietnam War that was... What you were supposed to...
05:24.890 --> 05:27.274
[SPEAKER_00]: This was 64, 65.
05:27.254 --> 05:39.152
[SPEAKER_00]: And I realized that I had to make a seamless transition to go from Miami and I transferred to Kent State, which was in Northern Ohio about 35 miles south of Italy.
05:39.172 --> 05:43.118
[SPEAKER_00]: We knew at Kent State during the shooting of the students.
05:43.458 --> 05:45.261
[SPEAKER_00]: I graduated in your afternoon.
05:45.281 --> 05:46.323
[SPEAKER_00]: And a year before that.
05:46.383 --> 05:47.224
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so it was 72.
05:47.244 --> 05:48.146
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the 70s.
05:48.166 --> 05:48.907
[SPEAKER_00]: 70s.
05:49.107 --> 05:49.968
[SPEAKER_00]: May 4th, 1970.
05:50.349 --> 05:52.452
[SPEAKER_00]: OK, oh, thank you.
05:52.432 --> 05:56.822
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't know our facts and figures, but that's all.
05:56.862 --> 05:59.147
[SPEAKER_00]: Soldiers and victims come out of it.
05:59.167 --> 05:59.668
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
05:59.688 --> 06:04.720
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's nothing more impactful and seeing nearly young actually do that live.
06:05.361 --> 06:11.976
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw them with the Wang Bach Center theater maybe five, six years ago.
06:11.956 --> 06:19.984
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I saw a new young at in New York in 1969 with a new young in crazy words.
06:20.004 --> 06:20.404
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah.
06:20.685 --> 06:21.445
[SPEAKER_01]: Just incredible.
06:21.465 --> 06:22.246
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
06:22.406 --> 06:23.347
[SPEAKER_00]: Very stoned evening.
06:23.387 --> 06:25.209
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got stoned just being there.
06:25.610 --> 06:26.150
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
06:26.170 --> 06:26.270
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
06:26.290 --> 06:28.893
[SPEAKER_00]: I've had those experiences by Marley in the way.
06:28.913 --> 06:30.014
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a pause mall.
06:30.074 --> 06:30.775
[SPEAKER_00]: Nice.
06:30.795 --> 06:32.496
[SPEAKER_00]: A pause mall was great.
06:32.516 --> 06:33.437
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like 1973.
06:33.457 --> 06:37.562
[SPEAKER_00]: It was in the early reggae days.
06:37.982 --> 06:38.082
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
06:38.062 --> 06:41.711
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, music was very cool and it still has this very cool.
06:41.811 --> 06:55.564
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, so basically because of the war, I had just a couple of months to make that transition to go from Miami to Kent and they did have a total of journalism department where I
06:55.544 --> 07:01.694
[SPEAKER_00]: was glad to be there and kind of my journalism and writing career flourish there.
07:01.754 --> 07:07.343
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote a number of pieces for the Kent Stateer, which was the daily newspaper.
07:07.383 --> 07:11.569
[SPEAKER_00]: I was covering things like I did a five-part series on drugs on campus.
07:12.150 --> 07:15.716
[SPEAKER_00]: I did another extended series on Seth Duncampus.
07:16.096 --> 07:20.303
[SPEAKER_00]: And these were picked up by the Akwin Beacon Journal.
07:20.283 --> 07:21.865
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you were a journalist.
07:22.005 --> 07:26.211
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, even as a student, I was an active journalist.
07:26.231 --> 07:32.380
[SPEAKER_00]: I won a National Herst Writing Achievement Award.
07:32.660 --> 07:34.803
[SPEAKER_00]: I was published in a book called Story.
07:35.705 --> 07:49.564
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was just very heartening to not just go through the paces of the courses, but to see an externalization of the things that I was writing in the
07:49.544 --> 08:08.785
[SPEAKER_00]: just being able to directly connect with all the performers who came to campus and kind of be an eyewitness to the transition of, you know, initially the student boards that book talent would bring people that or, you know, stand gets in the jazz category.
08:08.765 --> 08:19.580
[SPEAKER_00]: But moving over into more rock category, I can remember interviewing everyone from the temptations to the Johnson bastion and 11 spoonful, Frankie Valley in the four seasons.
08:20.541 --> 08:23.065
[SPEAKER_00]: Chad and Jeremy, the list goes on.
08:23.485 --> 08:24.907
[SPEAKER_00]: We could just do the laundry.
08:24.967 --> 08:28.953
[SPEAKER_01]: Then they were probably excited to get interviewed because there wasn't the internet.
08:29.193 --> 08:31.637
[SPEAKER_01]: You were the internet.
08:31.677 --> 08:33.079
[SPEAKER_01]: You had a lot of power.
08:33.820 --> 08:35.582
[SPEAKER_01]: The pen was
08:35.562 --> 08:47.081
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly and there wasn't even a Rolling Stone magazine at that point so that you know getting some national press in the so-called Bible of the music business billboard It was a big deal.
08:47.101 --> 09:02.346
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it really was and like I say just you know being able to show my parents a by-line in a magazine They're figuring their investment to get off exactly you're you're there down that was the 70s Yeah, what was your next move
09:02.326 --> 09:13.025
[SPEAKER_00]: I came to Boston because once again, the war was still ongoing and as having a student deferment was the best way to have your life, yes I remember that period.
09:13.045 --> 09:14.067
[SPEAKER_01]: So what was your number?
09:14.267 --> 09:15.209
[SPEAKER_01]: What was your lottery now?
09:15.269 --> 09:20.819
[SPEAKER_00]: The funny thing was that for some reason, this was something that people today can't appreciate.
09:20.919 --> 09:21.280
[SPEAKER_00]: But
09:21.260 --> 09:41.462
[SPEAKER_00]: you know there was a draft going on and then to make everything equal it was determined that you were no longer going to be vulnerable based on whether you were married or not or had a student deferment it was everybody's birthday was you know 366 numbers were placed into a ball and randomly pick
09:41.442 --> 09:44.709
[SPEAKER_00]: and it was a national television and radio event.
09:44.829 --> 09:45.911
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody was glued.
09:46.131 --> 09:47.033
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember it well.
09:47.053 --> 09:50.180
[SPEAKER_00]: And for some reason, I was at home in Cleveland with my parents.
09:50.240 --> 09:51.242
[SPEAKER_00]: I was sitting in the kitchen.
09:51.382 --> 09:54.288
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think we had a phone call on something that happened.
09:54.408 --> 09:56.232
[SPEAKER_00]: And I missed the first 10 numbers.
09:56.252 --> 10:02.725
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you're on edge on a continuous basis as to where's my number called in the first 10.
10:02.705 --> 10:17.328
[SPEAKER_01]: It turned out that I was in the high hundreds, and, well, you know, interesting similar story for myself, I was waiting in with friends, of course, and I knew my number would be ugly because that's just the kind of luck I have.
10:17.348 --> 10:18.890
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure enough, it was 99.
10:19.451 --> 10:22.536
[SPEAKER_01]: For me, which was interesting, is that they got up to 98.
10:22.616 --> 10:25.320
[SPEAKER_01]: I got up my physical notice.
10:25.300 --> 10:31.350
[SPEAKER_01]: and I split the U.S. for a year and traveled to Europe, Africa, and Asia, overland.
10:31.491 --> 10:43.832
[SPEAKER_01]: It was frankly a positive experience because it allowed me at the age of 21, 22 to see the world travel on my own around the world.
10:43.812 --> 10:56.033
[SPEAKER_01]: And because I wasn't going to Vietnam, I mean, Vietnam is unlike the wars today, or any other, it was just ludicrous, so we're killing Vietnamese for no reason.
10:56.053 --> 10:56.173
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
10:56.854 --> 11:00.100
[SPEAKER_00]: But how did you experience knowing your,
11:00.080 --> 11:01.442
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what's his man?
11:01.622 --> 11:06.428
[SPEAKER_01]: So here's here's the this is the definition of Bruce Okay, they're up to 98.
11:06.508 --> 11:08.350
[SPEAKER_01]: I get a note in grease.
11:08.370 --> 11:15.499
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd been gone for eight months my mother I'd back then when you traveled you could leave Mail at American Express offices.
11:15.739 --> 11:17.722
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, so I would check in every city.
11:17.742 --> 11:21.126
[SPEAKER_01]: I was in to see what was if my parents were sending me notes
11:21.106 --> 11:23.992
[SPEAKER_01]: And my mom said, oh, they stopped at 98.
11:24.273 --> 11:25.095
[SPEAKER_01]: You can come home.
11:25.415 --> 11:26.357
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god.
11:26.638 --> 11:26.818
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
11:26.838 --> 11:27.580
[SPEAKER_01]: Which you talk about.
11:27.620 --> 11:28.883
[SPEAKER_00]: Living on the razor's head.
11:28.923 --> 11:30.185
[SPEAKER_01]: Which is the story of my life.
11:30.246 --> 11:31.188
[SPEAKER_01]: It hasn't changed.
11:31.208 --> 11:31.468
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
11:31.488 --> 11:33.192
[SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, I remember the period.
11:33.212 --> 11:34.795
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, so you're now in Boston.
11:34.815 --> 11:35.216
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
11:35.336 --> 11:39.044
[SPEAKER_01]: Boston was kind of a fun environment in the 70s.
11:39.104 --> 11:39.766
[SPEAKER_01]: Having been here.
11:39.786 --> 11:40.948
[SPEAKER_01]: I was at Northeastern.
11:41.249 --> 11:41.409
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
11:41.630 --> 11:41.730
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
11:41.710 --> 11:52.800
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a Boston University, I was going for my master's degree, and you guys were, well, were you, you guys were beating us up in being part and we couldn't win a game if you beg for it.
11:53.881 --> 12:07.813
[SPEAKER_01]: But what was your, I was, I was a marketing major, but I went, I had my co-op job was at Arnold's company, so I got into advertising in the 60s, believe it or not, and 69 to 72.
12:07.893 --> 12:10.215
[SPEAKER_01]: I was at Arnold and ended up coming back.
12:10.195 --> 12:21.873
[SPEAKER_01]: back in the 70s to 80s as a senior VP of the company for 10 years, so it was a great way to get into the business, but we're here for you.
12:22.013 --> 12:24.697
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, thank you for interviewing me though.
12:24.957 --> 12:26.159
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I'm one hand washing down.
12:26.199 --> 12:28.302
[SPEAKER_01]: Now we're in the 70s and what are we doing?
12:28.443 --> 12:31.227
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I got my other, you're getting your graduate.
12:31.287 --> 12:36.034
[SPEAKER_00]: I got my master's degree in Journal and Journal and Boston University.
12:36.014 --> 12:47.690
[SPEAKER_00]: Then I thought that Boston is too small city with too many talented people and I'm probably going to have to leave, you know, and I literally came to Boston with one suitcase.
12:47.870 --> 12:49.913
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know anything about Boston.
12:50.734 --> 12:57.904
[SPEAKER_00]: I just knew that the segue from undergraduate to graduate was was vital for my own life preservation.
12:57.884 --> 13:01.949
[SPEAKER_00]: And getting the degree was quite wonderful.
13:02.009 --> 13:11.442
[SPEAKER_00]: I did a Massachusetts that was about 160 pages on the underground media in the country.
13:12.123 --> 13:17.069
[SPEAKER_00]: And how, well, that was your focus for the next 40 years.
13:17.169 --> 13:17.630
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
13:17.690 --> 13:18.291
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
13:18.351 --> 13:20.934
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a prelude to this pretty much, who is my life.
13:20.994 --> 13:21.715
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
13:21.695 --> 13:40.513
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was a housing period for so much in the so-called underground when it's underground pressed like Boston after dark in the Cambridge Phoenix and the publications like broadside and evidence even on Boston after dark back then oh yeah, that was and that we that was what 74
13:40.493 --> 13:48.395
[SPEAKER_00]: Even earlier, you know, I mean, Steven was in charge probably in 69 70 step when I was in graduate school.
13:48.435 --> 13:56.157
[SPEAKER_01]: We had case studies and one of the case studies was on Steve Mendesch I'm really and and the experience that he had when he was buying
13:56.626 --> 13:58.028
[SPEAKER_01]: Boston after dark.
13:58.549 --> 14:19.085
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and how he lost all the money the night before he was supposed to close and had a fine money And yeah, we buy it so it just shows the kind of spirit and entrepreneur and and as we both know Stephen was an amazing character in Boston and an amazing leader We wasn't who we miss dear.
14:19.105 --> 14:20.507
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly and
14:20.487 --> 14:35.610
[SPEAKER_00]: one of the most resilient, resilient teamwork, yeah, I mean, and he was determined either joyously or grimly to achieve whatever his mission was and, you know, not to be denied.
14:35.590 --> 14:35.870
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
14:36.071 --> 14:47.730
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, and for decades, he played whack-a-mo with his competitor as either putting them on a business buying them emerging with them and it was always another one that thought they could eat his lunch and then he ate there.
14:47.850 --> 14:48.751
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
14:48.912 --> 14:49.813
[SPEAKER_00]: And he ate all of ours.
14:49.993 --> 14:50.134
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
14:50.154 --> 14:55.843
[SPEAKER_00]: He was one of the first people that I met in Boston and you worked for Steve back then.
14:55.823 --> 15:02.737
[SPEAKER_00]: No, actually I was a freelance writer, initially, but I imagine he used mostly freelance back then anyway.
15:02.757 --> 15:08.368
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, he had dedicated department hints, so there was a music editor and there was an arts editor.
15:08.409 --> 15:14.541
[SPEAKER_01]: So for people that don't know, we should, you know, who are listening to this, describe the Boston after dark.
15:14.521 --> 15:36.310
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, as I started to say about the underground media that I was covering, and really the thrust of my thesis was how the underground media, whether it was the press or underground radio and body by WBCN, which started on March 15, 1968, or underground films, all of these different media were impacting and changing.
15:36.290 --> 15:45.354
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, not only counter, but the traditional media, which really had a stranglehold on readership, eyeballs, attention, ears, everything.
15:45.414 --> 15:46.076
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm perspective.
15:46.096 --> 15:46.958
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
15:47.299 --> 15:50.487
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was really a totally turbulent time.
15:50.547 --> 15:53.134
[SPEAKER_00]: I often say that 60s began.
15:53.114 --> 16:02.409
[SPEAKER_00]: with the Kennedy assassination November 22, 1963, and ended in Nixon's resignation in August 1974.
16:02.470 --> 16:16.573
[SPEAKER_00]: So it doesn't actually fit the calendar per se, but that was on 11-year stretch, where there was so much turmoil, so much transition, so much change,
16:16.553 --> 16:20.681
[SPEAKER_00]: in the world, in the culture, and it was not just even a domestic situation.
16:20.741 --> 16:32.944
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you had, you know, after Kennedy, the British invasion, the Beatles coming on board, and subsequent, you know, just you could use almost music as the embodiment of the transition from month to month.
16:33.044 --> 16:35.068
[SPEAKER_01]: That was an incredible period to grow up.
16:35.088 --> 16:35.669
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, things like that.
16:35.689 --> 16:36.250
[SPEAKER_01]: And experience.
16:36.230 --> 16:40.214
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and there was no road map, you know, everything was on the map.
16:40.274 --> 16:54.067
[SPEAKER_01]: It's similar in many ways to today's explosion and chaos created by AI and the internet and social media and things are changing as dramatically and as quickly as they did, I believe.
16:54.288 --> 16:56.690
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, if history would be really, yeah, and I agree with you.
16:56.830 --> 17:05.038
[SPEAKER_00]: And if history repeats itself when we took point, I think as we did probably in the early
17:05.018 --> 17:11.089
[SPEAKER_00]: The citizen, where you will reach a point collectively of exhaustion, they won't be able to take it.
17:11.109 --> 17:11.970
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm exhausted right now.
17:12.131 --> 17:12.632
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
17:12.772 --> 17:14.515
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that was a period of disruptors.
17:14.675 --> 17:14.876
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
17:14.916 --> 17:16.619
[SPEAKER_01]: No different than the disruptors now.
17:16.819 --> 17:17.019
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
17:17.200 --> 17:18.121
[SPEAKER_01]: And I agree with you.
17:18.141 --> 17:24.613
[SPEAKER_01]: That period probably, you know, for me it was more like 60, six to about,
17:24.593 --> 17:33.682
[SPEAKER_01]: That's 75, 74, 75 things started to change and it was pretty much a disco kind of a movement.
17:33.782 --> 17:43.272
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the nature of the economics of the country, the famous New York tabloid front page headline for it to New York City drop dead.
17:43.652 --> 17:47.116
[SPEAKER_00]: It was about, you know, don't depend on the federal government for it.
17:47.136 --> 17:48.217
[SPEAKER_00]: New York was going bankrupt.
17:48.277 --> 17:49.498
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
17:49.558 --> 17:54.583
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so New York was looking for funding from the federal government for, you know,
17:54.563 --> 18:05.160
[SPEAKER_01]: Boston back then, I have a much warmer feeling for Boston of that period because it was small, manageable, everybody knew everybody and you could really make an impact in town.
18:05.841 --> 18:10.008
[SPEAKER_01]: Less opportunity, but made for a much more entrepreneurial environment.
18:10.048 --> 18:14.715
[SPEAKER_01]: Boston now is not as accessible as city,
18:14.695 --> 18:19.280
[SPEAKER_01]: in terms of people and interactions that it once was.
18:19.541 --> 18:28.631
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what I kind of addressed earlier in terms of thinking I had to leave the city because it was small and all the good jobs and all the good opportunities were kind of taken.
18:28.651 --> 18:41.125
[SPEAKER_00]: But in reality, I connected very fortuitously with a person who had just become the assistant general manager at WBU, RADO and a guy named Clark Smith who was a clerk.
18:41.105 --> 18:56.438
[SPEAKER_00]: I never knew Clark was up here, he just started there, he had built his college radio station from the ground up, he knew engineering, Clark has a very amazing background, a great broadcast, and still active still out there if you haven't.
18:56.899 --> 18:58.523
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyhow, let's me know
18:58.503 --> 19:05.335
[SPEAKER_00]: Clarke, Clarke, Clarke gave Clarke a copy of my thesis on the Underground Media.
19:05.675 --> 19:11.345
[SPEAKER_00]: He read it and he said, you know, I graduated in August of 70.
19:11.365 --> 19:19.179
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, which would like to be the music director of WBWR, which at that point, the station played all kinds of music, very eclectic.
19:19.920 --> 19:21.743
[SPEAKER_00]: They played,
19:21.723 --> 19:23.265
[SPEAKER_00]: classical music in the mornings.
19:23.285 --> 19:27.891
[SPEAKER_00]: They had what the term hadn't even been applied yet, but it was world music in the afternoon.
19:28.952 --> 19:31.035
[SPEAKER_00]: On weekends, they were heavy with jazz.
19:32.116 --> 19:44.772
[SPEAKER_00]: From midnight to six, they had a guy named John Hawkeheimer, aka Hawke, who played underground music with eyes shut as far as the FCC was concerned.
19:44.792 --> 19:44.912
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
19:44.892 --> 19:48.540
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was no same harbor midnight to six back then.
19:49.261 --> 19:51.707
[SPEAKER_00]: So he jeopardized the license every night.
19:51.827 --> 19:54.292
[SPEAKER_00]: That was truly experimental reading.
19:54.312 --> 19:55.074
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it really was.
19:55.114 --> 20:02.029
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was responsible for bringing acts to the station, dealing with the record companies.
20:02.831 --> 20:05.196
[SPEAKER_01]: Among that, then there was a very active.
20:05.176 --> 20:18.388
[SPEAKER_01]: record promotion of their system of adding records of supporting records, which is missing frankly from radio, even though they believe, I think incorrectly, that digital is their pathway.
20:18.428 --> 20:20.890
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not digital is their distribution point.
20:20.910 --> 20:22.051
[SPEAKER_01]: They haven't figured that out.
20:22.071 --> 20:26.035
[SPEAKER_01]: Radio is still very much a deliverer of new music.
20:26.435 --> 20:27.176
[SPEAKER_00]: I agree.
20:27.296 --> 20:34.963
[SPEAKER_01]: It's certainly a vital component of it's
20:34.943 --> 20:45.073
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, back then, radio was the dumbest and the people that we had, what happened is that we were flourishing doing quite well.
20:45.173 --> 20:57.046
[SPEAKER_00]: John Silver came on board as the president of Boston University and he decided that unlike other college radio stations generally, which were 10 watts or on the left-hand side of the dial, which, you know, B.R.
20:57.086 --> 20:59.348
[SPEAKER_00]: was at 90.9, you know, he up the power.
20:59.328 --> 21:14.350
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and it became a 50,000 watt flame thrower and basically he wanted control of it so by the end of 71, he turned his staff 32 into three and took control any house on that jump sober.
21:14.330 --> 21:23.093
[SPEAKER_00]: And in that period, we accomplished a lot and the people who came through that I interviewed range from Paul Cantner from the Jefferson Airplane.
21:23.795 --> 21:28.687
[SPEAKER_00]: He did a five hour stint with the great promotion person from RCA Don Delacy.
21:29.650 --> 21:30.853
[SPEAKER_00]: Don Delacy, I know that man.
21:30.833 --> 21:50.558
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and done was such a trooper because Cantner came on and run 12 30 AM and he was the first person I ever saw using cocaine and he stayed until five in the morning on the air playing music being interviewed and Not surprising about two years later.
21:50.578 --> 21:55.264
[SPEAKER_00]: He had a significant heart attack when he was still very young, but he had a good rug.
21:55.364 --> 21:55.845
[SPEAKER_00]: He did.
21:55.825 --> 22:02.156
[SPEAKER_00]: And he had a daughter with a great slick name, China, and a great life until he passed.
22:02.236 --> 22:07.164
[SPEAKER_00]: And she's still out there in her 80s in California with a career as an artist.
22:07.545 --> 22:08.987
[SPEAKER_00]: But we had David Bowie.
22:09.107 --> 22:11.591
[SPEAKER_00]: Bowie did not even have a character.
22:12.052 --> 22:17.421
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not even have working papers to perform back in that era.
22:17.501 --> 22:19.084
[SPEAKER_01]: Which band was he with at that point?
22:19.104 --> 22:19.825
[SPEAKER_01]: Which album?
22:19.805 --> 22:23.092
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, he was still on Mercury.
22:23.192 --> 22:37.925
[SPEAKER_00]: He was before the big Ziggy and before he really conquered America and when I met him, I mean, the backstory to that little encounter was Bill Coleman was the promotion person for Mercury Records.
22:38.245 --> 22:39.889
[SPEAKER_00]: He was driving Bowie.
22:39.869 --> 22:53.642
[SPEAKER_00]: And John Landau, who was not only a writer, later became Bruce Springsteen's manager in producer, but at that point he was local and he was writing for the Cambridge Phoenix, and he was also the album reviews editor for Rolling Stone.
22:53.682 --> 22:54.925
[SPEAKER_00]: He lived in Cambridge.
22:54.905 --> 23:02.435
[SPEAKER_00]: Bill Coleman, black promotion guys, driving David Bowie in a dress in that dress period of his and John Landau.
23:02.455 --> 23:04.557
[SPEAKER_00]: The car is going down.
23:04.798 --> 23:05.739
[SPEAKER_00]: The car breaks down.
23:06.700 --> 23:12.808
[SPEAKER_00]: So the three of them start walking towards 640, 630 Commonwealth Avenue.
23:13.429 --> 23:17.154
[SPEAKER_00]: And Landau, it's after midnight Landau said I had enough of this.
23:17.194 --> 23:22.060
[SPEAKER_00]: He walked home because he lived in Cambridge, Port and he just had to go across the
23:22.040 --> 23:31.219
[SPEAKER_00]: Bowie and Coleman come up to the station and Santa say a two-hour interview was not captured because B.U.R.
23:31.239 --> 23:41.500
[SPEAKER_00]: was so impoverished we didn't even have tape and record the interview so you believe that words are flying somebody has the universe so many has it that we're listening at home.
23:41.480 --> 23:54.479
[SPEAKER_00]: hopefully but it was it was really quite spectacular and I knew who Boeing was because I read the British press melody maker and NME and sounds all kinds of publications.
23:54.499 --> 24:03.252
[SPEAKER_01]: I was a big listener to BBC back then I saw a short wave radio with my passion and discovered a lot of the British rock stars.
24:03.232 --> 24:03.733
[SPEAKER_01]: that way.
24:03.773 --> 24:08.302
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it was kind of a second wave, you know, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
24:08.322 --> 24:13.212
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but yeah, then you had all these acts that were playing the Boston Tea Party, you know, so you had Tea Party.
24:13.232 --> 24:15.096
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, Stuart, Jeff Ray's right in here.
24:15.116 --> 24:15.456
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
24:15.476 --> 24:17.340
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, let's definitely.
24:17.360 --> 24:18.262
[SPEAKER_01]: The who played there.
24:18.482 --> 24:21.128
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was, you know, I'm, I'm never going to keep party with you.
24:21.208 --> 24:21.308
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
24:21.288 --> 24:22.569
[SPEAKER_01]: just phenomenal.
24:22.590 --> 24:29.978
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, in my archives, I have a number of Boston Tea Party posters, you know, because every show that they did had his own unique poster.
24:30.218 --> 24:31.320
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was one poster.
24:32.161 --> 24:34.143
[SPEAKER_00]: They did two calendar posters.
24:34.443 --> 24:36.105
[SPEAKER_00]: One was in April of 1969.
24:36.726 --> 24:38.428
[SPEAKER_00]: The other was in May of 1969.
24:39.029 --> 24:43.534
[SPEAKER_00]: The main one is so saturated with talent, particularly British talent.
24:43.594 --> 24:45.456
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's overwhelming to think,
24:45.436 --> 25:03.901
[SPEAKER_00]: that shows like the who with Rassan, Roland Kirk, the great multi-instrumental jazz performer opened for them and they were doing Tommy, that Jeff Bech group with Rod Stewart on lead welcomes all of these acts, Led Zeppelin all of these acts were doing three nights.
25:04.442 --> 25:10.971
[SPEAKER_00]: The velvet underground was the underbill, the underbill from the velvet underground show was the almond brothers.
25:10.951 --> 25:13.855
[SPEAKER_00]: And all of these were available for 350 and 450.
25:14.356 --> 25:15.237
[SPEAKER_00]: And you have to remind me.
25:15.257 --> 25:17.741
[SPEAKER_00]: Do my people there was a decimal point in there?
25:17.761 --> 25:19.564
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it was in 350 hours in the past.
25:19.924 --> 25:22.628
[SPEAKER_01]: The access to that music back then was extraordinary.
25:22.769 --> 25:23.750
[SPEAKER_01]: Totally.
25:23.770 --> 25:26.114
[SPEAKER_01]: And you could see great stars.
25:26.134 --> 25:26.234
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
25:26.254 --> 25:28.177
[SPEAKER_01]: And A, they didn't think they were great stars.
25:28.597 --> 25:30.360
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were still struggling off of them.
25:30.380 --> 25:32.042
[SPEAKER_01]: And they weren't making the big bucks.
25:32.062 --> 25:32.163
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
25:32.183 --> 25:35.247
[SPEAKER_01]: So they were willing to go out and play every venue.
25:35.307 --> 25:35.828
[SPEAKER_01]: They could get
25:35.808 --> 25:47.801
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and there was a circuit in there and this basket had a great circuit, you know, of rock, well, you had this collection of colleges and collection of young people, so it was a natural destination for everybody.
25:47.841 --> 25:53.007
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and that in this city was kind of a taste maker at that point, you know, if you, if you.
25:53.027 --> 25:58.913
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like the first landing place either New York or Boston will wear all these British New York still is.
25:58.893 --> 26:05.365
[SPEAKER_01]: pretty much dominating, but Boston was becoming sort of the underground alternative destination.
26:05.385 --> 26:05.866
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
26:05.926 --> 26:14.061
[SPEAKER_00]: And had, you know, the publications like the boss came from Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge, Phoenix, Boston, and David Dark, which began the boss.
26:14.081 --> 26:14.863
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
26:14.983 --> 26:17.989
[SPEAKER_00]: And WBCN, which was really a radio platform.
26:18.991 --> 26:20.293
[SPEAKER_01]: Was that a radio station?
26:20.273 --> 26:39.666
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
26:39.764 --> 27:01.131
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, post termination, I was one of the 29 people in the John Silver Fired, not, not not to be walkin' personally and say, David, you're gone, no, no, we did not get a handshake and a check and a go and watch, no, it was very abrupt and people were very heartbroken because it worked so hard in that year.
27:01.111 --> 27:13.668
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, the great thing was the segue that I made was meeting all the record company promotion people and we bonded and it was back in that era as very social as well as professional interaction.
27:14.710 --> 27:17.994
[SPEAKER_01]: And because you have to live this lifestyle.
27:18.074 --> 27:18.996
[SPEAKER_00]: Totally successful.
27:19.136 --> 27:19.797
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't trust.
27:19.837 --> 27:20.618
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not just work.
27:20.678 --> 27:21.499
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a whole lifestyle.
27:21.479 --> 27:29.291
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not nine to five, it's probably more like 11 to two a.m. That's right, on occasion five a.m.
27:29.311 --> 27:29.832
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
27:30.193 --> 27:37.364
[SPEAKER_00]: But so a couple of the promotion people connected me with a company called Music Promotions.
27:37.765 --> 27:40.549
[SPEAKER_00]: And the guy who worked there was a guy named Danny Lipman.
27:40.930 --> 27:43.133
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a record veteran himself.
27:43.113 --> 27:59.867
[SPEAKER_00]: He represented, he kind of had a boutique advertising agency in the accounts that we had, and then I did all the creative work for, or the Wii A group of labels, Warner, Electric, Lannick, the Orson Welles, Cinema Complex, which I lived right down the street from.
28:00.148 --> 28:00.789
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Massette.
28:00.809 --> 28:01.771
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Massette.
28:01.791 --> 28:02.573
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
28:02.553 --> 28:08.981
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, that was a complex, it was a great complex, yeah, it was a restaurant, it was a restaurant, and also a performance area.
28:09.001 --> 28:10.883
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I saw some great bands.
28:10.903 --> 28:21.896
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, one of the magical nights, you know, one of the fixture films, you know, Don Laugh started his concerts right down the street from there in the mid 70s, like 75ish.
28:21.916 --> 28:25.700
[SPEAKER_00]: I do remember there was a place for writing in Harvard Square and Call of the Performance Center.
28:25.901 --> 28:28.864
[SPEAKER_00]: But one of the great moments,
28:28.844 --> 28:42.509
[SPEAKER_00]: The Orson Welles Cinema was famous for probably having a two or three year run of the Reggae oriented film that How did they come and that was probably very much instrumental in reggae blossoming and getting great movies It's a great alternative.
28:42.709 --> 28:43.671
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
28:43.691 --> 28:45.013
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I started easy ride over there
28:44.993 --> 28:45.854
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, exactly.
28:45.954 --> 28:46.194
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
28:46.214 --> 28:46.635
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
28:46.655 --> 28:47.095
[SPEAKER_00]: Great film.
28:47.115 --> 28:56.085
[SPEAKER_00]: And I mean, they did all kinds of, you know, once again going back to the underground sensibility, films like John Arowsky's El Tobo.
28:57.226 --> 28:57.346
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
28:57.426 --> 28:57.707
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyhow.
28:58.488 --> 29:03.593
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that was, you know, I lived in Cambridge show, like 72 to like 76.
29:03.673 --> 29:05.315
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a great area.
29:05.335 --> 29:06.376
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a great area.
29:06.556 --> 29:14.545
[SPEAKER_01]: And right down the street for more semester, I literally go every night to have some because, you know, a single guy and wasn't
29:14.525 --> 29:19.471
[SPEAKER_01]: So I would go there and listen in bands and a lot of great jazz.
29:19.491 --> 29:20.292
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
29:21.093 --> 29:21.313
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
29:21.353 --> 29:25.798
[SPEAKER_01]: It was really a leading edge kind of music experience.
29:25.938 --> 29:26.419
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
29:26.439 --> 29:40.195
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the nights that the harder they come was featured and Sam Copper, who was a DJ on WBCN, had come from the Orphium Theatre and he
29:40.175 --> 29:42.539
[SPEAKER_00]: came out after the film.
29:42.559 --> 29:44.362
[SPEAKER_00]: He said everybody's staying in seats.
29:44.402 --> 29:45.624
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got special surprise.
29:45.704 --> 29:48.869
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course people have been smoking and dope and then the whole deal.
29:48.949 --> 29:52.355
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they're kind of ruined and wasted at that point.
29:52.956 --> 29:54.959
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, guys, special surprise for you.
29:55.440 --> 29:55.500
[SPEAKER_00]: And
29:55.480 --> 30:01.266
[SPEAKER_00]: From side to the stage, it just took over everyone's mind, blew it away.
30:01.306 --> 30:06.711
[SPEAKER_00]: He brought a Jimmy Clip, the star of the film, who had just done a show at the Orphan Cools.
30:06.731 --> 30:07.031
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
30:07.152 --> 30:13.698
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was almost like a Woody Allen thing where they step off of the screen and walk into the crowd.
30:13.718 --> 30:14.399
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
30:14.419 --> 30:16.521
[SPEAKER_00]: And everybody's stone, so they're like, they couldn't believe it.
30:16.541 --> 30:17.702
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, they couldn't believe it.
30:17.762 --> 30:18.523
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
30:18.543 --> 30:19.063
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, sure.
30:19.083 --> 30:20.605
[SPEAKER_00]: So you live for those kinds of moments.
30:20.725 --> 30:24.829
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyhow, I was working at music promotions
30:24.809 --> 30:25.971
[SPEAKER_00]: No, not from BCN.
30:26.091 --> 30:35.785
[SPEAKER_00]: I was also freelancing for BCN at that point, writing articles, probably the first major local and national press that BCN got.
30:36.325 --> 30:40.031
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote about them for Billboard magazine.
30:40.091 --> 30:46.480
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote about BCN, a very extensive piece, which is still available up online for Boston Magazine.
30:46.460 --> 31:08.805
[SPEAKER_00]: uh for uh fusion magazine which at the time was the East Coast counterpart to Rolling Stone based at 909 Beacon Street uh uh Barry Globsky was the publisher and Robert Selma, the editor and they gave me the editorial real estate space to scratch out and do long features and among them was on BCN
31:08.785 --> 31:23.976
[SPEAKER_00]: Concurrent when I was doing the music promotions gig and one of the clients that was managed by music promotions was this new group called the modern lovers that included Jonathan Richmond
31:23.956 --> 31:36.191
[SPEAKER_00]: who later went on to great summer fame and now the issue is to want to make a roadrunner or dream on as the official state song of Massachusetts.
31:36.691 --> 31:42.839
[SPEAKER_00]: It hasn't been resolved yet, it's settled, but Joyce Linahan, a good friend of ours, is a petitioning for roadrunner.
31:42.939 --> 31:44.460
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyhow, Jonathan was in the band.
31:45.422 --> 31:49.947
[SPEAKER_00]: David Robinson, a leader, became the drummer for the modern up for the cars.
31:49.927 --> 32:01.608
[SPEAKER_00]: And Jerry Harrison, who joined the Talking Heads, or as they say it, Talking Heads, Noga, and Ernie Brooks, who was doing some work in New York as well.
32:01.669 --> 32:05.936
[SPEAKER_00]: But that was, you know, I wrote the band bio for the press kit.
32:06.017 --> 32:07.599
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that was one of my assignments.
32:07.720 --> 32:08.982
[SPEAKER_00]: When did you start at BCM?
32:08.962 --> 32:13.710
[SPEAKER_00]: I started BC, I freelance for about four or five years after a music promotion is closed down.
32:13.730 --> 32:21.743
[SPEAKER_00]: I started at BC in 1978 and what was your day-to-day responsibility?
32:21.783 --> 32:25.890
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure, it was a multitude of things, but what specifically were you focused on?
32:25.870 --> 32:31.678
[SPEAKER_00]: We all grew multiple heads and had multiple hats in those days back then you had to do everything Yeah, exactly.
32:31.698 --> 32:49.903
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was creative services director and that meant handling all the promotions with all the record companies, the film companies, any external promotions came just back then everybody came through BCN if you had something cool to talk about because it was the place to be heard.
32:49.883 --> 32:55.189
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, actually, what happened initially was from that period when it started in 68 until about 73, 74.
32:56.270 --> 33:03.299
[SPEAKER_00]: And then it went on a slow and steady decline in the aforementioned Clarke Smith became program director of a new station called CLZ.
33:03.319 --> 33:06.382
[SPEAKER_01]: CLZ, you know, and did an amazing introduction.
33:06.402 --> 33:08.745
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, they did a concert from fantasy.
33:08.765 --> 33:13.571
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and he started, you know, that was one of the best intros of a new format in Boston.
33:14.071 --> 33:15.553
[SPEAKER_01]: He sort of led the way there.
33:15.533 --> 33:19.740
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he picked the appropriate time when everyone else students come back September 1st.
33:20.221 --> 33:22.705
[SPEAKER_00]: He did on Labor Day weekend.
33:22.886 --> 33:23.707
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember I believe.
33:23.807 --> 33:24.408
[SPEAKER_00]: It's happening.
33:24.789 --> 33:24.889
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
33:24.909 --> 33:25.831
[SPEAKER_01]: You got to listen here.
33:25.851 --> 33:25.991
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
33:26.251 --> 33:27.053
[SPEAKER_01]: All the new music.
33:27.293 --> 33:28.295
[SPEAKER_01]: Just stay with us.
33:28.595 --> 33:35.427
[SPEAKER_00]: And what he did, if he created this whole illusion about the illusion is the perfect effort.
33:35.507 --> 33:35.708
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
33:35.728 --> 33:40.596
[SPEAKER_00]: Because basically he took all the live recordings of all the
33:40.576 --> 33:49.030
[SPEAKER_00]: popular acts of that era, you know, whether it was the Rolling Stones or Bob Seagre, and everything that had been glued to the radio in the whole weekend.
33:49.230 --> 33:58.365
[SPEAKER_00]: And he created this mythical event called Concert from Fantasy Island, and he introduced all these new DJs included Kent Shelton, and
33:58.345 --> 34:00.289
[SPEAKER_01]: My parental spasana work there.
34:00.309 --> 34:01.651
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if you remember spasana.
34:01.691 --> 34:07.662
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, his brother is my morning DJ at and more to time for 20s Just great person.
34:07.682 --> 34:11.990
[SPEAKER_01]: I the other spasana who used to work at CSE is in Rochester now.
34:12.010 --> 34:12.471
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, excellent.
34:12.491 --> 34:14.375
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, okay See them all the time.
34:14.395 --> 34:14.896
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
34:14.916 --> 34:15.337
[SPEAKER_00]: You're good.
34:15.357 --> 34:17.581
[SPEAKER_01]: I will send you I will send you best.
34:17.641 --> 34:17.721
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay
34:17.701 --> 34:19.143
[SPEAKER_00]: very good, very good.
34:19.163 --> 34:35.608
[SPEAKER_00]: So anyhow, I think what happened in 1975-76-77, BCN was on the decline, and their teammates were Hastings, who was the owner, who was kind of letting everything flow away, and he fortunately got a general manager named Cleedobra.
34:35.588 --> 34:39.832
[SPEAKER_00]: who and also a great program director named Tommy Hages.
34:40.333 --> 34:42.295
[SPEAKER_00]: And Tommy and Clea member, Tommy.
34:42.315 --> 34:42.475
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
34:42.595 --> 34:44.798
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was a woman that worked there.
34:45.639 --> 34:48.722
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I date, I dated her.
34:49.803 --> 34:53.066
[SPEAKER_01]: She was telling me, I just felt like I remember her as I am so sorry.
34:53.086 --> 34:56.870
[SPEAKER_01]: I never forgot what she said, but what's her name?
34:56.890 --> 34:59.453
[SPEAKER_01]: And she took me a concert to see the King's.
34:59.433 --> 35:18.345
[SPEAKER_01]: And then after we went and met Ray Davies and the band and here I am first time ever being associated with a rock band and a concert and we go to their hotel room and they're watching the baseball game and sitting having a beer and that was it.
35:18.385 --> 35:21.711
[SPEAKER_01]: That was that was that was my first rock experience.
35:21.691 --> 35:23.533
[SPEAKER_00]: Fill in the blanks if this is life.
35:23.553 --> 35:25.555
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, hello.
35:25.575 --> 35:26.556
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, so let's keep going.
35:26.777 --> 35:33.984
[SPEAKER_00]: So anyhow, that BCN under time he has this and Kleidoba were kind of reacting to the challenge.
35:34.004 --> 35:47.479
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the first moves that they made, Charles Lacmandera, by his own admission to taking a year off in 1977, and took a year off to explore the world of cocaine.
35:47.459 --> 35:49.902
[SPEAKER_00]: And he enjoyed that interesting world.
35:49.922 --> 35:50.964
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
35:51.444 --> 35:57.172
[SPEAKER_00]: And when he reaches breaking point, he agreed to Tommy's request that Charles come back.
35:57.232 --> 36:06.444
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been on WBCN and he just kind of gave it up and after his Europe indulgence, he still wasn't convinced that he and his broadcasting C-leg.
36:06.484 --> 36:14.013
[SPEAKER_00]: So he came back as a kind of no nuclear plume personality named Dwayne Ingles Glasscock.
36:14.354 --> 36:16.116
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, it is weekend shows.
36:16.096 --> 36:17.098
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
36:17.118 --> 36:21.868
[SPEAKER_00]: And that gave him the confidence to actually come back and do the morning mattress show.
36:22.288 --> 36:23.912
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that was one of the first hires.
36:23.932 --> 36:25.254
[SPEAKER_00]: I was one of the hires.
36:25.896 --> 36:38.020
[SPEAKER_00]: I for once words was kind of helpful in rating WC OZ and hiring Mark Parento and Ken Shelton who worked there and they came on board and that became
36:38.000 --> 36:46.273
[SPEAKER_00]: a formidable dominant, you know, team of broadcasters who held together for probably 15 years.
36:47.215 --> 36:48.056
[SPEAKER_00]: The same team.
36:48.216 --> 36:49.859
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a great sound, great.
36:49.879 --> 36:50.460
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
36:50.480 --> 36:57.751
[SPEAKER_00]: And usually, as you know, Bruce is a broadcaster, one year in radio is seven years in life.
36:57.932 --> 36:58.793
[SPEAKER_00]: And life in life.
36:58.773 --> 37:01.978
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, you know, it's like dog years to it's a real life.
37:02.519 --> 37:08.449
[SPEAKER_00]: And just to hold together these people, trials in the morning, can it mid days and mark in the afternoon?
37:08.469 --> 37:08.930
[SPEAKER_00]: God bless.
37:08.950 --> 37:10.252
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just so potent.
37:10.452 --> 37:12.115
[SPEAKER_00]: And we were off to the races.
37:12.135 --> 37:14.479
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, never challenges and speed bumps along the way.
37:14.960 --> 37:24.696
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, at a certain point where things just can keep getting better and better by the mid to late 80s, it was always in the
37:24.676 --> 37:33.188
[SPEAKER_00]: ratings in the 12 years old and over raw numbers, it was either WBCN was number one or kiss 108 was number one.
37:33.208 --> 37:38.616
[SPEAKER_00]: And such an impact on the culture and the city of Austin overall.
37:38.876 --> 37:43.964
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, we did a lot of giving back to blood drives and food drives.
37:44.064 --> 37:49.772
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, when Rishi created kiss, that was a major departure in the city as well.
37:49.752 --> 37:50.613
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly.
37:50.713 --> 38:07.778
[SPEAKER_01]: And so how these two Mammoth stations, but talking to two different communities, you know, the rock alternative world was a completely, you know, different humanity than the kiss world, which was clubbie, Dancy, but both captured probably
38:07.758 --> 38:20.153
[SPEAKER_00]: 80% of everyone 18, 49% exactly, amazing, amazing period, yeah, and very, you know, cultural dominance during that era.
38:20.173 --> 38:25.220
[SPEAKER_00]: And the theory was that, you know, everyone is your competitor.
38:25.280 --> 38:30.506
[SPEAKER_00]: If you look at one dollar as the financial pie that everyone carves up.
38:30.787 --> 38:33.630
[SPEAKER_01]: So you had Charles versus Maddie.
38:33.610 --> 38:39.440
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's a winning series, but you great winning personality is killing each other, trying to kill each other.
38:39.460 --> 38:43.667
[SPEAKER_00]: But in reality, good friends, because I'm at it actually work at BCN.
38:43.687 --> 38:43.808
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
38:43.828 --> 38:45.470
[SPEAKER_00]: That was an accelerating period.
38:45.751 --> 38:52.563
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, I think, you know, what happened, it was some kind of strange program.
38:52.583 --> 38:54.466
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, decisions made at BCN.
38:54.486 --> 38:55.548
[SPEAKER_00]: It was kind of weird.
38:56.369 --> 38:58.032
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like I went to the end of this camera.
38:58.079 --> 38:59.601
[SPEAKER_00]: No, he was on, he was on board.
38:59.661 --> 39:06.609
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, he started as Charles's kind of Quincy producer, one of the many producers.
39:06.629 --> 39:07.470
[SPEAKER_00]: Charles was smart.
39:07.891 --> 39:09.012
[SPEAKER_00]: He surrounded himself.
39:09.132 --> 39:21.707
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think, ultimately, out of his salary, he got very, you know, Mel Carmesan who was... Well, Mel did a great job making sure of the people that built that place, made money.
39:21.687 --> 39:43.813
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, and not only the history gave Charles enough money that he could use his salary as a budget to surround himself with talented producers and writers and at one point I think Charles had a team of more than a dozen people who are all contributing, you know, people would show up at five in the morning for the six a.m. shows.
39:43.793 --> 39:51.962
[SPEAKER_01]: missing from radios, that spontaneity, that excitement, that leading edge kind of intensity, that rarely exists.
39:52.222 --> 40:03.074
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it exists, but rarely exists in radios now, where you could try different stuff, and you can cross, pollinate across many different disciplines, but still make it work.
40:03.455 --> 40:03.555
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
40:03.575 --> 40:04.957
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not the way it is anymore.
40:05.017 --> 40:10.763
[SPEAKER_01]: Very channeled and very narrowly distributed in terms
40:10.743 --> 40:29.562
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and you can't do it if you're voice tracking, and you know, somebody in Denver is doing a show that does vocal, you know, or announcement drop in for a station, it in theapolis or, you know, is spending, you know, so four hour show, they can do it in, uh,
40:29.542 --> 40:35.770
[SPEAKER_00]: 42 minutes because they're just voice tracking the local information and the music is playing.
40:36.130 --> 40:38.774
[SPEAKER_00]: And the other thing is, you know, they're always looking at the clock.
40:38.794 --> 40:54.874
[SPEAKER_00]: They want to do more music less talk and there's the absence of the personality, you know, which, you know, I think it happened in the big league, so to speak, the major markets that, you know, the accident we're developing in the
40:54.854 --> 41:04.915
[SPEAKER_00]: They had no place to go, you know, they may have been talented, but they were then as they hit the big leagues, they were repressed, don't cock, don't be joking around, you know.
41:05.096 --> 41:09.145
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, they're worrying about their licenses, they're worrying about corporate.
41:09.385 --> 41:09.706
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
41:09.726 --> 41:10.327
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
41:10.668 --> 41:11.469
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was the difference.
41:11.610 --> 41:12.031
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
41:12.051 --> 41:13.133
[SPEAKER_01]: BCN was not corporate radio.
41:13.113 --> 41:15.376
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know, the mail was not court right.
41:15.556 --> 41:22.044
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean granted we did focus groups, but we only use that as a springboard to what we did.
41:22.125 --> 41:23.466
[SPEAKER_00]: We were not 10 or 10.
41:23.486 --> 41:24.608
[SPEAKER_00]: It was okay to use focus.
41:24.668 --> 41:26.410
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you can get information.
41:26.430 --> 41:27.672
[SPEAKER_00]: You can meet your audience.
41:27.692 --> 41:28.413
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah.
41:28.573 --> 41:30.055
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, strategies.
41:30.075 --> 41:31.897
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you're creative.
41:31.997 --> 41:36.703
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but, but there was still it's still allowed for improvisational radio.
41:36.723 --> 41:38.125
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was so critical.
41:38.105 --> 41:39.227
[SPEAKER_00]: Afrodex.
41:39.247 --> 41:39.707
[SPEAKER_01]: What did that?
41:39.907 --> 41:51.283
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, so anyhow, in 94, you know, I kind of saw that, you know, BCN was heading in a kind of more corporate direction and Steven Mendedch had been a lifelong adult friend.
41:51.723 --> 41:53.666
[SPEAKER_01]: And let's define this for everyone.
41:53.726 --> 41:59.895
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, let's think Steven Mendedch, you owned the Boston Phoenix and also WF and put FNX on the air.
42:00.115 --> 42:00.435
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
42:00.455 --> 42:03.259
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a player in the community in the alternative space.
42:03.760 --> 42:07.605
[SPEAKER_01]: In the 90s, making some very big inroads in terms of
42:07.585 --> 42:12.793
[SPEAKER_01]: alternative lifestyle, music, culture, and journalism.
42:12.813 --> 42:15.797
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, and he was working both sides of the street.
42:15.877 --> 42:20.104
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, there's he appreciated the editorial side of the Boston Phoenix.
42:20.464 --> 42:31.180
[SPEAKER_00]: He appreciated the programming content of WFNX, but he also had an eye towards the finances and the budgets and the economics of running
42:31.160 --> 42:32.402
[SPEAKER_00]: big city properties.
42:32.883 --> 42:41.279
[SPEAKER_00]: And at one point, I think there were more than a dozen individual companies under the umbrella of the Phoenix Media Communications Group.
42:41.299 --> 42:53.341
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, he, he had his trade division, he had his magazine division, you know, having, having worked for Steve, I was, I was president, remember the FNX video network.
42:53.421 --> 42:54.062
[SPEAKER_00]: We have five.
42:54.042 --> 42:56.506
[SPEAKER_01]: 2002, 2003.
42:56.606 --> 43:02.115
[SPEAKER_01]: That's where we met at the Phoenix Group.
43:02.716 --> 43:07.884
[SPEAKER_01]: But Stephen was intellectually incredibly bright guy.
43:08.164 --> 43:13.232
[SPEAKER_01]: Not only a great entrepreneur, but a really smart man.
43:13.212 --> 43:17.580
[SPEAKER_00]: Feisty and never never ran from a bad and Jewish boy.
43:18.101 --> 43:23.591
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I was fostered together But he made changes that are impactful even today.
43:23.891 --> 43:26.376
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, he really loved his imprint.
43:26.396 --> 43:28.740
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and and anyhow he
43:28.720 --> 43:38.004
[SPEAKER_00]: And at it's zenith, I think the Phoenix organization was doing $45-50 million a year that there were four Phoenixes.
43:38.064 --> 43:43.678
[SPEAKER_00]: There was Portland Providence, Worcester, and obviously Boston.
43:43.699 --> 43:45.463
[SPEAKER_00]: There were three or four.
43:45.443 --> 43:47.566
[SPEAKER_00]: FNX, there were four stations.
43:47.586 --> 43:48.367
[SPEAKER_01]: There was Portland.
43:48.407 --> 43:49.368
[SPEAKER_01]: There was Manchester.
43:49.448 --> 43:50.689
[SPEAKER_01]: There was Boston.
43:50.790 --> 43:52.091
[SPEAKER_01]: And then there was a problem.
43:52.131 --> 43:52.512
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
43:52.532 --> 43:52.772
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
43:52.792 --> 43:53.192
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
43:53.212 --> 43:54.494
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was the FNX network.
43:54.514 --> 43:55.075
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the network.
43:55.095 --> 43:55.495
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
43:55.515 --> 43:55.776
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
43:55.916 --> 44:02.564
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he also bought from your originator, uh, Don Levy and Robert Bernbaum.
44:02.584 --> 44:03.946
[SPEAKER_00]: He bought stuff magazine.
44:04.466 --> 44:10.894
[SPEAKER_00]: That morphed into
44:10.874 --> 44:22.885
[SPEAKER_00]: telephone interactions, and he was really a pioneer when it came to new technology and Brad Middleton's son was very pivotal in all of that as well.
44:22.925 --> 44:26.554
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he was also very much a big believer in the web at the time.
44:26.534 --> 44:27.656
[SPEAKER_01]: The web was growing.
44:28.056 --> 44:31.522
[SPEAKER_01]: The website at Phoenix was stated the art.
44:31.542 --> 44:36.751
[SPEAKER_01]: He was experimenting on not only interactivity around the web, but also e-commerce.
44:37.151 --> 44:40.337
[SPEAKER_01]: He was jumping into that back in the 90s.
44:40.377 --> 44:43.682
[SPEAKER_01]: People hadn't even figured out what a website was at all time.
44:43.662 --> 44:44.643
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, totally totally.
44:44.663 --> 44:51.649
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the 900 numbers that were made, that's where you made this money is on the sex lines.
44:51.769 --> 44:53.271
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and God bless.
44:53.291 --> 44:55.613
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no.
44:55.633 --> 44:56.454
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
44:56.474 --> 45:13.669
[SPEAKER_00]: That the Phoenix under Stephen's direction developed along this proprietary information, strategies and approaches that became worldwide in the sense of you license the ability
45:13.649 --> 45:26.720
[SPEAKER_00]: And right in the Phoenix and Steven's own backyard, even though culturally, they would lock horns, but he licensed what he had accomplished to the Boston Herald.
45:26.740 --> 45:29.623
[SPEAKER_00]: But it became so big that it was international.
45:29.683 --> 45:31.945
[SPEAKER_00]: It was licensed in newspapers all around the country.
45:32.305 --> 45:35.768
[SPEAKER_01]: There was even... We were running, he was running ads all over the country.
45:36.009 --> 45:37.830
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and it was, it was bilingual.
45:37.890 --> 45:41.213
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know, there was Spanish, and well, there was millions of dollars.
45:41.233 --> 45:43.335
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
45:43.315 --> 45:50.647
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, quite frankly, when I started there in April of 94, I had never sat in front of a computer before.
45:51.027 --> 45:53.892
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't even know what I was doing.
45:54.032 --> 46:04.429
[SPEAKER_00]: And quite frankly, it was kind of as you look back on and it's kind of sad that they didn't have, you know, an HR department that acclimated you to the gave me the first week of what's just new.
46:04.409 --> 46:06.592
[SPEAKER_01]: Sit down and do your job, whatever that was.
46:06.652 --> 46:08.656
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, just like throw you in the team.
46:08.776 --> 46:21.996
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember walking by your desk and there would be like and this is probably the precursor to your your your company now and I could I could see why you you have the largest collection of pop culture on earth
46:21.976 --> 46:29.523
[SPEAKER_01]: You've been accumulating it from all these jobs, but I remember walking by your desk and seeing piles of stuff, piles.
46:30.023 --> 46:32.946
[SPEAKER_01]: And you couldn't see you because you would be behind the pile.
46:32.966 --> 46:36.869
[SPEAKER_00]: But I always tell people that I know where everything is.
46:37.129 --> 46:40.632
[SPEAKER_00]: If you give me the challenge, I can extricate whatever it isn't you need.
46:40.893 --> 46:41.653
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't believe you.
46:42.094 --> 46:42.774
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, yeah, that's all.
46:42.794 --> 46:44.195
[SPEAKER_00]: It's bigger than the Pepsi challenge.
46:44.636 --> 46:46.017
[SPEAKER_01]: It was bigger than the Pepsi challenge.
46:46.057 --> 46:49.120
[SPEAKER_01]: But if anybody ever saw it, there wouldn't believe what your desk looked like.
46:49.140 --> 46:51.662
[SPEAKER_01]: Today, you know, the story you had to work for.
46:51.642 --> 46:53.324
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd be a fire hazard.
46:54.025 --> 46:55.547
[SPEAKER_01]: You'd be a pink slope.
46:55.567 --> 46:56.247
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
46:56.267 --> 47:06.319
[SPEAKER_00]: That was another thing interesting enough when I moved through my current location at the Norwood Space Center in Norwood, where I've got 10,000 square feet for my archives.
47:06.640 --> 47:17.953
[SPEAKER_00]: Opening the boxes, I found one box that had, and this was a little project that I did back in, I think it was late 80s.
47:17.933 --> 47:22.539
[SPEAKER_00]: I saved for about six months every pink slip that I got.
47:22.659 --> 47:29.188
[SPEAKER_00]: And back then, we didn't have any phone access or any messages that were left for you.
47:29.549 --> 47:34.956
[SPEAKER_00]: Basically, there was a air quotes secretary who would write down the phone calls.
47:34.996 --> 47:38.581
[SPEAKER_00]: You got exactly with a message and the date and the time.
47:38.601 --> 47:40.884
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm probably saying about a thousand of these.
47:40.904 --> 47:44.709
[SPEAKER_01]: I believe it was a good segue into David Bieber archives.
47:45.129 --> 47:47.873
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got 10,000 square feet.
47:47.853 --> 47:59.589
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, of cultural schmutz, all right, and that's what the cabinet last year, and that you've collected over this century of work.
47:59.609 --> 48:10.704
[SPEAKER_01]: Tell us about how you thought about putting this together, why you thought about putting this together, and tell us about what you're doing with it, because it's really kind of a unique and extraordinary destination.
48:10.744 --> 48:15.430
[SPEAKER_01]: If people want to live some pop culture, it's a great place to hang out.
48:15.410 --> 48:17.814
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I appreciate your perspective on that.
48:18.014 --> 48:24.385
[SPEAKER_00]: And basically, I will not claim to have any strategy.
48:25.146 --> 48:26.929
[SPEAKER_00]: Basically, I could see that when I went in.
48:28.372 --> 48:32.679
[SPEAKER_00]: But, well, I can still remember when your first came in and I was at a very primitive state.
48:33.080 --> 48:37.107
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, I had just moved in and earned me a drug meal.
48:37.127 --> 48:37.367
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
48:37.347 --> 48:54.748
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's nothing exciting about seeing 8500 brown boxes and sometimes white boxes that you have no idea what the content is you're just looking at the I remember walking and saying myself who in God's name would collect all of this crap
48:54.728 --> 49:04.703
[SPEAKER_01]: which wasn't crap, which was me, which, which turned out to be some extraordinary stuff, and who would actually keep it somewhere and pay to store it exactly.
49:04.923 --> 49:06.786
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was what I was most amazed about.
49:06.806 --> 49:09.690
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, how much you'd stored over those years?
49:09.851 --> 49:20.787
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the story is that, yes, I love my day jobs, you know, whether it's WBCN and Boston Phoenix and WFNX music promotions before that,
49:20.885 --> 49:28.878
[SPEAKER_00]: But, uh, caching the check was fine, you know, and I kept me afloat and I bought a house in West Roxbury and everything's fine.
49:29.319 --> 49:36.090
[SPEAKER_00]: But, what was, uh, the side benefit were all the promotional items and all the great creations.
49:36.170 --> 49:38.033
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you have to remember in that period,
49:38.013 --> 49:51.992
[SPEAKER_00]: From the late sixties all the way into the current century, the record companies, the movie companies, the book publishers, they were competitive with each other, not just in terms of the releases that they were making.
49:52.612 --> 49:57.899
[SPEAKER_00]: What is new albums or new novels or new, you know, anything that, you know, new films.
49:58.300 --> 50:07.412
[SPEAKER_00]: But all the ancillary surround promotional marketing tools that they created were so inventive.
50:07.392 --> 50:19.104
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were very generous with the media because they were all trying to capture our attention which would then be a springboard to us giving them bigger attention to our audiences.
50:19.825 --> 50:36.943
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I saved all this with not having any purpose or mission never knowing what I was going to do with it, but I felt the urge to preserve.
50:36.923 --> 50:40.071
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, talk about some of the stuff that's in there.
50:40.091 --> 50:41.033
[SPEAKER_01]: How it's curated.
50:41.053 --> 50:53.785
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that your company does curate at many different places with some of this pop culture right for years for not only years decades that I could it all couldn't have been a myth.
50:53.765 --> 51:03.056
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, then I would talk about my, I'm going to save it, I'm going to put in the archives, and I, I grew my capacity to live with the things that I own at my house.
51:03.476 --> 51:07.501
[SPEAKER_00]: So I basically took outside storage, which kept growing and growing.
51:08.101 --> 51:14.108
[SPEAKER_00]: I had a place that was in Avon, Mass, and it was totally non-accessible.
51:14.329 --> 51:17.292
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, I would bring content home,
51:17.272 --> 51:23.638
[SPEAKER_00]: Every night I would go through it and I didn't just throw everything in a box and it became a gentleman with a time capsule.
51:23.698 --> 51:27.482
[SPEAKER_00]: I would have maybe 40 different categories going concurrently.
51:27.562 --> 51:36.391
[SPEAKER_00]: So there'd be a box for cassettes, a box for 12-inch records, a box for books, a box for t-shirts, and on and on.
51:36.992 --> 51:43.498
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I get maybe between 75 and 100 boxes together, rent a small van,
51:43.478 --> 51:55.331
[SPEAKER_00]: taking out the avon, everything would be put on a pallet, maybe 30, 40 boxes on a pallet, they'd be shrink wrap, fourth lift would come along, put it in box heaven on industrial shelving.
51:55.871 --> 52:06.803
[SPEAKER_00]: And with safe, I had the mental security of knowing that I had my things in a clean, and temperature control place, but this went on for 25 years.
52:06.783 --> 52:09.427
[SPEAKER_00]: And I probably bought the building over two or three times.
52:09.547 --> 52:11.250
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure you know, and I mailed a check.
52:11.610 --> 52:23.608
[SPEAKER_00]: And everybody would say, when can we go visit the archives or, you know, and I was so horribly frustrated because I would do things just out of friendship if the Boston Globe said we're doing a piece on, you know, retro posters.
52:23.848 --> 52:29.917
[SPEAKER_00]: I would, you know, find, uh, I kept one percent of my favorite things at home.
52:30.098 --> 52:33.803
[SPEAKER_01]: What are some of your favorite things, tell us what really turns you on from your collection?
52:33.783 --> 52:39.843
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, for example, with friend of mine, not the neighbor, I've heard him and Peter won't live here.
52:39.883 --> 52:46.425
[SPEAKER_00]: We've been friends for 40 plus years, you know, something that I work a project maybe he'll talk to me one day.
52:47.080 --> 52:49.364
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, okay Peter doesn't talk to me.
52:49.465 --> 52:50.747
[SPEAKER_01]: I need to be the facilitator.
52:50.847 --> 53:02.089
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, Peter when I was running W AF and wanted some of his music played in rotation and we were a current rock station and weren't playing classic any classic rock.
53:02.109 --> 53:04.654
[SPEAKER_01]: So a classic artist didn't have a home there.
53:04.794 --> 53:05.876
[SPEAKER_01]: He still hasn't forgiven me.
53:06.117 --> 53:08.542
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, maybe one day Peter will forgive me.
53:08.562 --> 53:08.802
[SPEAKER_01]: All right
53:08.782 --> 53:25.997
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyhow, you know, something that, you know, a project that we have made have worked on together that, you know, he signed, you know, gave me a very endearing, you know, signature and other things are, you know,
53:25.977 --> 53:35.175
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't pay attention to the dollar value of things other than the monitor and the marketplace.
53:35.576 --> 53:42.349
[SPEAKER_01]: So I have is your dollar value you think that your collection is worth.
53:43.679 --> 53:55.266
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how many zeros to put to the first number, but I'm sure it's easily six, but I have not collected with an eye towards dollar value.
53:55.427 --> 53:59.055
[SPEAKER_00]: I've really collected because I just a hoarder.
53:59.035 --> 54:25.212
[SPEAKER_00]: No, because I think that my toys and treasures work for me, you know, so it's a lot of things are externalized, you know, the verb hotel, this is an interesting story about, you know, Steven Mendes, you know, when I found myself out of a job because in 2012, Steven abruptly sold WFNX and 2013, he abruptly closed down the Boston Phoenix and I was a little bit of a drift I worked with Steven,
54:25.192 --> 54:29.960
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, for eight months after that, you know, is the placement of all the archives.
54:29.980 --> 54:34.186
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I tried to, uh, I met Steve for lunch.
54:34.206 --> 54:35.689
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to buy the Phoenix for him.
54:36.350 --> 54:41.057
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I wanted to buy, especially the his online portal because I thought,
54:41.037 --> 54:49.670
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, this is a great way to communicate with a young community, active build a community, sell them, you know.
54:50.011 --> 54:54.258
[SPEAKER_01]: And we had some conversations and he decided just to close it down.
54:54.458 --> 54:54.598
[SPEAKER_00]: Really.
54:54.738 --> 54:54.979
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
54:54.999 --> 54:55.319
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
54:55.339 --> 54:57.763
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I think he had just kind of,
54:57.743 --> 54:59.204
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it runs course.
54:59.224 --> 55:04.949
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that he got battered in the 2008 financial meltdown.
55:04.970 --> 55:06.211
[SPEAKER_00]: I think everybody knows.
55:06.231 --> 55:16.300
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but I mean, he is one of those classic stories of, you know, in March of 2009, and it's lowest point, he sold everything.
55:16.880 --> 55:22.665
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, granted, it didn't affect the quality of his life going flowing.
55:22.685 --> 55:27.750
[SPEAKER_00]: No, he had already made his money.
55:27.730 --> 55:29.893
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, he was exhausted.
55:29.913 --> 55:30.573
[SPEAKER_00]: He was exhausted.
55:30.934 --> 55:32.716
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, he tried to keep it afloat.
55:32.736 --> 55:35.820
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, Barry I think was sort of leaving at that point.
55:35.840 --> 55:36.421
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
55:36.441 --> 55:39.605
[SPEAKER_01]: And that Barry was his revenue engine in many ways.
55:39.965 --> 55:53.822
[SPEAKER_00]: But so I worked with him just, I had a friendship for about eight months and, you know, throughout 2013 transferring all of the archival material where it currently resides at Northeastern University.
55:53.802 --> 55:55.124
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know this.
55:55.144 --> 55:55.244
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
55:55.425 --> 56:01.294
[SPEAKER_00]: And the beauty and Steven's mandate is it in the snow library.
56:01.314 --> 56:02.276
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, it is.
56:02.296 --> 56:02.516
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
56:02.736 --> 56:02.997
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
56:03.017 --> 56:03.638
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll have to go there.
56:03.738 --> 56:04.219
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
56:04.239 --> 56:09.767
[SPEAKER_00]: And the beauty of it by Steven's mandate is that it's not just content available to scholars.
56:10.028 --> 56:18.882
[SPEAKER_00]: If you make an appointment, if you say hi and you call up and say hi and Bruce Mittman, I have a history with the Phoenix and Steven's mandate, but you didn't even have to.
56:18.862 --> 56:25.150
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, Bruce Mittman Pedestrian citizen, you know, that they would make the bound volumes available to you.
56:25.190 --> 56:30.458
[SPEAKER_00]: If you said I want to check out the ad that I placed from Arnold and company in 1973.
56:31.259 --> 56:32.300
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure we did.
56:32.480 --> 56:33.482
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
56:33.502 --> 56:33.602
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
56:33.622 --> 56:33.722
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
56:33.742 --> 56:36.105
[SPEAKER_01]: And that they would give Martin Leonard in 1973.
56:36.125 --> 56:38.168
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, okay.
56:38.188 --> 56:38.288
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
56:38.268 --> 56:40.370
[SPEAKER_00]: You work with Howard Tempkin with you.
56:40.390 --> 56:42.432
[SPEAKER_01]: What now Howard was had just left.
56:42.572 --> 56:43.193
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
56:43.713 --> 56:44.874
[SPEAKER_01]: Another name from the past.
56:44.894 --> 56:45.575
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, absolutely.
56:45.595 --> 56:46.816
[SPEAKER_00]: Another Phoenix store.
56:47.016 --> 56:47.857
[SPEAKER_01]: A good map.
56:47.877 --> 56:48.358
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
56:48.378 --> 56:54.103
[SPEAKER_00]: So anyhow, but that's the beauty is you could not just walk in off the street, but you can make an appointment.
56:54.323 --> 56:59.669
[SPEAKER_00]: And whatever your mission, whatever your purpose is, you could access the Phoenix market.
56:59.689 --> 57:00.389
[SPEAKER_00]: I had no idea.
57:00.409 --> 57:00.710
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
57:00.730 --> 57:07.296
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think Stephen wanted it that way because what had been created for the public still belongs to the public.
57:07.276 --> 57:09.699
[SPEAKER_01]: That's just a great great like us.
57:09.719 --> 57:24.715
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and so I worked with him and then I don't know where in I guess it was like February of 2014 I got a phone call from him and he's still acting like a boss and say okay David a Demon a meeting has been set up.
57:24.976 --> 57:28.600
[SPEAKER_00]: You're gonna go to 3333 Newbury Street next Tuesday at two o'clock.
57:28.620 --> 57:30.362
[SPEAKER_00]: You're gonna meet a guy named Steve Samuels.
57:30.382 --> 57:36.068
[SPEAKER_00]: He's got a great idea for taking the Howard Johnson's hotel which is
57:36.048 --> 57:58.833
[SPEAKER_00]: Basically, 1271, Boyleston Street, right next door to where WB, where I'd worked at WBCN at 1265, he's buying the Howard Johnson, where he'd actually bought it, you know, the deal closed on December 31, 2013, and now he wants to turn it into kind of a celebration of music and media and pop culture that came out of the Fenway in by extension in the Greater Boston area.
57:59.233 --> 58:03.658
[SPEAKER_00]: And Steven, who knew that I had
58:03.638 --> 58:15.383
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, fabled, but imaginary archives because they didn't have hands on access, but I had to play along this even it presolved me to Steve Sandwell since this guy was got warehouses full and great content.
58:15.503 --> 58:18.008
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, I had no hands on access to it all.
58:19.451 --> 58:20.854
[SPEAKER_00]: We did.
58:20.834 --> 58:36.126
[SPEAKER_00]: a quick turnaround that I started with Steve Shamil's in February of 2014, the verb hotel, which the Howard Johnson's was renamed as, and that opened in July of 2014.
58:36.106 --> 58:51.769
[SPEAKER_00]: and retaining the bones of the architecture and the structure of the hotel and the Mondrian design and the art look, but surrounded with all things from my archives, both in the lobby, the corridors,
58:51.749 --> 58:57.758
[SPEAKER_01]: and what you've done in a number of places at the Wank Center for the Museum as well.
58:57.878 --> 59:08.134
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a full-comeraconda in the world, and working with Joe Spalding, which has been a terrific experience and Joe retired in Casey Sword, who's now the CEO.
59:08.194 --> 59:08.895
[SPEAKER_00]: I worked with him.
59:09.075 --> 59:10.998
[SPEAKER_01]: We interviewed Casey just recently.
59:11.018 --> 59:11.599
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, terrific.
59:11.619 --> 59:11.839
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
59:11.859 --> 59:14.603
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure he's got some great, well, he's got some great strength.
59:14.624 --> 59:14.784
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
59:14.964 --> 59:16.947
[SPEAKER_00]: Because Casey basically,
59:16.927 --> 59:34.783
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I worked with him and did, you know, dozens of installations at the Candidate or in Beverly, Casey basically did the same thing Joe did only later, Joe in the 1980s in conjunction with Anne Wang and his family, saved, uh, was then, um,
59:34.763 --> 59:38.607
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess it was the musical, the Metropolitan Center.
59:39.588 --> 59:50.619
[SPEAKER_00]: It became the Wang Theatre, but Joe through his efforts in fundraising and bringing on a board of sympathetic directors saved that theater from the wrecking ball.
59:50.879 --> 59:57.887
[SPEAKER_00]: And Casey did the same thing at the cabin because that had been just kind of in a downhill swirl.
59:57.947 --> 01:00:04.213
[SPEAKER_00]: It was your known for magic shows primarily, there was a resident magician,
01:00:04.193 --> 01:00:05.875
[SPEAKER_00]: but tell us the same story.
01:00:05.955 --> 01:00:06.555
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, interesting.
01:00:06.575 --> 01:00:07.917
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, no, that's great.
01:00:08.057 --> 01:00:10.640
[SPEAKER_01]: That's great, that it's a hearing it for me as well.
01:00:10.680 --> 01:00:10.900
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
01:00:11.220 --> 01:00:18.488
[SPEAKER_01]: Tell people here that are listening and hopefully there'll be plenty because David Bieber's on the air here.
01:00:18.508 --> 01:00:21.190
[SPEAKER_01]: Tell us about David Bieber archives.
01:00:21.330 --> 01:00:29.779
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, where it is, what to do to get there, how to interact with you, because it's truly an iconic destination in this town.
01:00:29.759 --> 01:00:42.280
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and you need to come back to see what happened, almost concurrent to doing the verb hotel, which I dressed from my favorite things at home.
01:00:42.360 --> 01:00:49.793
[SPEAKER_00]: I never confessed until much later to Stephen Minnich and Steve Samuels that basically all
01:00:49.773 --> 01:01:10.482
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... warehouses full of content were inaccessible to me at the time and it basically and maybe to the verbs benefit i drew upon my favorite things that i kept at home but that was the only resource center that i had then uh... in 2016 i got the word that the place that i had been
01:01:10.462 --> 01:01:13.766
[SPEAKER_00]: paying sending, you know, rent checks off to an avon.
01:01:14.407 --> 01:01:15.128
[SPEAKER_00]: I was being sold.
01:01:15.228 --> 01:01:18.653
[SPEAKER_00]: The new owner was in he didn't want to be in a warehousing business.
01:01:18.693 --> 01:01:30.208
[SPEAKER_00]: He wanted the space because he was in the air conditioning and heating unit business and he needed these space availability for these big units that he had that was basically storage for himself.
01:01:30.188 --> 01:01:33.116
[SPEAKER_00]: So we said, listen, you know, we've been here a long time.
01:01:33.136 --> 01:01:34.520
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not going to kick you to the curb.
01:01:34.720 --> 01:01:40.516
[SPEAKER_00]: You got to leave, you know, you know, that began the APB to everybody I knew I need a space.
01:01:40.997 --> 01:01:43.343
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to move anytime soon.
01:01:43.423 --> 01:01:44.486
[SPEAKER_00]: I need a long lease.
01:01:44.586 --> 01:01:46.712
[SPEAKER_00]: I need a large amount of space.
01:01:46.692 --> 01:02:16.581
[SPEAKER_00]: And a guy named Peter Gold, who was one of the co-founders of the Boston Music Awards in the 1980s, came up with this place that had formerly been a multi-building complex manufacturing the Nolium, and basically David Dupri and his kind of fellow developers were on a mission to change the nature of these dozen plus buildings.
01:02:16.561 --> 01:02:20.387
[SPEAKER_00]: I committed to 20 years and 10,000 square feet.
01:02:21.269 --> 01:02:26.658
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the brigade of the movement started Mark Silverman from Mark's Movers.
01:02:27.980 --> 01:02:32.508
[SPEAKER_00]: I enlisted 12 and half tractor trailers to move the content.
01:02:32.528 --> 01:02:34.832
[SPEAKER_00]: We estimated 8,500 boxes.
01:02:35.733 --> 01:02:42.805
[SPEAKER_00]: And basically what happened was David Dupree, one of the co-owners of the Norwood Space Center,
01:02:42.785 --> 01:03:00.102
[SPEAKER_00]: Listen, we're not quite ready for you, but, you know, you're going to land on the second floor of building eight in building two, we it's unoccupied now, but it's safe, you can land everything there and what we give you ultimately a year later is a clean white box.
01:03:00.082 --> 01:03:01.304
[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't charge me rent.
01:03:01.484 --> 01:03:03.166
[SPEAKER_00]: They put a new roof on the building.
01:03:03.426 --> 01:03:04.308
[SPEAKER_00]: They cleaned it up.
01:03:04.548 --> 01:03:05.970
[SPEAKER_00]: It's beautiful, immaculate.
01:03:06.370 --> 01:03:08.694
[SPEAKER_00]: And they said, what you do with that space is yours.
01:03:09.174 --> 01:03:11.918
[SPEAKER_00]: So finally, it was available.
01:03:12.038 --> 01:03:16.063
[SPEAKER_00]: And then everything landed in building too, but then had to be hand carried.
01:03:16.084 --> 01:03:18.767
[SPEAKER_00]: 8500 boxes from building two to building eight.
01:03:19.188 --> 01:03:22.772
[SPEAKER_00]: In my least, they said that there is a lift.
01:03:22.793 --> 01:03:24.655
[SPEAKER_00]: The lift never got activated.
01:03:24.635 --> 01:03:31.212
[SPEAKER_00]: So what what we did and I call it a billion Brazilians handcarrying everything upstairs.
01:03:31.873 --> 01:03:32.054
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
01:03:32.675 --> 01:03:34.620
[SPEAKER_00]: And it made it safely.
01:03:34.921 --> 01:03:40.956
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what you saw, you know, maybe seven years ago, eight years ago, whatever it was.
01:03:40.936 --> 01:03:58.830
[SPEAKER_00]: And basically, then the unpacking began, and very fortuitously, a good friend of mine, John Strymesh, his family owned a new mobile book fair in Newton, and they had sold a book business, and the book business, and they retained ownership of the building.
01:03:58.930 --> 01:04:00.373
[SPEAKER_00]: The book business moved down the street.
01:04:00.653 --> 01:04:03.619
[SPEAKER_00]: John and his family were selling the building.
01:04:03.599 --> 01:04:12.412
[SPEAKER_00]: he said you need shelves because you're doing me a favor because I'm going to have to pay to have the shelves and all the debris in the building home the way I said this is perfect.
01:04:12.853 --> 01:04:26.493
[SPEAKER_00]: So next began that process of moving hundreds of shelves they had to be because they were constructed out there at the bookstore they had to be broke unscrewed and the nails taken out and then struck how long was this process?
01:04:26.513 --> 01:04:26.974
[SPEAKER_00]: What was
01:04:26.954 --> 01:04:39.436
[SPEAKER_00]: uh that only took about two months uh but moving the show but that was so perfect because the versatility and the different sizes of the shelves accommodated 175,000 albums that I have.
01:04:39.596 --> 01:04:47.531
[SPEAKER_01]: How is it set up now so that a visitor can come in and and if they want to kind of look for something is it by category?
01:04:47.611 --> 01:04:47.811
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
01:04:48.112 --> 01:04:48.372
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
01:04:48.352 --> 01:05:15.102
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there are categories and interesting that you bring that up because just yesterday I spent about four hours with a couple of people from the bird regarding the next installation, which is going to be rock and roll fashion and I spent, you know, maybe two weeks working on extricating content that is appropriate for that subject and that display and installation is going to be in the bird for probably four or five months.
01:05:15.082 --> 01:05:16.364
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, I don't know.
01:05:16.484 --> 01:05:17.426
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, here's the critical thing.
01:05:17.446 --> 01:05:18.307
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't sell anything.
01:05:18.448 --> 01:05:19.970
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't know this for sale.
01:05:19.990 --> 01:05:20.251
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
01:05:20.271 --> 01:05:23.216
[SPEAKER_00]: Funny thing is in the early days of the Norwegian Space Center.
01:05:23.236 --> 01:05:25.139
[SPEAKER_00]: It was an open house for all the tenants.
01:05:25.840 --> 01:05:27.803
[SPEAKER_00]: And I let some people come in.
01:05:28.184 --> 01:05:31.349
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was a woman who came from the back of the area towards the front.
01:05:31.449 --> 01:05:36.077
[SPEAKER_00]: Their arms were full and she said to me, who do I pay exclusively for curating?
01:05:36.057 --> 01:05:36.638
[SPEAKER_00]: exactly.
01:05:36.718 --> 01:05:41.647
[SPEAKER_00]: I do installations, everything I retain ownership of everything, everything, however, is for lease.
01:05:41.667 --> 01:05:45.534
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's nothing that I keep on the sidelines that are so precious that I wouldn't put out there.
01:05:45.554 --> 01:05:49.101
[SPEAKER_01]: And you have no intention whatsoever, selling individuals.
01:05:49.581 --> 01:05:54.370
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been corded by people, including hedge fund, you know, money,
01:05:54.350 --> 01:06:06.125
[SPEAKER_00]: But, and I've watched with some starkness of seeing the value of things, you know, that a make-in-manel baseball rookie card can go for $12.6 million.
01:06:06.285 --> 01:06:11.052
[SPEAKER_00]: And David Gilmore Pink Floyd guitar can go for $14 million.
01:06:11.092 --> 01:06:12.754
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember, Billious worth a lot of money now?
01:06:12.774 --> 01:06:13.675
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly, yeah.
01:06:13.655 --> 01:06:14.176
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
01:06:14.196 --> 01:06:19.524
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, so it's the trash of yesterday or the treasures of today.
01:06:19.684 --> 01:06:20.245
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
01:06:20.385 --> 01:06:22.909
[SPEAKER_01]: And on that note, I appreciate the time.
01:06:23.249 --> 01:06:24.431
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for coming by.
01:06:24.471 --> 01:06:28.577
[SPEAKER_01]: It's obvious that David Bieber archives is in front of me.
01:06:29.859 --> 01:06:32.944
[SPEAKER_01]: I appreciate you taking me through and back in time.
01:06:33.325 --> 01:06:35.287
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's just an amazing place.
01:06:35.848 --> 01:06:41.637
[SPEAKER_01]: And people should participate in David Bieber's archives because it's an extraordinary walk through time.
01:06:41.617 --> 01:06:42.999
[SPEAKER_00]: Well I appreciate all those words.
01:06:43.099 --> 01:06:49.549
[SPEAKER_00]: I work with some great people like Chuck White and Joe Packard and Lance Salimo and Kevin Rutan.
01:06:49.629 --> 01:06:51.992
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, it's not just singularly me.
01:06:52.072 --> 01:06:59.162
[SPEAKER_00]: I've saved these things, but you know, we are a good force of nature to externalize everything that I have.
01:06:59.223 --> 01:07:03.909
[SPEAKER_00]: Anybody wants to find me, you can go to Davidbeberarchives.com.
01:07:03.929 --> 01:07:05.311
[SPEAKER_00]: Beber's phone like Justin.
01:07:05.532 --> 01:07:09.177
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't get his checks
01:07:09.157 --> 01:07:19.158
[SPEAKER_00]: None of the less in archives with an S so you know I'm not open to the public but by special arrangement if you contact me I would be glad to provide a tour.
01:07:19.418 --> 01:07:25.030
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's leave it on that note and thanks for joining us today and I learned to fly with you.
01:07:25.291 --> 01:07:28.397
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm like it was a great experience you hit all the high notes.
01:07:35.060 --> 01:07:35.841
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for joining.
01:07:36.362 --> 01:07:42.289
[SPEAKER_01]: We hope you listen to our next episode as we continue to bring an extraordinary people willing to tell their stories.
01:07:42.950 --> 01:07:48.397
[SPEAKER_01]: And remember, no matter the odds, no matter the circumstances, no matter what life may bring.
01:07:48.998 --> 01:07:58.350
[SPEAKER_02]: There's an opportunity for greatness within each of us when we learn to fly.
