In March 1968, one week after his first show on the fledgling FM rock station WBCN, nighttime deejay Peter Wolf ran into Jim Parry, a Princeton graduate and self-professed “unregenerate folkie,” who had journeyed to the folk music mecca of Harvard Square. “Wolf said, ‘I’m doing this show at this new radio station, but I’ve never engineered before and I have no idea how to do that,’” Parry recalls. “’Oh, gee, I did that when I was in school,’ I said.”
As simply as that, Parry joined the cast of characters on Wolf’s show, manning the controls, pushing buttons and cueing up records. At the end of each night, as dawn drew near, Wolf would launch into a closing rap in which he thanked his cohorts including “Jim Parry – looking so merry!”
JOINING FULL TIME, NICKNAMING SCHECHTER, GETTING EXITED
In May, when WBCN went 24/7 with free-form rock replacing all classical music programming, Tommy Hadges, Al Perry and Jim Parry all received their own weekly shows; by April ‘69, the graveyard shift from 2am to 5am was handled by cleanup man Jim Parry. Along with being one of the first full-timers, he also, rather famously, gave Danny Schechter the title that would identify him for his entire radio career. When Parry couldn’t read Schechter’s infamous scrawl, he told the newsman he could read it himself on the air. Parry gave the nervous Schechter an impromptu windup for his first radio moment: “Danny Schechter – the news detector…the news inspector…the news dissector!”
After the famous WBCN strike was resolved in 1979, an inevitable trimming of the staff ensued with Parry, the one deejay left who could trace his genealogy back to the first nights of ‘BCN’s “American Revolution,” unexpectedly drawing a pink slip. “I was not pleased with the end,” he explained sourly. “They fired a couple of people in each department; but, it was really changing…a lot. The guys that came in knew how to run radio stations and it became very different.”
(by Carter Alan)
Carter Alan is a former WBCN deejay now heard on WZLX-FM in Boston. He is the author of Radio Free Boston: The Rise and Fall of WBCN (University Press of New England, 2013).
