Multi-award-winning, longtime WBCN program director Oedipus indirectly got into the radio business through right time-right place situations in Israel and at Tufts Dental School. The Cleveland native grew up listening to Motown and top-40 radio and, at a very young age, saw Little Stevie Wonder play at Leo’s Casino in Cleveland. Years later, while living on a kibbutz in Israel, a friend mentioned that Boston was his type of town. Upon his return to the States, Oedipus, then 21, moved to the city with a knapsack and a guitar.
VOLUNTEERING AT WBCN, WTBS, NUIT BLANCHE, THE DEMI-MONDE
A temp job at Tufts involved answering phones during the receptionist’s lunch break, but he did it with such dramatic flair, coworkers suggested he should be in radio. A roommate who volunteered at WBCN told Oedipus that Charles Laquidara was looking for a writer and Oedipus talked his way into the volunteer position.
He also started doing weekly news reports about Boston music clubs, for the station, and stumbled onto the beginnings of the punk rock scene. This music wasn’t yet being played on radio here, but Oedipus landed a volunteer slot at MIT’s WTBS (now WMBR) that became the first punk rock show in the country. He started with a show called Nuit Blanche, then did another, The Demi-Monde, which caught the eye of ‘BCN program director Tommy Hadges, who noticed that Oedipus, on a tiny 10-watt station, was actually getting ratings.
JOINING WBCN, NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS, BOSTON EMISSIONS
Hadges hired him as a part-time announcer at WBCN. That led to a full time position and, soon after that, Oedipus created Nocturnal Emissions (taken from a line in Lawrence Durrell’s novel “The Alexandria Quartet”). The Sunday night show began as punk rock and new wave and, after he began including many bands from Boston, Oedipus split it into two shows: Nocturnal Emissions and Boston Emissions.
Big changes came with Oedipus being named program director at a time when WBCN was being crushed in the ratings by WCOZ. His plan was to add more structure to the station’s free form format, and it worked; WCOZ went out of business and ‘BCN kept going, just changing with the times. As album-oriented rock switched to alternative rock, Oedipus continued adding new titles to his resume. He was named vice president for programming for WBCN, then vice president of alternative programming for Infinity Broadcasting (now CBS Radio), which involved 16 alternative and rock stations.
THAILAND, THE OEDIPUS PROJECT, THE OEDIPUS FOUNDATION
When he left CBS, Oedipus followed through on a decades-long fascination with Thailand and enrolled at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, where he met his wife. These days, they split their time between a Boston suburb and Bangkok.
But Oedipus is still very much involved in radio. On his website, called The Oedipus Project, he plays both new indie music and favorites taken from his personal library. He also does a weekly two-hour new music show on Radio BDC, the Boston Globe’s Internet station. On top of that there’s The Oedipus Foundation which, in his words, is “my foundation for artistic offense, environmental defense, and life longevity.”
(by Ed Symkus)
