In 1968, Sam Kopper arrived back in Boston after graduating from Syracuse University, taking a sales job at WBCN. “Selling [time on ‘BCN] was not hard,” he says. “[The station] was coming out of every window in Back Bay, so places like head shops and record stores totally got it.” Even so, Kopper hated selling, lasting only two days in the department.
Fortunately, he got a shot as a deejay one night in May, filling in for Joe Rogers and the timing could not have been more perfect. Within days, ‘BCN began programming rock 24/7 and the station went on the hunt for jocks to fill out the expanded schedule. Kopper was added to the first full-time lineup, doing mornings.
Program director, Departure
Steven Segal, a brilliant deejay in his own right, was brought in from the West Coast to be program director, but his chaotic personal life indicated that he might not be the best choice to lead the air staff, so Kopper assumed that role. “When Steven arrived, he was the ‘John Lennon’ of the station,” Kopper says. “I basically exercised and made real his visions.” He became the point person in programming during his first few years at ‘BCN and remained in that role for more than a decade, developing as a broadcast engineer while coordinating a number of on-air concerts.
In 1978, when new program director Charlie Kendall arrived, things started to sour. Kopper, who was driving his “Crab Louie” recording bus around the East Coast to engineer as many as three live broadcasts a week for several radio stations, took the hint. “He wanted me to leave and I was really busy anyway, we decided I would resign.” Kopper got a bigger bus, stuffed it with recording gear, renamed his company Starfleet and went on to continued success. He returned as the keeper of WBCN’s archives in 2009, shortly after the station went dark.
(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).
