Tim Montgomery:

At 312 Stuart Street it was Kenny Greenblatt, Jack Kearney, Crazy Al Perry and me. We were the fanatics, the true-believers who told the BCN story everyday. I had no freakin’ idea what I was doing, but the one thing I knew was that BCN meant something to hundreds of thousands of people like me. And I knew that there was a colossal change taking place in the culture, pushed forward by a convergence of the new FM radio technology giving voice to a new form of music created by a generation rallying around a common cause. We had our own medium. No one over 30 need apply.

In those early years we pitched head shops, record stores, concerts and waterbeds – Spectrum India, Experiment Two, Stop, Look and Listen, Discount Records and Skippy White’s, to name a few. The best ads told us about acts coming to the Tea Party, Pall’s Mall or The Aquarius Theatre. The worst ads were whatever Charles didn’t like! Let’s see – there was Marca Prima wine. They never changed their copy. There was Honeywell Pentax cameras. Charles reminded us all that Honeywell made napalm that scorched Vietnamese children. I lost that account. There was The Australian Wine Board – my first big agency win. When their representatives visited the station, Charles happily played the classic Monty Python sketch where they compare the bouquet of an Australian wine to an Aborigine’s armpit. I lost that one, too.

But, in the end, everyone on the staff seemed to know what fit the station’s mission and its sound. Even me. Maybe, especially me. Because I told that story every day, with the passion of the converted. It was an amazing moment in time and I miss it.