Second up on this special weekend at WROR was Charles Laquidera. Here’s a jock who really deserves more attention as one of perhaps Boston’s most legendary Rock Jocks. Unlike Top 40/CHR formats where the jocks are known for their lightning-fast presentations over the intros of songs, Rock Jocks of the AOR era generally would wait till a song was over to speak and would do their thing and THEN begin playing a song. It’s been said that repeating call letters, time, temperature and the intro of a song
is really all just a crutch that so many jocks use to mark time (something that still rears it’s ugly head at so many stations even today). But these Rock Jocks had to really be entertaining all my themselves WITHOUT the help of all these traditional elements. One of the best was based in Boston… and unlike Howard Stern, Mancow or most of Rock Radio’s more modern morning people, Laquidera was not ‘famous’ outside of Boston (although, at the beginning of this aircheck, Laquidera plays a recording of an interview he did with George Harrison on the first radio station he worked at – KPPC Pasadena, Ca., which, as he points out evolved into the legendary K-Rock in L.A. He could have held his own in any market, but for whatever reason, he decided to stay in Boston until retirement. And in Boston, there really was only ONE Rock morning show that mattered, and that was “The Big Mattress” on WBCN.
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This runs 11:30. At the very end of this clip, Laquidera says he’s not actually at WROR, and JUST as he is about to say where he recorded the tracks from… the recording runs out. I suspect he did this at his home in Hawaii, as Laquidera’s been retired on the big island since the late 90s.
