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CHA CHI LOPRETE
WBCN Promotions Director and "Vice President of Prizes"

It was back in the mid 70's when a young chemical technician from Polaroid dreamed of a better life as an unpaid radio intern. "It was a really boring job: steel toed boots, all that stuff," says LoPrete. "But good money. I was making $30,000 a year out of high school working at Polaroid, and back then that was really, really good." It was also really, really boring, which is why young Larry LoPrete wrote in when he heard Charles Laquidara soliciting interns for WBCN.

LoPrete began answering WBCN's 24-hour listener line. He would work from 7am to 3pm at Polaroid and then head over to WBCN where he would answer phones from 4pm until whenever they asked. Soon he moved to the promotions department, where he gave out bumper stickers at shows and worked his way up to part-time van-driver. In November 1982, a position opened up as Assistant to Promotions Director David Beiber, and LoPrete got the job. He finally quit Polaroid and went to work for WBCN full-time.

LoPrete soon became a personality to WBCN listeners. Sunday newsman Matt Schaffer dubbed him "Cha Chi" and when he began to go on the air to talk about the contests, he became "Cha Chi LoPrete, Vice President of Prizes." He was highly sought after by listeners who hoped that he held the key to their eternal happiness, or at least a pair of Aerosmith tickets. He even became a part-time DJ, turning his encyclopedic knowledge of the Beatles into a two-hour Sunday night show devoted to the band. He got the chance to interview each of the surviving Beatles during his time hosting that program.

When Beiber left the station in the late 80's, LoPrete became Promotions Director, and promotions are much bigger now than they were when he started. The department which had one van driver when LoPrete started now has five vans and twenty workers - ten van drivers and ten street team people plus two full-time assistants, Tim and K.C.

Thirty years of heritage do help a station to do better promotions. "We've been doing it for a long time," says LoPrete, "so we know what doesn't work and what does." Plus, WBCN has always been known as a station which expanded its promotional view past the music and into the listener's total lifestyle. At the beginning, that meant supporting the political movements of the sixties. Nowadays, that means lots of movie promotions, the Patriots, and all the "Extreme sports" like boarding, skiing, and the halfpipe. Recently, it also means plenty of wrestling promotions; LoPrete, like many of his listeners, is a big fan of the WCW, and the walls of his office feature pictures taken with legends like George "The Animal" Steele and Killer Kowalski.

The transition to the alternative format has opened up the promotional opportunities at WBCN, because new music leads to more opportunities to tie in with bands that need the support. "I wouldn't know how to work at a classic rock station," says LoPrete. "How do you do promotions for music that's been out for ten years?" Not to say that promotions were difficult back in the last days of WBCN as an AOR, thanks to the CD revolution of the late 80's. "People were buying all those classic rock albums that were coming out on CD so it wasn't like we were behind the times."

WBCN's biggest show means a lot of promotional opportunities as well, even if it does originate from New York City. LoPrete is a huge Howard Stern fan and tries to bring in as many people from Howard's show as possible. "We had Crackhead Bob in September at an amazing opening for Newbury Comics. It was one of the greatest retail grand openings that we have ever done. We had [Wind-Up artists] Stretch Princess playing and Crackhead Bob doing an appearance. This is a retail store on a Saturday morning at lunchtime and we had hundreds of kids in the store - you could hardly move around. Last year we had Crackhead Bob on the same day as the first snowstorm of the winter, and I still had 600 people come to see him in the middle of a snowstorm." LoPrete also points out that WBCN is heavily promoting Stern's new television show, which is on their sister TV station, WBZ-TV Channel 4. "For the first broadcast of the TV show, we had a listener win a Dial-a-Mattress bed and a 27" color TV, delivered to their house an hour before the show's premiere."

Sixteen years in the promotions department means a lot of time to try to think up interesting promotions, and WBCN has its share. They had a listener swallow 104 goldfish live on the air to win U2 tickets. They did "30 Days of Pearl Jam" in honor of their 30th birthday this year, sending listeners to thirty different cities to see Pearl Jam. Earlier this year, the station gave away front row seats to the Lilith Fair - but only to guys. "We did a premiere party for Dazed and Confused a few years ago," says LoPrete. "We had a table set up with rolling papers and tobacco and listeners had to compete to roll a homemade cigarette faster than a certain DJ of ours. Unfortunately, the DJ did it so fast that no listeners could beat him. It was sort of a hobby of his."

Mostly, they just like to drop stuff. Every Halloween the station gets a 600 pound pumpkin and drops it a couple hundred feet on the air, and listeners come just to see it smash on the ground. For Secretaries Day, WBCN used to have secretaries come to throw their typewriters off the roof of the building. One year, the desire to smash objects even extended to the WBCN van. When the station decided it was time to get a new station vehicle, the old van was dropped from a crane to the delight of the WBCN fans.

WBCN definitely has the station festival down pat. Each year they take over Great Woods for the summertime River Rave. In December, the WBCN Christmas Rave puts artists all over Boston, taking over the Orpheum Theatre and filling the clubs on Landsdowne Street across from Fenway Park as well as the clubs in Cambridge's Central Square, all on the same night. The Fort Apache series gives 104 listeners at a time a chance to see artists like David Bowie, Beck, and Barenaked Ladies perform live in the intimate setting of the Fort Apache recording studios in Cambridge. The annual "Mallapalooza" show throws a rising band (this year, Harvey Danger) onto a floating stage in the middle of a lagoon next to the Cambridgeside Galleria to perform free for the listeners. Last year WBCN attracted 5000 kids at noon on a Wednesday to watch Stone Cold Steve Austin arm-wrestle WWF President Vince McMahon on that same floating stage.

WBCN has done its "Rock 'n' Roll Up Your Sleeve" blood drive annually for the past 25 years, and it is the single biggest day of blood donation each year in all of New England. And don't forget the WBCN Sausage Cart on Landsdowne Street. "One day this guy called up, and is a fan of the station, and he asks if we want to put our logo on his sausage cart," says LoPrete. "I blew him off for a while, but one day I said, sure go ahead, and he brought over some sandwiches for us and put our logo on the cart. So now he's out there on a Friday night when people get out of the clubs, selling sausages and advertising the station. A month ago, he actually hired Crackhead Bob to come down one night and serve sausages from midnight to two in the morning on a Friday night. He paid for it out of his own pocket."

Perhaps LoPrete is best known around the station for being personal friends with one of the great legends of music, and not one you would expect from a WBCN Promotions Director. "I've been friends with Tony Bennett since the late 80's," says LoPrete, "because we were the first station to actually put him on the air. He had never been on a rock station before, but I got to know his son who manages him. Oedipus and I discussed having Tony on the air and, sure, it wasn't our demographic but he wasn't gonna sing on the air. We talked to him about his experiences and some of the rock stars he had gotten to know, like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Bruce Springsteen. Ever since we put him on the air, he has always given the station credit for being the first and he has always remained friends with the station."

That led LoPrete to a close friendship with the Bennett family. He spends the occasional weekend with Tony and Danny Bennett and was Tony's personal guest one year when Bennett performed at halftime of the Super Bowl. Among the expected radio tchochkes in his office is a can of "Rig-a-Tony Bennett," a prop from a Bennett appearance on the new Muppet show. And you wouldn't be the first to notice a distinct relationship between the great crooner and the BCN Vice President of Prizes. LoPrete actually played Tony Bennett's son on Bennett's Christmas special when Danny Bennett didn't feel like appearing on television.

So where does WBCN's promotions department go from here? "You never stop learning," says the Vice President of Prizes. "The business changes all the time and if you get to a point where you think that you know everything, well, maybe its time to find another job. Things that worked five years ago might not necessarily work today." That's what keeps Cha Chi LoPrete and the WBCN promotions team always on the cutting edge of radio.