Former WEBN-FM owner Frank “Bo” Wood, who took Cincinnati on a fun ride to the “lunatic fringe of American FM radio,” has died at age 83. He had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for several years.
Wood founded WEBN-FM with his father, Frank Wood Sr., in an old house on Considine Avenue in East Price Hill and grew it into Cincinnati’s most influential and outrageous FM station, and one of America’s iconic rock stations.
Born Frank E. “Bo” Wood III (and known as Frank Jr.) he once described his radio philosophy to me as “something humorous, menacing, and with a twist.”
From Wood’s fertile imagination came the request to Rozzi’s fireworks to synchronize music to the pyrotechnics in 1977, which evolved into the annual end-of-summer WEBN-FM Riverfest; the fictional day-long Fools Day parade on March 32; the WEBN-FM Frog mascot; Jerry Springer’s first broadcast commentaries on WEBN-FM in the late 1970s; and clever commercials for Tree Frog Beer, Negative Calorie Cookies, and other wickedly funny fake Brute Force Cybernetics products. He also supported the WEBN Album Project LPs featuring local musicians in the 1970s.
And at 72, near the end of his broadcasting career, Mayor John Cranley in 2014 named his long-time friend the city’s unpaid Commissioner of Fun, where Wood organized pumpkin-smashing events after Halloween.
Wood helped launch the broadcasting careers of his sister Robin Wood, the longtime WEBN-FM morning host; Eddie Fingers; Jay Gilbert; Craig Kopp and Dennis “Wildman” Walker; and created a pipeline of radio talent from the University of Cincinnati that included WGUC-FM morning host Brian O’Donnell, future WEBN-FM general manager Jaqui Brumm, Tom Sandman, Geoff Nimmo, Curt Gary, Louise Wilkoff, Dennis Steele, and Tony Tolliver.
“Bo Wood more or less invented Eddie Fingers. When I first came to ‘EBN (from 96 ROCK), Eddie was just kind of a snarky, wise guy with not much edge,” says Fingers, who was hired in 1985 before Robin Wood’s maternity leave. He switched to sister station WLW-AM after Gary Burbank retired in 2007.
“Bo encouraged me to let go of the reins, and just let the show go in whatever direction it wanted to go. He always told us that no matter what we did, he had our back. Believe me, that freed us all up to do the crazy stuff that you remember ‘EBN for. I can tell you, and I think I speak for a lot of people, that I pretty much owe my career to Bo Wood. He understood that business was business, but why not have some fun in the process,” Fingers says.
Philadelphia native Jay Gilbert says that “my entire adulthood and career has been in Cincinnati thanks to Frank Wood. He changed my life and the lives of everyone in this city, whether or not they ever listened to WEBN or went to a fireworks show.
“The courage to take chances, and the fearlessness mixed with joy that he inspired in me and in so many others, is Frank's lesser-known legacy. But I think it is the more powerful and lasting one,” says Gilbert, the longtime WEBN-FM and WOFX-FM afternoon host. Gilbert now hosts Is This Folk Music or Not at 8 p.m. Sundays on WMKV-FM (89.3).
Broadcasting executive Randy Michaels, who was Wood’s competitor-turned-partner in Jacor Communications, noted that in Cincinnati’s rich media history, Wood “dared to do things the Crosleys (WLW radio and TV) and Tafts (WKRC radio and TV) wouldn’t have dreamed of . . . He attracted quirky, gifted people and not only encouraged but demanded that they take the intelligent risk.
“He wanted to build brands that were more than just music utilities. The industry misses him and so do I. He was a formidable competitor, a great partner, and a good friend,” Michael says.
“Bo is just about the most fascinating guy I ever met. Brilliant,” says O’Donnell, who started in radio when Wood hired him to host WEBN-FM’s all-night Saturday show in 1972 for about $2.10 an hour. He supplemented his meager income by working on the WEBN-FM promotional balloon crew, chasing after Bo or his father piloting the station’s hot air balloon.
Wood also started the WEBN-FM sky diving team, and recruited DJs and other staffers to join him in the early 1970s. It was created to parachute at the new Kings Island amusement park, which was owned by Taft Broadcasting, which operated rival WKRQ-FM (Q102) says Sandman, former WEBN-FM DJ and production director.
After earning an economics degree at Harvard University in 1964, and graduating from the University of Chicago Law School in 1967, he came home to help his father assemble the Price Hill station in 1967 to broadcast classical music and jazz. He briefly worked as an attorney before trying radio, hosting a 10 p.m. Saturday album rock music show called Jelly Pudding as "Michael Xanadu.” A lack of advertisers in the first years, and too few radio receivers to get the relatively new FM band, Wood and his father created fake Brute Force Cybernetics product commercials to fill the airtime and get noticed.
"I always believed great radio came out of a typewriter — and later a word processor — not the microphone. We were not only trying to get people to listen to us, we were trying to convince them to go out and buy an FM radio," Wood told me in 2007 for the station’s 40th anniversary.
Wood “encouraged creativity in everything we did. Not just comedy bits but commercials too. He told us to make it memorable. There were other people on staff to sell it. Our job was to write it. And if our clients' products weren't compelling enough, we made them up, like Brute Force Cybernetics, the Fools’ Parades, and the Committee for Aesthetic Public Spectacle,” says Sandman, who hosts Sandman Standards 8-10 p.m. Thursday and 5-7 p.m. Saturday on WMKV-FM (89.3).
Longtime WEBN-FM news director Craig Kopp says that “Bo’s genius was finding creative people and then giving them free rein. He just got out of the way and let it happen,” says Kopp, now Morning Edition host at WUSF-FM in the Tampa Bay area. “I haven’t worked in such a creative environment since."
The popularity of rock music on Jelly Pudding, and the high quality of music on the FM band, eventually convinced the Woods to adopt a “progressive rock” format — while keeping Frank Wood Sr.’s Sunday morning classical music and overnight jazz. But it wasn’t easy.
“In the winter of '72, we were $40 short to make payroll, if I skipped myself. So I went down to the Coke machine in the basement and got $40 in dimes. That was the closest we came to going out of business," Wood told me.
By 1975, the station was No. 1 with the age 18-34 demographic. The next year he created the fictional Fool's Day Parade with parody commercials for Snappy Cicada Pizza and a Greater Cincinnati Chili Float covered with 300 pounds of grated cheese and propelled by its own gas. The Our Lady of Perpetual Motion Marching Band paraded through Hyde Park and Mount Adams on April 1 for more than two decades. In 1985 the staff sang Gilbert’s “We Are The Fools,” a spoof of Live Aid’s “We Are The World.” (Gilbert directs the recording in this YouTube video.)
The following year, on Aug. 30, 1977, Wood celebrated the station's 10th anniversary with fireworks over the Ohio River — without additional police protection.
On a Tuesday night!
"The police just thought some little radio station was throwing a fireworks show," Wood recalled. "The only place we promoted it was on WEBN, and a huge crowd showed up on both sides of the river. In retrospect, we were one of the best-branded stations ever. It was larger-than-life in a medium-size city.”
For the first years, the fireworks soundtrack was played song by song from “carts,” or individual recorded tapes in half-inch thick plastic cases, from the Newport riverfront. Now the computerized soundtrack is linked to the fireworks’ detonation schedule.
Wood took big risks for huge rewards. In 1984, when The Police were at the height of their popularity, Wood bought all 16,000 tickets to their concert of Riverfront Coliseum (now Heritage Bank Center) — and resold them at face value through a post office box. “No other station got giveaway tickets — or ad dollars — for the biggest show of the year,” Gilbert wrote in his Cincinnati magazine tribute to his former boss last year called “A Frog In Winter.”
Wood sold WEBN-FM in 1986 to Terry Jacobs’ Jacor Communications and became Jacor president. A few years later Jacor shocked the Tri-State by buying WLW-AM, the city’s No. 1 AM station, bringing together WLW’s Randy Michaels with Wood, his former rival, and creating a broadcasting powerhouse that’s still the core of iHeartMedia's Cincinnati portfolio.
Wood left Jacor in 1990 and formed companies called Broadcast Alchemy, Secret Communications, and The Darwin Group. Secret Communications, a venture capital company, owned and operated 22 radio stations in nine cities from 1991 to 1997, including WNNF-FM (WINK 94.1). Outside his 35th floor office at 312 Walnut St. were an electronic putting machine and a miniature basketball net.
When I spoke to Wood for the 40th anniversary in 2007, he explained that the theater of the mind was the cornerstone element for WEBN-FM.
“A lot of time and energy was spent in the early days to establish the brand,” he says.
It paid off for decades.
Sandman says that “WEBN-FM was so extremely different from radio today — but also from all the other stations 50-plus years ago, because of Frank Wood.”
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