Looking out the studio window of the radio station where she’d worked for 29 years, DJ “Mistress Carrie” Sarao could see a crowd gathering outside. It was a Friday night, Feb. 21, 2020, and freezing, but that didn’t stop hundreds of Bostonians from flooding the parking lot when they heard the news. There was no invitation, just an impulse, an impromptu meetup of loved ones known and unknown. At midnight, the city would lose its last rock radio station.
Debuting in 1970, WAAF helped launched the careers of local bands like Aerosmith and Godsmack, and put national groups like Shinedown on the map. To many listeners, the station was as much a part of Boston as Fenway Park and clam chowder. WAAF was, Mistress Carrie’s longtime colleague and fellow WAAF DJ Mike Hsu told me, a “local Massachusetts club of troublemakers and assholes.” At big rock concerts, chants of “ ’AAF! ’AAF!” were as common as feedback. Sometimes WAAF loyalists would come to blows with devotees of their onetime competitor — rock station WBCN — before the latter went off the air in 2009. For Mistress Carrie, a 51-year-old, purple-haired rock evangelist, WAAF was the soundtrack to her adolescence, as it had been for so many other Bostonians.
In the days leading up to the end, the mood at WAAF was somewhere between hospice care and a rowdy Irish Catholic wake. Old friends flooded in; listeners called with high-octane send-offs; Aerosmith’s Tom Hamilton stopped by to pay tribute. But as the clock ticked toward midnight, there was a quiet in the on-air studio. Mistress Carrie’s voice broke as she told her listeners to keep their heads high, shoulders back, and horns up.
“We’re goin’ out proud,” she said. “Because we were all part of something special.” “It was awesome,” Hsu replied solemnly. Six minutes before midnight, Mistress Carrie and Hsu taunted the soon-to-be owners of their beloved station.
“There’s only one way to go,” Mistress Carrie said. Editor’s picks “Loud,” Hsu stated. “In your face,” replied Mistress Carrie. “Evil,” Hsu declared authoritatively. Crackling in the background was the soft but ominous sound of rain falling and church bells ringing — the iconic opening of Black Sabbath’s 1970 track “Black Sabbath.” The song was “handcrafted, especially chosen” for “the segue into the new format,” according to Hsu — intended, Mistress Carrie told me, to “inject as much satanism in the airwaves as possible before we flipped the switch.”
“Wherever you are,” Mistress Carrie implored her listeners, her voice breaking, “roll your windows down!”
“Crank it up!” yelled Hsu. “One last time, baby!” Mistress Carrie spat out, before screaming a chant that had rung through Boston’s rock scene for half a century. “’AAF! ’AAF!” she yelled, with Hsu joining in. About 150 current and former employees, crammed into the adjacent office space, opened the door to join in. Their chanting voices filled the airwaves. “’AAF! ’AAF!” With their final song growing louder, the DJs faded out the mics and closed the studio door.
“And [we] sat there with our headphones on,” Mistress Carrie says, “and cried.” Perfectly timed by Hsu and Mistress Carrie, the song ended at midnight, when an engineer came in and flipped a switch, ending WAAF’s transmission once and for all. In the studio, all was silent save for the tears of Mistress Carrie and Hsu.
Listeners, though, heard something else: the impersonal dawning of a new era. There was no flashy sign-on, no new local DJ to take the reins as the frequency changed hands. The new owners couldn’t be bothered to tip their hat to their new Boston audience with a shout-out or a song by a local artist. Instead, they just punched into their automated playlist, which emanates via satellite to hundreds of radio stations across the country, fading in midsong.
With the signature clean production and contemplative, easy pace of Christian rock, artist Jeremy Camp’s 2006 track “Let It Fade” invited listeners to be saved, to find new life. WAAF had just become the latest casualty in a string of radio stations all over the country, all lost to a massive but little-known nonprofit called the Educational Media Foundation. If you’ve ever wondered why it seems like every other station on your dial is Christian rock, EMF is a big part of your answer. From its headquarters in a Nashville suburb (the organization is slowly relocating from its longtime home of California), EMF plays the generic sounds of contemporary Christian music, or “CCM.” It is a genre that everyone from artists and critics to church leaders have decried as being somewhere between “the absolute worst” and “doctrinally unsound.”