![]() ![]() Playing guitar in a middle-aged blues-rock outfit wasn’t so different from appearing at charity events with Lenny Clarke, or doing bit parts on Denis Leary’s Rescue Me. ![]() At a charity roast of Boch several years ago, emcee Joel McHale, formerly of The Soup, joked that “Ernie and the Automatics” sounded like the name of the Sesame Street band.įrom Boch’s perspective, though, it was on-brand. The group’s lone album, Low Expectations, experienced some success on the Billboard charts, and the group opened for a handful of major acts. In 2004, he formed a band called Ernie and the Automatics, paying a couple ex-members of the band Boston to tour with him. “Ernie wasn’t going to be talking about automobiles, but projecting a lifestyle,” says his friend and ad guru Bruce Mittman, who used to run WAAF.īoch stopped wearing suits, literally grew his hair out, and started drifting back to music. He toured the local shock-jock circuit, joining WAAF’s Greg Hill and WRKO’s Howie Carr with regularity. (He kept two luxury car dealerships and built up the Subaru of New England cash cow, which remains his primary business concern.) Instead of appearing on camera to sell cars, though, Boch began asserting himself as a media personality in his own right. Even as he began to sell off retail dealerships, he arranged for them to retain the Boch name. Along with his business empire, and his dying-breed Boston patois, Boch inherited his father’s knack for publicity. Photograph by Tom Herde/ The Boston Globe/Getty Imagesīoch Sr. Boch, before his extreme makeover, outside his used car dealership in 2003. ![]()
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