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Book

WBCN and the American revolution : how a radio station defined politics, counterculture, and rock and roll

Call Number

  • 384.5453 L6995 (OSH)

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Publication Information

Cambridge : The MIT Press, [2021]

Physical Description

284 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 29 cm

Summary

"While San Francisco was celebrating a psychedelic Summer of Love in 1967, Boston stayed buttoned up and battened down. But that changed the following year, when a Harvard Law School graduate student named Ray Riepen founded a radio station that played music that young people, including the hundreds of thousands at Boston-area colleges, actually wanted to hear. WBCN-FM featured album cuts by such artists as the Mothers of Invention, Aretha Franklin, and Cream, played by announcers who felt free to express their opinions on subjects that ranged from recreational drugs to the war in Vietnam. In this engaging and generously illustrated chronicle, Peabody Award-winning journalist and one-time WBCN announcer Bill Lichtenstein tells the story of how a radio station became part of a revolution in youth culture. At WBCN, creativity and countercultural politics ruled: there were no set playlists; news segments anticipated the satire of The Daily Show; on-air interviewees ranged from John and Yoko to Noam Chomsky; a telephone 'Listener Line' fielded questions on any subject, day and night. From 1968 to Watergate, Boston's WBCN was the hub of the rock-and-roll, antiwar, psychedelic solar system. A cornucopia of images in color and black and white includes concert posters, news clippings, photographs of performers in action, and scenes of joyousness on Boston CommonInterwoven through the narrative are excerpts from interviews with WBCN pioneers, including Charles Laquidara, the 'news dissector' Danny Schechter, Marsha Steinberg, and Mitchell Kertzman."--

Notes

Includes index.

Contents

  • Boston 1967: before the revolution
  • The Boston Tea Party
  • Ugly radio is dead
  • A new kind of radio
  • 1968: the year everything changed and that changed everything
  • WBCN and the American revolution
  • Campus unrest
  • Peace is in the air
  • WBCN: the hub of the community and the soundtrack of the city
  • WBCN news and public affairs
  • The news dissector
  • The second wave
  • The Lavender Hour: gender freedom in the air
  • Lock-up
  • We've got to get rid of Nixon
  • Rock and roll future
  • Nixon's resignation and the end of the revolution
  • Lessons learned.

Subjects