THE YEAR was 1968. Young Americans were dying in an unpopular war halfway around the world. Protesters were battling police on campuses and in the streets throughout the country. A national upheaval was underway involving the anti-war, civil rights, feminist, and gay and lesbian movements. These revolutions would forever transform the nation socially, culturally, and politically. But you would never know it from listening to the radio, where fast-talking DJs played ads for acne cream along with Top 40 pop ballads like Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s “Something Stupid.’’
And then came WBCN-FM.
The radio station, which billed itself as “The American Revolution,’’ was the vision of a young, hip entrepreneur named Ray Riepen, who simultaneously created the “alternative’’ newspaper The Boston Phoenix and the legendary rock club the Boston Tea Party. WBCN began broadcasting from the back room of the Boston Tea Party on March 15, 1968. From the moment it hit the air, the station helped define, as well as promote, popular culture and politics in Boston for the ’60s/boomer generation in a way that nothing had before. And its impact quickly spilled over nationally.
Since Tuesday’s announcement that WBCN’s owner, CBS, will take the station off the air in August, its role in launching music careers, including The Who, The J. Geils Band, Aerosmith, and U2, has been widely cited. But WBCN was more than a cultural innovator. It was a social and political force as well, particularly from 1968 to 1975, when, long before Facebook or MySpace, the station served as the social medium that connected a generation in Boston.
Given Boston’s role as a cultural and political crossroad in the 1960s, virtually every major political, social, and musical figure from that era crossed paths with the city, and with WBCN. Activist Abbie Hoffman was a station regular; John Lennon talked politics with the station’s “News Dissector,’’ Danny Schechter; Jane Fonda announced her “Indochina Peace Campaign’’ on the WBCN airwaves; and Duane Allman and Jerry Garcia jammed on acoustic guitars on-air until late into the night. A 23-year-old Bruce Springsteen gave his first radio interview on ’BCN, highlighted by a nervous on-air “Hi Mom.’’
At the same time, the station went live to cover major antiwar demonstrations on the Boston Common, as well as more radical actions, including a live report during a break-in by protesters at a Harvard research office where confidential documents revealing unreported CIA domestic activities were “liberated.’’ When street demonstrations got out of hand, along Boylston Street or in Harvard Square, as often happened, and store windows (especially those of banks) were broken and tear gas was fired, you could turn to ’BCN to find out what was going on, the way people turn today to Google or Twitter.
I was fortunate to have been a part of it, first in 1970, at age 14, as a volunteer answering the station’s “Listener Line,’’ and later when I got my first assignment from Schechter, who handed me a cassette recorder and sent me to Boston Police Headquarters to cover a protest of the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton by the Chicago police. A year later, program director Norm Winer gave me my own Saturday night show.
The airwaves were also peppered with a cast of characters ranging from “Captain Squid,’’ a mysterious caller whose identity was not known even to those at the station; Stuart Soroka, Boston’s “hippy dippy weatherman’’; and Darrell Martinie, “the Cosmic Muffin,’’ the first astrologer most of us had encountered.
The station’s “free-form’’ format is unheard of today, even at college stations. Announcers were free to play whatever they wanted, from rock (Beatles and Led Zeppelin) to jazz (Sun Ra and Gary Burton) to comedy (Lenny Bruce and the Firesign Theatre).
By 1975, this era of WBCN was winding down. Richard Nixon had resigned the year before, Saigon had fallen, and the movie “Saturday Night Fever’’ had ushered in disco. The station’s desire for a more homogenous sound led to the use of “playlists.’’ But the iconoclastic spirit of the station’s first seven years lived on for decades. Even today, with the closing of the station, WBCN’s legacy of media that matters is not lost.
Perhaps Charles Laquidara summed it up best when we talked about the impact of the station for research on a documentary film I am producing about the early days of WBCN. “We thought we were just doing radio,’’ he said. “But a day hasn’t gone by where someone hasn’t said to me, ‘That thing you played. . .’ or ‘That thing you said, it changed my life.’’
Bill Lichtenstein is a print and broadcast journalist and documentary producer. 
