“Constructing a visual history of an aural medium”: Katherine Rye Jewell on Bill Lichtenstein’s *WBCN and the American Revolution: How a Radio Station Defined Politics, Counterculture, and Rock and Roll*

In WBCN and the American Revolution: How a Radio Station Defined Politics, Counterculture, and Rock and Roll, compiled from research related to the documentary of the same name, Bill Lichtenstein constructs a visual history of an aural medium, replete with photographs, archival finds, and ephemera.

In a sense, the book isn’t actually the history of a radio station: it is the history of a scene (or a “cultural field,” in the Bourdieu-ian sense). An ecosystem of local businesses­—clothing and record stores, venues and press outlets—grew in Boston’s Brahmin enclave to support countercultural revolution and political activism, fueled by a DIY ethos that presaged punk of the mid-1970s. WBCN’s history reveals this underground, told through interviews and oral histories as well as the documents and ephemera of these scenes, including newspaper clippings and photographs. The book is an archive of Boston’s bohemia as much as it is the ideas and aesthetics of countercultural radio. As such, this book approaches an intellectual history of public space and cultural revolution told in a tactilely different manner–by participants, rather than removed historians.

The scene, and WBCN, came together around the Boston Tea Party, a venue founded by the unlikely figure of Ray Riepen (a fact captured in a photograph of the suited man with a pocket square in front of a psychedelic poster) (14). The scene that emerged around his club rivaled that of Andy Warhol’s Factory and shared its aesthetics. But the Boston Tea Party enters rock legend because a host of the era’s supergroups moved across its stage—and in front of WBCN’s microphone, a failing classical signal rescued from obscurity by Riepen’s intervention.

The incongruity and juxtaposition of acts, such as the Allman brothers opening for the Velvet Underground make the argument. Blues artists reached new audiences via the venue. In this manner, the book represents archivist impulses and awe-filled reminiscence with a “remember when they were small” incredulity. A golden age mythology emerges from this approach: the psychedelics won over the squares and allowed musical genius to redefine not only bohemia, but popular culture itself—injecting openness, experimentation, and the possibility of envisioning new ways of living and relating into the public sphere. As one interviewee notes, “The concerts ended in the early seventies, like so many things and feelings of the time. But the impressions lived on in the music and in the spirit of those of us who had a glimpse of that utopia.” (33) This scene, populated by mostly young white people of Boston and its surrounding suburbs, offered a new market for a new kind of radio station catered to their aesthetics and politics.

The scene history veers from music venue into area college campuses, as WBCN began to sell ads and create programming catered to this audience. Riepen employed a model of taking amateurs from local college radio and putting them on the air, playing music they had a passion for to people who were just like them: it worked. WBCN drew its on-air aesthetics from this scene, and in this sense, it is a radio history, capturing WBCN’s influence in the business and practice of commercial radio.

WBCN proved that airing album cuts and psychedelic music, as well as interviewing artists and connecting with fans, was good business. It connected with other radio innovations in freeform, a reaction to Top 40 AM, which San Francisco KMPX DJ Tom Donahue and “father of progressive radio” infamously called a “rotting corpse, stinking up the airwaves” in the second issue of Rolling Stone in 1967. WBCN sold advertisements, and the station’s overt political content and news coverage did not mar sales. Indeed, Danny Schechter “the News Dissector” and the station’s frequent overlap with former members of the Weather Underground did not seem to thwart the station’s ability to sell airtime.

As a scene history this book departs when the subject of politics arises. In radio, the audience is always a bit mysterious. One can never be sure who exactly is tuning in. In this regard, the book assumes a general attitude: youthful listeners with antiwar politics fomented generational revolution—whether that constituted WBCN’s listeners or not. Certainly, the station’s antiwar coverage (and presence at protests) and anti-Nixon messages animated staffers’ sense of purpose and method of “doing radio.” Lichtenstein asserts that these opinions, “shared by the majority of America’s young people,” defined the station’s culture. The broad-brush strokes of this historical context belie the era’s political complexities (in fact, older Americans tended to be more critical of the war effort than young people, and large opposition did not emerge until 1970, according to one calculation). In 1972, Nixon garnered a strong youth vote, earning 52 percent of voters under 30, and George Wallace polled well in white ethnic enclaves of South Boston and elsewhere. (The history stops in roughly 1974, thus not confronting Boston during the busing crisis.) WBCN’s history does not delve into this complicated partisan or political terrain, although this is not the focus of the book and thus not a criticism. Rather, it captures the experiences, artifacts, and memories of the on-air and behind-the-scenes staff that made WBCN so valuable to its listeners.

WBCN cultivated countercultural, politically-motivated listeners, not the wide demographic of all potential listeners between 18 and 34 in the Boston market. Such focus adds to the argument that this book is radio history, more specifically a history of the business of radio. DJs and announcers operated from a general sense of their audience, less on the practicalities of building a political coalition along the lines of activists and organizers. engaging in a theater of the airwaves, rather than the theater of the streets, it was a countercultural radio station that supplemented the shift to a symbolic, media-driven politics from the old style of political coalition building and constituent outreach.

The ties between station staffers and listeners were more than imaginary. The famed Listener Line provided help and information for those needing a ride or who had a bad acid trip, acting as a kind of social media long before the rise of the internet (129). The line aimed at fulfilling the public service obligations embodied in the Communications Act of 1933, in which licensed stations served the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.” Hopelessly commercial Top 40 stations had abandoned their listeners, and WBCN’s staff sought to fill this void. This kind of listening in and public service connection, revives the history of radio in the United States around mass democracy and the public sphere. WBCN brought the aspirations of the alternative, underground press linked to countercultural developments to the mainstream—and made it profitable. They took seriously the news coverage they offered (149-151) in addition to airing the newest and most exciting music.

The station attempted to diversify the gender and sexuality of on-air staff: for example, it introduced Maxanne to the airwaves, whose sense of what music would prove popular helped launch Aerosmith and Queen to superstar status. (Soul fans were left with an AM signal that went off the air at primetime, supplemented by programming from college stations.) WBCN aired The Lavender Hour, as well, which offered some of the only regular programming for gay and lesbian listeners, giving voice to communities. (199) WBCN provided outreach to people incarcerated, including a weekly program for listeners in prisons and jails, which allowed them to access news as well as make requests and dedications, and supported the political efforts of the incarcerated to improve conditions (209).

Lichtenstein argues that WBCN was participatory, if not democratic. WBCN offered the scene’s soundtrack and launched hard-rock’s origin story. Staffers began as participants rather than marketers—they were authentic, not AstroTurf co-opters of the scene. This depiction implies a challenge to Thomas Frank’s arguments in The Conquest of Cool: that cooptation, or rather corruptive influence of commercialism and success, came later, after the station’s commercial viability drew national advertisers. Once the station left its seedy studios behind the Boston Tea Party for the swanky, corporate atmosphere of the Prudential Center, commercialism and the success of artists from Led Zeppelin to Bruce Springsteen changed the game. WBCN maintained connections to the underground, drawing DJs from college radio stations going forward (including the first punk rock radio DJ Oedipus, from MIT’s WTBS), but they weakened as the station became increasingly powerful as an exemplar of commercial rock radio in the 1980s. This argument appears most strong in the allusions to a lost golden age, when WBCN maintained its countercultural scene connections, authenticity, and utopian aspirations. As one interviewee put it, what WBCN achieved in the late 1960s and early 1970s would be “Almost impossible today because big corporations control the stations.” (147) Rather than touching upon this question of co-optation and commercialism, the narrative presents, in compelling visual detail, the artifacts of this lost mode of radio broadcasting. Those listening in, presumably, were the members of the crowds depicted in the protest photos (including that of the cover, underneath the skywritten peace sign in 1969).

This kind of experiential and visual history arises from the realities of doing radio history, in which the sound experience is often lost to time and physics, captured only on rapidly degrading magnetic tape. But even if the sonic record deteriorates, Lichtenstein demonstrates how traditional archival research can construct “sound” history—capturing the tangible connections between radio’s practitioners and listeners through methods now possible only through the underfunded and often-neglected signals of community and college radio.

WBCN no longer exists – though 104.1 still broadcasts “hot adult contemporary” and reflects the corporatization of radio thanks to deregulation. But WBCN’s revolutionary past and the potential for participatory radio with authentic connections between broadcasters and communities lives on in memory and on the page, thanks to this visual exploration.