WBCN and the American Revolution: How a Radio Station Defined Politics, Counterculture, and Rock and Roll
Bill Lichtenstein
How Boston radio station WBCN became the hub of the rock-and-roll, antiwar, psychedelic solar system.
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 stati
‘WBCN and The American Revolution’ to premiere May 6
Community Content
The documentary “WBCN and The American Revolution,” which chronicles the early years of Boston rock radio powerhouse WBCN, will air on GBH 2 at 9 p.m. May 6.
The film was produced by Newton native Bill Lichtenstein, a Peabody Award-winning filmmaker who also became the youngest WBCN DJ in the station’s history when he began broadcasting there at age 14 in 1970, as part of an open classroom program at Weeks Junior High School in Newton Center. He later became a news announcer with a weekly program on WBCN. Lichtenstein is a graduate of Newton South High School.
WBCN Documentary Broadcast Premiere on May 6 – Special Online Panel April 26
April 23, 2021 in Film, History
The documentary “WBCN and the American Revolution” chronicles the founding of Boston’s groundbreaking rock station that combined late-1960s countercultural politics and music in way that influenced freeform radio to come. Directed by journalist and former WBCN employee Bill Lichtenstein, the film will premiere on GBH 2 in the Boston area. It will air nationally on PBS stations this coming fall.
We talked with Bill Lichtenstein about the documentary a year ago on episode #241 of our podcast. We discussed how even though it was a commercial station, WBCN operated more like a community station, such New York’s WBAI, which was also blazing a freeform trail of music and politics.