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This is March 15, 1968.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
And now it's time
for our revolutionary new experiment in radio.
This is WBCN in Boston... Jerry Garcia Band, Duane Allman,
they're all here.
Railroad tracks on Mass. Avenue were blockaded
for a while tonight in Cambridge
in a militant anti-war protest.
This is WBCN in Boston, the American Revolution.
By the score, the hippies have been descending
on the Boston Common.
Their recreation area is this grassy plot
on the corner of Charles and Beacon Streets.
The summer before was the Summer of Love
in San Francisco-- we didn't have a Haight-Ashbury community.
We did have the Boston Common.
- Hi, hello. - Hi.
- Why are you here? - Because I
like love-ins.
Is it possible to love everybody?
- Yes. - How come?
How come people haven't loved everybody for 2, 000 years?
Because they've been mixed up.
The very presence and activity of this community
has caused crossfire and conflict from other groups
inside the community of Boston.
Namely, the police department, local businessmen,
and members of the Boston City Council.
If you've got a group of people
who have no means of communicating
with the establishment, as has been the case with the hippies,
then communication becomes the primary problem.
These people think that the,
the normal community, the "straights," as they call it,
just don't understand them,
don't want to understand them, and completely reject them.
And they just go from bad to worse.
Conformity gives shape and size
and character to society, doesn't it?
Just think of these hippies down on Charles Street,
every one of whom is trying to look different from the other.
Aren't they a mess?
I would hope that the,
most of these people would take up a trade
or a profession and get to work
and help to build a better America.
Hippies have caused a little bit of problem in our,
in our business.
They're using the Boston Common
as a, as a lavatory.
They're full of bugs and parasites.
You show them a bar of soap, they'll run for the hills.
I mean, what is going to happen?
This is not the same city of Boston that we grew up in.
JOSEPH F. TIMILTY: Boston Common was set up
originally for the benefit of all the people of Boston.
Today, a colony of unwashed,
unshaven people have managed to infest
that area and desecrate that community by their love-ins,
their sit-ins, their smoke-ins,
and a few other ins that I wouldn't dare to describe today.
We now have a different type of pollution: people pollution,
hippie pollution, the flower people.
All I am asking is for the police department
to enforce the regulations.
My name is Ray Riepen,
and in 1966, I moved to Cambridge and
was going to do some graduate work
at the Harvard Law School.
Shortly after that, I opened the first rock club
on the East Coast, called the Boston Tea Party.
A woman whose divorce I'd handled called me one day
and asked me if I would do some free legal work
for Andy Warhol and Film-Makers' Co-op in New York,
which had been backed by the Ford Foundation.
They had talked about opening a Boston branch.
Shortly after I put my money up and signed the lease,
she called me and told me that
the Ford Foundation had changed their mind
and that they, they were not going to open
a Boston branch of the Film-Makers' Co-op.
So, I quickly had to figure out what I was going to do,
besides file for bankruptcy.
It just occurred to me that with 240,000 students in Boston,
that the best chance I had
to pay the rent on this thing was to give,
you know, play rock music there
and have, you know, have a rock club.
We're at the Boston Tea Party tonight!
In Boston, Massachusetts. All right, right on.
There is no place like this place,
and runnin' around about this place,
lookin' at things like this place...
Well, we were
all hippies, we all had long hair, and Ray didn't.
Ray was a straight guy.
You would not have picked out Ray
to be the owner of the Tea Party.
Ray was kind of an interesting character, I mean, here he is,
so very much the Kansas City lawyer.
He had a way of kind of sitting back from it all,
and I think that he quickly realized
that he was really on to something.
Well, when you went in, it was, like, this old
kind of temple-like building.
Across the top of the stage, it said, "Praise Ye the Lord."
In the '30s, the building had been used as a Calvary temple,
so there was this little, you know, religious overtones.
Up in the balcony would be
the light show.
A filmmaker named Ken Brown,
who produced these great little films of stuff
that he cut out and these little characters who'd move around.
It had a good vibe to it, you know?
It was just a great, funky place.
We had the real thing.
I was a Tea Party regular.
I went there as often as I could, I mean...
Let's think about this for a second,
the fact that I could go see the Who
for $3.50 is insane.
There is a terrific poster from May
of 1969 that just tells you
what was going on at the Tea Party.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk was opening for the Who
and they were doing three nights at the Tea Party.
The Allman Brothers played there
for the, their first time up north.
Duane Allman, of course, was there.
It was amazing that you could see music
of that level in such a small, intimate environment.
There was a whole transition period
that was starting to happen with these traditional blues players
performing in front of a white audience for the first time.
People just never really saw anything like that.
Seeing people like Muddy Waters for the first time
was just mind-boggling.
Ray was good at finding talent,
bands that these days,
you'd say, "My God, Led Zeppelin, really?"
Yes, yes, really.
Led Zeppelin made their first U.S. tour
in January '69.
They actually had only about
an hour's worth of music in their set.
The audience was just going crazy.
Led Zeppelin started just improvising,
and they went on to play for four hours.
Their manager, a guy named Peter Grant,
was quoted afterwards, saying,
"Wow, I knew we'd made it when I saw
the reaction of the people at the Tea Party."
Thank you very much, this is a song called "Heroin."
The last weekend of May of 1967,
the Velvet Underground played the Tea Party.
It turns out that this was a really, really important gig,
because up until that time, they'd been part
of Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable,
and the multimedia and the whole thing.
And this was the first gig that they ever had
where it was just the four band members
playing as a rock band.
LOU REED You know, Boston was the whole thing,
as far as we were concerned.
It was just, it was the first time we played in public
and didn't have all those things thrown at us.
The, you know, the "leather freaks," the...
You know, "druggies."
It was the first time anybody just listened to the music,
which blew our minds collectively.
When Ray Riepen first developed the, the whole concept
of the Tea Party, there wasn't any radio station at all
that played any, any of this kind of music.
The only place on radio that you could listen
to rock and roll was on A.M. radio,
and you got 40 songs played over and over again.
That's why they called it Top 40.
At the time, we didn't notice
that it was, like, the same songs every 30 minutes or so,
because it was kinetic, and it was active, and it was loud.
- Plays hits number...
Five, four, three, two...
One, one, one, one.
Your job was not so much to be responsive
to the audience as it was
to force this music down their throats.
And then putting them on the air
in this high-energy format
with 18 minutes of national commercials,
very highly produced commercials, every hour.
Oh, there's a miserable old acne pimple!
What to do?
The DJs were all, usually outsized personalities,
sometimes screaming, sometimes not,
but always with some sort of schtick.
We're gonna play this one for everyone saying
"Whoo, whoo, Ginsburg!"...
...tonight at Adventure Car Hop.
And they always talked like this.
"Hey, Sunday, simply...
Chris Karamesines and his nitro- burning dragster!", you know.
In Italian, there's a great phrase,
and the opera singers use it, "senza coglionis."
It means without balls, literally.
And, you know... And you know something is
sort of, sort of white bread, it's a sort of...
It lacks-- it lacks feeling, it lacks passion.
And I think that a lot of that was what was being broadcast.
Everybody had the same records,
but you couldn't hear it on the radio.
Jefferson Airplane, their debut album.
Steve Miller Band, Quicksilver Messenger Service.
You know, jazz rock was being born,
and Cream's album came out, and Donovan.
The music business
changed by 1968 to, 70% of the record sales were albums.
And some record would come out,
and you would just listen to it over and over again
and you would just talk about it.
And the Beatles, in 1967, when they released "Sergeant Pepper,"
they have talked about knowing the fact
that when they put that out,
they were going to completely dominate the conversation
and the airwaves about this record-- and they were right.
Well, "Sergeant Pepper" started it.
That was an album that really changed the way we dressed,
the way we looked, the way we thought, what drugs we took.
You know, "A Day in the Life" comes across
as one of the most important songs I've ever heard,
and it still is,
about how absurd a day can be, and how, when you get stoned,
you see it from a different perspective.
I mean, really, that's what that song's about.
"Woke up, got out of bed, took a smoke and then went..."
Well, I got the idea that in a town
of 240,000 students, 84 colleges,
it might be, you know, appropriate to play the music
they were buying at the record stores.
I went down to the N.A.F.M.B. convention,
which was the week before
the National Association of Broadcasters'
principal convention,
and I thought, "Well, I'll go down there and tell them
what I'm thinking about doing and see what they say."
And so, you know, I told them that I thought,
you know, I'll limit the commercials to eight an hour
and have conversational tone
and play album cuts.
They all asked me, well, what my background was,
and I told them, well, I was a lawyer,
and I was doing graduate work
at Harvard Law School, and they suggested
that I concentrate on that and leave broadcasting to them,
because I was the dumbest person they had ever met.
That there was nothing about my concept of programming
that was economically viable in America.
He was what we needed, he was an entrepreneur
who had kind of the affinity for the culture
and, but at the same time, kind of
the personality of the entrepreneur,
which is kind of, "My way or the highway, I have this vision."
So I began to pull Dun & Bradstreets on all the,
you know, radio stations in Boston.
And here was WBCN that had been in Chapter 11,
and it was about to go down again and was late payment.
And they were somebody that I knew that
they had to be desperately looking for an alternative
to just going off the air.
So he wound up connecting
with a man named T. Mitchell Hastings.
T. Mitchell Hastings was a, a genius,
and he also created a small radio called
the FM Hastings Jr.,
which was a small, pocket-sized radio.
So T. Mitchell Hastings
owned a radio station in Boston named WBCN.
But then he began to acquire some other stations.
In Hartford, WHCN.
WNCN, which was in New York City.
And these stations were all essentially bankrupt,
because they were classical music stations
that couldn't sell any advertising
and, you know, begging on air for people to buy spots.
DELLA CHIESA You're listening
to Concert Network Radio.
We have been in severe financial trouble,
looking for funds here at WBCN.
If you can help us, send your contribution
to 171 Newbury Street, Back Bay, Boston,
and if we don't have adequate funds,
we'll be forced to go off the air.
We had problems, you know?
We had people coming in from the Associated Press...
In those days, we had the,
we had the newswire right at the studio.
Disconnecting it, taking it out.
Because the bill hadn't been paid.
And I went to him and I said,
"Mr. Hastings," you know, "what am I gonna do?"
I was program director at the time.
He said, "Well, read from the newspaper."
That was it.
So, Ray was able to convince this technical genius,
T. Mitchell Hastings,
into just giving him the overnights.
He knew exactly what was going on in San Francisco,
and in Pasadena, California, and in New York,
where other FM stations took advantage of the fact
that nobody wanted to listen to FM,
and started broadcasting rock in stereo.
I was supposed to be class of '68 at Tufts.
I was a philosophy major with no career prospects.
When I got to Tufts, it just happened that
the dorm that I was living in,
the next room, this guy named Joe Rogers
was playing this incredible Muddy Waters,
he'd play Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
Stuff that I'd never heard-- jaw-dropping, amazing music.
So I was working at the,
or doing a show at the Tufts station,
and one evening, unannounced, Ray appeared there.
I think that was easy enough for him to do,
because I'm pretty sure we didn't lock the door.
I listened to the college radio stations
and drove around, and then I just drove over and walked in.
They were on the air and I just walked in
and introduced myself and I said,
"I'm trying to get some time on a network
"and I need some announcers.
Would you guys be interested in going on real radio?"
Meeting Ray was really an interesting experience.
I heard he controls the club, the Boston Tea Party,
very important guy, and he's gonna start
a commercial radio station.
I'm, like, "Okay, fine," you know, "I'm in school,
I'm a full-time student, what can I do?"
But I went over to his apartment,
which was this amazing,
modern, gorgeous place in Cambridge, but oddly enough,
there wasn't one piece of furniture in the room, okay?
He had a lot of books stacked around,
but no furniture, and I'm, like,
"If this guy is so freaking successful,
why doesn't he have any furniture?"
I told them what I had in mind,
and they probably thought I was crazy, too, because,
you know, it didn't exist yet.
The deal was, if you worked on a college station, maybe,
was to try and be professional,
and of course, professional meant standard broadcasting,
which I thought was ugly radio.
And that was one of the genius parts
of Ray Riepen's plan and his business model for WBCN,
is that he did not hire
professional radio announcers-- he hired kids.
What he cared about was your passion for the music
and what was called at the time the underground culture.
I'm looking at...
...a momentary flashback
caught in time, which is
the BCN air staff.
Jim Parry was one of the DJs.
Joe Rogers was then Mississippi Harold Wilson.
Sam Kopper,
J.J. Jackson,
who was the first African American DJ at BCN.
Then there's Steven Clean, Steven Segal.
Al Perry, who was also a DJ,
but also was a guy who kind of took one for the team
and became a sales guy, ultimately sales manager,
and then general manager.
You can see Al wearing a tie,
so he was probably fresh from a sales call to some agency.
This truly tells the tale.
When we got there, we were just excited
and in awe of the idea that we were being allowed
to play any sort of music
and could speak any way we wanted to on, on the radio.
And then when it turned out that the radio station
was going to debut on a Friday night, well, then,
what they had to say was, "Well, I guess, Rogers, it's you."
It wasn't because I was
their ace designated lead-off hitter.
It was, that's how the schedule was,
and my instructions were simply, "Don't screw it up."
We have been in severe financial trouble
here at WBCN-- we're experimenting with new formats,
trying to kind of feel our way around.
I'm Ron Della Chiesa, I'll be here tomorrow evening
with another mixed bag of programming for you.
And now it's time for our revolutionary new experiment
in radio, as we told you:
our first live broadcast with Mississippi Harold Wilson.
So on, this would be March 15 of 1968, yeah,
I carried my records up the stairs to, up to the top floor
of the Newbury Street building where the station was.
Began by playing some Mothers of Invention,
Frank Zappa, some sort of farting and belching noises.
That first broadcast, March 15, 1968,
I remember Joe Rogers, Mississippi,
you know, dropped the needle and played amazing music,
and it was a magical time.
It was completely free form,
it was, play whatever we want, bring in records from home.
For the first time, there was an outlet for music
like this on the radio.
This was music of substance, these were artists of interest,
these were artists who displayed their roots
and their influences.
The music was just always important to us,
and it was clearly ours.
Older people didn't like it, didn't understand it.
You'd hear Jimi Hendrix.
Not, not necessarily "Foxy Lady."
You might hear "If 6 was 9."
You'd hear a song six deep into the Hendrix album.
I remember Joe Rogers had brought to the playlist,
and I started playing one of the earliest known recordings
of Aretha Franklin, when she was with a gospel choir,
a stomping gospel song.
Whatever rock was happening, fine.
You want to play some folk, no problem.
If you wanted to play some Beethoven
or some Carl Orff-- no problem, mix it up.
Throw in some Monty Python, throw in some spoken word.
You never knew what you were going to hear
on the radio station.
Every station would get the records by the Firesign Theatre,
and it would just take you for a trip.
It was literally...
...acid-y, you know, it was like acid.
Nick Danger, Third Eye.
I want to order a pizza to go, and no anchovies.
No anchovies? You've got the wrong man.
I spell my name Danger.
What?
You'd hear some Muddy,
you'd hear some Grateful Dead, you'd hear some Tom Rush--
you'd hear a little bit of everything.
It was just, like, amazing.
Quite simply, you were not going to hear
this music anywhere except at WBCN.
I remember the absolute shock
of hearing long-form sets of 30, 40, 50 minutes,
and suddenly we had found on the radio
what was the soundtrack of our lives.
It's so vivid to me what it was like...
You just walk in and,
to a radio station, and there'd be all these albums.
You could tell by the color, almost,
of that one edge what artist it was.
We would pull these albums out,
and, you know, you'd pull-- first, you'd pull four or five
and say, "This is how I am going to start my show."
And then you start getting inspired along the way,
and you'd say, "Ah, this song would go with..."
And you'd run up before the record ended
and you find that album, you pull it out,
you go to the other turntable that was empty,
and you put the record on, slap it on there,
and you'd queue it up.
But if it was in the same key, you'd let it go,
and that was the magic moment where the two songs
would go together...
And then the other song would come up,
and people would go...
"Oh, man, that was great."
I remember distinctly driving
from New York to Boston, and BCN you could just start getting,
like, 40 minutes outside of town,
and I remember hearing the static.
Finally, it settled into a song that I knew by Bob Dylan.
And all of a sudden, just hearing that coming
through my speakers from a radio station in Boston,
I knew that I just felt home.
One DJ would go from 10:30 to 2:00,
and then from 2:00 to 5:30, Peter Wolf would take over,
you know, in the wee hours.
Peter Wolf was a well-known musician in town,
and he was a rock star in Boston--
later, obviously, a huge rock star.
And he was doing 2:00 to 5:00 or 6:00 a.m., and you could just
feel everything change when Peter walked in the room.
Ah, yes, kooma labor gomma gabor.
This is Woofer Goofer, Mamma Toofer, Habba Doofer,
you're listening to WBCN FM, 104.1 in Boston.
And you know what WBCN mean?
You know what WBCN means? Wolf!
You got it, baby, Wolf's boss...
Let it happen, cap'n!
I would be on the air when he would come in,
and he would almost always come in with his friend Big Charles.
I was kind of like his sidekick.
I started calling him the "Woofer Goofer"
and then I became the "Master Blaster,"
anything you can do I can do a little bit faster.
WBCN in Boston, Woofer Goofer, Mamma Toofer,
104.1, having a little fun.
You got it, baby!
It was a total violation of everything we stood for,
but he was such a great guy and such a great personality.
Here was a radio station
that was an underground rock station,
and Wolf was doing the overnight show, and it was just amazing.
Yeah, we're doing it, WBCN in Boston, give us a call.
You know what I'm talking about.
When the station began,
the broadcasts were from the fifth floor
of 171 Newbury Street, that's where WBCN
as a classical station existed.
Because T. Mitchell was very leery
of having long-haired hippies going into his studio,
which was kind of a, you know, upscale shopping area,
and a lot of ad agencies there,
he just didn't want to be associated with these people,
even though he was maybe thinking he'd be happy
to take their money.
I don't know whether they thought we'd steal
the classical records or whether
somebody would be smoking funny cigarettes up there, or what.
But they didn't socially want the two groups to interact.
We were hippies, we had long hair,
we had, you know, rock and roll band shirts.
And we did, you know, sort of the usual substances.
The decision was made that it would be better
to do the actual shows from, away from Newbury Street.
Ray got two turntables and a microphone
that could be installed over
in the backroom of his dance hall,
the Boston Tea Party.
The studio was literally
on a side room backstage at the Boston Tea Party,
which was an amazing place to be sitting,
because you'd see these bands going back and forth, and, like,
"Oh, look, there's Jefferson Airplane," or "Oh, look,
there's the Who," or whatever.
And somebody brought up the point that it was going to be
kind of noisy when we turned on the mic, and he was, like,
"Who gives a shit?
It's gonna sound fantastic, let it go."
HADGES The instrumental from the album
by the Quicksilver Messenger Service, a song called
"Gold and Silver," and don't forget, they will be in
at the Boston Tea Party,
53 Berkeley Street, this weekend,
so you want to go out and see them.
Tom Hadges leading the American Revolution.
The place, 104 on your FM dial in stereo, the new WBCN.
The record library was a closet, it was about this wide,
had a door and I think four shelves on it.
And this was also the green room during shows,
so Ten Years After,
the British neo-blues band, were there one night,
and Ray Riepen, in his expansive mood, said,
"Hey, you want some records? Take some."
So Alvin Lee, was the lead guitarist, said, "Okay,"
and grabbed everything from B through D,
and, you know, packed them in the thing
and went away-- so we could not play the Beatles
or the Doors for a month or so, till they got replaced.
So this is, uh... kind of a loose operation.
The response from people was so great,
they loved the music and they loved the different approach,
because we were sort of treating radio not as a performance,
but as a relationship with our listeners.
So what was on March 15 an overnight programming slot
by May 1 was 24 hours.
Different announcers had done shows, and in the process,
mentioned to the listeners that it would be good,
if they can hear us,
maybe they could send in a postcard.
BARNA This is Rich Barna with you
on the American Revolution, and if'n you like what you hear,
why not write us, as we like to know what it is that you like--
and also what it is that you don't like.
And they did, and they sent in
thousands and thousands of postcards.
The mailman delivering the mail was bringing it in duffle bags
of these postcards from listeners.
"You have me as well as half the philosophy department
here at Harvard as faithful listeners."
"The revolution is becoming ever more popular
at Newton High."
"I work in a store where we play your music all day."
"Man, everybody's listening."
By time it went on the air, you know,
in that spring, full time,
you could walk down
some of the streets in Boston, like Comm. Ave.,
and people would have their windows open
and their radio speakers
deliberately on the windowsill,
playing this to the world.
And everybody is on the same station.
I have vivid memories of walking up
Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, every store,
whether it was the record store
or the Orson Welles Cinema,
you heard it in every store.
You could go from one end of Boston
to one end of Cambridge and not have a radio,
and you could hear BCN all the way.
At the B.U. library,
they had this really cool thing
where you could just put headphones on and plug it in.
You could look around the room and every,
everybody in there, every one of them, was listening to WBCN.
BCN was really becoming established
I mean, there was nothing else
on the radio that was even close to what was happening.
You're listening to wonderful,
bigger than a bread box radio, WBCN in Boston.
We felt like we were going through a revolution.
At that time, the station
was mostly about the music,
but remember, when the station leadership chose
"The American Revolution" as the theme,
I think that's a recognition that there was more to it
than just a lifestyle revolution,
that it was also about a political revolution.
It's playing off, "Here's Boston,
"Boston was the hot bed of the American Revolution,
the original one-- this is a new one."
My first memory of BCN was when,
I don't know which disc jockey it was, but when they said,
"This is the American Revolution," you know?
And you felt that they meant it.
Good evening, my fellow Americans.
By early '68, there was a sense of expectation
on a political agenda.
Lyndon Johnson's presidency was being threatened.
This man, who albeit
had a good domestic record on equal rights,
had a horrible foreign policy in that he was
sending young men off to a war that we should not have been in.
People were cutting their hair
and shaving their beards and Going Clean for Gene.
Gene McCarthy, he was our hero.
I remember being at Fenway Park
for a huge Gene McCarthy rally.
Johnson went on national TV
with a message that nobody was expecting.
I shall not seek,
and I will not accept, the nomination
of my party for another term as your president.
And that just
threw open the gates.
Everything just really changed, quickly.
This is the "CBS Evening News,"
with Walter Cronkite.
Good evening.
Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of non-violence
in the Civil Rights Movement, has been shot to death
in Memphis, Tennessee.
And then, you know, Robert Kennedy,
two months later, in June of '68, he was killed.
After my shift, I got in my car and was driving home
and I tuned the radio,
and what I heard was the Robert Kennedy rally after
the California primary.
...the divisions, whether it's between
Black and whites, between the poor and the more affluent,
or between age groups or on the war in Vietnam,
that we can start to work together, we are a great country
and a compassionate country.
I remember listening to the results
of the, of the vote.
So, uh...
My thanks to all of you, and now it's on to Chicago
and let's win there, thank you.
And it was, like, we won, we won, we won!
"Oh, my God, Robert Kennedy has been shot!"
I remember coming in to do my morning show.
I had this copy in front of me:
"Robert Kennedy has been shot," and so I went on the air
to say that, and it was just, you know,
it's among those moments in life that you just...
You feel like you're totally hit in the chest.
The assassination of Kennedy
was such an emotional, almost physical, blow,
because it felt like there wasn't any hope
in the legitimate political channels anymore.
And then the absolute, you know, confrontation
of the Chicago Convention in August of '68.
Well, I think if people stay in the park,
they'll be okay, they'll be treated
with respect by the police.
Those people that, those Yippies that march
on the Amphitheatre or go downtown
and demand their rights...
They'll be risking their lives.
That's right, these cops here are tough, they'd...
They'd kill you with a smile.
He's being kicked and smashed
by these police officers here, he's being hit by billy clubs.
They're kicking him, they're jumping on him--
it's unbelievable!
We were shouting at the cops yesterday
that they should go to Prague
and teach the Russians and stuff,
and apparently they took that as a compliment.
Instead of Bobby Kennedy, we got Hubert Humphrey.
And certainly the...
as institutional a politician as there was.
I proudly accept the nomination
of our party.
I don't think any of us really thought
that Hubert Humphrey was a great
receptacle for our hopes and dreams.
And then you add to that the third-party candidacy
of George Wallace, who was playing
the segregationist, racist card,
and it was an autumn of chaos, huge marches,
students demonstrating.
Nixon was
and felt like the personification
of American evil, of everything that was wrong in the country.
Nixon ran on a platform of peace.
We didn't believe him for a minute.
He was Tricky Dick Nixon.
Nixon had been Eisenhower's vice president,
and so to many oldest Boomers, we remember,
you know, this strange, gargoyle looking guy.
He was, like, out of central casting for the job.
There wasn't anything you could look at and go,
"Oh, no, maybe he's really a nice guy on the side."
No, he's like this all the time.
From then on, it was, we are at war with Nixon.
We are at war with American political leadership.
Shortly after the station started,
Ray started getting phone calls from professional disc jockeys,
who said, "Ray, you got to get rid of those kids.
Bring me in, we can really make this thing fly."
And somehow, Ray came to the conclusion,
made the decision that he was going to stick with the kids.
It was a crazy decision, but that was it.
Everything followed from that decision.
The sequence of offices for BCN was interesting.
We were in the Tea Party there for a while.
But then we moved to Stuart Street
for the full-time offices.
We were in a small studio over a luncheonette
run by a guy named Flash.
We were up on the third floor,
so you could smell, you know,
if the burgers got burned, it somehow came up.
We had a relatively small space and a lot of people,
because the station had become a 24-hour station.
I remember when bands would come
and they'd look around and there'd be, like,
all kinds of crap on the walls
and piles of junk on the floor and stuff.
They'd get instantly comfortable.
Maybe there wasn't a chair, maybe they had to sit
on a table-- that's also possible--
but the studio functioned very well.
All of the equipment itself was impeccably
bought and maintained,
but everything else about the place was a mess.
So the story with my photographing WBCN
is that I was such a fan at first,
that I sort of got to know them
and they began feeling comfortable with me
as a photographer.
And I would show up, photograph them
here, there, and everywhere,
and then at one point,
we all gathered into their little record library,
which was tiny.
One of the DJs, John Brodey, decided it would be cool
to take off his clothes.
And that's the X-rated version of that picture.
And... it was like one family, one big happy family.
There seems to be a whole jock revolution
happening in America.
This is your old friends here at WBCN in Boston,
104.1.
This is WBCN in Boston.
I'm never sure if what I'm hearing
through my earphones is not the same as what
you're hearing through your radio, really.
It goes through a lot of changes before it gets to you.
It was all about freedom,
being basically a commune of people working together to--
of all equals and irreverence.
We were speaking truth to power.
I mean, we were 22-year-olds,
who, you know, thought we knew all the truth.
Boston was in the grips of counterculture,
students trying to find new ways of living,
new ways of being.
You know, the great discussions were, "How are we ever gonna
"live our life in this kind of a society?
"How do you have a moral life?
How do you have a good life?"
We hated the old men sending the young men
off to war, but that kind of consciousness expansion
was happening then
politically,
socially-- obviously on racial issues--
and musically.
More and more artists
were putting political messages in their songs, and I think that
appealed to a lot of people, because they wanted something
a little bit more than just, "Baby, I love you."
And so, you know, "Baby, I love you,
but we got something we gotta do."
You had one song.
"There is something happening here," you know?
And it's all Buffalo Springfield
and it drives from right at that moment.
Rock music has always been about creating chaos
and raising hell, you know?
I mean, that's what it's supposed to do.
If you're doing your job right, that's what you're doing.
And it's people's natures, that are that age, to be belligerent.
You know? I mean, it's a biological fact.
It's hormonally driven, and we felt sold out.
We felt bitterly betrayed by our country,
and you fuse that attitude with the sort of inherent
anarchy and chaos of rock and roll,
and it was an extremely potent thing.
And BCN became the mouthpiece for that.
It became the delivery system for that music to the audience.
You know? To all of us.
Free expression was...
I mean, we talked about that all the time.
It was, like, how much can we get away with?
These were the times when the Rolling Stones
came to play "The Ed Sullivan Show,"
and they could not play their song
"Let's Spend the Night Together,"
that was their new hit song,
but were not allowed to say the word "night."
And Mick Jagger had to say,
"Let's spend some time together," because the concept
of spending the night together was too risqué.
At the same time, we watched
"The Smothers Brothers," that they were struggling with
what they were being allowed to do and what they couldn't do.
What are you doing?
I'm getting ready to go to college.
At the time, that was the state of the art
of the struggle for expression.
Our government is asking us as citizens, good citizens,
to refrain from traveling to foreign lands.
Okay, all you guys in Vietnam, come on home.
And clearly, at WBCN,
we just-- we ignored most all of those rules,
and that was something the audience could hear.
We didn't really care what the rules were.
We tried to-- well, we did, we made our own rules.
We, we formed a radio consciousness
that was further and further and further more political
and more dangerous, and we worked hard to be dangerous.
We were the first station that played
John Lennon, "Working Class Hero,"
where John Lennon says, right in the middle of the song,
he says, "You think you're so clever and classless and free,
but you're all fucking peasants as far as I can see."
We played that, no beeps, nothing.
Using an obscenity like that, it was part of the song.
You really didn't have a right to cut that out.
And... there were times
when songs like that needed to be played, just, period.
One of the things we were supposed to do
was to push the edge of the envelope,
and it wasn't so much that you were concerned about
offending someone, because obviously, the audience
you were playing to were not going to be offended,
but because of the FCC, and all you need to do is
get a letter from somebody, and you've got this incredible fine
you got to deal with and all of that.
Each announcer had his or her own
FCC license-- you could lose your job
there or any place else by losing your license.
Somebody would write a letter to the FCC,
and next thing you know, I'd get a letter.
And then I'd have to go down, they'd have a--
I don't know what they call them--
but they'd have a conference, and here would be some...
you know, administrative person
in the Federal Communications Commission in Washington,
wanted to know what kind of a deal I was running up there.
The Non-Violent Direct Action Group
is planning a little winter campaign
to focus attention on the war in Indochina.
Their meetings are held on Wednesday nights at 7:30 p.m.
at the Phillips Brooks House in Harvard Yard.
We'll remind you about that again next Wednesday.
This is WBCN and we're in Boston.
The Vietnam War hung over everything.
If you graduated from high school or college in that time,
probably your first concern, as a male, then, was,
"Am I going to be drafted?"
263.
That's my lottery number.
If you had number one, you were going.
And you got number one by the date that you were born,
and my date, September 9, was number 263 out of 365,
so I didn't get drafted,
and I was really, really, really happy.
Boston was seething, I mean,
250,000 college students,
most of whom by then had turned against the war.
Don't forget, I mean, Boston was
a battleground of ideas, it wasn't just a community.
This was the place that Henry Kissinger,
you know, taught at Harvard.
And so, so were activists opposing the war there,
and there was a back-and-forth.
There were protests at M.I.T.,
there were protests all across the Boston area
in all these universities.
Because we saw the universities as part of the war machine,
the war system, you know?
That they were providing intellectual capital,
that they were contractors for the Pentagon,
providing studies and research and training.
And, you know, we opposed that, we wanted to expose it.
So we began to look at every way
that we can impede and oppose the war.
About 300 students today took over
the main administration hall at Harvard.
Acting in protest against
the Reserve Officer Training Corps program,
they evicted several deans and then locked themselves in.
What would it take for the SDS
to make peace with the university?
Well, we've said all along that we have
a series of demands that are non-negotiable demands,
and it would be very, very easy.
All the university has to do is meet them.
The Harvard strike got a lot of attention,
because Harvard gets a lot of attention.
This was the elite, the crème de la crème of American students,
and I was writing for the "Old Mole" in Cambridge.
The "Old Mole" was our underground newspaper,
and we had a small collective
of people putting it out.
And I came into the offices
of the dean of Harvard College, which was occupied--
this is before the Occupy Movement--
occupied by all of these activists
smoking dope in the dean's office.
And I talked to some of the people from SDS, Harvard SDS.
I said, "You got to stop this immediately,
"because this will become the story,
"that you're defacing the university.
Get these people out of here right now."
So they did, they got all the students out of there.
I said, "Are the doors locked?"
They said, "Yes." I said, "Good.
Let's go into the filing cabinets."
So we seal off the offices.
And the offices are filled with files.
And they're looking through.
And what they're looking for is any files that say
"C.I.A.," Central Intelligence Agency,
any files that say "R.O.T.C.," Reserve Officer Training Corps,
any files that say "Dow," or other major corporations.
And we're finding them.
And we began to find
all kinds of secret documents about,
from the Pentagon to Harvard,
from the C.I.A. to Harvard.
"Henry Kissinger will be in Saigon next week."
He was then a professor at Harvard.
And all this material was there.
The university said, "We have no contracts
with the Central Intelligence Agency."
We're finding files that have contracts
with the Central Intelligence Agency.
So now we're pulling all these papers out,
and the question is, what are we going to do with them?
And so we say, "Well, you got to publish this somehow.
How are we going to get this out of here?"
Meanwhile, the State Police surrounded Harvard Yard.
In the dean's office, we had these little bookbags,
green bags, and so we filled one with these documents.
The "Old Mole" was down the street.
And I took one, a student, and we came to the door,
the State Police on this side of the fence,
the activists on this side of the fence.
"How am I going to get out of here?"
So I pick a fight with this kid, "Let me out of here!
"I hate this revolution!
"Look what you're doing to Harvard!
You're destroying the whole place, I can't stand it!"
At which point, a cop comes over and says, "Let this guy leave!"
And the cop escorts me out, not knowing
that in my bag are all these documents.
And Danny was part of a team that then set to work
to really analyze the content of the documents,
and to begin to map out a real analysis of what they showed,
and he was just terrific at it.
The next day, the "Old Mole" had a special edition
with, printing all of these documents from inside
the halls of Harvard, which showed how compromised
the administration was and how supportive it was of the C.I.A.
and various government contracts
in support of the war in Vietnam.
And that was an important moment in the Harvard strike.
The angry conflicts
on the college campuses continue.
President Pusey of Harvard held a press conference to say
he called in the police because
the students occupying the administration building
were breaking into the confidential files.
Today, about 3,000 students gathered to protest
the police coming on to the campus Thursday morning,
when they swung their clubs and arrested about 200.
The confrontation produced
some of the worst violence experienced at Harvard
in its entire history.
They effectively brought the war
right back into Harvard Yard
and galvanized 16,000 members
of the Harvard community to go on strike.
It's a warm, clear day here at the Boston Common.
We had also seen that Nixon and his administration
had no plan to end the war, and so at this point,
there was as close to a general strike as we could
possibly figure out, and it was called the Moratorium.
Stop what you're doing and take time out
to register your opposition to the war.
The Greater Boston Peace Action Coalition
needs volunteers to leaflet, help out in the office,
and sell buttons.
For more information, call 661-1090.
We were pretty tireless in making people aware of it.
It would have been very difficult to have been in Boston
at that time and been part of the community,
and not be aware of exactly why and when and where
that event was taking place.
In Boston, every single college
and university basically shut down.
You had the law schools marching to the Common,
you had high schools marching to the Common,
you had suburban housewives
leading delegations of suburban housewives.
In historic Boston Common, an immense crowd,
the largest Vietnam peace demonstration ever seen.
We were so hurt that our country would continue
to proceed and sacrifice lives for a conflict
that everybody knew really wasn't,
that it wasn't justified, it just wasn't right.
Our next speaker will be Abbie Hoffman.
I'll tell you what's wrong with this society!
Abbie Hoffman gave his usual great,
you know, speeches with his funny lines,
but one of the immortal lines was when he pointed
over to the Hancock building.
John Hancock building, hypodermic needle.
Look at it--
John Hancock building!
Fucking John Hancock...
John Hancock was a revolutionary!
He was no goddamn life insurance salesman!
We all laughed, but, you know, he said,
you know, "It's time to up the ante here."
April 18, 1775.
Everybody who is here
who is now alive remembers that famous day and year.
Paul Revere, he rode out through M.I.T., out through Harvard Yard
and Arlington and Lexington and Concord, screaming and yelling,
"The pigs are coming, the pigs are coming,
the pigs are coming!"
He said, "Get your shit together!
We gotta have a revolution!"
BCN had paid a skywriter to put a peace sign
up in the sky,
and everybody cheered and it was announced that BCN had done it.
The applause is for a skywriter
who was just made a huge peace sign in the sky.
And, you know, here it was writ large in the sky
by the radio station I was working for.
That was a thrilling thing.
The peace symbol came from a fellow,
I believe his name was Wayne.
I seem to think that I might have
wrote a check for that myself.
'Cause we didn't have a lot of money, you know-- I don't...
There were times when I just wasn't going to go
into someone's office who was over me at the time,
and fight with them.
On my coffee table at home is a, someone put out a book
about peace, and if you flip through it,
that peace symbol is in it, so...
I mean, we're each powerless, you know?
I mean, none of us at that time-- being so young, too.
You know, it's hard to get your parents' attention
or your boss's attention or your teacher's attention,
you know, through most of your life at that point.
We had very limited experiences,
and the causes that we held precious
and the issues that we felt were the priorities
were things that we might never have
a chance to express adequately.
Through this collaborative experience,
we were able to get the world's attention
and make our feelings known.
It elevated our aspirations to doing more
and, you know, validated us, validated the battle.
Our audience, they had to be informed about
what was happening to their country,
what was happening locally.
BCN did a very good job, as the movement
got more political, of not being the, the leader.
In other words, people didn't go to the streets
because BCN told them to go to the streets.
It was the internet of its day,
when you could communicate with the station,
the station would communicate...
It was the community resource of how you knew what was going on.
That's the new single Wilson Pickett's got out,
"Don't Let the Green Grass Fool You."
Before that, Ben E. King, "When You Love Someone,"
and then Forever More, "Eight O'Clock and All is Well."
We were getting so many phone calls
that it was impossible to actually answer the phone
when you're doing your show.
You know, I just want to share
something with you, okay?
All right, since I've been on the air at 10:00,
I've had a really hard time,
getting, you know, like, a show together
the way I'd like to.
I don't know, what I am leading up to, I guess,
is, we really, we really would like
some volunteer help down here.
You know, like, we're in no position to pay bread for it,
but we really need help answering phones,
and connecting people up with the right numbers and things.
The Listener Line was a telephone line
in which people who listened to the radio station
could call us and ask us anything.
All stations had request lines,
but, you know, deep down inside, you knew they weren't
really listening to what you said and--
even if they answered the phone.
If you called BCN's Listener Line,
you would instantly realize, "Well, geez, these people
really do care about what I have to say."
I remember there being a complete reference library.
I mean, people would say, "Where can I get a good pizza?"
They'd want to know things that you'd, you know,
you'd go to Siri on your iPhone now and ask questions.
But you'd call the Listener Line instead.
The number is 536-8000.
One of the things I loved doing
was the Cat and Dog Report.
You'd say, "Hey, I lost my cat."
"What color was the cat? Okay, what color...
What color eyes did it have?"
So it was called the Cat and Dog Report.
And it was popular.
I don't even know how we, you know,
how we got there, but somebody brought in
a stray puppy once, and we said,
"Oh, let's get all the stray puppies
and, you know, let's find a new home for them," or something.
Okay, it's animal time.
Seems like everybody's had their litters,
and all these people have surplus cats.
I've got some coming up myself, so I know how it is.
Two fluffy black cats.
They're about seven weeks old now.
625-1885 if you'd like one.
People would want to call the Listener Line
when they had a problem, and it would be
the first call that they would make.
I can remember people who were suicidal,
that our... Listener Line people would stay on the phone
with them for hours.
And acid casualties.
It was a tremendous service for the community.
Kate Curran was the one... one that sort of organized
the entire group.
It was a completely volunteer service,
and it was a very important part of the station.
This is the Holy Modal Rounders
with a mantra for you.
The Golden Guru for WBCN Boston says
chant this mantra every day and make bad karma go away.
There was a great history of acts stopping by for interviews,
who also decided that they would bring a guitar along and play.
It, it really hadn't happened on the radio before.
Another time, uh... the Listener Line person came in and said,
"The musician's downstairs, he just played at the Arc,
"another musician, I guess they both played at different places,
uh, Jerry Garcia."
I said, "From the Grateful Dead?"
"Yeah." "Who's the other one?"
"Duane Allman from the Allman Brothers.”
"Yes, send them up, we'll play, yeah cool."
So they come up and we're...
...you know.
"So what do you got now for us,"
and we're doing this on air, we're smoking dope.
Oh, my earphones.
I'm sorry, man.
Even Jerry Garcia's cough is melodic.
Haha, yeah, sure.
Even his cough is heavy.
These guys, there's Jerry Garcia and Duane Allman.
I mean, stuff like that couldn't happen today with musicians.
Unless they were paid big bucks, by, you know, a record company
or somebody to go and do that.
But here's these two guys coming up, they'd each played
their respective gigs, and they came up,
and they played for two hours.
The video theatre presents...
"Reefer Madness."
In order to exist we had to have commercials,
so everybody knew that.
Even the most jaded announcer knew that.
The advertisers tended to be small shops.
The ads were incredibly inventive and funny.
Michael Fremer was a stand-up comedian
in Boston and he did a lot of voices.
FREMER Hey, what's the matter now, Beaver?
Gee Wally, I don't know,
it's just that there's a big sale
at New England Music City, and Cheap Thrills,
and Eddie Haskell took all my money.
You didn't turn the advertisement off.
You either turned it up or listened to it.
What could be better for an advertiser than have someone
listen to your commercial?
The sales people didn't decide what went on the air,
the announcers decided what went on the air.
Didn't care about the ratings.
We didn't care about any of that stuff.
We were just concerned about doing great radio.
Partly, it was the sound.
We didn't want a hype sound on the air.
It just didn't fit.
But the other thing was the product.
The whole sense of this product is right
for this station, for WBCN.
This product is not.
And of course they were appalled.
They were doing us a favor.
Here we were, this independent rock and roll station,
and they were nice enough to call us and want to do us
a favor and give us an ad and then we'd tell them,
"I'm sorry, it's too ugly."
On the bulletin board at WBCN,
there's a handwritten sign, which says at the top,
"We don't want to advertise:"
there follows, "cosmetics, hair oils, deodorants,
"underwear, WBCN news department.
"Any product that purports to make a person better liked
or more pleasing than his real self."
For a sponsor to say, "Like the real you's
a drag, man, if you use our product, you can be better."
Well, you know, like, we just don't like to do that,
because it's just not real,
it's just not what's really happening.
One of the reasons they listen to us
is to get away from that crap.
I was on the front page of "Advertising Week" every week.
I was the highest grossing...
I was getting A.M. time,
I was getting $55 for a 30-second spot.
I had done that in 14 months, so we revolutionized...
And, of course, a year later, every station in the country
tried to sound like BCN.
Larry Glick for the WNEX Public Affairs Department.
Guam-based B-52 bombers hit
South Vietnam's notorious guerilla-infested zone.
In the very beginning we did not have news on,
because our attitude was, all these other radio stations
these days have five minutes of news at the top of the hour
and some of them have a half-hour news at 6:00,
and news is perfectly well covered.
We were getting heat on that from the, you know,
you had a certain obligation as far as the FCC was concerned
to provide news and public affairs.
So Charles is saying to me in this period,
"Come and do the news, come do the news.
"You know, just don't come on and call me,
"and say, 'Here's a demonstration,'
come do the news."
But I didn't want to do it.
That's not me, I'm an organizer, I'm not the news.
And by chance, a dear friend of mine, Bo Burlingham,
just one of the sweetest people in the world,
shows up on my doorstep,
and he has been, much to my great sadness,
caught up in Weathermen.
Well, I was as desperate as everybody else was
because it looked like the war was going on interminably.
Students for Democratic Society, when it started out,
it was very nonviolent.
The Weathermen actually seemed like
they were serious about doing something, and I decided,
I would go with them.
And now, much to my great delight,
he and his soon-to-be-wife Lisa show up on our doorstep and say,
"We're out. Out of Weathermen."
And... and they lived with us for a while,
and then got on their feet.
I was in a situation where I needed to get a job.
So, I was talking to Michael about that and he said,
"Well I heard that WBCN is looking for a news director."
So I go in, I introduced Bo to Charles and to Ray,
and they hire him and we put together some volunteers,
including Danny Schechter, who will support him.
We came up with a plan that we were going to get together
a team of people, who were going to gather
the news during the day, and then Charles was actually
going to read it, with, you know, rock and roll,
and all sorts of other things going on.
When the sun came up this morning,
the WBCN news team was there.
For them it was just the start of another day.
The first day we did okay,
and then Thursday rolled around,
we had this meeting over lunch,
and I remember they all left,
and then I heard the ticker machine,
which was where we got most of the news.
And it said, "Flash, flash, flash."
A federal grand jury in Detroit today charged the 13 top leaders
of the Weathermen with plotting to bomb public buildings
in Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Berkeley, California.
Attorney John Mitchell said, "The indictments grew out of
"an investigation begun after three other Weathermen
"blew themselves up in a fashionable townhouse
in New York's Greenwich Village in March."
David?
I looked at the list of names,
and it started off with a bunch of names of people
who I knew were underground.
And I got to the last name on the list and it said,
"Robert Burlingham."
And I was, you know, I was totally stunned,
and I'd really not been involved at all in the underground.
Bo comes in with this... the thing he'd ripped, and he says,
"Charles, we have a problem."
Long before they said, "Houston, we have a problem."
It was, "Charles we have a problem."
And I looked at it and it says, "Attorney General John Mitchell
has just announced that indictments are being issued
in Detroit for 13 Weathermen.”
And so I go, "So what's wrong with this?"
And he says, "Seventh name."
I look down, seventh name,
Bo Burlingham, my news director.
So he calls me up right away and says, "Oh my God,
I'm about to be arrested-- the FBI."
So I come and pick him up.
The first thing Michael and I did when I left BCN
was to go see Ray Riepen, who had hired me.
I said, "Well, you know, geez, I got this...
"this is a federally licensed business, it makes me nervous
"to have a guy that's indicted for dynamiting federal buildings
"on the payroll.
I gotta let you go."
And he said, I'm actually a part owner,
I have a newspaper
"called the 'Cambridge Phoenix,' and if you wanted to,
you could work there."
I thought that was very generous of him.
So that's what we did, and he wrote for the newspaper then
for a year or two, and then I think,
"Mother Jones" out on the West Coast.
Meanwhile we're getting the lawyers to work on it
and the FBI had no idea.
I mean, he's doing the news on WBCN,
and the FBI has no idea he's in Boston.
All charges were dropped, yeah, there were all sorts of
illegalities and irregularities.
And so we needed a new news director,
and... and that's when Danny Schechter came into the picture.
We'll have news coming up
in about five minutes-- Danny was out covering things...
I became the news director at BCN, you know,
filling in for Bo Burlingham.
And I bring... I write script,
and I bring it to the DJ to read.
It was a 2:00 newscast.
Jim Parry was the DJ, and he takes a look at
what I typed out and he says, "I can't read this.
"I can't even... I can't even understand what it's saying,
"this is a sloppy mess.
You read it."
He then introduces me.
"And now Danny Schechter
the news inspector, the news ingestor."
I started playing with these,
"Danny Schechter, the news inspector,
Danny Schechter the news selector,"
and sort of the news dissector was one of those.
And, I loved that idea of the news dissector,
and it sort of stuck.
In the news right now, police in Boston
got orders this morning to halt an anti-war demonstration.
About 30 Vietnam veterans,
carrying toy M-16 rifles and in full fatigues,
stalked across City Hall plaza
in a mock search and destroy mission.
This was an era in which, you know, the Vietnam War
hung over everything.
While I was at BCN I tried to cover it in a different way
than it was being covered by other media outlets.
The AP copy would come over.
And it would make a reference to 40 of the enemy were killed.
And Danny would just scratch it out,
and he would eliminate the word "enemy."
And, of course, at the time, all you were hearing was,
you know, "the enemy this," "the enemy that."
We were killing people
who, who were presented as our enemies and they weren't.
As far as the war was concerned, there was critical commentary,
but if you look at the criticism
it's, "We're not fighting it the right way,
we're making mistakes, we should do better."
Danny was an exception.
That's why people who had a different picture of the world,
including many young people, tuned in to hear
Danny Schechter, your news dissector,
I think at 6:00.
And then you got a picture of what was actually happening
from a very different point of view.
The WBCN news team didn't have a model for how to do the news.
They were creating what it would mean for
a rebellious rock and roll, freeform
FM station to start incorporating news.
Who's the one
who has pledged an honorable end to the war in Vietnam?
Nixon's the one.
You want peace. I want peace.
MAN Oh, that's nothing to what
I could say if I chose.
They were combining music.
They were combining hard news.
They were combining parodies and comedies,
and did so brilliantly, in a way that paved the way
for "The Daily Show" and Stephen Colbert.
And there's a direct line through that.
I was living in a house with a group of
people, and one of my roommates was active on behalf
of the Indians at Wounded Knee.
The FBI came to the house one morning...
This was a story that came directly to me,
woke me up one morning, and I covered it,
and then we played the whole tape on BCN.
It was great radio.
I lived in a house with a number of other people
who were activists.
One of them, Bill Zimmerman, was a pilot,
and he had delivered food to the Indians in Wounded Knee.
The American Indian movement had seized this tiny village
on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota,
as a protest against the conditions
of reservation life in America.
The hamlet of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, still remains
under control of militant Indians.
The government still refuses to talk to their leaders.
One could drop food into the village via parachute
and there would be very little the federal forces could do.
This was an attempt to help them.
An act of solidarity.
And we made the drop on April 17, 1973.
And so eventually the FBI found out about
who was behind these planes, and this whole action,
and came to my house, where Bill also had a room, to arrest him.
And what is your name, sir?
And who are you, sir?
My name is Bob Smith, I'm with the FBI.
- Bob Smith? - That's right.
They came in, all of them had their guns drawn,
and they were making a lot of noise,
so the other people who lived in the house woke up.
You got the tape recorder going?
Yes, sir, I certainly do.
All right, what's your name?
Dan Schechter.
WBCN in Boston, I'm covering this here.
Danny immediately produced a portable tape recorder,
and went up to one of the FBI agents,
and introduced himself as
Danny Schechter, the news dissector,
and said, "I'm here covering the bust.”
Are you a resident of this dwelling?
Yes, no, I'm covering this arrest.
What's happening here?
We have a warrant for other people.
Are you a resident of this dwelling?
Can you tell me who you have a warrant for?
We don't have to tell you anything.
You don't have to tell me anything?
And they weren't really expecting that.
That there would be somebody, a journalist, in the house
actually covering it.
And so they threatened me, you know, with arrest myself
about, you know, that I was, you know, interrupting justice.
Now, if you interfere with us,
you're interfering with justice.
We have told you we have a warrant for this man
and other men.
Now do not interfere with justice.
I'm telling you now. Amazing, right?
His sense of theatrics was amazing.
You know, in other words, the whole idea
of challenging these guys,
"I'm a reporter and I'm covering this story right now."
The fact that, "This is my house
and I am just coming out at 6:00 in the morning."
He probably was, you know,
wearing his bathrobe or something.
And Zimmerman was arrested.
He was, you know, indicted in Boston.
The charges were later dropped,
which is often the case, that the FBI would violate
its own rules and legal protocols.
I'm sure that they never get that sort of a reaction,
so that is so great, so typical of the guy.
To set the stage,
and it's unthinkable at this point in time,
women were really
a curiosity in terms of being on the air then.
I think even our own enlightened announcers, male announcers,
may not have been quite so enlightened.
Because, again, they're coming from an old world
and moving into this new one.
I loved BCN, and listened to it all.
I mean my, you know, my car radio was just,
that's where it was set, on BCN.
We used to do public service announcements,
we called them PSAs for...
it was called Project Place.
If you're scared, uptight about anything
and you're falling, drop into Project Place's drop-in center.
Project Place needed some help,
so I made a tape of a PSA,
"If you're a doctor, you want to call this number,
and if you're a chick and can type."
I hear Charles Laquidara, who was one of my faves,
I love Charles Laquidara too,
make this announcement saying
Project Place needs volunteers
and, "If you're a chick, and can type, call us."
And I thought, I cannot believe this.
Calling women "chicks," I think some people thought
was a hip thing to do, but I think women
were reading Betty Friedan, you know, at the time.
So I went to a Bread and Roses meeting, and said,
"We have to do something about this."
And one of the people in the group said,
"Let's get some chicks."
"Chicks?" - Like little baby chicks.
And then, in the middle of the next day,
our poor manager, his name was Len Cohen,
Len's sitting there, and all of a sudden,
they come walking in.
It was suddenly a lot of women getting off the elevator.
We walked into the office, they had no idea.
I mean they were like, "What is going on here?"
And we scattered the chicks and said, you know,
"These are chicks, we're not chicks."
They've got a cardboard box they dumped... they opened it up,
and dumped it on his desk, it's like 40 baby chicks.
"These are chicks.
We are women."
We got up from our desks in the sales room,
and we saw... I saw some baby chickens
come out of their hands,
and the chicks were walking around on Len Cohen's desk.
It was like within two weeks we had our first women show.
And that ad, needless to say, went right out the window.
What happened was it kind of showed that, you know,
we were open to criticism, and we took it,
and we did something about it.
The demands that we made that day included
that they give us an hour of airtime.
The following hour was pre-recorded
by Bread and Roses for Women's Liberation.
We talked about violence against women,
we talked about reproductive rights,
we talked about the major issues of the day,
and it was played on BCN.
WBCN took that situation and helped change itself
but also helped contribute to what was going on
at that particular time.
There were no women on the air at BCN,
so the decision to hire a woman
was a very important step for the station to take.
Both Maxanne and Debbie Ullman were hired in rapid succession.
Maxanne had established herself in Seattle.
And one of the great things about Maxanne,
her ears were impeccable.
Maxanne heard bands that none of us heard.
And I'm talking about Aerosmith,
some of us minimized their importance,
thinking that they were too derivative
of the Rolling Stones,
that was an obvious comparison in the beginning.
You know, Maxanne heard the quality of what they did,
the musicianship, song writing, and so on,
and very quickly she was proven right.
And she kept playing the same song over and over
by this Boston group, that local group--
"Dream on, dream on, dream on."
"Max, find another song!"
"This group is going to be huge, Charles!"
"Yeah, but you don't have to keep playing it."
And then, of course, she broke Aerosmith,
broke them in the world.
Queen. Queen broke out of Boston.
Maxanne was one of the first people to hear the record,
the first album, an unlabeled slab of vinyl,
is what they played it for us on.
And it knocked her socks off,
or whatever it was she was wearing on her feet,
maybe her flip flops.
And she was invariably right.
Maxanne rocked harder than any of the rest of us,
it's not like girls are wimpy musicians.
Maxanne was out there
pounding it out, and she became one of the stars because of it.
It was a rock and roll station,
that was the part that made it so radical,
that they accepted that, the demand, and then
all of a sudden you had, you know,
these women disc jockeys.
Picking the music, and interacting with the musicians
in the way that disc jockeys do,
and it was like transformative.
I remember one night I'm listening to BCN,
I'm at home, and someone called me up, and said,
"You ought to turn on Jerry Williams."
He's a famous talk master at the time in Boston.
Hello America, welcome back,
fourth and final hour here on WBZ radio, the spirit of 103.
He was talking about WBCN, so I immediately tune in,
and I'm listening to these outrageous things
he's saying about WBCN.
The free of form I like.
Right.
But that business of freaks announcing...
I agree.
Like everybody sitting around smoking pot.
Then he goes on and on about women,
and how women want to sound like men,
and they really don't belong on the radio.
Radio is just a voice.
And sometimes women's voices, because of the high frequency
of those voices, sometimes turn some people off.
Jesus, sounds like another world, doesn't it?
God!
You know what turns me off about women on the air?
No.
They're trying to be men.
If they would try to be women,
be themselves, be female...
Some women try to fall into that trap of saying,
"Hi there, Sally Kraufloin, from Los Angeles, California,
bringing you the news."
You know, it's... they're on that male kick.
Be yourself, be like you are.
As one man said, the radio is a woman's companion
during the other day. Mm-hmm.
And I think I would certainly as a woman
rather listen to a man than listen to a woman
rattle on and on.
I could call up any of my friends and talk.
There's a place in broadcasting for women,
but not the ones I heard on BCN.
Wow, they are really straight on.
I can't even tell the guys from the girls over there,
for that matter.
When they're walking down the street
I can't tell them apart either.
You know, you look back on it and you think it's like
looking back on what women used to wear in the 1920s.
You go, "Oh my God, this can't be real.
"Did someone really say that?
Did someone really believe that?"
But all you can kind of do is look back on it
and think, as a result of that,
there was an impetus to change even more quickly.
You know BCN had a commitment to diversity in music and ideas
that mattered.
John Scagliotti and Andy Kopkind came to work at the station
doing commentaries, they did
"The Lavender Hour," which was a gay radio program.
BCN was one of the first places, I think, where
diversity took off in a much greater way.
I think the idea that we found ourselves
in the middle of an experiment
where gay people, Black people, women,
were all kind of working together.
Andy and I were gay, so that changed the dynamics of BCN.
There were two gay guys there.
Andy had started a career in "Time" magazine.
They got him out of London School of Economics.
You know, he was on his way, he was going to be
the next editor of "Time" magazine.
Then he got arrested for being gay in Griffith Park,
and that ended, and then he went to work for
the "New Republic" and he embraced his...
the Civil Rights and all these other things
that he grew up with and felt,
but now was able to work on them in a much... a real way,
but he was very talented and was a good writer.
We had covered a lot of gay stuff in our news,
and we did the first gay pride march in New York.
Bette Midler!
We always followed the cultural aspects
in our programming,
so of course Bette Midler would be on the, you know,
the first gay pride coverage on WBCN.
And then Sunday night was never a big time,
and so Norm, he didn't know what to do with Sunday night,
and nobody wanted to do it.
And so he came up with this cockamamie idea of "Potluck."
Which would be that anybody could sign up for "Potluck"
and be on the radio in our staff.
So it was our chance, Andy and my chance,
to actually be DJs, you know, because we were doing the news
and all of this, but we just wanted
to go and play some records.
You know, we love playing music, we had parties at our house.
We had the greatest gay parties in town on Newbury Street.
But we figured we couldn't just be DJs
so we decided to do the first "Lavender Hour."
The "Lavender Hour" was a very important addition
to what was going on.
The first time that people could actually come out.
No one was doing anything like that on the radio in those days.
That was really pioneering stuff.
If you've been to a gay bar or a gay dance
in the last six or seven years,
you've heard the jukebox play the Supremes'
"Stop in the Name of Love."
And tonight, for our "Potluck" show,
we'll find some other music
and poetry that expresses the range
of gay experience these days.
Or I'd go out and interview David Bowie,
and have a fight with David Bowie at a press conference
about why he was just going to be a bisexual,
why wasn't he coming out all the way?
And he would yell at me
and then we'd play "Changes."
What made you start writing gay songs?
Um... what made me start writing gay songs?
Well, let's put it this way,
it's not something that would be normally acceptable
on the top 40 market or any rock market
before you started writing.
Well, you see, it's acceptable to the people
that I've wrote to and play for.
That always has been.
Who doesn't like gay people?
There's no... there's no antagonism at all.
You seriously believe that gay people
are not subject to oppression in this world, are you crazy?
Who said that I didn't?
I said that I found no hostility towards anyone.
Well, that is .
Okay, well I'm not trying to be hostile.
You have done some openly gay stuff,
which I was very glad to hear for the first time,
coming from a singer.
You must have had some process of forethought
before you actually started writing material.
I was inspired.
Well, I just thought it was just me, this is my life,
I was in a little bubble, you know, this gay bubble,
where it wasn't a big deal and the people I worked with
didn't find it a big deal.
But, guess what, it's 50,000, or a million watts,
or I don't know, huge watts.
People are listening to you in New Hampshire,
they're listening way out in western Mass.
And all of a sudden there's this gay thing on the radio.
The first time on commercial radio
that a gay program had ever been on.
We didn't know that, now we do, but we didn't know it then.
Then we started getting letters, and it was really incredible
to get this letter from kids
who were like gay, 16,
and we would get like a letter
that would say, "Oh, I was thinking of committing suicide.
And it just saved me, it just saved me."
All of a sudden I realized, "My God, I'm having a great time
being a DJ doing 'The Lavender Hour,'
and all this other stuff," and meanwhile people
are actually seeing this
turning into such a massive moment for their lives,
was pretty incredible, very incredible.
Good evening my fellow Americans.
When Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia,
WBCN was on and they said,
"Turn on the TV, the president's going to talk."
So we turned on the television
and there's Nixon pointing to Cambodia and Laos.
We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war
into Cambodia,
but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam.
It looked like he was winding down the war at the beginning,
but then he escalated.
And, you know, BCN said, "There's going to be
a demonstration, you know, tomorrow."
My recollection is from like
May 1st through May 4th
there were giant protests across the country.
That was the start of what eventually led to Kent State.
At Kent State itself they went to demonstrate
and the administration said that they couldn't.
So it was an "illegal demonstration"
and they called in the National Guard.
I'm David Brinkley, NBC News.
Kent State University in Ohio has had campus violence
for three nights causing the National Guard to be called in,
and today the guardsmen opened fire on the students,
killing four of them--
two young men and two young women.
When students were shot by the National Guard
and they didn't have weapons,
and it was such a shock, it was such a crime.
I don't think anyone anticipated
that sort of response from the authorities
and the consequences were irreparable.
So college campuses everywhere reacted to this.
Boston University, Brown,
and Tufts have suspended classes for the rest of the school year.
A national coordinating center
at Brandeis University says there were
240 such strikes today.
There was a war going on, and it wasn't just a war in Vietnam,
there was a war at home.
There was a war covering up the war.
There was a culture in Boston that was partial to,
supportive of, actually informing people
about what was really going on and BCN was part of it.
It was at this period
that BCN was coming to be a voice that was quite unique
and courageous and that made a huge difference.
The FBI is reported preparing to shut down some of the 500
small agencies it maintains around the country
because of security reasons.
Last month more than a thousand documents were stolen
from the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania.
This story here, it's another example of BCN
trying to inform the public about information
that major media and the government
didn't want people to know about.
Can you explain what happened--
they went in, they stole files?
I mean there was an activist group that found
a FBI office
in Media, Pennsylvania, of all things.
That name is fascinating, you know.
And they were able to...
we would say then liberate these documents
and try to make them public.
And, you know, so BCN was certainly interested
in this information because it was about the ways in which
our government was spying on us.
And, of course, the government didn't want this known
and we did want it known.
They started reading them on the air,
all that spying,
all that kind of, you know, COINTELPRO stuff became public.
And that undermined any possibility that
that would ever be secret and they couldn't stop it.
Danny did a really good job at like "Just read it, read it,
read it on the air."
I mean what it says about BCN,
and particularly about, like,
Al Perry, who was the general manager at that time,
it's like he didn't try and shut that down.
I remember this, yeah, yeah.
Look... what's the issue here?
Danny didn't steal them.
They were made available to him, so, yeah.
What are you gonna... you're not gonna... you know...
If you don't do this, then it's... it's just...
they're in control, complete control, and you can't...
You know, there's... there's a time when you have to
take a stance.
And maybe that's what, in a lot of ways,
WBCN was about in that respect.
There was a time when it just... you had to say,
"This... we're stopping it right here," you know.
There can be no whitewash at the White House.
We all heard about it first on the 17th of June.
The news reports said, "Five men were arrested
"with bugging equipment at the Democratic National Committee
"headquarters in the sprawling, luxurious
Watergate apartment office complex in Washington, D.C."
It was the theme of the WBCN news for months on end.
And by making it so conspicuous, we got those points across.
The Watergate Five,
all using aliases taken from Hunt's mystery novels,
finished a lobster dinner on the night of June 17th,
and then...
broke into the Democratic Headquarters
to repair bugging devices that they had already planted
as well as to photocopy important documents.
It was like a soap opera that we weren't writing,
but that surpassed our expectations
with every new episode,
and it just kept getting better and better.
Yeah, Charles Colson was a C.I.A. agent?
Yes, this... this memo,
which is... it was a confidential memo,
but what hasn't appeared in the papers, as far as I know,
is the fact that which appears in this document
that Colson is C.I.A.
Hunt is asking him whether or not during the time in the '50s
when he was in Saigon, he was receiving information reports,
orders through military channels or through his C.I.A. channels,
his Colson's C.I.A. channels, and Colson says that, yes,
he was receiving them through C.I.A. channels.
The station offered news and perspectives and reporting
and investigate journalism, and we won all sorts of
top journalism awards for doing it,
and the culmination of it
was 1972 when Nixon, you know, was running
for re-election and he was being challenged by George McGovern,
a peace candidate.
Massachusetts came through for McGovern
and the only state to do so.
We want to give a special note of thanks
to the people of Massachusetts.
It isn't just an accident that the American experiment
began in Massachusetts and that we're carrying it on here
at the nation's capital.
We're going to keep doing that for a good many years to come.
Whether we can legitimately, as the BCNers
of that time, take credit
for enlightening enough Massachusetts people
to alter the result here in Massachusetts, I don't know.
But it's certainly symbolic of the consciousness raising
we were trying to do and the effect it could have.
Take it away.
As time went on,
we started broadcasting live on a regular basis
from a couple of different locations.
Jazz Workshop, run by Fred Taylor,
one of the great jazz clubs in the world.
Next door you walked down the stairs and to the left
was Paul's Mall, owned by the same guy,
booked by the same guy, Fred Taylor.
These were dingy, underground clubs,
very, very constrained in terms of space.
You know, if Randy Newman was performing at Paul's Mall,
the front row was, you know, six feet away from him
and that was it.
Randy Newman's comes back on stage,
timing it perfectly.
That's not funny.
I'll sing it again and don't laugh.
In 1973, we had this young guy from New Jersey come in,
never played live on the radio before,
had never played in Boston before.
If I recall, he even had a tuba player there,
and it was on Maxanne's show.
Hello, Bruce Springsteen.
We're on the air?
Yeah, we are on the air.
Hey!
All right, all right.
Is the tuba mic all right, right there?
Yeah? Okay, here we go.
Take it away, fellas.
One, and a two, and...
Those sorts of appearances, and the spontaneous
just showing up in the studio,
and they were really magical moments.
This is my very first time on the radio,
and I want to say hello to my mother,
who lives in California.
Hi, Mom.
All right, let's do, uh...
New Jersey, New York was not a problem,
but spreading out from there was really tough for them
at the time.
Don't you want to say a word or two
about Asbury Park, New Jersey?
I've been trying to get out of there for 20 years.
No...
I think that he really appreciated the fact that BCN
was willing to be so supportive.
I really do want to thank WBCN and Maxanne,
because when we first came here, when we first came to Boston,
we played to about ten or 20 people.
And now it must be damn 50 people in the place.
Well, the power of media is just overwhelming.
But I want to thank you very much and let you know
that we really appreciate it because we really do.
Bruce was playing in a lot of clubs around town.
He's playing at Charlie's Place, he's playing at Joe's Place,
and he seemed to just bop from club to club.
He played in... he didn't just play in one or two venues,
he played in all these crummy bars.
But then he was playing theaters,
Harvard Square Theater, that's like a theater,
that was a big deal.
Tonight we're lucky enough to have Bruce Springsteen
and Bonnie Raitt.
He took the stage, and within minutes,
people knew that there was something going on here
that was extremely extraordinary,
and extremely incredible.
Opening up his set with "New York City Serenade,"
which starts with a classical piano introduction
by David Sancious.
That's unheard of!
A band hits the stage, you hit it with... hit it hard--
the horns blare, the guitar blares.
He comes out there and he starts with this beautiful
melodic piano and people are going, "What is this?"
But this one... this one photo,
the way his back is arched,
the way his hands are extend out on the keyboards,
it's just... something's about to happen,
and that's the feeling you get from it.
It wasn't till later on, that I had...
that I had learned that that was the show
that Jon Landau was at.
And as he said, "I have seen the future of rock and roll,
and its name is Bruce Springsteen."
Hey, Boston, come out tonight!
That date is always called out.
Bruce Springsteen opens for Bonnie Raitt.
Jon Landau declares him the future of rock and roll.
Absolutely one of the highlights of WBCN live broadcasts
was from the Jazz Workshop of Patti Smith,
the Patti Smith Group.
Maxanne, what's going on down there?
They've been turning away people by droves.
There's lines down the street.
This is the best night,
it's the best part of the show: the tune up.
They'd just come out with their debut album
the year before, Patti Smith the writer, the cultural figure.
Not exactly a mass appeal artist but our cult loved her.
Because she was on a major record label at the time,
Arista Records,
the record executive, the promotional executive,
took her backstage before she began and said,
"Look, this is on the radio,
don't say any bad words."
But he was kind of heavy-handed
in the way that he conveyed this to her.
And so Patti came on stage and the band was rocking...
There was the Patti Smith broadcast and my assignment
was to be back at the studio
with my hand on the... well, basically the on-off switch,
basically which controls whether or not that...
whether or not that broadcast would proceed.
And I was sitting with my boss,
with the general manager of BCN at the time, Al Perry,
and we were enjoying the show,
and at a certain point she stopped,
and she did a little monologue about the importance of radio.
It was very heartfelt and very sincere.
You know what radio has in it?
R-A-Y-dash-D-I-O.
And "Dio" is God, so like radio is like ray of god.
That's its highest possibility.
The show moved on and at a certain point,
she just stopped dead in the midst of a song,
and admitted to the audience
that she felt very intimidated
by the limitations being placed on her
to say what was on her mind.
We shouldn't worry about slang terminology
on a rock and roll station.
I mean, you should be able to express yourself in America.
We have like one of the most colorful languages,
which is like integrated with our art,
the art of this generation is rock and roll.
And she just started blurting out... in the form of a poem
she started blurting out obscenity after obscenity.
A stream of obscenities.
I can't even read my fuckin' poem.
It just doesn't even interest me anymore.
So there was a difficult decision there.
Because as the obscenities came out,
you had to decide whether to let them go or to cut them off.
And I guess at the time it seemed to me the better idea
to let them go.
I think she went out of her way because she was sort of
singing it to kind of alert the station of the fact,
"I'm going to sing this song to the club.
"If you don't want to hear these songs... these words broadcast,
turn me off right now," and it would have been an option.
Well, it didn't happen, obviously, but, you know,
that's... that's radio,
If that doesn't quintessentially sort of package up
BCN's true essence, stuff like that on the radio,
wow, amazing, amazing.
Never happened again...
Never happened again.
Tweet, tweet, tweet.
WBCN in Boston.
Is my microphone off? One, two.
Oh, so my microphone's on?
Oh, I didn't hear it, but it's on, right?
Oh, right on, Patti!
I mean, well she was an artist, she was a poet,
so when she said, "This is rock and roll radio,
and we should be able to say what we think,
or say what we feel," you felt like you could do that at WBCN.
You could say what you think and you could say what you feel.
The fact is that really BCN was one of the few stations
in America that played the music of Patti Smith.
It was not traditionally commercially viable--
you know, she would push the limit.
She pushed the envelope artistically.
And these were the kinds of artists
that we wanted to support.
Eh, maybe no one heard it, and I don't think anyone did
because I don't recall ever hearing about that.
One of the few.
You know, we were beginning to get ratings.
The station was making more and more money,
and symbolically, I guess, moving
to the top of the Prudential Tower.
The move to the Pru was the dramatic one because that was
the plushest, most amazing, modern, sterile,
mainstream, corporate U.S.A. place
you could imagine moving into.
That place should have been the home of the "Today Show."
And I don't think I said hello yet.
Hello, I'm Tom Hadges, this is WBCN you're listening to.
We're in Boston.
I'll sit here till about 2:00 this afternoon.
People would pay to come up to the 50th floor
to walk around the top of the Prudential Building,
which was the single largest, tallest building in Boston
at that time.
And, "Oh, by the way, there's BCN."
Hi, everybody.
Good music. Right here.
You know, BCN was considered alternative media,
but at the same time mainstream media.
You know I would go to work at 6:00 in the morning,
and walk around the sky walk, and look at Boston waking up,
and looking at the beauty of this whole area
and BCN was on top of it.
There was a tension growing between the demands
of paying the bills and what we all wanted.
We all wanted to be faithful to the original concept of WBCN
and the mission of BCN.
Personally, for me, it was a challenge.
It was the difficulty of being sure that we could maintain
our honesty, and the fact that we weren't selling out.
Ugly Radio is Dead was just as important when we moved into
the Pru mid-'70s as it was when the station launched in '68.
No question, being up there was a daily reminder
of how much value the station held just on a business level.
But I think there was, not a capitulation,
but a certain realization inside that you went, "You know,
"this is not going to last forever.
Days are... days are numbered."
Try new coconut Newsoft fabric softener.
Discover for yourself
the softness of natural coconut conditioners.
Oh brother, I quit.
Well, we were starting to sell national advertising.
I became responsible for national ads.
I'll never forget the first time I went to New York
with our national rep,
made my first call, had to put on a tie.
And I walk in and the media buyer,
a rather imposing woman,
stood up behind her desk and cursed me out
because apparently they had sent a reel...
all the ads came in these little eight-inch reels to the station,
and whoever was the production manager at the time--
I'm not going to name any names--
had written "F.U." on the box
and mailed it back to the agency.
Oh my...
So I had a lot of those experiences.
Hey, you're better looking than I am,
why don't you stay here?
Blondes, they say, photograph better than brunettes.
I'm afraid you'll catch me picking my nose.
Oh, you want a level, don't you?
Yes, yes.
Good evening.
This is the 37th time I have spoken to you from this office,
where so many decisions have been made
that shaped the history of our nation.
Need anymore?
You know, people talk about the '60s being the Hippie Era,
the Golden Era, whatever you want to call it,
depending on what your perspective is.
The '60s went past the '60s, because my guess,
if I had to say when the '60s, when that Golden Era,
when FM radio started going in the other direction
of being capitalistic and not being underground anymore,
I think it was after Nixon resigned.
I have never been a quitter.
To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent
to every instinct in my body.
The fact that it ended with Nixon's upper lip
perspiring profusely, that was a good ending.
I remember sitting there in my home with my three-year-old...
with my three-year-old daughter, and forcing her to watch it,
and telling her that,
"I just want her to remember these images."
You know, even vaguely because she's just little.
But eventually I would talk to her about the significance
of this and it's something
she could tell her grandchildren about.
It was a great day.
Therefore I shall resign the presidency
effective at noon tomorrow.
Vice President Ford will be sworn in as president
at that hour in this office.
You know, it was, uh... elation
and, uh... celebration,
and but also sadness that it, you know, it had to come
to all the way to this,
to get this gargoyle out of running our country.
I mean, at the end of it all my parents were against me,
my long hair, everything from the beginning.
They said, "It's the drugs, Steven, get off those drugs."
But at the end, they sat down, and my father had tears
in his eyes and he said, "You were right."
He said, "You were right, they've been lying to us."
There's the president waving goodbye.
You hear the applause.
By '74, it's not only that Nixon resigned,
he was such a convenient target of all of our wrath.
But it was, everything was becoming in a way
more institutionalized, more commercialized.
The acts that played the Tea Party were now playing big halls
and getting paid tons of money, the ticket prices were going up.
There were a lot of stations all over the country now doing what,
you know, in a way what BCN was doing.
I think pretty much not as well and not as overtly political.
But playing the kind of, you know,
the album cuts and all that.
So it really was becoming much more of, you know,
institutionalized and just part of the regular American culture.
Little did we know, you know.
Little did we know that we would be involved in something
that would be as much fun and so meaningful to so many people.
The best thing about it was we were doing it ourselves.
We were making it up as we went along.
We were developing friendships,
we were putting up with each other,
we were trying to create something
that hadn't existed before.
You don't get that opportunity much in broadcasting.
I think one of the other things I'd like to see people remember
WBCN for was what it stood for.
Independence, having people make up their own minds
as what to play, what to say.
We've learned a lot since the '70s
around what inclusion means.
And some of what learned is that we're actually
all on the same planet here,
in the process of suffering some of the same consequences
of our neglecting to recognize our shared humanity.
Of course the question that everyone's asking is
can this happen again?
The fact that everyone can be a communicator.
Pick up your smartphone, shoot a video.
If it's important, it will get seen by a lot of people,
and it can create social change.
No question about that.
Abbie Hoffman, the godfather of the Yippies,
was from Worcester, Mass.,
and he, you know, became a sort of occasional correspondent
for WBCN and was on the air.
And, you know, when he was asked to summarize, you know,
the legacy of his work,
you know, he said basically, you know, "We were young,
"we were sometimes crazy, we made mistakes,
but we were right."
I think that could be said of WBCN.
One, two, one, two, hey!
Good night.
You there, Fatman?
Yes, Max, how they doing?
Well, I think... I think that
with all the Minguses, and the Miles, and the 'Tranes
that have been in this room,
nobody ever destroyed the ceiling quite so bad before.
John Cale just put the nick of a bass through the ceiling here.
Oh, I wish we could have seen that.
Good night, Fatman.
Good night, Max.