RADIO DAYS: HOW BILL LICHTENSTEIN GOT THE BAND BACK TOGETHER FOR A CRITICAL HUB HISTORY DOC
Photo of WBCN Airstaff circa 1970 in record library at 312 Stuart Street studios in Boston by Peter Simon
At 39 years old I’ve come to terms with the fact that I missed out. Despite having protested and partied and seen hundreds of concerts, as a journalist I’ve also spent a lot of time with Baby Boomer mentors, and I more or less believe the subtext of their every anecdote and vignette: Their seminal era was much better, more fun, more inspirational, and certainly a lot more original than most others, mine included.
Filmmaker Bill Lichtenstein has delivered a stunning reminder of this intergenerational reality in his new project, WBCN & the American Revolution. The documentary linchpin of this year’s Independent Film Festival Boston, his film rips wide open a warp into the late 1960s and early ’70s. All with the familiar backdrop of sex, drugs, and music but with a Boston focus, funk, and flavor that you won’t get in a gratuitous CNN decade doc.
With his time capsule about to rock the IFFBoston after years in development, I asked Lichtenstein to share a couple of war stories—about the old days, sure, but also in regard to the challenge of summoning and interviewing an iconic alt media rogues’ gallery. Having landed on-air at WBCN as a 14-year-old in 1970, he started from the very beginning.
The genesis…
I always had a radio pressed against my ear—I used to put one under my pillow at night. … I grew up loving radio, but in those days loving radio meant Top 40 radio, which was literally 40 songs over and over again. …
Somewhere along the way, my class [from Brookline] had a field trip and we actually went to WBCN. It just seemed like the coolest place you could imagine. It was just so different—the way people talked. …
To be able to turn on the radio and to hear someone making reference to the head shops around town, to the anti-Vietnam War movement that was just taking off … it was this thing that really had no connection to anything that came before it. And it had arrived in Boston. … It really was something you hadn’t seen, and now to hear it on the radio was amazing. …
And so in ninth grade I was in this open educational program and they said, You have to go get a volunteer job one day a week. Some people went to volunteer at a hospital or lab or something, and I called [WBCN]. They had just started a listener line—it was like Google, ask a question and they’d answer it or find the answer—and they needed people to answer it, so I started answering the listener line on Wednesdays.
Within a month or two, Danny Schechter, who was doing news, said, Can you do me a favor? There was a demonstration at the Berkeley Street police station against the killing of [Black Panther] Fred Hampton in Chicago. He handed me this tape recorder and said, Just push the little red button. I brought it back and he showed me how to cut the tape, and [from there] I started producing radio spots.
The connection…
I’ve heard from people who have made movies about their families that you’ll find out things you never knew. I found out how I ended up with a show, which was I was at a meeting about [how WBCN could attract more high school students] … and Al Perry, who was the general manager and is in the film, says that I said, You don’t know anything about high school students. After the meeting, Al [told the program director], We should give him a show. Shortly thereafter I started doing a weekly all-night Saturday night radio show on ’BCN. That was my connection to the station.
The spark…
Initially, what made me want to do the film, it started during the 2000s. During the Iraq War, post-9/11 there was a sense that somehow artists, musicians, all of us somehow had lost the imperative to speak up about what’s going on in society. There was a moment in particular when Bruce Springsteen did a fundraiser for John Kerry and was attacked for being too political. Back in the day he would have been attacked for being too conservative for doing a fundraiser for a Democratic candidate.
Photo of Bill Lichtenstein at WBCN circa 1973 used courtesy of Don Sanford
The source…
Certainly Boston was on par [with San Francisco when it came to counterculture influence] … and very little of it was ever chronicled. I don’t know what that is, but there really was a missing chapter, a missing book from the ’60s about how you got from San Francisco to Watergate. Something happened in the middle there, and it didn’t happen in San Francisco. San Francisco burned out by ’68 or ’69, and New York became commercialized, so a lot of what happened was in Boston.
The process…
Boston was a central point of the ’60s and the counterculture, so everybody came through—every major musical figure, political figure—in some way and intersected in some way with ’BCN. So there was all of this archival stuff, most of which had been lost to the ages. …
We really thought it out. We had a white wall in an office we were in … with this overview of events that had happened in Boston. Then we had to gather the archives. … It was like archaeology. We would find something like a tape of Patti Smith at the Jazz Workshop and figure somebody must have some photos. …
Initially we thought about doing it as an ensemble, with like six people, but we decided that we couldn’t. … ’BCN was an extended family. … All of these people largely were successful because they were great storytellers. And so part of what helped make the film work was the ability to sit them all down. There are great moments in there because of it.
The bigger picture…
The belief was always that this told a story about social change and people speaking up for what is right. If it was just about Boston, it would have a limited appeal, so really from the beginning we looked at how ’BCN in fact had a much broader influence, and then we tried to tell that story. Some people who remember the station have this enduring love for it, but it’s also a story simply about how media can create social change. That’s a universal story.
WBCN & THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AT IFFBOSTON. SOMERVILLE THEATRE, 55 DAVIS SQUARE, SOMERVILLE. SAT 4.27. MORE INFO AT IFFBOSTON.ORG AND THEAMERICANREVOLUTION.FM
Chris Faraone is the News+Features Editor of DigBoston and the Director of Editorial for the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. He is also the author of four books including '99 Nights with the 99 Percent' and 'Heartbreak Hell.'
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