Radio Free Boston: The Rise and Fall of WBCN

I Read the News Today

By the beginning of 1969, the Wheels of Fire album by Cream, with its rambling, fifteen-minute rock jams and abstruse, poetic lyrics, had gone to number 1 in America; the “all-you-need-is-love” Beatles were squabbling, and Janis Joplin brought San Francisco acid blues to the top of the album chart. Martin Luther King Jr.’s path of nonviolent civil rights protest ended in gunfire and death; three Americans had just circled the moon in Apollo 8; the Vietnamese peace talks commenced in Paris; the Democratic National Convention had been ravaged by a torrent of street violence; and likely presidential nominee Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated in Los Angeles. “The jocks really knew their stuff,” Ron Della Chiesa observed. “They were on the edge of what was new, what was happening, and what the youth market was going to be. Think of the timing of all that: Vietnam was going on, the protests, civil rights, the spin-offs from the assassinations, the country in upheaval. Then, there was the music; it couldn’t have been The only thing anybody was ever concerned about was the fCC. That was the only brake on the system. Nobody would ever say, politically: “You’re too radical.” Frankly, the listeners loved it, the bands loved it, the staff loved it. bill liChtenstein I READ THE NEWS TODAY i read the news today 41 more timely . . . the stars lined up.” Tommy Hadges remembered, “There was an amazing array of music that was coming out. The war was going on; there was a cultural revolution, a drug revolution, a political revolution. But [it was] also about being in Boston . . . in a city where it is renewed and refreshed every year with all the new students that come in. With the university environment having a lot to do with the social revolution going on, WBCN fit right into that.” Joe Rogers offered his view of WBCN’s music mission: “I always felt that I was there to bring this music to the people. The reflex was, you’ve got this huge record library and ‘look at the things I’ve found!’ The emphasis was on doing sets [of music] and segues; we thought that’s what our craft was. You tried to sneak one song into another in a clever way, whatever that would mean.” “It was kind of like college radio, you played the music you liked and you talked about it,” Jim Parry described. “Each show was quite a bit different. I would put a lot of folkie things in and Charles, at one point, was fired because he was too ‘rocky.’ That lasted a couple of days and then he was back,” he laughed. “We all pretty much winged it.” Tom Gamache (known as “Uncle T”), who eventually got on the air at ’BCN in March 1969, thrived on the spontaneity: “I decide what I’m going to play about two minutes before I put it on the turntable,” he told the Boston Globe that same month. A lot of Gamache’s choices were “the most bizarre,” according to Laquidara. “He blew our minds with Frank Zappa and the Mothers; he turned us all onto ‘Witchi Tai To’; he was the guy that played Captain Beefheart, John Coltrane, and Roland Kirk. If every station has that guy that pulls the most brilliant songs out of his ass, he was that guy.” J.J. Jackson told Record World magazine in 1978, “The jock was allowed to show his personality on the air, and lay out the show the way they wanted. You could play everything from Stockhausen to Alvin Lee; the only record you knew you were going to play was the first one.” “It was a very mellow presentation,” Sam Kopper described. “A lot of times we were stoned on the air and we came across very gently, very conversationally ; that’s one hallmark of that time. The other thing I really give due credit to Steven [Segal] and then Charles, was the madness that lasted at ’BCN into the early nineties. That was laid down at the very beginning.” Segal found the on-air lunacy to be quite normal because “there was so much bizarre stuff happening in real life! For me, I’d just kind of start the 42 radio free boston engine and see what came up. It was almost always spontaneous; I never knew what...