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  But, even though the news department allowed itself to smile, even laugh at times, by no means did its members forget that they were very much under the U.S. government’s steady gaze, as Danny Schechter described: “There had been a vocal group of activists who put a bomb in the Suffolk County Courthouse. They issued a communiqué and then called ’BCN to say it was pasted up in a phone booth. We brought it to the station and I [went on the air and] reported it.” The document ended up on Schechter’s desk, crammed in a colossal pile as papers chronicling the next day’s news events quickly plowed it under. Although a brilliant news man, Schechter wasn’t, by any account, a neat one. “Then the FBI showed up and they wanted [the communiqué]. I didn’t want to give it to them, but Al Perry [now WBCN’S general manager] told me, ‘You have to!’ Everybody was living in fear of the FBI or the government yanking our [radio station] license. So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll give it to them.’ But then I couldn’t find it.”

  “You have to picture his office,” Lichtenstein added with a snicker. “Danny would sit and clip newspapers and the clips would pile up, and the newspapers that were clipped would just pile up; the next day he would just start again. He had an enormous amount of material laying around.”

  “There was a half-eaten tuna fish sandwich or something on my desk; it was a mess!” Schechter apologized to the agents: “Honest, it’s here someplace.” After twenty minutes of watching him search, they became restless and disgusted, handing the news man a business card that he promptly “misplaced” too. The sensitive document never turned up again, but luckily for ’BCN, neither did the FBI men.

  There was selflessness in being a personality in those days. The biggest insult a listener could give you was, “You’re on an ego trip.” You were speaking on behalf of a cultural community, and we were the rallying point, for a time, of that budding, tightly knit community. NORM WINER

  MOVIN’

  ON UP

  “Media Freaks Act Out Battles of the Radicals” read the headline of the Boston Globe story by Parker Donham in June 1970. He was describing the wild, often naked, scenes at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, as it hosted the Alternative Media Conference First Gathering. The event was a rallying cry for more than 1,500 hippie announcers, writers, producers, and directors scattered across the country in the days before radio conferences became big business and MTV, and then the Internet, linked (and homogenized) singular cultures across North America. The conference represented a microcosm of the entire counterculture as different groups with widely divergent views squared off in debate while extracurricular sex and drug use flourished openly. A young Mark Parenteau, then a teenage DJ in Worcester with the radio handle of Scotty Wainwright, signed up and made his way north. “They were having Creem magazine, Rolling Stone, other alternative newspapers, all the legendary FM jocks who had become famous . . . I guess it was a ‘getting-together,’ but it was [also] a huge party. Every city had a band representing them, and the band for Detroit was the MC5. Wow! I loved their energy. So that weekend I gravitated and hung out with all the Detroit people.” That would lead to “Scotty Wainwright” meeting all the right names and soon getting himself hired at Detroit’s WKNR-FM and then WABX-FM. But he’d get back to Boston . . . eventually.

  In addition to describing a circle of skinny-dipping, joint-smoking film-makers around a college swimming hole discussing the artistic merits of filming an orgy, the Boston Globe story also mentioned that four WBCN disc jockeys attended the conference. Norm Winer was swept up by the same carousing spirit that Parenteau witnessed: “This is where Atlantic Records signed J. Geils Band on the spot. . . . Dr. John was there . . . Baba Ram Dass [the spiritualist] and Jerry Rubin. It was the first time we met many of our counterparts. They shared our philosophies and convictions; it really fortified and energized us. We weren’t just crackpots clinging on to an unrealistic goal—there were other people sharing that.” Andy Beaubien drove to the conference with Charles and Norm: “It was strange and bizarre, but fun and exciting. I remember driving back, all energized, but also politicized. We came to the station and we all went on the air and had a discussion, kind of a debriefing, taking phone calls live. There was this sense that this was the beginning of a major change.”

  “We were very utopian in our way of thinking,” Jim Parry acknowledged.

  “We wanted to be crazy, committed, but responsible, music-loving human beings,” Sam Kopper stressed. “Those were our ideals and makeup, and I’m proud of that.”

  “A lot of the decisions were made by all of us for a long time,” added Al Perry. “There were occasionally some interesting arguments, but I think we stood for the community.”

  It was, as the song said, the dawning of Aquarius, and a spirit of unity bonded the members of ’BCN’S young staff, inspiring them to reach out to serve their brotherhood of listeners. Kate Curran, who came to the station as “an indentured servant for Charles,” as she jokingly referred to her unpaid status, headed up the effort to establish a daily schedule of volunteers who would be available to answer listener calls. “Charles, kind of, put me in charge. At first we had people answering the business phone [because] there wasn’t a separate line. If it was a business call, they’d hand it over to the secretary. It was very confusing. Then there was a separate line, but we’d have issues if a volunteer didn’t show up for a shift because the new phone line would just ring and ring and ring. The secretary didn’t have time to answer it, so she’d just wrap it up in a blanket and put it in a bottom drawer.” Those early efforts, though, resulted in a formal WBCN Listener Line that took requests and provided information about the songs being played, upcoming concerts, a list of available rides to different cities, the lost cat-and-dog report, and answers to a myriad of questions. “We hated to have to say, ‘I don’t know.’ Curran and her second-in-command, Arlene Brahm, obtained reference books, including an encyclopedia set, to answer even the most random questions a listener could venture. “The Listener Line grew exponentially,” Curran added, and soon the air staff counted on it to be there. “Danny Schechter looked at the volunteers as his own little slave pool,” she remembered with amusement. “His thing was, ‘Oh good, they have food!’” Of course, as Bill Lichtenstein could attest, sometimes being in the right place at the right time on the WBCN Listener Line could be a very good thing indeed.

  David L. Bieber in the June 1970 Boston article wrote, “A further means of activating the WBCN audience is via public service announcements, jointly handled by Andy Beaubien, who does the afternoon show, and [J.J.] Jackson. ‘We can’t put on a Robert Goulet Heart Fund appeal because it doesn’t relate to our audience,’ says Beaubien, ‘but we can perform a real public service by giving out the information about the presence of Project Place (a sanctuary for down-and-out young Bostonians) or the need for volunteers for the Cambridge Free School.’” Listener Line volunteers often referred callers to these organizations; those on bum acid trips were most often advised to phone Project Place if they needed more help (and the phone hadn’t melted in their hands). The article also mentioned some WBCN-produced public interest programming that had been presented on the air, including Laquidara’s “Eco-Catastrophe,” a twenty-five-minute documentary about the environment, and a special prepared by the women’s liberation organization Bread and Roses. Aired on International Women’s Day, that program targeted male prejudice in the media and trumpeted the group’s battle for equality in the workplace.

  WBCN’S involvement with Bread and Roses resulted from a local firestorm sparked by Charles Laquidara after he recorded a public service announcement for Project Place’s Drug Dependency Treatment Center. Sam Kopper, who caught most of the flak as program director, recalled, “They were looking for more doctors and office staff. Charles did this spot where he said, ‘If you’re a guy, we need doctors; if you’re a chick, we need secretaries.’” The Valentines’ Day 1970 edition of the Boston Globe identified the quote as, “If you’re a chick and you can type, they need t
ypists.” Nevertheless, the article also reported that the response to this slip of chauvinism was immediate (and creative): “About 35 young women, protesting ‘male supremist [sic] policies’ at the hip rock music station, WBCN-FM, swarmed into the station’s Stuart Street studios yesterday and threw eight live baby chicks on the station manager’s desk.” One of the protesters, according to the article, made the group’s position clear to Kopper: “These are chicks—I am a woman.” The Boston Globe went on to interview Debbie Ullman, one of four females on staff at the time, who allied herself with Bread and Roses: “WBCN isn’t taking a leadership role in the women’s liberation movement.” She then pointed out that the male members of the staff were distressed by the action: “It’s the first revolutionary issue in which they’ve been confronted as the enemy.” Laquidara defended himself by saying that the needs of the Drug Dependency Treatment Center were immediate and the announcement recorded quickly. However, the gaffe still exposed an embarrassing bias at the station, even if the male staffers didn’t realize they had it.

  The infamous baby chick incident gave Kopper real clout with Ray Riepen and Mitch Hastings to support the concept of incorporating a greater female presence on the air. Debbie Ullman was considered for a full-time shift, but after a summer of fill-in work, she flew the coop. “I was under the spell of Woodstock and had the urge for going; I was ready to get into somebody’s car and drive to California with my dog.” The West Coast sojourn didn’t last: Ullman would soon be persuaded to return (“I was living in a cow field with an artist in Mendocino”) and take over the morning show. But in her absence, the search continued to find another hip female jock with radio experience, and eventually Kopper heard good things about twenty-year-old Maxanne Sartori at KLOL-FM in Seattle. He contacted the DJ and asked for a tape of her work. “I loved the way she sounded right away.” Maxanne made her way east, sliding into the afternoon two-to-six slot on Friday the 13th of November 1970, just as the station’s beloved J.J. Jackson accepted an offer to do radio at KLOS-FM in Los Angeles. While many lamented the loss of one who had already become legendary, the community also accepted and embraced Maxanne’s rejuvenating enthusiasm and energy. It is not fair to say that her star at WBCN would eclipse even J.J. Jackson’s but rather that Maxanne’s contribution to the radio collective would take the station to an exciting new level.

  Big changes were also afoot for overnight jock Norm Winer, who left WBCN for a new job as program director at CKGM-FM in Montreal. It was a “sign of the times” job offer, as Winer recalled: “The station owner flew to India several times a year to meet with his guru, and he hired a whole bunch of spiritual young Canadians to run the radio station. [Then] their PD took a leave to take up with [his] guru for two years, so they needed [someone] to fill in.” Exit Winer (in a flourish of sitars) for his promising new gig. He’d be back in six months, barely long enough to be missed, but in that time he hired Sam Kopper away, leaving Charles Laquidara in charge of the WBCN air staff. When a sudden managerial shakeup at CKGM tossed Winer back to Boston, he immediately sought out his former boss: “I came back from Canada, it was March or April 1971, and I remember following Ray Riepen around his apartment, trying to talk him into letting me be program director. I said I had a plan and that I had been [a] PD for six months and knew how to read the ratings, or something.” Since sparks had been flying between Laquidara and Riepen, Winer’s pitch worked. “He’d had enough of Charles. So, I came back to ’BCN, after being the rookie, to being the boss, to people who weren’t really used to having a boss. Then, [the goal was to] have a cohesive plan that we all could agree on, creating some minimal rules to have a consistency so we could continue to create and program collectively. That was the strength of the station, well through the seventies anyway.” Kopper also limped back to WBCN after his even briefer Canadian career of a mere six weeks, but his old morning shift had already been doled out to the recently returned Debbie Ullman. After all of these musical chairs had finally been positioned, the feminist listeners in WBCN’S audience had to have been pleased: by the spring of 1971, a year after the Bread and Roses intervention, WBCN now had a female announcer in both the morning and the afternoon shifts.

  Maxanne, as she simply referred to herself on the radio, felt grateful that Laquidara had set off the chain of events that made her attractive to hire, even though Sam Kopper maintains that it was talent that landed her the job. She joked to the Boston Globe years later in 1983, “You could say I owe my career to Charles because he’s the one who said chicks on the radio.” Bill Spurlin, who worked at WBCN as an engineer at the time, observed in his blog, “Max was a very striking, handsome woman, [and] a woman on the radio was a New Phenomenon in 1971. The idea that a woman could control that stream of power was enough to shake my male-centric, woman-in-the-kitchen prejudices, and reinforced the very power of the medium itself.” It was quickly evident that Maxanne liked to rock, as Debbie Ullman observed: “I was motivated by the counterculture—played Jesse Colin Young, Incredible String Band, Holy Modal Rounders, BB King, Jefferson Airplane, Velvet Underground; [but] she was really into the rock and roll. She was much more tuned into what [would be] happening with ’BCN by the later seventies.”

  Maxanne loved to rock, punished WBCN’S studio speakers, broke Aerosmith, and introduced Bruce Springsteen. With Kenny Greenblatt in the Prudential Studios. Photo by Dan Beach.

  “A lot of what she played are the songs you hear on Classic Rock radio today,” added Tommy Hadges. Maxanne would eventually be credited with championing Boston groups like the J. Geils Band, Aerosmith, and the Cars, and counted some less famous bands from the area as favorites, including Reddy Teddy, Nervous Eaters, Fox Pass, and Willie “Loco” Alexander. Hadges continued, “She was the one that was really able to find the cuts that seemed to resonate with the audience.” In regard to “resonating,” Maxanne also liked to feel the music she played. “She ran those speakers at the loudest possible level imaginable,” Hadges joked seriously. “The production room at Stuart Street was right next to the air studio; Andy Beaubien and I would try to get some work [done] in the afternoon. But sometimes it was difficult because Maxanne had her speakers up so loud that the whole place was rattling!”

  With its latest lineup in place, the on-air collective headed into 1971 as darlings of the underground media, standard-bearers for the counterculture bohemia entrenched in Boston, and heroes to so many young bands. Artists were offered free reign to drop in at Stuart Street for interviews and to play live on the air. “I remember one of the first live broadcasts was Jesse Colin Young and the Youngbloods,” Kate Curran recalled. “They set them up front in the sales office and they played for an hour or two. Dr. John came in and all the volunteers and hangers-on were there in the Listener Line area going, ‘Wow, it’s Dr. John!’ On his way out he looked at us and said, ‘Catch you in the moonbeams.’ It was soooo Dr. John!” Others as diverse as Hound Dog Taylor, Van Morrison, Pete Townshend, and Gary Burton also dropped in. One historic evening in November 1970, Laquidara hosted an acoustic guitar summit on his show featuring Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Duane Allman (who had less than a year to live).

  To further the egalitarian goals of a hippie “revolution,” yet still bring in the cash needed to keep business going, the staff needed to confront and compromise with the typical business model that made any radio station’s survival possible. The most radical viewpoint was to not sell advertising at all, like college radio stations. But where would the money come from with no school or foundation underwriting the programming? The WBCN compromise was to place a certain limit on the number of commercials allowed on the air, a practice begun by Ray Riepen and agreed to by the staff. “One of the initial deals was eight ads an hour,” the general manager said. Because demand usually outpaced inventory for the first twenty-four months after the change from classical music, this choice worked for the station. Boston magazine reported that as of May 1970, the rate charged for a one-time, one-minute commercial in AAA time
(the most coveted positions in the evening) on WBCN was $32, and the net sales for that March “rose to the highest in the station’s history, surpassing all other FM stations in the city.” The 20 May 1970 edition of the New York Times, in a story entitled “Around Country, FM Turns to Rock,” pictured Laquidara working in the studio and pointed out that WBCN’S shift from classical to rock had “enriched the station by $41,000 a month.”

  The WBCN collective considered the style and presentation of the commercials to be equally important to the number. Some accounts, like any of the U.S. Armed Services or the tobacco companies, were flat-out refused. Other national companies that might be welcomed were asked to leave their slick and professional, agency-produced commercials at the door, and ads with jingles in them were also turned down. A potential advertiser had to agree that its spots could be rewritten, produced, and voiced by ’BCN announcers, an attempt to adapt the messages to echo the “underground” attitude at the station and create palatable, even entertaining, vignettes for its listeners. Tim Montgomery, who replaced Debbie Ullman in sales in 1971, recalled, “Up until 1973, maybe ’74, we didn’t run any prerecorded commercials. It didn’t matter who the advertiser was; they were all either [done] live or we produced them.” With his rate cards and station information stored, ironically, in an old army surplus gas mask bag, Montgomery canvassed local businesses looking for advertisers. Then, “I’d sell the ad, convince them that WBCN was the right kind of radio, but then I had the task of saying, ‘Well, you might have a lovely spot, but we can’t run it. [But], believe me, we know how to talk to our listeners.’” Montgomery quickly became one of ’BCN’S most successful rising stars. “I must have written thousands of ads in the time I was there. Then I had to voice and produce them myself. I had no experience doing that; I just picked it up.” Montgomery became “the voice” for Underground Camera, a major supporter of the early WBCN. “They were ahead of their time, in thinking that you should use a regular person to voice the ads. Of course, everybody on ’BCN was an ordinary person, I suppose, in their delivery and voice. There were no actors behind the mike at WBCN.” Laughing, he added, “Except for Charles!”