READERS GUIDE

WBCN and The American Revolution is the award-winning, feature-length documentary and book that tell the amazing, untold story of the radical underground radio station WBCN-FM, set against the dazzling and profound social, political, and cultural changes that took place in Boston and nationally during the late-1960s and early-70s, one of the most transformative periods in American history.

The story is told through the actual sights, sounds, and firstperson accounts of a compelling cast of characters who connected through the radio station, exploding music and countercultural scenes, militant anti-war activism, civil rights struggles, and the emerging women’s and LGBTQ-liberation movements.

The film and companion book provide a powerful tool to facilitate conversations in classrooms and in the community about the power and uses of media, specifically community radio, to help create social change and to promote greater media literacy. For community radio stations and local film and media arts organizations, screenings of the film coupled with discussions also present a valuable and powerful tool to help engage listeners and members of the public, including potential new audiences, in discussions about the missions and work of the organizations, and to engage new volunteers and supporters.

To this end, this guide provides questions and resources to create a robust and engaging community or classroom discussion to about the book and film.

Introduction

How Boston radio station WBCN became the hub of the rock-and-roll, antiwar, psychedelic solar system.

While San Francisco was celebrating a psychedelic Summer of Love in 1967, Boston stayed buttoned up and battened down. But that changed the following year, when a Harvard Law School graduate student named Ray Riepen founded a radio station that played music that young people, including the hundreds of thousands at Boston-area colleges, actually wanted to hear. WBCN-FM featured album cuts by such artists as the Mothers of Invention, Aretha Franklin, and Cream, played by announcers who felt free to express their opinions on subjects that ranged from recreational drugs to the war in Vietnam. In this engaging and generously illustrated chronicle, Peabody Award–winning journalist and one-time WBCN announcer Bill Lichtenstein tells the story of how a radio station became part of a revolution in youth culture.

At WBCN, creativity and countercultural politics ruled: there were no set playlists; news segments anticipated the satire of The Daily Show; on-air interviewees ranged from John and Yoko to Noam Chomsky; a telephone “Listener Line” fielded questions on any subject, day and night. From 1968 to Watergate, Boston’s WBCN was the hub of the rock-and-roll, antiwar, psychedelic solar system. A cornucopia of images in color and black and white includes concert posters, news clippings, photographs of performers in action, and scenes of joyousness on Boston CommonInterwoven through the narrative are excerpts from interviews with WBCN pioneers, including Charles Laquidara, the “news dissector” Danny Schechter, Marsha Steinberg, and Mitchell Kertzman.

Lichtenstein’s documentary WBCN and The American Revolution is available as a DVD sold separately.

Endorsements

   •  “A fascinating journey back in time when music and radio were at the center of a movement, and an inspiration for what media can be today. WBCN holds a special place in history.”
—Jon Abbott, President and CEO, GBH
   •  “A team of young heroes, women and men, black and white, straight and gay, passionate, fearless and revolutionary, broadcast the music and ideas that shaped how every college kid thought, felt, and acted for the rest of our lives.”
—Rob Barnett, former president, CBS radio programming; author of Next Job, Best Job
   •  “As a budding broadcaster at powerhouse WBZ-AM in the early 1970s I fell for WBCN and told my boss, who said: ‘FM? It’ll never last.’ He was right in that there will never be another WBCN.”
—Robin Young, host of Here and Now (NPR)
   •  “Living in Boston in those years, and deeply immersed in activism, it was impossible to miss the crucial role of WBCN in creating an engaged activist community, and, not least, providing indispensable information and analysis.”
—Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor, MIT; Laureate Professor and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair, University of Arizona

Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. Were you surprised to learn about the programming at WBCN in the 1960s and 1970s? Did you have a similar
kind of radio station in your town growing up? If so, tell us about it.

2. Tell us about a scene, a line, or a moment in the film or book that resonated with you, and why.

3. What did you think of the book? What did and didn’t you like about it?

4. In the film, Ray Riepen refers to the dominance of the commercial stations with obnoxious personalities, “Top
40” playlists and loud commercials as “Ugly Radio”. For WBCN, he hired kids who had a passion for music and
the “underground culture” as the announcers. How did this make a difference?

5. Do you see news and programming as being objective or subjective?

6. What is your source for the underground or alternative culture in your region?

7. How does the media reflect the values and interest of the organization and/or who owns and controls it? Is
that reflected via who is on the air, in the programming?

8. From a statement in the film: “We were treating radio not as a performance, but as a relationship with our
listeners”. Do you feel that you have a relationship with your favorite radio station?

9. Danny Schechter says in the film “WBCN had a commitment to a diversity in music and ideas.” While that may
be true, women listeners had to stage an action and demand that their voices be heard at the station. WBCN
dedicated one hour a week for a show hosted by women from the liberation movement. They also had “The
Lavender Hour” co-hosted by two gay men. That was in the early 1970’s. H ow have things changed since
then regarding diverse voices on the radio? Do you feel that the voices of marginalized groups are regularly
reflected on the airwaves?

10. WBCN had a relationship with local grassroots organizations, creating PSA’s touting their work. They also
covered political actions happening in Boston, including the perspective of the activists in the struggle. Do
you see any evidence of those approaches existing on the radio now?

11. How might radio be uniquely suited to help break down social, cultural and other barriers?

12. If you don’t have a community station in your town, are you interested in getting something started?

13. For students: How is radio different from social media?

14. For students: How was radio in the early days of WBCN (late-1960s and early-70s) different than radio today?

15. For students: Can you imagine building a social movement without the internet or social media? How would you do it?

16. For students: Why do you think music from the 1960s remains relevant today?

17. For students: People in the 1960s brought their talents to the effort to create social change, from song writers, to artists, to organizers. What are your talents that you can bring to helping change a situation that concerns you?

18. For students: What do you think made people so passionate about social issues at the time depicted in the documentary? Do you see that reflected today?

19. For students: Are there issues that you can see using media to help change? What are they and how would you do it?

About this Author

Author Statement – Bill Lichtenstein

On a summer evening in 1968, I was watching the local evening news on my family’s television in our living room in Brookline, Massachusetts. As a 12-year-old, I was aware of the psychedelic, LSD-fueled youth revolution which had exploded in San Francisco the summer before in the city’s Haight Ashbury district as part of the “Summer of Love,” and concurrently in New York City’s East Village.

But in Boston, even with its 250,000 college students and more than 80 colleges and universities, the youth revolution that would soon upend the world had yet to arrive. And then, suddenly, it did.

In the summer of 1968, “the hippies,” as they were called, appeared on the Boston Common. They were thousands of young people, dressed in rainbow colors, barefoot with long hair, playing guitars and Frisbee, and they took up residence on “the Common,” the plot of land that had traditionally been the backyard of the Boston bluebloods who lived on exclusive Beacon Hill.

Like the story of the Pied Piper, the presence of the hippies sent out a clarion call to young people throughout the city and suburbs. As for me, I remember getting up and leaving my family’s living room after seeing the hippies on the local evening news and taking the train from Brookline to the Boston Common to see the hippies and the scene for myself.

Soon after, in 1970, I was in a 9th grade alternative educational program in Newton, MA, where students were given the chance to get a volunteer job one day a week.

Being a devoted fan of radio, albeit the only radio available that played rock and roll at the time, which was Top 40 radio, I called what was then a newly-launched underground radio station in Boston, WBCN-FM, and asked if they needed help. My timing couldn’t have been better as they had recently started a “Listener Line” staffed by volunteers, to handle the flood of calls the station was receiving from listeners to answer questions about everything from how to help a roommate on a bad LSD trip to how to respond to a draft notice, to people looking for a ride cross-country or help finding a lost cat or dog.

I began answering the station’s Listener Line, and soon after I was recruited to cover demonstrations for the news department. I helped develop a distinctive sound for news reports that combined highly-edited sound bites, often of President Nixon or other politicians, with music and comedy, a style that would remain a signature of the radio station. Soon after, I was given my own weekly four-hour radio show. It left me with a keen sense of belief in the power of media—especially radio—to create and fuel political, social and cultural change, to give a voice to those who didn’t have one, and to serve as the connection between all of us.

With everything going on in the world today, it’s a lesson and story as relevant—and timely—now as it was then.

Suggested Reading

Radio Locator
There are 44,000 radio stations throughout the world reaching 77% of the earth’s population. This radio station search engine
has links to over 15,800 station websites and 11,700 audio streams from the United States and around the world.

https://radio-locator.com/

LPFM Database
Community radio stations have become a force in recent years. This website has a directory of low power FM stations across
the country, plus web links and associated organizations.
http://lpfmdatabase.weebly.com/

Free Press
Media is perhaps the most powerful tool to help create social change. Free Press is an advocacy organization that works
to ensure that media and technology are used for justice. Their activist tools include tips for writing an effective letter to
lawmakers, editors and your local radio station.https://www.freepress.net/get-involved/activist-tools


Common Frequency
Common Frequency is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to innovative new community and college radio. By providing free and
low-cost aid to regular people educating themselves to be the media, Common Frequency (CF) has been supporting the launch
of grassroots stations since 2006.
http://commonfrequency.org/node/3

National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB)
Founded in 1978, NFCB is the oldest and largest national organization dedicated to community stations within the public media
system.
https://nfcb.org/about/

Future of Music Coalition
Future of Music Coalition (FMC) is a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit organization supporting a musical ecosystem where
artists flourish and are compensated fairly and transparently for their work.
https://futureofmusic.org/issues/campaigns/i-support-community-radio

Radio Survivor
Radio Survivor attempts to shed light on the ongoing importance of radio: from the airwaves (FM, AM, Short-wave, HD, satellite)
to online. Their weekly bulletin reports on trends and updates in this space.
http://www.radiosurvivor.com/

Association of Independent Radio: AIR
AIR was founded in 1988 by 10 independent radio producers, and has expanded to more than 1,300 independent audio
producers, multimedia journalists, and public media programs, stations and networks across 30 countries, headquartered
in Boston.
https://airmedia.org/

Airtime
A guide to launching a fully licensed online radio station.
http://Airtime.pro

Free Music Archive
The go-to sources for free music and royalty free music.
https://freemusicarchive.org/

Prometheus Radio Project: Freeing the Airwaves from Corporate Control
The Prometheus Radio Project is a non-profit organization founded by a small group of radio activists in 1998. Prometheus
builds, supports, and advocates for community radio stations that bring together and empower local, participatory voices
and movements for social change.
https://www.prometheusradio.org/

Common Sense Media
Common Sense Media provides guidance around media and news literacy:
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/search/media%20literacy

FCC Commissioner Nick Johnson
Website of the legendary FCC commissioner:
https://fromdc2iowa.blogspot.com/

Current
Current is the journal of public broadcasting
http://Current.org