The American Revolution

This doc makes the claim that fm rock radio started on wbcn in 1968 and was the brainchild of the owner of the tea party club. Nice story....not true.

Fm rock radio was started in san francisco by tom donahue in 1967. The playing of deep album cuts, less commercials and having dj's sound like regular people was in fact successful and spread to la and nyc before it got to boston.

Bill Lichtenstein's Documentary covers the early years of Boston's famed FM rock station. The doc makes a slight exaggeration by calling WBCN the very first 'underground' music station in the nation in 1968 (outlets in San Francisco and elsewhere stake claims as well), but it certainly became the most influential with it's "American Revolution" slogan.

It's audience of some quarter of a million local area college students (including Harvard) gave it a direct pipeline to the counter-culture movement. Icons of the era including Abbie Hoffman, Jane Fonda and Jerry Garcia could be heard on its airwaves. The news division became a local beacon for the left. But, it was also about the music. The DJs were famous for playing the 'deep tracks' that Top 40 radio wouldn't touch. They were among the first to tout Led Zeppelin, The J. Giels Band (singer Peter Wolff began as DJ there himself), Bowie, Aerosmith, Springsteen - and later punk artists like Patti Smith and The Ramones. Their eclectic mix also included smatterings of blues, jazz and even classical.

The Documentary is very much Boston-centric (Lichtenstein himself worked at the station). It does a decent job of trying to tie it together with the broaader anti-war movement and 60s revolution nationwide, but, it is, at its heart, a valentine to a time and a place (mostly between 1968 and 1975). Some of the original on-air personnel such as Charles Laquidera, Danny Schechter ('the news dissecter'), Al Perry and Peter Simon give witness to the station's progress over the years. Ray Riepen who founded the station (along with the local music club, The Boston Tea Party) is also on hand to give a detailed history from the inside. The station continued in it's rock format until 1996 although by the 80s it had already started to slip a bit from the bullseye of the Boston music radio scene. It's too bad that Lichtenstein doesn't give the viewer a more complete view of the entirety of the station's run, even if it's somewhat understandable that those first 6 or 7 years were the most crucial. All in all, a nostalgic treat for Bostonians of a certain age.

Saying "not true" isn't true. Yes, Tom Donohue broke the radio rules on KSAN in San Francisco - perhaps the night he played the long version of "Light My Fire" by the Doors. But the truth is all this repressed energy in American youth burst out at about the same time (as it did in Paris, and on Radio Luxembourg, too). Who's to say just what the flashpoint was? Maybe it doesn't matter. What matters is we all caught on to how we were being oppressed socially, politically, and beaten and conscripted into subservience by the government which was supposed to preserve our freedoms. So yeah, I was bi-coastal, coming from the West Coast to the East Coast and I loved listening to Tom Donohue and his Southern California brethren at KPPC and others and once in Boston to WBCN, each and all great, earth-moving radio stations.