Wbcn and the American Revolution: How a Radio Station Defined Politics, Counterculture, and Rock and Roll

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 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. Interwoven 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 or in a special bundled edition of book and DVD.

From 1968 to Watergate, Boston's WBCN was the hub of the rock-and-roll, antiwar, psychedelic solar system. This documentary presents the amazing, untold story of the radical underground radio station WBCN-FM, set against profound social, political, and cultural changes that took place in Boston and nationally during the late 1960s and early 1970s.Told through the actual sights, sounds, and stories of a compelling cast of characters who connected through the radio station, exploding music and countercultural scenes, militant antiwar activism, civil rights struggles, and the emerging women's and LGBTQ liberation movements.
WBCN and the American Revolution is "the incredible, true story of how a radio station, politics, and rock 'n' roll changed everything."
Directed by Peabody Award-winner Bill Lichtenstein, who began working at WBCN at age 14 in 1970, and companion to his book. the lavishly illustrated WBCN and the American Revolution.