Radio Free Boston (10 page)

There was a big protest at the Boston Police station that used to be right up the street from Stuart Street. The police in Chicago had shot a Black Panther in his apartment and people were saying it was an assassination. Danny handed me a tape recorder. “Here, go up the street and cover this demonstration.”

“How do I do that?”

“This is the microphone, push the red and white buttons and it'll record; then just ask people, ‘Why are you here?'” So, I went up the street and people gave me all these really intense answers, [which] I brought back and he used for the news.

Thus began Bill Lichtenstein's long career as an award-winning investigative reporter and journalist, although shortly afterward he lost his cool, high school–mandated volunteer job when Schechter began paying him out of the news department budget.

Lichtenstein once covered a Boston demonstration and subsequent protest march through the city streets. He tagged along as the throng crossed the Charles River on the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge, heading into Cambridge. “It ended up at the Center for International Affairs over at Harvard. This was Kissinger's old office and it was tied to the war effort. They would meticulously call it the
CFIA
, but people would roll their eyes and say, ‘No, the Center for International Affairs should be [called] the
CIA
!' [The crowd] ended up breaking in and trashing the place; they started ransacking files and tearing everything up.” He laughed at the memory of finding a desk that hadn't yet been overturned or destroyed in the melee, which still had an intact telephone. “So, I called Danny up, live on the air from inside, to do a report while all this was going on.” He was in the middle of his call to
WBCN
when suddenly, “Somebody yelled that we had to get out, the police were coming! I concluded my report with, ‘Desks are being overturned, files are being ransacked and phones are being ripped out of the walls!' Then I pulled my plastic phone jack out of the wall too!”

Danny Schechter elevated the editorial power of the news department with two additions, Andy Kopkind and John Scagliotti. The former, a noted writer for left-wing magazines like the
New Republic
and
The Nation
, would later compose political essays in publications as prominent and respected as
Time
magazine. Before he got to
WBCN
, Kopkind worked in Washington at the Unicorn News Collective, which fed reports about issues concerning the war to counterculture radio stations across the country. His partner, John Scagliotti, revealed, “The collective, though, was going bad; it was time to leave D.C.” Charles Laquidara, who knew Kopkind, invited him to come up to Boston. Scagliotti continued, “Andy went up, I followed, and while we were at '
BCN
, Danny said, ‘Why don't you do some stuff and maybe they'll hire you at some point.' It was all very flexible.” So, despite Kopkind's semilegendary status, he and Scagliotti began on a volunteer basis, like all the others.

“Our very first ['
BCN
] piece was on the Victory Gardens in the Fenway,” Scagliotti recalled. “No one knew what they were back in those days; [it was] just these people planting nice vegetables. This was the first piece of radio craziness that we did: at the beginning [of the report] we took
The Messiah
, the part where they sing, ‘let us rejoice,' and we took all the ‘let us' . . . ‘let us' . . . ‘let us' [parts] out and cut them all together to make ‘lettuce . . . lettuce . . . lettuce.' Then we had [a recording of] a woman who just
mentioned, ‘We grow lettuce over here,' and then in comes the ‘lettuce . . . lettuce . . . lettuce . . .' That was our early work; weird!” he added, chuckling. “In fact, we were discovering and developing a whole new sound that was beginning in the early seventies, because radio had never really mixed sound effects and live actualities in news and public affairs, like using a car crash sound when there was something [in the report] we didn't like.” The chemistry clicked; soon Kopkind and his young protégé were both drawing checks from
WBCN
. Eventually, Scagliotti would even be made the news director, technically Schechter's superior. He downplayed this role: “I was the boss only because nobody else wanted to do it. When [the department] got big, somebody had to manage it and make sure everybody got paid!”

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
MC
5. 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 typists.” 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.