How WBCN Revolutionized Radio, Boston — And The World

NATICK, MA — It's no surprise that WBCN started the day that a young person with a revolutionary idea got laughed out of a room full of guys in suits.

Ray Riepen, a Harvard law student and co-founder of The Boston Tea Party (a rock club known for having the Velvet Underground as its house band), went to a National Association of Broadcasters meeting in 1968 with a new idea for a radio station, one oriented around albums rather than singles, and with fewer commercials per hour than the top 40 stations of the day.

The broadcasters told Riepen to go back to Harvard. Instead, Riepen took his new format and applied it to a struggling Boston classical music station, WBCN. The new station, staffed by college kids, was entirely new in the broadcast world: a mashup of new music, news reporting and humor that rose alongside the turmoil of the late 1960s and the Nixon era.

A new documentary "WBCN and The American Revolution," premiering Sunday at Natick's The Center for Arts, details those early few years of WBCN, before Howard Stern, Princess Cheyenne and disco.

Director Bill Lichtenstein got a job at the station at age 14 in 1970 taking calls on the listener line. He was instantly taken with the station's connection to the larger cultural movements happening in Boston. He got the idea to revisit those days with a documentary in 2006 during the height of the Iraq War, which he saw as a parallel to the Vietnam era.

"I thought it was an interesting idea to make a film about WBCN and how, before cell phones and the internet, all of this tremendous change happened," Lichtenstein said.

On top of introducing the Boston area to bands such as Quicksilver Messenger Service and Patti Smith — who played her first live radio broadcast on WBCN — the station was covering news in the area unlike other media outlets. Reporters from the station covered protests and used humor to contextualize events such as the Nixon impeachment, akin to shows such as "The Colbert Report." The station was also the first to have women DJs and to broadcast LGBTQ voices.

"WBCN was one of the first places where diversity took off," Lichtenstein said.

True to its shaggy beginnings, WBCN didn't have any sort of formal archive. Instead, Lichtenstein pieced together the station's history through photos and recordings that he found through fans and former employees. The widow of former Boston Globe photographer Jeff Albertson invited Lichenstein down to her home in Florida, where she kept boxes of old negatives from the station's early years. The materials used in the film have been turned into a public archive through UMass Amherst.

The history of the station is still relevant today, Lichtenstein says, because it shows how larger cultural revolutions form — not to mention that there's a divisive president facing impeachment right now. And the station's DNA can still be found in today's social media and on public radio, which didn't exist in the 1960s.

"WBCN was less of a performance and more of a relationship with listeners," he said. "When you turn on the radio and hear someone say, 'Let us know what you think,' WBCN created that."

If you go ...

"WBCN and The American Revolution"
4 p.m. Sunday; 7:30 p.m. Monday and Tuesday
The Center for Arts, 14 Summer St., Natick