When WBCN rocked the airwaves (and politics too) - Cambridge

**Bruce Springsteen at Harvard Square Theatre in 1974. (Photo: Barry Schneier)**

An unpopular president, endless war, the threat of a military draft and a disaffected population that is sick of it all. We could be talking about life in America under the Trump administration.

Instead, the subject of Peabody-winning filmmaker Bill Lichtenstein’s latest documentary, “The Airwaves Belonged to the People: WBCN and The American Revolution,” casts back to the days of disgraced former president Richard Nixon, examining this period of social and political unrest through the lens of the underground rock ’n’ roll station WBCN, the old 104.1 FM.

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It’s a subject that Lichtenstein can speak on with authority. He joined the radio station in 1970 and watched a parade of Who’s Whos of the era’s musical innovators walk through the studio doors. The film includes archival footage that captures these contemporary and future stars at a time celebrities were less guarded about their image and personal lives.

Along with broadcasting music for a new generation, WBCN planted its flag in the social and political movements of the day: the antiwar movement, civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights movements. Lichtenstein frames these as part of the larger struggle of a generation to turn the page past the toxic politics of a country that had lost its way.

What can we learn from this story in the present moment? There will be a screening of the film at Somerville Theatre on May 10 with a Q&A exploring the impact and lessons of the WBCN cultural phenomenon. The filmmaker will be joined by fellow WBCN announcer Maxanne, a pioneer among female disc jockeys who helped establish bands such as Aerosmith, The Cars and Queen, as well as an appearance by former disc jockey Joe Rogers (aka “Mississippi Harold Wilson”), the first voice ever heard on the radio station.

Filmmaker Bill Lichtenstein answered a few questions about his film ahead of the screening.

You began at WBCN as a volunteer on the Listener Line at age 14 and later became a newscaster and announcer with your own program. You must have been wild about radio. Are you still a regular listener? Does that medium still grab you? If so, what do you listen to?

I grew up loving radio. When I was 5, my father bought me a tiny crystal radio kit – the kind you built yourself, with no battery, tuned with a little coiled wire. I put the tiny earphone to my ear and heard a Red Sox game in Spanish on a Boston station. I was transfixed.

After that, I kept a radio close by, even under my pillow at night if my mother didn’t find it. In those days, the station for a kid in Boston was WMEX, and the announcer above all others was Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsburg.

When I was 14 and had to find a volunteer job one day a week as part of an alternative education program in Newton, I called WBCN. The station was still in its earliest days. They had just started the Listener Line and needed volunteers. That’s how it began.

I still love radio. The basic form has changed less than almost any other medium. What has changed profoundly is ownership. Community radio has been upended by corporate conglomerates, and that has deprived people of real local media.

The film draws on more than 100,000 audio and visual items, including rare archival material from Jane Fonda, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Garcia, David Bowie and Lou Reed. What was your favorite rare find out of the lot, whether it made it into the final cut or not?

There were so many remarkable finds, almost all from listeners or fans, but the film was made almost in reverse from the way most historical documentaries are produced. Usually you start with the story and then look for images and sound to illustrate it. In our case, what audio and visual archives we were able to find largely determined which stories we could tell – and the more tapes, photos, film, the better.

That’s in part why we focused on certain moments. It wasn’t only that Springsteen, Patti Smith, Led Zeppelin or the Velvet Underground mattered more than others. It was that we had enough surviving material to build real audiovisual sequences around them.

The most important find was probably the Bruce Springsteen tape from his WBCN interview and performance with Maxanne Sartori. I had heard it live as a teenager and never forgot it. The station’s original tape disappeared, but years later I found a copy online that cut off in exactly the same place as the original reel. That told me the tape had survived somewhere – and made me realize other lost WBCN material might still be out there too.

“The Airwaves Belonged to the People: WBCN and The American Revolution” was titled “WBCN and The American Revolution” when the initial theatrical release was abbreviated by Covid. What’s behind the name change?

The name change was meant to make clear why the film matters now. Questions about media ownership, corporate consolidation, independent journalism, free expression, democracy and dissent are again central to the country – and they are central to the film.

WBCN was not just a radio station that played music. It was part of a larger ecosystem in which radio, music, activism, journalism and community all fed one another.

Adding “The Airwaves Belonged to the People” emphasized that larger point. In that era, media and culture helped end a war, drive an unpopular president from office and advance civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights and other movements that had been excluded or marginalized by mainstream media.

The title is a reminder that media does not have to be passive, corporate or disconnected from public life. It can belong to the people. And when it does, it can help people believe change is possible.

There is a thesis offered by multiple talking heads in the film that the music of the era and progressive political activism were in lockstep. Yet today baby boomers make up the majority of the conservative Maga base and don’t flinch at spending thousands of dollars to see bands whose music was once part of the counterculture. Was the music really that political, or are we looking back through rose-colored glasses?

I think the music and politics really were intertwined. That is not nostalgia or rose-colored glasses. It was an accurate reflection of the time.

Ralph Gleason said something about that era that always stayed with me: No matter what you were doing – cooking dinner, shopping, making love, studying for a test – somewhere in the back of your mind you were thinking, “We’ve got to get rid of Nixon.” Nixon and the war in Vietnam. They permeated everything.

That doesn’t mean every musician was a political theorist or every song was a manifesto. But the atmosphere was political. The culture was political. The war, civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, the draft, Nixon – all of it was unavoidable.

WBCN helped fuel that connection by treating music, news, activism and daily life as part of the same conversation. One of the lessons of that era was that all politics is personal. It isn’t only about what button you wear or who you vote for. Your actions, your choices, your work and your life are your politics.

There’s a laundry list of contemporary factors that suggests that it would be difficult to replicate today the success of WBCN’s model. What’s at least one obstacle standing in the way of “the next WBCN” that you’d like to see removed?

When we first started fundraising for the film, I borrowed a line from Apple: We live at a time when it has never been easier to communicate, but never been harder to be heard.

That is the reality now. WBCN needed studios, transmitters, engineers, staff and all that infrastructure to reach a few hundred thousand people. Today, any high school student with a phone can potentially reach half a billion people if a video goes viral. But there is so much clutter and noise that it is very hard for any one voice to break through.

The greatest obstacle to “the next WBCN,” I think, is media consolidation, especially in radio. In the old days, ownership limits meant local stations could still have real local identities. Now huge companies can own hundreds of stations, many of them programmed from somewhere far away.

You can’t have true community radio in that kind of system. Community radio should support local artists, give voice to people who are not otherwise heard and reflect the place where it exists. Breaking up radio conglomerates and putting more local media licenses back into local communities would be an enormous change.