BEFORE: Well, I hope you had a great July 4, I tried to make sure my day was as American as possible. I stayed up late playing video games, then I slept in, breakfast was some snack cakes from the deli, then my wife and I went grocery shopping, I watched three episodes of "The Great Food Truck Race" and last week's "America's Got Talent", then dinner and a movie - all while wearing a T-shirt that shows Elvis Presley shaking hands with Richard Nixon and posing for that famous picture. What could BE more American than all that?
I avoided watching any fireworks, but I sure HEARD a lot of them, my neighborhood always sounds like a war zone, and I don't feel safe leaving the house. Too many amateurs with fireworks sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, and I just can't relax, the whole day long I feel like I'm living in the Ukraine, and once again, there's zero policing of amateur fireworks in NYC.
Lou Reed and Andy Warhol carry over from "The Velvet Underground" via archive footage.
THE PLOT: The incredible story of how a radio station, politics and rock and roll changed everything.
AFTER: Here's something else that 's truly America - rock and mother-freakin' roll, right? We made that, it's ours - I mean, so is jazz but who cares about jazz any more? And rap's ours too, but I'm too damn old to appreciate it. So it's classic rock for me, and I grew up in the suburbs of Boston, listening mostly to WBCN after I rejected Top 40 radio and gravitated more toward classic rock. But WBCN was playing that music before it was classic, when it was just "rock". Actually, they played a lot of stuff, not all of it was rock but most of it was. I remember they used to have "ABC" weekends, which meant they mostly played Aerosmith, Boston and The Cars, the three most famous bands to come out of the area. (Umm, sorry, J. Geils Band and Dropkick Murphys...)
This film is about the intersection of Boston's rock history with American political history, or at least the stuff that went down between 1968 and 1974 - very informative for me, because I was born in 1968 and I didn't pay much attention to the news during those years. I think that's probably good for a 5 or 6 year old, to not watch too much news, and it was true then and it's just as true today. This film shares some structure with last week's documentary "New Wave: Dare to Be Different", except it's set 10 to 15 years earlier, and thus during a vastly different music and political scene. Plus, WLIW was in Long Island, and that's a very different crowd from Boston, a big college town - WBCN's listeners in the early 1970's were politically active students, who participated in protests and tried to change minds and the world, while the Long Islanders in the 1980's just wanted to put mousse in their hair and go drinking and dancing at the clubs. I'm generalizing here, but it sounds pretty accurate.
In 1968, Ray Riepen, a man looking for a way out of his law career took over WBCN, which was a struggling classical music station in Boston (I remember the giant classical station in Boston was WCRB, and it took me too many decades to realize their call letters stood for "Classical Radio Boston", except that it didn't, it was owned by Charles River Broadcasting...) and decided that there was an opportunity to play something other than the same Top 40 songs over and over again. The Beatles had changed everything in the music world with the "Sgt. Pepper" album and radio stations weren't reflecting the way that people were listening to music in their own homes, which was more album-oriented. Also, the "youngs" were collecting records by the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and the Mothers of Invention, and those albums just weren't being played on high-falutin' Boston radio, so he saw an opportunity. On March 15, 1968, the station switched to its "underground" progressive rock format by playing "I Feel Free" by Cream, and that's a bit like MTV launching with "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles, if you ask me.
By June of 1968 the radio station had hired a full complement of disc jockeys, including Peter Wolf, who also fronted the J. Geils Band and worked the overnight hours for people working the graveyard shift, or any miscreants and insomniacs. (I remember the station playing comedy cuts at 5 pm and introducing them with a short quote from George Carlin, referring to the audience as "morons, psychopaths and mental defectives" - that was WBCN's audience, and probably also their DJs.). When Peter Wolf left the station to focus on his music career, Charles Laquidara was hired to fill in on the 10 pm to 2 am shift, and he stayed with the station for 25 years and transitioned to mornings with his show "The Big Mattress". (This led to a conflict years later when Howard Stern's show went nation-wide, and WBCN was one of the few stations that aired it on time delay, late at night. Eventually the money or the legal issues between Stern and WBCN forced Laquidara over to WBCN's sister station WZLX in 1996.)
What I never new was that WBCN played an important role in providing non-mainstream news to the Boston area, and that's essentially what this documentary is about. News is a daily thing, but if you string enough daily news together than what you've got is history - and WBCN was right in the middle of it all, with student protests led by Abbie Hoffman, updates on the traffic problems caused by the Woodstock Festival, the station's own news director getting accidentally indicted with the militant group The Weathermen, and then the next news director found himself in the middle of a federal agent raid on his own house, which was connected to food drops made to Wounded Knee Indian Reservation. And then of course, the big story of Watergate played out over several years was a key focus for their news department.
Again, I was a very small child then, so it's fascinating for me to learn that the rock station I listened to was front and center during what they called "The American Revolution" - OK, not the first one, but a revolution in music. Station owner Riepen also ran The Tea Party, a prominent Boston concert venue where you could see The Who or Led Zeppelin play in 1968 for a ticket price of $3.50. Then the Velvet Underground played their first public concert at the Tea Party, and for a while, after being kicked out of their upscale Newbury Street studio location, WBCN broadcast from a small room backstage at The Tea Party, which was inconvenient and noisy but allowed for very famous rock musicians to be interviewed for the station after their concerts. But eventually WBCN got a bit more corporate and moved to better broadcasting digs at the top of the Prudential Tower, which at the time was the tallest building in Boston.
I know this was the heyday of culture change, but it's a bit of a shame that this film only covers the station's history up through 1974. Sure, this was a turbulent time in American culture, and the station and its staff got involved in civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, and Native American rights, they had a show oriented toward prison inmates, health warnings about street drugs, and even ran an on-air service helping to reunite people with their lost pets. But the station transitioned to a slightly more mainstream format in 1975, so maybe that's why the documentary ends where it does - eventually there was less freedom for the DJs and more structure for the music format. They still had the most varied playlist in town, and helped promote bands like The Ramones, The Clash, The Police and local band 'Til Tuesday during the 70's and 80's.
Nothing good lasts forever, I guess - once the radio station started making money, that clock was ticking, and ownership changed hands in 1979, with most long-time employees deemed "non-essential" and fired, leading to a protest where the entire staff walked out in solidarity. The protest grew huge, was publicly supported by those ABC bands (Aerosmith, Boston and The Cars) and the owners bringing in substitute DJs during the protest happened to be illegal. There's a whole other documentary to be made about that notable event, if you ask me. More format changes came in 1994 and 1999, but then when Howard Stern left for satellite radio in 2006 (he'd finally won the Boston morning-time battle in 1996), WBCN's ratings went way down when Stern's listeners left. They held on a couple more years, but the station went belly-up in July of 2009.
I miss the station dearly, I moved out of the Boston area in 1989, but I liked knowing that whenever I came back, I could tune in to 104.1 and hear the classic rock, and I enjoyed moving my mother's radio away from the classical station whenever I could.
Also starring Michael Ansara, Richard Barna, Andy Beaubien, David Bieber, John Brodey, Bo Burlingham, Ron Della Chiesa, Noam Chomsky (last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"), Charles Daniels, Tommy Hadges, Eric Jackson, Mitchell Kertzman, Sam Kopper, Charles Laquidara, Bill Lee, James Montgomery, Tim Montgomery, Steve Nelson, Al Perry, Ray Riepen, Joe Rogers, Rochelle Ruthchild, John Scagliotti, Danny Schechter, Barry Schneier, Steven Segal, Peter Simon, Bob Slavin, Martha Jean Steinberg, Debbie Ullman, Dinah Vaprin, Steven Wayne, Jerry Williams, Norm Winer, Bill Zimmerman,
with archive footage of Duane Allman (last seen in "Muscle Shoals"), John Bonham, David Bowie (also last seen in "The Velvet Underground"), Walter Cronkite (ditto), Mick Jagger (ditto), David Brinkley, Clarence Clemons, Roger Daltrey (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), George Harrison (ditto), Paul McCartney (ditto), Ringo Starr (ditto), Pete Townshend (ditto), Jane Fonda (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Aretha Franklin (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Michael Fremer, Jerry Garcia (last seen in "New Wave: Dare to Be Different"), Bruce Springsteen (ditto), Abbie Hoffman (also last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"), George McGovern (ditto), Hubert Humphrey (last seen in "Steal This Movie"), Chet Huntley, J.J. Jackson (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Lyndon Johnson (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), John Paul Jones, Robert Kennedy, B.B. King (last seen in "Tina"), Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Henry Kissinger, Alvin Lee, John Lennon (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Bette Midler (ditto), Richard Nixon (ditto), Freddie Mercury (also last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Keith Moon (last seen in "Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation"), Randy Newman (last seen in "ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band from Texas"), Muddy Waters (ditto), Jimmy Page, Joe Perry, Robert Plant, Patti Smith (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Dick Smothers, Tom Smothers, Steven Tyler, Gov. John Volpe, Peter Wolf.
RATING: 7 out of 10 curse words from Patti Smith
No comments:
Post a Comment