Radio Free Boston

by Carter Alan

  Riepen considered the FM radio band as virgin territory for his experiment and attended a 1967 FM broadcasting conclave in Washington, D.C., to share his views and garner feedback. The reaction, however, was universally negative, even condescending. “I told them what I wanted to do and they asked, ‘What’s your background?’ I said ‘I’m an attorney, I’ve got a business degree; I’m in the concert business.’ They said, ‘Well, you better go back and practice law because you’re the dumbest son of a bitch we’ve ever heard of! You can’t have breaks with no talk-overs and no jingles . . . or [the DJS] using conversational tones and playing eight to ten minute [musical] pieces!” Ridiculed at the gathering, he assumed an “I’ll show you!” attitude and forged on even more intently. With Steve Nelson and then Don Law taking care of the Tea Party, Riepen began examining Boston’s FM band in great detail for a likely spot to base his experiment.

  Riepen’s research led him to 104.1, WBCN-FM, a struggling classical music station that had sparked up its transmitter nearly ten years earlier on April 24, 1958. The owner and president, Theodore Mitchell Hastings, possessed a colorful and distinguished past as one of the very pioneers of FM radio. With a genius-level intellect, the man could easily grasp technical concepts that most found impenetrable; he was a true eccentric, with an almost childlike view of science, who commanded a great deal of respect from the engineering community. Like Ray Riepen, Mitch Hastings went to Harvard, graduating in 1933, and then formed an electronic research lab named General Communications, which performed extensive work in sonar and signaling technology for the navy during World War II. By 1951, he had become fascinated with the commercial possibilities of the still largely untouched FM radio band, with its low interference and static, as well as stereo feasibility. At the time, there were less than two dozen FM programmers in the entire country, with growth in new frontier virtually nonexistent. Hastings recognized that the newer radio band had to be readily accessible to the masses before its technology could expand on a grand scale. The key, he felt, was to create an FM radio for the car, which he developed with Raytheon engineer Ed Brooks and marketed to listeners on the handful of FM stations around the country. Hastings became somewhat famous for this, and after a few further developments and inventions (including a pocket FM transistor radio) he decided to jump into the world of radio station ownership himself.

  Pouring his own funds into the project and obtaining additional money from several financial backers, Hastings formed the General Broadcasting Corporation, later to be known as Concert Network Inc. The company expanded rapidly, acquiring a handful of powerful FM radio stations up and down the East Coast. According to Ron Della Chiesa, “His dream was to create a network of stations that would program classical music all over the country on FM. Up to that point, classical music was on AM; you couldn’t get the full frequency of it. [But] when FM came in, it was like a third dimension; you really got the depth and sound.” Hastings acquired and then changed the call letters of each station, putting a “CN” in each to designate Concert Network. “So, beginning his dream were these stations: WNCN in New York City, WHCN in Hartford, WXCN in Providence and [for a time] he had one on Mount Washington, WMTW.” Added to this list was an additional property in Riverside, Long Island, renamed WRCN and, of course, WBCN in Boston.

  Mitch Hastings struggled to keep classical music WBCN afloat. Photo by Sam Kopper.

  WBCN began broadcasting classical music on T. Mitchell Hastings’s birthday in 1958; and so his dream took flight. The idea was, as Hastings told Alan Wolmark twenty years later in Record World Magazine, “to go forward and develop FM broadcasting into the great public service it should be.” Hastings organized his network of stations into what he termed the “Golden Chain.” In effect, he could nearly pull off systemwide live broadcasts of the Boston Symphony and other classical programming by originating the transmissions on WBCN, which would then be picked up by high-gain antennas at ’XCN in Providence and rebroadcast to its own audience. In turn, that transmission would be relayed further down the chain to the stations in Long Island, Hartford, and New York. Although Boston was the originator in most cases, programs could also be sent back up the network in the reverse direction. In an age before satellites blanketed the skies and routinely linked broadcast stations around the globe, T. Mitchell Hastings was able to bypass the high costs of using phone lines to achieve this same purpose.

  T. Mitchell Hastings possessed another side to his personality, quirks and oddities that often challenged those around him. “[He] was a whack job, and I don’t mean that meanly; but he was just a very strange guy,” future WBCN program director Sam Kopper pointed out. “In addition to his sort of visionary eccentricities, he was a religious and spiritual seeker.” Not secretive about his beliefs in the supernatural, spiritual, and paranormal realms, Hastings and his wife Margot were regular acquaintances of Edgar Cayce, perhaps the most famous clairvoyant of the time. The couple sat with the seer on a number of occasions to seek advice and gain glimpses into a future that Cayce would reveal during his legendary and well-documented trances. Some of these predictions formed the basis of Hastings’s critical business decisions. “[He] was a wildly eccentric guy,” Chiesa agreed; “he believed in Atlantis, Cayce and mystics. [Hastings] lived in another world; he could have been an extra-terrestrial. But, he also believed in the power of classical music to awaken the spirit and the mind. He was a purist; there was a depth to what he wanted.”

  Ray Riepen, who would soon lobby to introduce rock music to WBCN, understood that Hastings was deeply committed to programming his personal love of classical music on the station. But he could also see the weaknesses in the owner’s thinking that jeopardized what he had built. “[Hastings] was a visionary guy in early FM who had put this little network together,” Riepen said, “but he was not a businessman; nor was he anybody of any taste or discernment.” In his own role as a program director and classical music expert, Chiesa had to agree that even though Hastings clearly loved the music, his tastes were quite finite. “He knew what he liked, [but] he didn’t really know that much about classical music. He would call the station occasionally and yell, ‘Get that off the air! I’m not enjoying that’; and it would be in the middle of something great like ‘Scheherazade’ or even Beethoven. He could call and disrupt the whole flow of what you were doing, and you had to pacify him by saying that you would do it, whether you did or not.”

  Personal peculiarities aside, Hastings was still quite a man to respect, but his innovations and his achievements could only take him so far. It soon became obvious that the classical music he loved so dearly would not generate the amount of advertiser interest needed to keep his stations thriving, or even financially afloat. Chiesa remembered, “There were times where we didn’t get paid for three or four weeks.” The bill for the UPI (United Press International) newswire service went overdue for so long that the company sent workers to disconnect the teletype machine and haul it away. This did not end news reporting on WBCN, though: “Hastings told us, ‘Just read from the newspaper’; so that’s what we did. He also had problems with his rent [at 171 Newbury Street]. The building was owned by an old architect named Edward T. P. Graham, who was becoming quite feeble and would just sit around in the office below the studio with an elderly secretary. I heard T. Mitchell talking to the secretary once when he was several weeks behind in rent, saying that he’d like to do a memorial program for Mr. Graham when he passed away. So, he was willing to trade air time for rent!” Plus, he had proposed the deal for a sponsored radio eulogy before the subject had even died! Sometimes Hastings took the elevator down to the street and personally canvassed the crowds passing by on the sidewalk, looking for people who would donate money to the station. Time and time again, though, classical music lovers or friends of Hastings would arrive in the nick of time, like the 7th Cavalry, to put up fresh funds to cover the bills.

  As Hastings’s financial woes deepened, he became increasingly desperate and open to almost an
y new possibilities for cash flow. In the early sixties, radio programmer Marlin Taylor had developed a winning format called beautiful music or easy listening. Taking advantage of the advanced fidelity available on the FM band, Taylor blended innocuous vocal songs with light orchestral hits to produce an inconspicuous mix for background listening. By 1966, after observing the success of several stations with this new format, Hastings contacted Taylor. Soon the sounds of Montavani, 101 Strings, Johnny Mathis, and the Ray Coniff Singers wafted with saccharine sweetness out of WBCN’S transmitter. “There was a period of several months where that’s all that we played,” Chiesa recalled. “Mitch liked beautiful music probably more than classical, because it was so bland and more accessible to him. But it didn’t work; the format petered out and we went back to the classical.” Chiesa also revealed that the first song played in the new format was “The Ballad of the Green Berets” by SSgt. Barry Sadler. Considering what WBCN would eventually become, the presence of beautiful music and particularly this song, a promilitary and Vietnam War anthem that went to number 1 in America and stayed there for five weeks in 1966, remains remarkably ironic.

  Ron Della Chiesa, WBCN’S classical music impresario (from 1987). Photo by Dan Beach.

  The “Golden Chain” that Hastings had worked so hard to forge began to fall apart: WRCN-FM on Long Island was sold, WXCN-FM in Providence cut loose in October 1963, and WNCN-FM in New York unloaded the following year. The network had been whittled down to just WHCN-FM Hartford and WBCN itself, and Hastings was on the brink of losing even these. Ray Riepen observed, “[WBCN] was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy; they were not making their payments and it was going to go down.” Frantic, the board of directors granted Riepen an audience to present his views about the merits of a free-form, rock music format. Joe Rogers related, “Ray went to them and said, ‘You have absolutely no income whatsoever during the overnight hours. I can provide you with actual listeners who might, in turn, generate sponsors who, in turn, could bring revenue to your station. Face it, you have nothing to lose.’” Don Law added, “Mitch Hastings was such a classical music lover and saw FM as the salvation for that music.” He shook his head and marveled: “Riepen actually talked him into changing his format.” It wasn’t easy, though, as Riepen picks up the story: “Mitch Hastings was appalled at this thing and fought it all the way. The board, though, were businessmen; they were old friends of his that were trying to save him. The classical music was continuing to flounder and they understood the deal. They were so desperate, they gave me [the time slot] after midnight.” Actually it was 10:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. and strictly on a trial basis, but it was a shot. Ray Riepen congratulated himself, got on the phone, and gave the go signal to Joe Rogers.

  There was an immense freedom; you were defined by your personality and your musical tastes. That was very intoxicating and exhilarating for everyone involved because you realized you were part of something incredibly new. PETER WOLF

  A RADIO

  COMMUNE

  Ray Riepen gathered his recruits for the new WBCN air staff, but, in a surprising move, avoided chasing after professional disc jockeys. “I didn’t want people who were in radio trying to figure out what we ought to do, because they couldn’t. They were swimming in the sea of a Top 40 world; all over-hyped and screaming. As far as [producing] something tasteful or smart, they didn’t have that kind of vision.” Joe Rogers marveled at the idea: “He could have staffed the station with real announcers, but he stuck with rank amateurs because that’s how he saw it. In the end I guess it was the right decision, but it was a peculiar thing to do at the time.” The place where Riepen could find the type of people he wanted, in an environment that embraced freethinking and was uncluttered by format and focused on the music, was on the Boston area’s many student-run radio stations. With Top 40 dominating the AM band and classical programming holding down the FM side, college radio was the place where the sounds of the burgeoning folk and blues revival and growing rock revolution could be heard.

  “When Ray originally decided to start a radio station, he went to the MIT and Harvard stations: WTBS and WHRB, to find people who would be willing to do this sort of alternative [he envisioned], and that was the core that started [WBCN],” Tommy Hadges pointed out. Both Hadges and Rogers were Tufts University students but had found their way onto WTBS. Riepen checked them out as well as several other jocks at the station including Jack Bernstein, plus Steve Magnell at Tufts and Tom Gamache on Boston University’s WBUR. He passed on Gamache but approached the others and set up a meeting at his nearly unfurnished Cambridge apartment to present his plan to them. After floating the idea around the room and receiving assurances from the jocks that they were certainly interested, not much else was discussed. Even later, when Riepen had confirmed that WBCN was giving the jocks a shot, there was virtually no planning or guidance from their mentor. Rogers elaborated, “No serious preparation. We knew there was a date coming up and whatever that was [in his best Riepen imitation], ‘Be ready and go do your god-damned radio show! Don’t fuck it up!’ There was no discussion of the format; it was, ‘Just do what you’ve been doing on these college stations, but do it better!’” Riepen added, “They didn’t have the concept that I had, but once we set the parameters, I didn’t restrict them. I wasn’t going to program the station; the idea of it was to be free-form and spontaneous.”

  It was only three weeks after their initial meeting that Rogers got the call to get down to 171 Newbury, but in that time Riepen had also pitched his idea to a familiar face at the Tea Party. “Peter Wolf sang in a group called the Hallucinations, who were mostly guys from the Museum Art School; I used to book them from time to time. Peter Wolf was kind of a star; he had the moves. He was a smart guy and very together in certain ways.” Showmanship, a keen ear for what the people wanted, and an encyclopedic knowledge of R & B and blues combined to make this gifted neophyte an excellent candidate for some musical vocation, in spite of his chosen field of study. As Wolf put it in the 2003 essay compilation Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues, “I was a student looking to become a painter somewhat in the German Expressionist manner. But then I was sidetracked by the blues.” Born and raised in New York City, Wolf’s entire life was surrounded by the arts: learning the basics of drawing, filling canvas after canvas, and then seeing jazz greats like John Coltrane and Miles Davis in the Village and soul giants James Brown and Ray Charles at the legendary Apollo. Upon arriving in Boston on his thumb, Wolf pursued his love of music with a passion, settling in Cambridge just a stone’s throw from Club 47, the most important early sixties terminus for local and touring folk artists in New England. Soon the singing novice and harmonica trainee became a regular at Club 47 and Boston’s Jazz Workshop, meeting and jamming with A-list favorites like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, and James Cotton. Peter Wolf’s apartment morphed into a haven of sorts for bands playing Club 47. Waters and his band became regular visitors, relaxing, playing cards, and cooking dinners before and after their sets while their scrawny host built some solid friendships and soaked it all in.

  Wolf threw his musical passions into the Hallucinations and began to perform on a steady basis around the area, finding a regular home at the Tea Party in early 1967. The word started getting around about the skinny kid who always dressed in black and sang like he grew up on the south side of Chicago. Riepen saw not only a talented lead singer for a band here, but one who could equally mesmerize on the radio. He piqued Wolf’s interest with his plan for WBCN. “[Riepen] was in my apartment one day and he was all full of steam and pumped up, telling me about this business venture he was getting into,” remembered Wolf. “He was going to take over this radio station, but he could only come in slowly by doing the evening [shifts], and if I had ten thousand dollars I could partner with him.

  ‘Ten thousand dollars? Ray, I don’t have ten dollars.’

  ‘Well listen, you’ve got ten thousand records! How about [being] a DJ and helping me get together a staff and build up a
library?’ And I loved radio; when I was growing up, it was so important to my knowledge of music. The idea of doing a radio show was exciting.”

  “He had a beautiful understanding of what to do with the radio,” Joe Rogers said of Wolf. “He understood something about show business and how to grab people’s attention, then what to do with them once you had them.” Charles Daniels, the “Master Blaster,” added, “We used to hang out in [Harvard] Square and spent a lot of time at Peter’s place because that’s where it all seemed to happen; it was like a big family. He always had the best records.”

  Rogers would be first, stepping across the threshold at 10:00 p.m. and into a new world not unlike Neil Armstrong’s small step a little more than a year later. Wolf would then arrive for the overnight shift, often, as demonstrated in future months, literally out of breath after rushing over from a gig. Indeed, it happened the very night he made his WBCN debut; the Hallucinations performed at the Boston Tea Party with the Beacon Street Union. WBCN would eventually broadcast from a back room at that dancehall, and many have speculated that it was a simple matter on 15 March 1968 for Wolf to run offstage, towel himself dry, and jump in behind the turntables. But Rogers is quick to refute this. “Many people think that the first [radio] show was at the Tea Party; I’ve given up trying to correct them. We began where the proper studios were located: 171 Newbury Street.”