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- Verified Buyer
You wouldn't know by looking at the cover photo but this book is full of photos and memorabilia, with large text chapters on the history and aspects of the great radio station WBCN was back in the early days. It is elegantly designed and edited with great care and expertise, written and produced by someone who was there and knew firsthand the importance of what went down at the dawn of freeform underground FM radio before it morphed into corporate classic rock format and became beholden to the interests of money and profit, casting aside freedom, integrity and verve in the process.Lichtenstein's documentary is an important film and this book is as well crafted as the movie, serving as a scrapbook of the ephemera and images associated with that time and place: Boston 1968-1973 and the music and politics of the counterculture that thrived therein. I was only eleven years old when I first tuned in to BCN in 1969, and it was the portal to a vast musical awakening that continued long after I left the East Coast and the station slid into its sad decline. The book and the author/filmmaker devote great attention to the political dimensions of the station and its listeners, deservedly so, considering the station's position as a beacon of truth and organizational resource for the youth culture of activism and opposition which it served and supported. But for me, it was the music that mattered the most and opened my mind. The range of genres and artists you could hear at any time of day or night in a given four-hour DJ slot was extraordinary, and as a young rock fan I expanded my tastes and awareness to include jazz, classical, avant-garde, folk and blues. A music set could last upwards of an hour sometimes, usually at least twenty minutes, and all the DJs had such down-to-earth personalities and diverse tastes in music that they became my best friends and mentors. So many great artists I heard for the first time on BCN, including Frank Zappa, Miles Davis, Leonard Cohen, Sandy Denny, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, David Bowie, Leon Russell, Big Star, Modern Lovers, Fleetwood Mac, Beaver & Krause, Traffic, Bonzo Dog Band, Firesign Theatre, Love, Pearls Before Swine, H.P. Lovecraft, Pink Floyd, Richard & Mimi Farina, Steve Reich, Spirit, Pentangle, Phil Ochs, Peter Ivers, White Noise, Velvet Underground, and on and on - artists whose records I went out and bought as a result of hearing them on the radio at 104.1 FM. Even the commercials were cool (I ended up buying my first stereo system at Tech HiFi with the money I saved up from my after-school job when I was still in high school).The book is beautifully designed, as I said, well worth the selling price, and if you were there at that magical time when underground radio blossomed and thrived you will want to own this volume of memorabilia and ephemera. The editing is splendid, I could find no typos or grammatical faults in the whole book, only one or two mistakes in a caption of a photo (that shot of the Velvet Underground with Doug Yule couldn't have been from 1967 since he wasn't in the group until the following year when he came in to replace John Cale) or some little discrepancy such as that.I'm glad I was there to appreciate the amazing radio that came out over the airwaves during that special time, and this book is a treasure to help me remember it all. It's sad that radio like that will never happen again, in the way it did at BCN by simply bringing together radio people who cared and who had the savvy to spread and share the music and allowing them to be themselves on air without strapping them down to formats dictating what they could or could not say or play. Now it is all about the money, the ratings, the quarterly profits, and even public radio is overdetermined by marketing consultants with the result being that music programming is all segregated into little two-hour slots where you only hear one genre or style and you don't have the sort of creative magic that happens when you mix it all up. When WBCN first went on the air on March 15, 1968, they opened with "I Feel Free" by Cream. Now the Cream song playing in my head is "Those Were The Days"..."Those were the days, yes they were, those were the days.Those were their ways, miracles everywhere, where are they now?They're gone."
