I lived in and around Boston back then, and for me and my peers, there was no other radio station. This was a time when most car radios were AM only. Car stereo was yet to come. It was a great time to be alive. If I remember correctly, my first FM car unit was an adapter that picked up the FM signal and played it in mono through the AM radio. BCN changed everything, I wouldn't be the man I am today, if it wasn't for the vibe and music that came out of BCN. Charles, the "Angel of the Airwaves", Jamaica Plain Jane and others made it happen. Does anyone remember the clone Duane Glasscock? Bigger than a bread box radio? Cake with chocolate frosting, WBCN in Boston? Jaime Brokett's Legend of the Titanic? The Alice in Wonderland/Dark Side of the Moon Halloween simulcast? Man... Thing is, we weren't about groups, sex, gender, colour, all the ways that the establishment uses to separate us... We were all in it together, AGAINST the establishment. Our mantra was " Do your own thing, man." Yeah we mostly all dressed, talked, and lived alike, grooved to the same beat for the most part, because there was nothing else. It saddens me to see how far the culture has moved away from that ideal. The peer enforced orthodoxy of today's identity culture is stultifying. We were about freedom of expression, freedom of thought, freedom of being. As always happens, if the establishment can't change it it co-opts it and sells it. Now it encourages the identifying with a group, because groups are easier to track, monitor, influence, and control. If a politician or an add agency had to market to the individual, they would be lost. With group targets, it's much easier... Personally, I don't like being a target of the established order. One final point, if everyone is special, no one is special but the individual.
Irony is what we have today is the Frankenstein offspring of the left. They became the establishment. They are the establishment now. And they're worse than the predecessor. All the same...miss the old big mattress days when Boston was "local" and had identity.. Now... like most places its a shell like corporate Disney version of its former self.
So well put. The rapid technological advances over these last 20 years, fascinating as they are, have driven individualism practically extinct, reducing it to little more than an abstract notion.
There were two preeminent rock station, WAAF and WBCN, that I could choose from as a teenager and then college student and I chose WBCN. Unlike WAAF that just seemed to play Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Rush and Ac/DC, I was introduced too all sort of interesting music of music on WBCN. I will never forget their live 1983 broadcast of Bow Wow Wow with Oedipus describing Anabella Lwin. I recorded the show on my Teac tape deck using Maxell high bias tape. Golden.
good doc, but has a lot of historical inaccuracies and blatant falsehoods fm rock, playing deep cuts with natural sounding dj's. was started by tom donahue in san francisco in 67...a full year before wbcn changed formats and it was a successful format by the time wbcn went fm rock
I grew up with this station. It was corporatized in the 1980's and just another way to sell concert tickets and furniture. Funny DJ's, but really, nothing special.
