Bill Lichtenstein was a ninth grader at Newton's Weeks Junior High School when he signed up for a weekly volunteer placement through the school's open-classroom program. His classmates fanned out into science labs, writing workshops, and design studios. Lichtenstein picked radio, and in 1970 that choice landed him at WBCN, the Boston station that had spent the previous two years turning FM dials into a running argument about the war, the draft, race, and rock and roll.
He started on the Listener Line, answering phones from callers who wanted a song title or directions to a demonstration. Before long he had talked his way into the newsroom, editing tape and filing reports. By fifteen he was hosting his own weekly show. On Friday, October 2, Lichtenstein returns to his hometown to present The Airwaves Belonged to the People: WBCN and the American Revolution at the West Newton Cinema, 1296 Washington Street, at 6:30 p.m., followed by a question-and-answer session with the audience.
The station Lichtenstein walked into had been born barely two years earlier, and almost by accident. In the late 1960s, Ray Riepen, who ran the Boston Tea Party concert hall, noticed that the albums kids were playing in dorm rooms and apartments got essentially no airtime. He persuaded T. Mitchell Hastings, owner of a failing classical music station at 104.1 FM, to hand deejays a free rein on an overnight shift to see whether anyone was listening.
On the night of March 15, 1968, a disc jockey calling himself "Mississippi Harold Wilson" -- the future WBCN mainstay Joe Rogers -- put the needle down on Cream's "I Feel Free" and declared FM independence. He called it, with characteristic irreverence, "The American Revolution." The experiment proved that an all-rock format could draw a mass audience and mass advertising dollars. By May, Tchaikovsky was out and rock programming was running around the clock, a schedule the station would keep for more than four decades.
The early jocks worked out of studios at 171 Newbury Street. Peter Wolf spun records there before he became the frontman of the J. Geils Band. The roster grew to include Jim Parry, Al Perry, Tommy Hadges, and Sam Kopper, among others. There were no set playlists. Announcers talked about whatever they wanted, from recreational drugs to Vietnam, and news segments carried a satirical edge that anticipated The Daily Show by decades. On-air guests ranged from John and Yoko to Noam Chomsky. A telephone Listener Line fielded questions on any subject, day and night, which is how a Newton teenager ended up with a front-row seat.
One assignment in particular stuck with Lichtenstein. He was sent to cover a protest at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs. Demonstrators walked out with documents, and those papers later helped expose CIA involvement at the center and fed into the book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. Lichtenstein came back to the station empty-handed. Danny Schechter, the station's news director and the man known on air as the "news dissector," delivered a lesson the teenager never forgot: "Next time you have a chance to get top-secret documents, get them!"
Years later, Lichtenstein set out to tell the story of WBCN not as a nostalgia piece about a radio station but as a case study in how media can move a society. The problem was that radio leaves almost no historical record. Stations of that era taped over their reels; broadcasts vanished as a matter of routine. What Lichtenstein found instead was that listeners had done the archiving themselves. Fans had pointed microphones at their radios and recorded thousands of hours of broadcasts onto home tape, then kept the cassettes for decades. A search for lost material turned into a crowdsourcing project that ultimately assembled tens of thousands of archival items -- an approach the American University Center for Social Media called "a revolution in documentary filmmaking."
Out of that trove came recordings that would otherwise be gone: Bruce Springsteen's first radio interview and first live in-studio performance, Patti Smith's first live radio broadcast with her band, and appearances by Abbie Hoffman, Jane Fonda, Jerry Garcia, David Bowie, and Lou Reed. The film also draws on interviews with WBCN veterans including Charles Laquidara, Schechter, Marsha Steinberg, and Mitchell Kertzman, along with Noam Chomsky and others.
The documentary premiered at film festivals in March 2019 and was originally released in 2020, when its theatrical run was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic. It later aired nationally on PBS, where The Boston Globe said audiences "watch with awe." Now in the middle of a theatrical revival, the film has been booked into 40 theaters across 12 states. Lichtenstein has said audiences tend to stay long after the credits, talking about how a radio station, dissent, and rock-and-roll culture shaped American politics and social movements.
The venue for the October 2 screening has a survival story of its own. The West Newton Cinema opened in 1937 as the Newton Theatre, designed by the Boston firm Krokyn, Browne & Rosenstein in a blend of Art Deco and Art Moderne styles. It spent decades as a neighborhood house showing foreign films, independent features, and children's movies, one of the last small independents in the region. The pandemic nearly finished it. Ticket sales collapsed, and in 2022 longtime owner David Bramante sold the building for $5.6 million to Mark Development, which owns the properties on either side, on one condition: interested parties would have two years to form a nonprofit and raise the money to buy it back at the same price. Otherwise the building would be razed and folded into a future development.
The West Newton Cinema Foundation launched a campaign with a deadline of August 2024. More than 1,200 donors ultimately stepped up, including a transformational anchor gift, and on August 27, 2024, the foundation purchased the historic cinema and began running it as a nonprofit for the community's benefit. Bramante, who had been selling the snacks, tearing the tickets, and running the projector, stayed on. A year later the cinema threw itself a birthday party with a full day of free movies.
Proceeds from the October 2 screening will benefit the Filmmakers Collaborative and support completion of Lichtenstein's latest documentary, Broken, which examines failures in the foster care and child welfare systems -- a subject he has covered for more than four decades. It is a fitting pairing for a filmmaker whose career began with a junior high school volunteer placement and a phone on the WBCN Listener Line.