Monday, February 9, 2015

RIP WBCN

Finished the book on WBCN about a week ago.

It fascinated me because it paralleled the arc of my life, and the arc of the futility of the baby boom generation. A generation that burned white hot with wild-ass hope and the promise of meaningful societal change, eventually fading to the soul limiting suffocation of corporatization and mediocrity.

The station was started essentially on a whim by a guy who believed he had identified a niche that had been overlooked.

Ray Riepen.

A guy who convinced the owner of WBCN, a classical music station, to take a shot on an overnight slot committed to rock 'n roll.

A guy who hired Joe Rogers as his first DJ, a Tufts University student who was working on the side as a DJ at the noncommercial station at MIT, WTBS -FM.

Rogers loaded up his own collection of vinyl records in a crate and lugged them over to BCN. This became the stations first music library.

How cool is that?

At the time rock was exclusively played on AM stations. By loud, obnoxious DJ's who played top forty. Period.

Riepen believed there was a thinking, intelligent, musically and politically savvy audience out there who lusted for a wide variety of music, intelligent conversation, and insightful new reporting.

He was right.

The beauty of the history of this station is the casual, no rules, no professionalism required approach to doing business.

Many of the DJ's had only amateur experience or no experience at all. People who rose to positions like general manager, music director, news director, sound engineer and promotion director had absolutely no experience in handling those responsibilities.

Everybody kind of fell into their role at BCN. The common thread that held it all together and made the station so successful was a mutual love of all kinds of music, a deep commitment to political upheaval and questioning authority, a rebellious nature and an intelligent approach to delivering the music and the news.

This all began in 1968.

In 1999, BCN was owned by Infinity Broadcasting and CBS. That corporation merged with Viacom. The NY Times reported that the merger would create a new company that "makes, distributes and broadcasts television programming, blankets the nation with radio stations and billboard advertising and owns and operates amusement parks."

The merger created a media conglomerate that included 160 radio stations, the CBS TV network, CBS Sports, internet properties like cbs.com and marketwatch.com, CMT, TNN, and MTV, Nickelodeon, Showtime, Comedy Central, Sundance Channel, Paramount Studios, five regional amusement parks through Paramount Parks, 6,400 Blockbuster stores, the Simon & Schuster publishing giant, and billboard advertising through TD1 Worldwide and Outdoor Systems.

This is the world we live in now.

A world with no room for individuality, personal expression, creative approaches or radical inspiration.

Trust me.

1968 was better.

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