Free Radio Free Boston by Carter Alan Page B

throughout his schooling. “As I was wrapping up my college years, I was saying to myself, ‘I’m getting kind of tired of this radio thing.’” Beaubien laughed because, as it turned out, being a DJ and radio programmer would become his lifelong career. “There were only two stations I was really interested in working [at]. One was WNEW-FM in New York and the other was ’ BCN . I asked Sam if he had any openings, and he said, ‘If you want to start working part time, you can.’ The weekend I started was the weekend of [the] Woodstock [festival], August 1969, so that’s why I didn’t go [to the concert]. I worked there for about a month or two; then Steven left and created an opening.” Beaubien recalled that Ray Riepen wanted to meet him when Kopper recommended him for the full-time position.
    I was very intimidated because I had heard all the stories about Ray Riepen. I walked in there and he said, “Well, tell me about yourself.” So I gave him my story, and then he said, in his Kansas City accent, “You know, there’s only one thing about you that kind of worries me.” I said, “What’s that?” “You’ve got previous radio experience. I prefer people who aren’t tainted by commercial radio.” I had to explain to him the reason I wanted to work at ’ BCN was [that], simply, I didn’t want to have anything to do with typical radio and that I wanted to get into the music. Obviously, I convinced him because he gave his blessing and I ended up working there.
    Beaubien immediately fell in love with his job.
    It was the most fun radio experience I ever had, even more fun than college radio. The station was truly free-form, no restrictions at all. The only thing we tried not to play was something we’d done in the previous couple of shows; the idea of repeating something was bad. We would have meetingsonce a week and sit around and talk about various issues, including the music. We tried, in a kind of informal, unstructured way, to keep a certain level of consistency in the programming. In other words, if somebody was going too far off the deep end . . . let’s say, playing too much John Coltrane, someone might say: “Hey, it’s cool to play Coltrane, but you don’t want to do three jazz artists in a row.” All of us had our predilections. Charles liked to play a classical piece every so often and we’d have discussions about that. We’d say, “Charles, when you played that Brahms symphony, it really sounded so . . . unlike us!”
    Chuckling to himself, he continued, “Jim Parry was really into folk music and acoustic blues—that was his predilection, and sometimes he’d go off the deep end there. I was really into guitarists in those days, so I was liable to go off in an Eric Clapton and Django Reinhardt set.”
    â€œIf you can imagine eight or nine people sitting down in a music meeting for an hour and trying to agree on anything—it was impossible!” Tommy Hadges laughed. “But . . . it was also wonderful . . . to have that freedom. It just isn’t anything that exists in broadcast radio today.”
    Music epitomized the main message of the early WBCN , but a voice of conscience always ran close alongside. The DJS didn’t attempt to separate music from their politics, which they wore on their sleeve. Ernie Santosuosso, in a March 1969 Boston Globe article entitled “The Beautiful Radio People,” wrote, “In an industry saturated by news broadcasts, WBCN is predictably unique. The announcer often allows the record of the moment to serve as his vehicle for a solitary news item.” Sam Kopper told Santosuosso how he handled the moments leading up to Senator Robert Kennedy’s death: “I read the hospital bulletin during the playing of ‘Come On, People, Let’s Get Together’ [the Youngbloods’ “Get