Radio Free Boston (3 page)

Tom Donahue, a successful West Coast Top 40 disc jockey and businessman, had read the same tea leaves as Riepen, but his vision came a year earlier. He proposed a radio show embracing some revolutionary elements: mixing album tracks, creating long sets of music drawn from many genres of music, speaking conversationally, and avoiding the wisecracking gimmicks of Top 40 delivery. He unveiled his ideas to the management at
KMPX-FM
in San Francisco, which featured ethnic programming at the time. Facing financial challenges, the owners decided they had nothing to lose and allowed Donahue to experiment with a free-form evening show based on folk, blues, and rock music. The new approach became an immediate sensation, especially amongst Bay Area students, and within a few months
KMPX
adopted the revolutionary format full time. Since that complete changeover occurred on 6 August 1967, Tom Donahue is credited with having started the very first “underground radio” station in America. Soon, the owners called on Donahue to repeat his success by extending the same type of programming to
KMPX'S
sister station in the Los Angeles area,
KPPC-FM
in Pasadena, which had previously been broadcasting classical music out of a church basement to no great financial reward. With underground radio visualized and the prototypes already flying on the West Coast, why couldn't the same also work in Boston?

Riepen considered the
FM
radio band as virgin territory for his experiment and attended a 1967
FM
broadcasting conclave in Washington, D.C., to share his views and garner feedback. The reaction, however, was universally negative, even condescending. “I told them what I wanted to do and they asked, ‘What's your background?' I said ‘I'm an attorney, I've got a business degree; I'm in the concert business.' They said, ‘Well, you better go back and practice law because you're the dumbest son of a bitch we've ever heard of! You can't have breaks with no talk-overs and no jingles . . . or [the
DJS
] using conversational tones and playing eight to ten minute [musical] pieces!” Ridiculed at the gathering, he assumed an “I'll show you!” attitude and forged on even
more intently. With Steve Nelson and then Don Law taking care of the Tea Party, Riepen began examining Boston's
FM
band in great detail for a likely spot to base his experiment.

Riepen's research led him to 104.1,
WBCN-FM
, a struggling classical music station that had sparked up its transmitter nearly ten years earlier on April 24, 1958. The owner and president, Theodore Mitchell Hastings, possessed a colorful and distinguished past as one of the very pioneers of
FM
radio. With a genius-level intellect, the man could easily grasp technical concepts that most found impenetrable; he was a true eccentric, with an almost childlike view of science, who commanded a great deal of respect from the engineering community. Like Ray Riepen, Mitch Hastings went to Harvard, graduating in 1933, and then formed an electronic research lab named General Communications, which performed extensive work in sonar and signaling technology for the navy during World War
II
. By 1951, he had become fascinated with the commercial possibilities of the still largely untouched
FM
radio band, with its low interference and static, as well as stereo feasibility. At the time, there were less than two dozen
FM
programmers in the entire country, with growth in new frontier virtually nonexistent. Hastings recognized that the newer radio band had to be readily accessible to the masses before its technology could expand on a grand scale. The key, he felt, was to create an
FM
radio for the car, which he developed with Raytheon engineer Ed Brooks and marketed to listeners on the handful of
FM
stations around the country. Hastings became somewhat famous for this, and after a few further developments and inventions (including a pocket
FM
transistor radio) he decided to jump into the world of radio station ownership himself.

Pouring his own funds into the project and obtaining additional money from several financial backers, Hastings formed the General Broadcasting Corporation, later to be known as Concert Network Inc. The company expanded rapidly, acquiring a handful of powerful
FM
radio stations up and down the East Coast. According to Ron Della Chiesa, “His dream was to create a network of stations that would program classical music all over the country on
FM
. Up to that point, classical music was on
AM
; you couldn't get the full frequency of it. [But] when
FM
came in, it was like a third dimension; you really got the depth and sound.” Hastings acquired and then changed the call letters of each station, putting a “
CN
” in each to designate Concert Network. “So, beginning his dream were these stations:
WNCN
in New York City,
WHCN
in Hartford,
WXCN
in Providence and [for a time] he had one on Mount Washington,
WMTW
.” Added to this list was an additional property in Riverside, Long Island, renamed
WRCN
and, of course,
WBCN
in Boston.

Mitch Hastings struggled to keep classical music
WBCN
afloat. Photo by Sam Kopper.

WBCN
began broadcasting classical music on T. Mitchell Hastings's birthday in 1958; and so his dream took flight. The idea was, as Hastings told Alan Wolmark twenty years later in
Record World Magazine
, “to go forward and develop
FM
broadcasting into the great public service it should be.” Hastings organized his network of stations into what he termed the “Golden Chain.” In effect, he could nearly pull off systemwide live broadcasts of the Boston Symphony and other classical programming by originating the transmissions on
WBCN
, which would then be picked up by high-gain antennas at '
XCN
in Providence and rebroadcast to its own audience. In turn, that transmission would be relayed further down the chain to the stations in Long Island, Hartford, and New York. Although Boston was the originator in most cases, programs could also be sent back up the network in the reverse direction. In an age before satellites blanketed the skies and routinely linked broadcast stations around the globe, T. Mitchell Hastings was able to bypass the high costs of using phone lines to achieve this same purpose.

T. Mitchell Hastings possessed another side to his personality, quirks and oddities that often challenged those around him. “[He] was a whack job, and I don't mean that meanly; but he was just a very strange guy,” future
WBCN
program director Sam Kopper pointed out. “In addition to his sort of visionary eccentricities, he was a religious and spiritual seeker.” Not secretive about his beliefs in the supernatural, spiritual, and paranormal realms, Hastings and his wife Margot were regular acquaintances of Edgar Cayce, perhaps the most famous clairvoyant of the time. The couple sat with the seer on a number of occasions to seek advice and gain glimpses into a future that Cayce would reveal during his legendary and well-documented trances. Some of these predictions formed the basis of Hastings's critical business decisions. “[He] was a wildly eccentric guy,” Chiesa agreed; “he believed in Atlantis, Cayce and mystics. [Hastings] lived in another world; he could have been an extra-terrestrial. But, he also believed in the power of classical music to awaken the spirit and the mind. He was a purist; there was a depth to what he wanted.”

Ray Riepen, who would soon lobby to introduce rock music to
WBCN
,
understood that Hastings was deeply committed to programming his personal love of classical music on the station. But he could also see the weaknesses in the owner's thinking that jeopardized what he had built. “[Hastings] was a visionary guy in early
FM
who had put this little network together,” Riepen said, “but he was not a businessman; nor was he anybody of any taste or discernment.” In his own role as a program director and classical music expert, Chiesa had to agree that even though Hastings clearly loved the music, his tastes were quite finite. “He knew what he liked, [but] he didn't really know that much about classical music. He would call the station occasionally and yell, ‘Get that off the air! I'm not enjoying that'; and it would be in the middle of something great like ‘Scheherazade' or even Beethoven. He could call and disrupt the whole flow of what you were doing, and you had to pacify him by saying that you would do it, whether you did or not.”

Personal peculiarities aside, Hastings was still quite a man to respect, but his innovations and his achievements could only take him so far. It soon became obvious that the classical music he loved so dearly would not generate the amount of advertiser interest needed to keep his stations thriving, or even financially afloat. Chiesa remembered, “There were times where we didn't get paid for three or four weeks.” The bill for the
UPI
(United Press International) newswire service went overdue for so long that the company sent workers to disconnect the teletype machine and haul it away. This did not end news reporting on
WBCN
, though: “Hastings told us, ‘Just read from the newspaper'; so that's what we did. He also had problems with his rent [at 171 Newbury Street]. The building was owned by an old architect named Edward T. P. Graham, who was becoming quite feeble and would just sit around in the office below the studio with an elderly secretary. I heard T. Mitchell talking to the secretary once when he was several weeks behind in rent, saying that he'd like to do a memorial program for Mr. Graham when he passed away. So, he was willing to trade air time for rent!” Plus, he had proposed the deal for a sponsored radio eulogy before the subject had even died! Sometimes Hastings took the elevator down to the street and personally canvassed the crowds passing by on the sidewalk, looking for people who would donate money to the station. Time and time again, though, classical music lovers or friends of Hastings would arrive in the nick of time, like the 7th Cavalry, to put up fresh funds to cover the bills.

As Hastings's financial woes deepened, he became increasingly
desperate and open to almost any new possibilities for cash flow. In the early sixties, radio programmer Marlin Taylor had developed a winning format called beautiful music or easy listening. Taking advantage of the advanced fidelity available on the
FM
band, Taylor blended innocuous vocal songs with light orchestral hits to produce an inconspicuous mix for background listening. By 1966, after observing the success of several stations with this new format, Hastings contacted Taylor. Soon the sounds of Montavani, 101 Strings, Johnny Mathis, and the Ray Coniff Singers wafted with saccharine sweetness out of
WBCN'S
transmitter. “There was a period of several months where that's all that we played,” Chiesa recalled. “Mitch liked beautiful music probably more than classical, because it was so bland and more accessible to him. But it didn't work; the format petered out and we went back to the classical.” Chiesa also revealed that the first song played in the new format was “The Ballad of the Green Berets” by
SS
gt. Barry Sadler. Considering what
WBCN
would eventually become, the presence of beautiful music and particularly this song, a promilitary and Vietnam War anthem that went to number 1 in America and stayed there for five weeks in 1966, remains remarkably ironic.

Ron Della Chiesa,
WBCN'S
classical music impresario (from 1987). Photo by Dan Beach.

The “Golden Chain” that Hastings had worked so hard to forge began to fall apart:
WRCN-FM
on Long Island was sold,
WXCN-FM
in Providence cut loose in October 1963, and
WNCN-FM
in New York unloaded the following year. The network had been whittled down to just
WHCN-FM
Hartford and
WBCN
itself, and Hastings was on the brink of losing even these. Ray Riepen observed, “[
WBCN
] was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy; they were not making their payments and it was going to go down.” Frantic, the board of directors granted Riepen an audience to present his views about the merits of a free-form, rock music format. Joe Rogers related, “Ray went to them and said, ‘You have absolutely no income whatsoever during the overnight hours. I can provide you with actual listeners who might, in turn, generate sponsors who, in turn, could bring revenue to your station. Face it, you have nothing to lose.'” Don Law added, “Mitch Hastings was such a classical music lover and saw
FM
as the salvation for that music.” He shook his head and marveled: “Riepen actually talked him into changing his format.” It wasn't easy, though, as Riepen picks up the story: “Mitch Hastings was appalled at this thing and fought it all the way. The board, though, were businessmen; they were old friends of his that were trying to save him. The classical music was continuing to flounder and they understood the deal. They were so desperate, they gave me [the time slot] after midnight.” Actually it was 10:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. and strictly on a trial basis, but it was a shot. Ray Riepen congratulated himself, got on the phone, and gave the go signal to Joe Rogers.