Radio Free Boston by Carter Alan

on the air from inside, to do a report while all this was going on.” He was in the middle of his call to WBCN when suddenly, “Somebody yelled that we had to get out, the police were coming! I concluded my report with, ‘Desks are being overturned, files are being ransacked and phones are being ripped out of the walls!’ Then I pulled my plastic phone jack out of the wall too!”
    Danny Schechter elevated the editorial power of the news department with two additions, Andy Kopkind and John Scagliotti. The former, a noted writer for left-wing magazines like the New Republic and The Nation , would later compose political essays in publications as prominent and respected as Time magazine. Before he got to WBCN , Kopkind worked in Washington at the Unicorn News Collective, which fed reports about issues concerning the war to counterculture radio stations across the country. His partner, John Scagliotti, revealed, “The collective, though, was going bad; it was time to leave D.C.” Charles Laquidara, who knew Kopkind, invited him to come up to Boston. Scagliotti continued, “Andy went up, I followed, and while we were at ’ BCN , Danny said, ‘Why don’t you do some stuff and maybe they’ll hire you at some point.’ It was all very flexible.” So, despite Kopkind’s semilegendary status, he and Scagliotti began on a volunteer basis, like all the others.
    â€œOur very first [’ BCN ] piece was on the Victory Gardens in the Fenway,” Scagliotti recalled. “No one knew what they were back in those days; [it was] just these people planting nice vegetables. This was the first piece of radio craziness that we did: at the beginning [of the report] we took The Messiah , the part where they sing, ‘let us rejoice,’ and we took all the ‘let us’ . . . ‘let us’ . . . ‘let us’ [parts] out and cut them all together to make ‘lettuce . . . lettuce . . . lettuce.’ Then we had [a recording of] a woman who justmentioned, ‘We grow lettuce over here,’ and then in comes the ‘lettuce . . . lettuce . . . lettuce . . .’ That was our early work; weird!” he added, chuckling. “In fact, we were discovering and developing a whole new sound that was beginning in the early seventies, because radio had never really mixed sound effects and live actualities in news and public affairs, like using a car crash sound when there was something [in the report] we didn’t like.” The chemistry clicked; soon Kopkind and his young protégé were both drawing checks from WBCN . Eventually, Scagliotti would even be made the news director, technically Schechter’s superior. He downplayed this role: “I was the boss only because nobody else wanted to do it. When [the department] got big, somebody had to manage it and make sure everybody got paid!”
    But, even though the news department allowed itself to smile, even laugh at times, by no means did its members forget that they were very much under the U.S. government’s steady gaze, as Danny Schechter described: “There had been a vocal group of activists who put a bomb in the Suffolk County Courthouse. They issued a communiqué and then called ’ BCN to say it was pasted up in a phone booth. We brought it to the station and I [went on the air and] reported it.” The document ended up on Schechter’s desk, crammed in a colossal pile as papers chronicling the next day’s news events quickly plowed it under. Although a brilliant news man, Schechter wasn’t, by any account, a neat one. “Then the FBI showed up and they wanted [the communiqué]. I didn’t want to give it to them, but Al Perry [now WBCN’S general manager] told me, ‘You have to!’ Everybody was living in fear of the FBI or the government yanking our [radio station] license. So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll give it to them.’ But then I