Radio Free Boston by Carter Alan Page A

couldn’t find it.”
    â€œYou have to picture his office,” Lichtenstein added with a snicker. “Danny would sit and clip newspapers and the clips would pile up, and the newspapers that were clipped would just pile up; the next day he would just start again. He had an enormous amount of material laying around.”
    â€œThere was a half-eaten tuna fish sandwich or something on my desk; it was a mess!” Schechter apologized to the agents: “Honest, it’s here someplace.” After twenty minutes of watching him search, they became restless and disgusted, handing the news man a business card that he promptly “misplaced” too. The sensitive document never turned up again, but luckily for ’ BCN , neither did the FBI men.

There was selflessness in being a personality in those days. The biggest insult a listener could give you was, “You’re on an ego trip.” You were speaking on behalf of a cultural community, and we were the rallying point, for a time, of that budding, tightly knit community. NORM WINER
    MOVIN’
    ON UP
    â€œMedia Freaks Act Out Battles of the Radicals” read the headline of the Boston Globe story by Parker Donham in June 1970. He was describing the wild, often naked, scenes at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, as it hosted the Alternative Media Conference First Gathering. The event was a rallying cry for more than 1,500 hippie announcers, writers, producers, and directors scattered across the country in the days before radio conferences became big business and MTV , and then the Internet, linked (and homogenized) singular cultures across North America. The conference represented a microcosm of the entire counterculture as different groups with widely divergent views squared off in debate while extracurricular sex and drug use flourished openly. A young Mark Parenteau, then a teenage DJ in Worcester with the radio handle of Scotty Wainwright, signed up and made his way north. “They were having Creem magazine, Rolling Stone , other alternative newspapers, all the legendary FM jocks who had becomefamous . . . I guess it was a ‘getting-together,’ but it was [also] a huge party. Every city had a band representing them, and the band for Detroit was the MC 5. Wow! I loved their energy. So that weekend I gravitated and hung out with all the Detroit people.” That would lead to “Scotty Wainwright” meeting all the right names and soon getting himself hired at Detroit’s WKNR-FM and then WABX-FM . But he’d get back to Boston . . . eventually.
    In addition to describing a circle of skinny-dipping, joint-smoking film-makers around a college swimming hole discussing the artistic merits of filming an orgy, the Boston Globe story also mentioned that four WBCN disc jockeys attended the conference. Norm Winer was swept up by the same carousing spirit that Parenteau witnessed: “This is where Atlantic Records signed J. Geils Band on the spot. . . . Dr. John was there . . . Baba Ram Dass [the spiritualist] and Jerry Rubin. It was the first time we met many of our counterparts. They shared our philosophies and convictions; it really fortified and energized us. We weren’t just crackpots clinging on to an unrealistic goal—there were other people sharing that.” Andy Beaubien drove to the conference with Charles and Norm: “It was strange and bizarre, but fun and exciting. I remember driving back, all energized, but also politicized. We came to the station and we all went on the air and had a discussion, kind of a debriefing, taking phone calls live. There was this sense that this was the beginning of a major change.”
    â€œWe were very utopian in our way of thinking,” Jim Parry acknowledged.
    â€œWe wanted to be crazy, committed, but responsible, music-loving human beings,” Sam Kopper stressed. “Those were our ideals and makeup, and I’m proud of that.”
    â€œA lot of