Author Bill Lichtenstein will discuss his recent book, WBCN and the American Revolution: How a Radio Station Defined Politics, Counterculture, and Rock and Roll.

About The Book: In 1968, a Harvard Law School graduate student named Ray Riepen founded a radio station that played music that young people, including the hundreds of thousands at Boston-area colleges, actually wanted to hear. WBCN-FM featured album cuts by such artists as the Mothers of Invention, Aretha Franklin, and Cream, played by announcers who felt free to express their opinions on subjects that ranged from recreational drugs to the war in Vietnam. At WBCN, creativity and countercultural politics ruled: there were no set playlists; news segments anticipated the satire of The Daily Show; on-air interviewees ranged from John Lennon and Yoko Ono to Noam Chomsky; a telephone “Listener Line” fielded questions on any subject, day and night. From 1968 to Watergate, Boston's WBCN was the hub of the rock-and-roll, antiwar, psychedelic solar system. In this engaging and generously illustrated chronicle, Peabody Award-winning journalist and one-time WBCN announcer Bill Lichtenstein tells the story of how a radio station became part of a revolution in youth culture.

About The Author: Author Bill Lichtenstein is a journalist and documentary producer. Winner of more than sixty major journalism awards, he has written for publications including the New York Times, the Nation, the Village Voice, and the Boston Globe, and produced and directed the feature-length documentary WBCN and the American Revolution. He worked at WBCN from 1971 to 1977, beginning as a teenage volunteer on the station's “Listener Line.” Learn more about Bill HERE.

Register below. Sponsored by the Corning Foundation and the Friends of the Library.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Can't make it to the library? You can watch this program live on the Town of Tewksbury's YouTube Channel.