In the summer of 1966, Kansas City attorney Ronald Ray Riepen, known to friends as “Ray,” arrived in Cambridge to begin his postgraduate studies at Harvard Law School. While studying at Harvard, Riepen was asked by Jessie Benton, the daughter of the American realist painter Thomas Hart Benton, to do a favor. Riepen had previously worked on Jessie Benton’s divorce from a local commune leader named Mel Lyman, who had become both famous and infamous in Boston in the mid-1960s as an early king of all media, or at least all underground media.

Benton told Riepen that she was working with Andy Warhol and the pioneering filmmaker Jonas Mekas to expand their New York–based film center, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and that the Ford Foundation had agreed to bankroll a second location for the film organization in Boston, where the group had been holding screenings. She asked Riepen to help negotiate and sign the lease for a building they had found to serve as the film cooperative’s Boston home.

Ray met with the landlord and signed the lease for the space, a century-old Unitarian meetinghouse in Boston’s South End with a giant Star of David on the front. Riepen advanced $5,000 of his own money as the lease deposit. He was not expecting the call he received shortly thereafter from Jessie Benton, who told him that the deal had fallen through. In other words, there would not be a Boston branch of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and the Ford Foundation would not pay the lease costs, including the deposit.

“I quickly had to figure out what I was going to do — besides file for bankruptcy!” Riepen recalls. It occurred to him that “with hundreds of thousands of students in Boston . . . the best chance I had to pay the rent on this thing was to play rock music there and have a rock club.”

Because the space lacked a liquor license and Riepen wanted to convey a sense of propriety to the Boston city establishment, he called the club the Boston Tea Party. “I thought it was just a fabulous name, and it also had the advantage of having tea in the title, which was another name for a very popular recreational drug that was going through the city like wildfire,” Riepen recounts.

Steve Nelson, who became the first manager of the Boston Tea Party, remembers the dance hall/rock club: “It was an old temple-like building. You’d walk up these wooden stairs to a landing with a coat room. Then up another flight and you’d enter this gigantic open room that had a stage. Across the top of the stage, it said ‘Praise Ye The Lord,’ because in the 1930s the building was used as a Calvary Temple, and that inscription was still there. So there were these religious overtones.”

The Boston Tea Party would be one of the first rock halls on the East Coast, preceding Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York City by more than a year. Tickets were just $3.

Over the next four years, crowds of young people showed up to see emerging rock artists destined to become superstars. Performers included The Who, Cream, The Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin, The Velvet Underground, Traffic, Van Morrison, Fleetwood Mac, The J. Geils Band, It’s a Beautiful Day, James Taylor, Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart, Elton John, The Allman Brothers, The Kinks, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Santana, Joe Cocker, the Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, and such jazz and blues greats as B.B. King, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Miles Davis.

“Initially, it was known as a hippie hangout,” recalls Nelson, “but as it gained popularity, the crowds diversified as all kinds of musicians came.”

“Ray was good at finding talent — bands that these days you would say, ‘My God, Led Zeppelin, really?’” recalls Tommy Hadges, a student at Tufts. “Yes, yes really.”

“We were all hippies. We all had long hair, and Ray didn’t,” recalls Mitchell Kertzman, then a Brandeis student. “Ray was a straight guy. You would not have picked out Ray to be the owner of the Tea Party and the guy that hired all these hippies and musicians. He still looked like a lawyer.”

As Riepen himself recounts:

My mother [who was visiting from Kansas City] called me one day after the club became successful. She said, “Well, Ronald, my friends are calling me and telling me that they’re reading about you in Newsweek and The New York Times and that you have opened some kind of a rock and roll club in Boston. And I thought you went back there to start an academic career. What is this?” She came to Boston to investigate what had happened to me.

I took her down to the Tea Party, and Country Joe and the Fish were playing. They were playing without shirts, the back projection on the liquid overhead projector was going, the sound was about 140 dB, we didn’t have any air conditioning, and the place was packed. So we walked up to the door, and when I opened it this cacophonous roar came out along with all the sweat and heat. She looked at me and said, “Well, Ronald, I won’t go in there.” And that was the kind of place the Tea Party was!

Often, the musical pairings were eyebrow-raising. Rahsaan Roland Kirk opened for The Who. The Grateful Dead were paired with the Bonzo Dog Band. Roots-rockers The Allman Brothers opened for the urban-psychedelic Velvet Underground.

In addition to British rockers, the Tea Party featured great blues artists who, until then, were largely relegated to playing segregated clubs for Black audiences.

“There were some great blues musicians who performed there: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, B.B.

King, and others . . . In 1967 and 1968, to have a band of racially mixed players or to have a racially mixed audience, in a lot of parts of Boston, it would raise eyebrows. It was controversial and was not tolerated,” says Nelson.

“There was a whole transition period that was starting to happen with these traditional blues players that were performing before a white audience for the first time. People never saw anything like that,” says Charles Daniels (also known as “The Master Blaster”), who served as MC at the Tea Party.

Playing the Tea Party was a breakthrough for these musicians as well, according to WBCN announcer Eric Jackson:

[At the Boston Tea Party] these musicians were able to reach an audience they had never been able to reach before. Whereas, before they probably played for 90% or more black audiences in small clubs. Now, they were playing in a much larger club to a larger and younger audience.

During the last weekend of May 1967, The Velvet Underground played the Tea Party. “It turns out that this was a really, really important gig,” says Nelson, “because up until that time they had been part of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, with the hoop dancers and the multimedia. This was the first time they had walked away from that. This was the first gig that they ever had where it was just the four band members playing as a rock band. The Velvet Underground said it was their favorite place to play in the country.”

“Boston was the whole thing as far as we were concerned,” said Lou Reed during a radio interview. “It was the first time we played in public and didn’t have all those things thrown at us — ‘leather freaks,’ ‘druggies,’ they’re this, they’re that. It was the first time anybody just listened to the music, which blew our minds collectively. Our first time here, we just couldn’t believe it. We couldn’t believe it. And it’s been that way ever since. I never believe it when I’m in Boston. It’s just a really nice scene.”

Meanwhile, the atmosphere at the Tea Party was geared toward the widespread taking of mind-altering drugs, from marijuana to psychedelics, to enhance the experience.

One person inspired by the psychedelic scene at the Tea Party was a young George Clinton, the musician and producer who later created Parliament-Funkadelic (P-Funk). Clinton has said that the Tea Party, LSD, and Led Zeppelin opened the “gate” to P-Funk.

Clinton told the Boston Herald that when he arrived in Boston in 1967, he preferred what the Herald called “suit and tie R&B,” but that changed after he took LSD and saw Led Zeppelin at the Tea Party.

“Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Vanilla Fudge, King Crimson: we saw them all, or we played shows with them,” Clinton said. “We got turned out on acid and these British bands. We had to have funk in our music, but we were also moving through the Vietnam War, The Beatles, Sly Stone, and psychedelia. We came through all this as it fed into our music.”

“The audience was mostly stoned, and there was a psychedelic light show geared around that,” explains Nelson.

One filmmaker who visited the Tea Party was Andy Warhol, as part of a publicity stunt engineered by Riepen. As Riepen recalls:

After eight months of the Tea Party’s success, another club opened across town by a promoter who decided that the Tea Party had a monopoly and they were going to put us out of business with a club called the Crosstown Bus. They had a lot more money and big connections in New York. They hired The Doors to perform and paid them more for one night than I might pay groups over four or five months. And by the time the date came, The Doors had the number one single in America with “Light My Fire.” We were pretty disheartened because they had a $200,000 sound system and advertising on television. We’d never taken any ads on television. We just had handbills, and that was it.

So we thought, well, we’ve shown people the way, but we’re not going to survive this. We’re going to be buried under this money. And then I got the idea. Andy Warhol owed me a lot of favors because I was booking The Velvet Underground, and no one else in America was playing them. So I called Andy Warhol up, and I said, “Listen, I want you to come up here and shoot a movie. And I don’t care whether you got film in the cameras or not. I want you to bring Nico and all those well-adjusted young people you hang around with at the Factory. This new club’s opening up — and they’re opening up with The Doors, for gosh sakes!”

And so he did. He agreed to do it, and they all came up.

I printed up these handbills that said “Be Part of What’s Happening!! Come to the Boston Tea Party This Weekend to Capture the People on Film as They Explode to the Sights and Sounds of the Velvet Underground.

Be a Part of Boston’s First Authentic Underground Movie. Andy Warhol, Velvet Underground, Boston Tea Party, AND YOU!!!”

So opening night, of course, The Doors sold out, and the Crosstown Bus owner’s financial backer was up from New York, and they said “Let’s drive by and see how the Tea Party is doing tonight.” And it was raining. And so they got in their limo and drove over to the Tea Party. And from Clarendon Street Station four blocks down to the Boston Tea Party, there was a line of people from the suburbs standing in the rain waiting to get in on this Andy Warhol movie. And the club’s backer evidently said, “You’re not going to beat those guys.” And that was it. They closed six or eight weeks after they opened.

As late as the beginning of 1968, the only place rock music was heard on the radio in Boston was on Top 40 AM stations, including WMEX (whose announcers were known as the Good Guys), WBZ, and the newcomer WRKO.

“You’d turn on the radio, and they would play the same forty songs over and over again. And that’s why they called it Top 40,” explains Mitchell Kertzman.

“There were eighteen minutes of commercials every hour,” says Richard Barna, a student on the air at the time at the Brown University station WBRU-FM. “They had highly produced jingles and an announcing style that I would characterize as putting a coat hanger in your mouth and yelling — with a smile.”

Ron Della Chiesa, then a classical music radio host, recalls Top 40 radio and music of the era, saying, “In Italian, they have a great phrase, and the opera singers use it — senza coglioni. It means ‘without balls,’ literally. And you know something is sort of white bread — it lacks feeling, it lacks passion — and I think that was a lot of what was being broadcast.”

By the spring of 1968, Ray Riepen saw lines of young people around the block, waiting to get into the Boston Tea Party to see musical artists and bands whose music could not be heard on the radio. “I thought in a town with over a hundred colleges and hundreds of thousands of college kids, it might be a good idea to play on the radio the music they were buying in the record stores,” recalls Riepen.

Riepen was aware of the advent of FM radio — a different, second broadcast band that allowed music to be broadcast in stereo with less static, making it ideal, initially, for classical music stations.

Riepen also knew that in New York City, San Francisco, and Pasadena, California, a few FM stations had begun broadcasting rock music. He envisioned a new kind of radio — a station where all kinds of music were played and the announcers spoke in conversational tones rather than howling and shouting at their listeners. And instead of 20 minutes or more of loud national commercials per hour, with their jingles pitching products from acne cream to drag races, the radio station would air only eight ads each hour, featuring local stores and community businesses.

Lacking a background in radio, Riepen decided to run his idea past broadcast professionals and visited the National Association of FM Broadcasters’ 1967 convention, the week before the annual NAB gathering:

I thought I would go down there and tell them what I was thinking about doing and see what they say. So I told them what I thought — you know, limit the commercials to eight an hour and have a conversational tone and play album cuts. Well, they all asked me what my background was, and I told them I was a lawyer and I was doing graduate work at Harvard Law School. And they suggested that I concentrate on that and leave broadcasting to them because I was the dumbest person they have ever met. That there was nothing about my concept or approach to programming that was economically viable in America.

“He was what we needed,” recalls Jim Parry, a future colleague of Riepen. “He was an entrepreneur who had that kind of affinity for the culture — and at the same time, the personality of the entrepreneur, which is ‘my way or the highway!’”

Riepen searched Boston for a commercial radio station in financial trouble, one that might be willing to lease him some of its airtime. While reviewing Dun & Bradstreet business credit reports, he found WBCN-FM, a struggling Boston classical music broadcaster, on the verge of a second bankruptcy. Riepen contacted the owner, T. Mitchell Hastings, an electronics engineer and entrepreneur who developed and marketed the Hastings FM Jr., which is billed as the world’s first shirt-pocket FM radio. Hastings owned four classical music FM stations along the East Coast as part of the Concert Network, including WNCN in New York, WXCN in Providence, WHCN in Hartford, and WBCN in Boston, which was so financially strained that announcers went on the air to ask for money.

“These stations were all essentially bankrupt because they were all classical music stations that couldn’t sell any advertising and then, you know, begging on air for people to buy spots,” recalls Steve Nelson. Riepen contacted Hastings and asked about using the radio station’s airtime between 10:30 p.m. and 5:30 a.m.

“Ray was able to convince Hastings into just giving him the overnights because nobody listens to FM,” recalls Tommy Hadges, an original WBCN announcer, noting that FM was a new innovation in radio at that time that had yet to fully catch on. “And nobody listens to WBCN, and nobody listens in the middle of the night.”

With airtime on WBCN secured, Riepen set off in search of announcers for his new kind of radio. He drove around the Boston area while listening to college radio stations. When he liked an announcer, he would go to the radio station while they were on the air, walk in, and introduce himself, telling them he was looking for announcers who would like to go on “real radio.”

“I told them what I had in mind, and they probably thought I was crazy, too, because, you know, it didn’t exist yet,” recalls Riepen. “You know, if you worked at a college station, maybe you had to try and be professional, and of course, professional means standard broadcasting, and I thought it was ugly radio.”

For the students on the air at their college stations, Riepen’s sudden and unannounced visit and offer of a job on the air were unexpected, to say the least.

“I was working at doing a show at the Tufts University station, and one evening, unannounced, Ray appeared there,” recalls Joe Rogers, who would become the first person on the air on free-form WBCN-FM. “I think it was easy enough for him to do because I am pretty sure we didn’t lock the door.”

Rogers says Riepen told him he was starting “a free-form radio station that would only be constrained by what you could imagine the listener would want to listen to.” Riepen said he was hiring entirely untrained people.

“He didn’t want professionally trained disc jockeys who had the proper voice to do this,” recalls Rogers.

“Part of Ray Riepen’s genius when he started WBCN is that he didn’t hire professional radio people. He found kids, like me, who loved the music and had a bit of radio experience. The sound was very natural,” recalls Richard Barna, another early WBCN disc jockey.

Joe Rogers recalls what happened then: “Soon after, there was a meeting in which all of us long-haired, untrained DJs mapped out a schedule. I got the Friday night time slot from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. Then it turned out that the radio station was going to debut on a Friday night, and so they said, ‘Rogers, it’s you.’ It wasn’t because I was their ace designated leadoff hitter. My instructions were simply, ‘Don’t screw it up.’”

On March 15, 1968, the new WBCN was born.

At 10:30 p.m., the station transitioned from classical announcer Ron Della Chiesa and Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” to Tufts student Joe Rogers, who called himself “Mississippi Harold Wilson” after the birthplace of the blues and the then-British prime minister. And while the station had no record library of suitable music to play, the announcers brought records from their own collections in milk crates or boxes when it was their turn on the air.

“I started by playing some songs by The Mothers of Invention and then some sort of farting, belching noise and then into Cream’s ‘I Feel Free.’ It all began at that point. It went well enough to get through the next four hours,” recalls Rogers.

But there was a hitch.

The daytime staff of the classical music station, which had its offices atop the brownstone on Boston’s prestigious Newbury Street, told Riepen they didn’t want the long-haired kids in their studios at night.

“I don’t know if they thought we would steal the classical records or whether somebody would be smoking ‘funny cigarettes’ up there or what, but they didn’t socially want the two groups to interact in any way,” recalls Riepen.

Riepen solved the problem by purchasing two turntables, a microphone, and two small Sparta audio mixer boards — the kind a DJ might use at a bar mitzvah party. He installed them inside the Boston Tea Party, in the band’s cramped dressing room. However, for the emerging radio station, sharing a green room with rock bands did present a few problems, as WBCN announcer Jim Parry recalls:

The record library was a closet about as wide as a door, with four shelves. It was also in the green room during shows at the Boston Tea Party. Ten Years After was performing one night, and they were admiring the record library, and Ray Riepen, in an expansive mood, says, “Hey, you guys want some records to take home?” Alvin Lee, who was the lead guitarist of the band, said, “OK!” And he grabbed everything — all the records from B through D. He took them all and left. So we couldn’t play anything from The Beatles to The Doors for about a month or so until they were replaced. It was kind of a loose operation.

Eventually, posters promoting the underground radio station began to appear throughout the Boston area, proclaiming “Ugly Radio Is Dead.” An on-air request to listeners to send a postcard if they were listening to the station resulted in mailbags filled with responses that clogged the stairwell leading up to the station’s offices.

“The mailman was bringing in duffle bags full of postcards from listeners,” remembers Rogers.

David Bieber, who, before working at the station, wrote a Boston Magazine article about it, recalls:

There was a real grassroots passion from listeners, people who were paying attention to what the station was doing and saying, and everyone had an opinion.

And the joke often was in those days that every listener had an opinion. One would write to say “I love when you play folk music but you play too much rock.” And then somebody else would write “I love when you play jazz but you play too much folk.” But it was clear that people were giving what they heard on the air great consideration. One letter from a listener said “I am very confused. Today, I was listening to your radio station and heard some very strange things going on. First, you played a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King preaching non-violence. Immediately after that came the Jefferson Airplane telling me to tear down the walls and revolt. Then came a record preaching love, peace, and happiness.” That shows you the spectrum of BCN sensibilities at the time.

WBCN’s new format was so successful that it expanded to 24 hours a day within two months, and the station could be heard throughout the Boston area. Announcer Charles Laquidara recalls the reach of the station: “You could hear it in the dormitory rooms, blasting out. In the stores. You could go from one end of Boston to the other end of Cambridge and not have a radio, and you could hear WBCN the whole way.”

“By the time it went on the air in spring full time, you could walk down some of the streets in Boston, and people would have their windows open and their radio speakers literally on their windowsill playing this to the world, and everybody is on the same station,” recalls Steve Nelson.

“I have vivid memories of walking up Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge,” photographer Barry Schneier says of WBCN. “Every store — whether it was the record store, a head shop, as we say, the Orson Welles Cinema — you heard it in every store. It really was the soundtrack of Boston at the time.”