He was almost certain this was a first draft of “Caravan.” Electricity was flowing once again.
* * *
• • •
RAY RIEPEN’S HIPPIE SALESMEN found it easy to sell $5 broadcast ads to every head shop and thrift store on Mass Ave. Even Mel Lyman tried to associate himself with the coolest thing in town: American Avatar No. 3 sports a picture of him bugging his eyes out, trying to look even weirder than usual, under the words “LISTEN TO WBCN 104.1 BOSTON.” “Previously, radio was just these terrible little AM stations,” Tea Party manager Don Law recalls. “It didn’t allow for much exposure for music, and FM completely blew the doors open for that. It was a huge shift.” With an extended microphone cord, a WBCN DJ could climb onto the roof of 171 Newbury Street and speak to the entire city while the sun rose over Back Bay. “It was like looking over the rooftops of Paris,” DJ Jim Parry wistfully remembered.
Soon a remote broadcast station was installed in the Boston Tea Party, where Fort Hill’s Moon in Leo shop had recently closed. The merger was a brilliant move. “It didn’t hurt us if we could talk to people like the Who, Led Zeppelin, Jeff Beck, or Rod Stewart between sets,” Rogers says. It was a perfect loop: WBCN drove people to the Tea Party, and seeing bands at the Tea Party made people want to hear more at WBCN. If a DJ was broadcasting during a concert, they had to cover themselves and the microphone under a heavy blanket for soundproofing. This lo-fi trick worked, but made it look like ghosts had taken over.
In some ways, WBCN turned its hip marketing slogan—“The American Revolution”—into reality. Not only did the station’s free-form nature trigger changes in the music industry, but it let DJs fearlessly wade into politics and protests even as the station’s FCC license hung in the balance. Riepen obtained subscriptions to foreign news services to get the most accurate information about the developments in Vietnam, insisting his DJs refer to the other side as the “National Liberation Front” instead of the Americanized term “Vietcong.” “It was important to let people know where they could get advice on what to do about the draft and the war,” Joe Rogers explained. “The station insisted that [listeners] become informed on the subject.” Riepen may not have sported a shaggy hairstyle, but his beliefs were legitimately aligned with the culture he was commercializing.
The Kansas City lawyer had proven the experts wrong; clearly, the youth market in Boston was “hipper than the assholes running broadcasting in America,” as he put it. He had proven his point to T. Mitchell Hastings too, who turned over twenty-four-hour control of the station to the freaks in May—just two months after their debut.
Though the station’s makeover was a success, all of Hastings’s original hires—from the front desk girl on up—hated the weirdos who saved WBCN from bankruptcy. Ray Riepen recalls that Hastings fought the new programming every step of the way. “[He] was such a classical music lover and saw FM as the salvation for that music,” Don Law noted. Which made it even more shocking to Hastings when he learned that the listeners embraced WBCN’s rock offerings more than its classical programming. This was nothing like what his old friend Edgar Cayce had predicted. Where was the lost city of Atlantis? And who the hell was Frank Zappa?
The board of directors sold Ray a majority holding of the station’s shares, making him the president and breaking Hastings’s heart. Hastings tried to bring him down. Even the on-air personalities of WBCN grew to resent Riepen. Despite fostering the kind of environment that allowed them to do such a thing in the first place, they began to trash their boss live on the air as a loudmouthed big shot. By the time they unionized in 1971, Riepen had had enough. He sold his shares back to T. Mitchell Hastings for $220,000.
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• • •
NONE OF THE STATION’S DEVOTED New England audience was aware of this behind-the-scenes strife; for WBCN fans, it was a nonstop miracle they could dial in at home or, thanks to T. Mitchell Hastings’s earlier invention, in their automobile. “Driving alone at night, in the darkened car, reassured by the nightlight of the dashboard, tuned to a disembodied voice or music, evokes a spiritual, almost telepathic contact across space and time, a reassurance that we aren’t alone in the void: we have kindred spirits,” Susan J. Douglas wrote in Listening In, her history of the medium of radio.
If you changed a few words of that description and set them against a two-chord backdrop, you’d essentially have “Roadrunner,” Jonathan Richman’s classic Modern Lovers anthem about driving at night with the radio on. Bandmate John Felice described the song’s inspiration: “We used to get in the car and we would just drive up and down Route 128 and the turnpike. We’d come up over a hill and he’d see the radio towers, the beacons flashing, and he would get almost teary-eyed. . . . He’d see all this beauty in things where other people just wouldn’t see it. We’d drive past an electric plant, a big power plant, with all kinds of electric wire and generators, and he’d get all choked up, he’d almost start crying.”
“Roadrunner” ends with the Modern Lovers chanting “Radio On!” as Richman maniacally lists the signs of the modern world unfurling all around him: factories, auto signs, a 50,000-watt radio signal, all of it an ode to “the power of Massachusetts.” In 1966, when late-night drives were inspiring Richman, he was listening to an AM station, as he warbles in the song. But just two years later, a teenager borrowing her parents’ car would have locked onto 104.1 on the other band. FM was a revolution—thanks to both Hastings’s invention and Riepen’s idea to play deep-cut album rock. In Boston legend, you could travel from one end of the city to the other with no radio in your car and always be in earshot of someone blasting WBCN.
* * *
• • •
T. MITCHELL HASTINGS was disturbed by the type of music that had saved his radio station, but he probably approved of the counterculture’s sudden embrace of all things occult. On February 11, 1968, under the headline “WHAT A DECK!,” The Boston Globe summarized the mystical moment to area readers: “An ancient fortune-telling card game called Tarot has become a favorite pastime for young Americans . . . it’s the newest manifestation of the recent upsurge in interest in games of the occult.” Ouija boards and ESP once again became all the rage in Boston. It was also the year the Globe started running the kind of daily astrology horoscopes that even church-loving readers enjoyed checking. If you wanted to know how your day might unfold, Jeane Dixon’s star-crossed predictions were waiting for you on page 18.
“Newspapers were specifically looking for ways to stay current, and astrology columns provided a means,” author Mitch Horowitz explains. “The counterculture was interested in all things mystical, provided they seemed to break with the religious culture of the 1950s.” But why? Cultural critic Camille Paglia put forth an interesting theory in 2003. “The baby-boom generation was the first to grow up in the shadow of nuclear war,” she wrote. “The sixties generation, in other words, had been injected with a mystical sense of awe and doom about the sky. This is one possible reason for the sudden popularity and ubiquity of astrology, which for most of the twentieth century had been a fringe practice.” It was like 1868 all over again.
Of course, the Fort Hill Community and Avatar had jumped on the astrology train early; in 1967, the underground newspaper listed everyone’s star sign in the masthead, and a “Using Astrology” column ran in every issue. This practice functioned almost like a “second tongue” for the FHC, closely guiding the group’s decisions, as the Los Angeles Times would later note.* The January 5, 1968, issue of Avatar featured this unsigned poem:
I met a man today, like many, who didn’t like astrology
It is mysterious and such . . . he felt.
Yes it is, I now reply, Astrology is the study of US
and we are indeed a mystery; and funny that myself comes right
before mystery in the Thesaurus
* * *
• • •
PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE, It Happe
ned in Boston? arrived in late 1968 with a pitch-perfect marketing campaign, summed up by the tagline: “It is impossible. It is real. And it happened in Boston.” The Watch and Ward Society didn’t lift a finger to ban it; indeed, the weird new novel seemed of a piece with the burgeoning New Age climate.
In the closing chapters, Alfred Omega’s terrible murders are revealed—yet no God appears as promised. So the narrator dons a disguise and begins a desperate escape out of Boston via Commonwealth Avenue, with police in pursuit. As he proceeds through the city, the idea of suicide becomes palatable, and he heads toward Cottage Farm Bridge to “tidy up my life by concluding it.”
His escape is interrupted on the Boston University campus, where two men recognize him. Just as it seems that there’s no way out, the tormented painter suddenly gets his wish: a meet and greet with God. Before his eyes, the city transforms into “parallelepiped houses of colored crystal rose,” while the sky becomes “a bronze bowl encrusted with a pair of blood-red suns.” The stage is set; God approaches.
While Greenan doesn’t cite it by name, the description—“three arched entrances set at the top of a flight of broad granite steps” near some “buildings of Boston University”—suggests that the church in question is Marsh Chapel at 735 Commonwealth Avenue. Greenan confirms to me that this is indeed the place he had in mind.
The information isn’t trivial, but a sort of accidental skeleton key to the book—because the most famous real-life event to take place at Marsh Chapel was also an attempt to access God through unorthodox, even scandalous, means: the Good Friday Experiment of 1962, aka the Marsh Chapel Miracle, in which Walter N. Pahnke and Tim Leary brought twenty divinity students into the basement of the chapel and fed half of them psilocybin pills.
Greenan was blissfully unaware of the experiment while writing the book. “I chose the chapel by chance,” he tells me. “When I first came to Boston, I lived and worked in the Kenmore Square area, and often walked by the chapel. It does seem an odd coincidence. Why in heaven’s name did they hold the trial in a church?”
Like Greenan’s narrator Alfred Omega, they wanted to know if there was a shortcut to meeting God.
Pahnke and Leary are deceased, but Dr. Gunther Weil, who was a facilitator at the Marsh Chapel Miracle, is still alive. Weil (no relation to Andrew Weil) was pursuing his doctorate at Harvard in the early sixties when, like Lisa Bieberman, he began to work closely with Leary and Richard Alpert. He also assisted Leary during his Concord Prison Experiment with psilocybin. Later, Weil would open the Intermedia Recording Corporation on Newbury Street, working with a fledgling local band named Aerosmith through the demo-cutting process for their song “Dream On.”* But in the early sixties, before the Beatles had ever stepped down upon U.S. soil, Weil’s focus was on exploring inner worlds. “We were the experimenters,” Weil says. “[The Good Friday Experiment] was [Pahnke’s] idea, and we ended up buying into it.”
On the morning of April 20, 1962, Pahnke, Leary, and Weil brought twenty divinity students into the basement of Marsh Chapel and gave half of them 30 milligrams of psilocybin, and the other half a placebo. Most of the facilitators, of course, also took psilocybin. The Good Friday worship service being conducted upstairs in the main chapel was piped into the smaller basement chapel’s speaker system. Reverend Howard Thurman, the chaplain of the church and a major influence on BU graduate Martin Luther King Jr., was aware of (and supported) the experiment that was happening beneath his feet, but his congregation had no idea. “It was probably the greatest Good Friday in two thousand years—or it was for half the subjects,” Leary drolly noted.
It quickly became apparent who had received which dose. As Reverend Thurman patiently explained the virtues of being born again to the sober congregation sitting in the pews, a more vivid religious experience was unfolding downstairs. “Everything in the world just seemed to grow inwardly with life. And I don’t mean just living things, even inanimate things. They just lived,” experiment participant Randall Laakko reflected later. Another subject, known as K.B. in Pahnke’s notes, recalled that “it left me with a completely unquestioned certainty that there is an environment bigger than the one I’m conscious of.” Huston Smith, the future author of the bestselling The World’s Religions, was also in the basement that Good Friday. While Smith had previously experimented with psilocybin, he considered the Marsh Chapel Experiment his first direct personal encounter with God—“the most powerful cosmic homecoming I have ever experienced.”
One subject who received the psilocybin got up to deliver his own sermon, but only gibberish emerged from his mouth. Another became convinced that God had selected him to deliver the message that a Messianic Age was about to dawn, and a thousand years of global peace were just around the corner. The subject raced down the chapel steps to Commonwealth Avenue, grabbed a letter from a postman, and “crumpled it up,” according to author Don Lattin’s reconstruction of the day. Whatever the letter contained, the subject surmised, was nothing compared to the message he had just received from God.
“The original Good Friday experiment is one of the preeminent psychedelic experiments in the scientific literature,” Rick Doblin wrote in his 1991 follow-up study. Its “fascinating and provocative conclusions strongly support the hypothesis that psychedelic drugs can help facilitate mystical experiences when used by religiously inclined people in a religious setting.” In 1966, even Time raved about the trial’s results: “All students who had taken the drug experienced a mystical consciousness that resembled those described by saints and ascetics.”
“Psychedelics can definitely bring about religious experiences,” Gunther Weil tells me. “They can stimulate a profound experience of spirituality. In this particular instance, these were divinity students, so the imagery and ritual [in the chapel] conveyed the Christian metaphor.
“Having said that,” he adds, “I wouldn’t go so far to say that it creates a permanent shift in consciousness. It opens the window to a possibility. You get a kind of preview of coming attractions.”
We get a preview of Alfred Omega’s coming attractions in the final paragraphs of It Happened in Boston? What they actually represent isn’t entirely clear. But think about it: There are hundreds of churches in Boston, and by some unconscious decision, Greenan concluded his novel about a tangible encounter with God in the exact location where scientists and drug-swallowing subjects attempted a startlingly similar feat.
It happened in Boston.
TEN
Something in the Bricks
ON SEPTEMBER 11, 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. and the president of Boston University posed on the stone stairs of the school’s Marsh Chapel for a photograph.
King was at the peak of fame. A year earlier, he had delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington; he would win the Nobel Peace Prize in December. As his star rose, threats of violence mounted, and King wanted his papers kept safe for posterity. His choice of institution: Boston University, where he had received his doctorate in theology in 1955. “I had the privilege of studying here for three years,” King told a reporter, “and it was this university that meant so much to me in terms of the formulation of my thinking and the ideas that have guided my life.” Boston was a second home to the Atlanta native. It was the city where he met his future wife—over lunch at Sharaf’s on Mass. Ave.—and found a mentor in Howard Thurman, who conveyed to him Gandhi’s belief in nonviolence as a force “more positive than electricity.”
On April 5, 1968, thousands thronged outside that same church to mourn King, assassinated the day before in Memphis. The crowd spilled onto the sidewalk underneath a low, gray sky. “A few years ago, a young man walked up these steps and used our classrooms and read our books,” Dean Robert Hamill pronounced. “Today he walks no more on this plaza or walks the streets of America. The world asks, ‘What is happening in our land?’”
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• • •
THROUGH THE EARLY PART of the twentieth century, Boston had a reputation as a racially progressive city, though contradictions were rife. The Puritans claimed to find slavery repugnant, but Massachusetts still played a vital role in the slave trade. The first colony to adopt slavery, Massachusetts was also the first state in the union to abolish it. The Beacon Hill brownstone of escaped Kentucky slave Lewis Hayden became an important stop on the Underground Railroad, and it was in Boston that William Lloyd Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society, working alongside Frederick Douglass.
After the Civil War, tensions developed between the growing number of Cotton Belt migrants and the small but influential group of “Black Brahmins” on Beacon Hill. Disputes rose about everything from where to hang your laundry to the acceptability of throwing dice in the streets. “To Boston-born blacks, the lesson was clear,” J. Anthony Lukas wrote in Common Ground, his Pulitzer Prize–winning book about race relations in Boston. The newcomers were “dragging them under, destroying their ‘special relationship’ with whites.”
In the coming decades, the number of African Americans arriving in the Commonwealth continued to grow, soon far outnumbering the Black Brahmins, moving into the brownstones of the South End and Roxbury. In the century between the end of the Civil War and 1968, the black population of Boston grew from 2 percent to 15 percent; most of the increase was between 1940 and 1960, as whites moved to the suburbs. While the black population grew, opportunities did not. “The only Black people I saw were people who had mops, or were driving the elevator up and down,” according to John Curtis Jones, who grew up in Roxbury in the 1940s. “They were doormen, cab drivers, factory workers, and maybe working in the garage.”
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