Radio Free Boston Read Free

least one that was filmed in Hollywood). This initial shock led into his next choice, the breezy blues of Cream’s “I Feel Free.” With that first complete song, WBCN’S new chapter, “The American Revolution,” one that would span nearly forty-one years and five months, had officially stepped out of its mother ship.
    As the prophet of “The American Revolution,” Ray Riepen left a lasting impression with anyone who worked for him at WBCN or the Boston Tea Party. “[He was] an extremely intelligent man with a fair amount of W.C. Fields in him,” Joe Rogers recalled. “When I met him he was living in an apartment in Cambridge with a mattress on the floor and a stack of books almost up to the ceiling. The man had one three-piece lawyer’s suit and a couple of shirts. That was it. In the back of his Lincoln Continental was his laundry . . . in the trunk.” Tommy Hadges described him as “a most unlikely entrepreneur” who drove his Lincoln “barefoot,” also saying that his first meeting with Riepen “was in his beautiful, luxury apartment, but there wasn’t a stitch of furniture in the entire place. To sit down, there was an orange crate! This was the guy that was going to take over a radio station?” Ten years Riepen’s junior, future WBCN jock and program director Sam Kopper called him “our boss, forever in a pin-stripe blue suit; that could be daunting. But, he was a hippie in spirit, [if] not in dress or look.” The “Master Blaster,” cohost of Peter Wolf’s eventual late night WBCN radio show, added, “Ray Riepen? He was a wild dude, man; he definitely had his own style. He had this big limo and he spent more time hanging out in that car going somewhere than he did in his house! He conceptualized the whole idea of the Tea Party and WBCN when people were just starting to question authority and be free.” Truly a memorable character, Ray Riepen would shuttle in and out of Boston in barely six years, yet histenure indelibly altered the city’s cultural landscape, even if his name is often overlooked today.

    Ray Riepen, the hippie entrepreneur. Photo by Michael Dobo/Dobophoto.com .
    Ray Riepen was a bright attorney who hit town from Kansas City to pursue a master’s degree at Harvard Law School. By 1966, the seeds of the counterculture had been sown and were swiftly taking root. Change electrified the air, especially in America’s college towns, where like-minded souls gathered from their diverse and staid homes across the country to collaborate and conspire freely on campus and in smoky coffeehouses, becoming part of some vast, liberal, petri dish. Riepen swiftly caught the buzz of the changing times firsthand in Cambridge and, as a voracious reader, soaked up the rich volumes of contemporary thought expressed by intellectuals all around him. There were opportunities out there for those who could visualize them, and even though he was a thirty-year-old graduate student in a scene that soon wouldn’t trust anyone over that age, he still shared a great deal of the love-your-neighbor mentality that the hippie movement would emulate. “I’ve never done anything in my life for money,” he explained. “I’ve done things antithetical to maximizing my money, because I’ve [always] wanted to do the most tasteful and innovative things.” At the beginning of 1967, after he had clumsily and quite accidentally backed himself into a deal involving a failed South End coffeehouse on Berkeley Street called theMoondial, Riepen’s entrepreneurial spirit managed to turn that disaster into a launch of the city’s eventual preeminent rock club, the Boston Tea Party. It was not without precedent. “I owned a jazz club back in Kansas City where Count Basie got started and John Coltrane played.” (This was a measure of coolness not be lost on local jazz and R & B fanatic Peter