As a hippie entrepreneur and something of a cultural prophet, Ray Riepen left a lasting impression on anyone who worked at his two famous start-ups, The Boston Tea Party and The Cambridge Phoenix. He also spearheaded rock ‘n’ roll on WBCN. “Ray was an extremely intelligent man with a fair amount of W.C. Fields in him,” said ‘BCN jock Joe Rogers. “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.”
HARVARD LAW, THE BOSTON TEA PARTY, UNION STRIKE, DEPARTURE
Riepen came to Boston from Kansas City to pursue a degree at Harvard Law School. By 1966, the seeds of the counterculture had been sown and he’d been swept up in the buzz of the changing times, deciding to launch what became the city’s preeminent rock club, The Boston Tea Party. He also looked to the FM radio dial to establish an underground rock music radio station, approaching WBCN-FM, a struggling classical music outlet, and talking the ownership into allowing him to experiment with his concept.
After a March 15, 1968 try-out succeeded, Riepen became WBCN’s general manager, loosely shepherding a ragtag group of hippie deejays through September 1971, when they organized themselves into a labor union. By that time, though, a power struggle wasn’t worth it to Riepen, who had also been dealing staff disagreements at the Tea Party and Phoenix. The ever-enigmatic businessman sold his interests in all three of his ventures and vanished within days. Though he lived in Boston for barely six years and his name has been widely forgotten, his tenure altered the city’s cultural landscape indelibly.
(by Carter Alan)
Carter Alan is a former WBCN deejay now heard on WZLX-FM in Boston. He is the author of Radio Free Boston: The Rise and Fall of WBCN (University Press of New England, 2013).
