2.

Change the Tracks

1969-71

In the summer of 1968 I was thirteen, and in typical teenage fashion, ready to move on from sharing the car radio with my parents. I was looking for something different, and growing up in Boston in the late 1960s and early '70s, I was damn lucky. We had one of the first commercial alternative radio stations ever, WBCN, a station that was really a way of life for someone coming of age in those radicalised times. Man, what a time to grow up. The excitement was non-stop, electrifying. Everything felt new because everything was new. Bands didn't have to throw away the rulebook as there were no rulebooks written yet. Every day there was a new discovery to be made, and WBCN was your guide - in both politics and music.

There was a fight to wage, and win, with authority. They were the days of the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon, the Black Panthers, Yippies, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the battle for civil rights. Believe what you've seen and read about these times. The music and WBCN - with its line-up of DJs, such as Charles Laquidara (fired after speaking out against the Polaroid Corporation for supplying lenses to the army for bombers, but reinstated after protests), Peter Wolf (who would become lead singer of the J. Geils Band) and radical newsman Danny Schechter, the 'news dissector' (who would later help me with the Sun City project) - spoke to us and for us. These guys were my teachers. Spurred on by them, my crew and I would participate in the anti-war protests in Boston. I was suspended from junior high for skipping class, heading up to the high school and inciting the students there to leave their lessons to protest the war.

The music they played on WBCN? From English medieval folk to west coast acid rock to acoustic jazz to psychedelic soul - there were no boundaries. I grew up listening to everything. Bands like Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Steve Miller Blues Band, Big Brother with Janis Joplin. Al Green and the Mahavishnu Orchestra would merge with Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Charles Mingus, Horace Silver and Muddy Waters. Sly and the Family Stone, the Allman Brothers, James Taylor, Joe Simon. Pentangle and Fleetwood Mac would battle it out with Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, The Temptations, Jethro Tull and the Mothers of Invention.

Boston was the last stop on the concert tour route that most groups would take before hitting New York City, so I was lucky enough to see many of these bands perform in my home town. And when they played Boston, they typically played the 'Gahden': Boston Garden, where the Celtics played and I happened to have a great connection. Or my dad did. One of his business colleagues, Holly Holiver, a hat-maker, had a season ticket for the Celtics games. Holly introduced my dad to the guy at the box office, Ed Mullaney. This was the box office that handled the tickets for all the concerts at the Garden, so my dad had five great seats on hold for every gig. We had to pay, but .

My friend Ralph Robinson and I on the Newman Junior High School football field, 1971.

While I couldn't convince my parents to let me go to Woodstock with my older cousin Marcia, they were comfortable with me going to the Garden, where I saw my first concert: Led Zeppelin, Johnny Winter and the MC-fucking-5 on 25 October 1969. I was fourteen, and I was going for it with my crew - Wade, Ralph, Bill and Jackie. We were a unique group. Wade was already a decent guitarist and had a lot of freedom, seeing as his bohemian parents owned the local record shop, and he was able to stay up late watching Johnny Carson. Ralph, Bill and I had somewhat stricter parents. Bill ran cross-country and loved the Mothers of Invention. Jackie was the ladies' man and the crew's tough guy. Ralph, who I'm still in touch with, was always messing around with his cameras, loved Miles Davis and had a water-bed. We all shared a love of rock music and marijuana. We came to that first concert with a bag of popcorn and a pocket full of joints. It was an unbelievable gig, with the MC5 kicking off with their proto-punk anthem 'Kick Out the Jams'. The sound wasn't great, but the energy was everything. I loved Johnny Winter, and his version of Dylan's 'Highway 61 Revisited' was unbelievable, probably my favourite cover ever. While Johnny was playing a rocking B. B. King track, a fight broke out in the crowd between two warring motorcycle gangs. As the lights came on, I'll never forget seeing blood spurting into the air as one biker hit another over the head with a crutch. To the fourteen-year-old me, this was rock'n'roll!

Zeppelin came on next, rocking their entire debut album (and sounding pretty much just like the record), as well as tracks from their yet-to-be-released second LP. One life-defining moment for me was closing my eyes while stoned as Robert Plant's voice decayed into eternity, singing the words 'Woman you need me .' Not bad for a first gig.

My second, a month later, wasn't bad either: Terry Reid, B. B. King, Ike and Tina Turner and the Rolling Stones. Besides the fact that the first live female rocker I got to see was the amazing Tina Turner, the headlining Stones were at their peak, playing lots of tracks from Beggars Banquet, with Mick Taylor on guitar on his first US tour.

While Ike and Tina Turner could share the stage with the Rolling Stones - in my new world, black and white bands would gladly appear together - racism and anti-Semitism were sadly still in the air in Boston. The Celtics were coached by a Jew, Arnold 'Red' Auerbach, and led by a black man, William 'Bill' Russell. The team would be the first NBA side to have an all-black starting squad and a black coach, but Boston itself was known throughout the league as a racist town, and with good reason. When most Americans of a certain age think of the city, they remember the racism shown by the citizens of South Boston during desegregation in 1974-5. Bused-in black children were jeered at, menaced and attacked by white kids and their parents. It was something reminiscent of the Deep South, and it featured on the national TV news every night. My parents were outraged.

My grandmother Jennie Levicheska Baker, 1971.

I had been born and raised in the city of Boston, proper, where my Ashkenazi grandparents had settled after leaving their homelands. My dad's mother, Jennie Levicheska, had made her way, alone, on a freighter from Chernobyl, Ukraine, to Boston, where she met my grandfather, Arthur Henry Baker (his name was actually Artur Beker, but whoever took the information at immigration anglicised it), who was from Augustów, Poland. My mother's parents, Jacob and Jeanette (Salamoff) Kaplan were also of Polish and Ukrainian descent. We were a small, close-knit family. My dad had two sisters, Edith and Dorothy, who had three kids between them - my only first cousins. We spent lots of time together, especially when celebrating the Jewish holidays with my grandmother Jennie, who cooked a great brisket and amazing sweets, which I'd pocket any time I could.

My parents, sister and I lived in the city of Boston until I was ten, when we moved out to the suburb of Needham, to our own house, complete with a backyard. Little did we know we were moving to a part of town that wasn't very tolerant of people of the black or Jewish persuasion, of which I was one. I was called a 'kike' for the first time by my Irish 'friend' John, who, I assume, hadn't learnt the word on a game show. There were not many Jews in Needham, but no black kids in our school or anywhere else, as far as I could tell. When the first black family moved in, it was big news in our 'hood, and the welcome wagon was not waiting for them. Apart from, I can proudly say, my dad. Being Jewish, he'd experienced anti-Semitism and wouldn't stand for the racism of some of our neighbours. I'll never forget that long walk down our street to knock on the door of the Evanses, welcoming them to the neighbourhood. They were very nice and accepted our hospitality.

There weren't any black kids in my school until 1971, when a programme called METCO started to bus in from Boston black and Latino kids who wanted to get a better education. It was great for me because I could finally expand my horizons a bit. I had always loved black music and respected black athletes but had no black friends. It took a while before the new kids became comfortable with their surroundings, and it was sports and music that helped break down the walls. I became friends with a METCO kid named Taweh Baysolow, from Nigeria. He played soccer and ended up being a star on the high-school team, and we were both into Isaac Hayes. Then my sax-playing friend Tom Nutile joined a band that one of the METCO kids was in called the Concessions. They ended up gigging at our school, playing convincing versions of Sly and the Family Stone songs. Everyone in the band was black, apart from Tom (who ended up with a black girlfriend).

As I was navigating...