A conversation w/ David Bieber of the David Bieber Archives about everything from Harvard Square’s theaters and venues of yore to the current underground media in Greater Boston
It is no exaggeration to say that BINJ wouldn’t have been able to present the authentic installation our nonprofit recently staged in Harvard Square without the help of David Bieber and the dedicated team at his namesake archive.
The Norwood, Massachusetts-based trove “represents 50-plus years of collecting and preserving the popular culture, music, and media of the 20th and 21st centuries.” For our purpose of highlighting the rich past of alternative publishing in Cambridge in particular, the abyss of everything from toys and instruments to literally millions of newspapers, magazines, records, press releases, and studio reels yielded almost every vintage slice of media ephemera on display at the Harvard Square KiOSK from June into early July. (Special thanks to Joe Packard and Chuck White of the David Bieber Archives for their help in every step of the curation process, from picking items to rotating the displays.)
Bieber’s knowledge of everything from publishing to politics is vast. Per his bio, he “has acquired more than one million artifacts, building a collection ranging from vintage vinyl to antique radios, movie memorabilia to original Andy Warhol art, posters to press kits, baseball cards to bottle caps, always believing that the transitory creations of today are the treasures of the future.” Critically, he was also basically there—likely backstage—for a lot of the movements that most people have only seen in the movies or read about. Bieber tends to recall extraordinary detail, too, right down to the regional and local level.
In this short but substantial discussion, BINJ Editorial Director Chris Faraone asks Bieber about iconic counterculture memories around Cambridge—from stories about protests that unfolded in the middle of Harvard Square where Out of Town News (now the KiOSK) was located, to those involving legends of music and film such as Joni Mitchell and Jimmy Cliff who cut their teeth in the neighborhood’s coffee shops or in some cases just made a short but indelible cameo in America’s cultural-intellectual capital.
Bieber earned his master’s degree in journalism from Boston University in 1970, writing for Billboard magazine while still in school. He subsequently spent four decades-plus working in Boston music and media, “including positions as creative services director at the groundbreaking WBCN-FM for 16 years and director of special projects at the Boston Phoenix/WFNX-FM for 19 years.” In this wide-ranging conversation, Bieber leans on that experience to school the crowd on various independent and underground outlets including Old Mole and other SDS papers published in Cambridge, and as well as the alternative newspaper wars involving the Cambridge Phoenix, The Real Paper, and Boston After Dark that inspired the 1977 movie Between the Lines. Plus much more.
You can also read more from Chris Faraone about the David Bieber Archives and its colorful cast of characters here, and learn more about the collection at their site here.
