Boston Babylon peels back the layers of a city often overshadowed by its colonial past to reveal a raw, untamed musical underworld that has shaped American rock & roll for more than seven decades. From the devastating winds of Hurricane Carol in 1954—toppling the Old North Church’s steeple and cracking Boston’s veneer—to punk-fueled unrest on the Esplanade in the 1990s, the book charts a turbulent relationship with rebellion, creativity, and cultural transformation that runs parallel to the city’s official story.

Curated by Charles William White III with unprecedented access to The David Bieber Archives, Boston Babylon blends rigorous research with vivid first-person accounts, interviews, and rare photographs. It moves through defining flashpoints: the racially charged MIT Riot of 1956; moral panics and bans that drove rock underground in the late 1950s; folk revival and psychedelic experimentation around Harvard; and Boston’s consequential roles in the British Invasion and American Punk scenes.

Along the way, the narrative tracks iconic figures—Gram Parsons, Joan Baez, Billy Squier—alongside darker forces such as Mel Lyman and Myles Connor, capturing the city’s constant interplay of light and shadow. It recounts moments when music bent history—James Brown’s televised concert that cooled civil unrest, the Rolling Stones’ Boston Garden show saved by Kevin White after a near-cancellation—and argues that Boston’s rock story is inseparable from struggles over identity, censorship, and creative freedom. Bold and unflinching, Boston Babylon reframes Boston as a cultural battleground where music became weapon, refuge, and voice.