Beaker Street
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Beaker Street with Clyde Clifford was the first underground music program broadcast regularly on a commercial AM radio station in the central US.
Beaker Street began on KAAY late in 1966 and ran through the mid-1970's. The program delivered the music of the late 1960s counterculture to the hinterland of America, to remote places where such music could not otherwise be heard over the air waves. Beaker Street attracted a legion of fans across the Midwest with its pioneering format which featured long album cuts from rock artists who otherwise would not get commercial radio airplay. The show pre-dated the FM radio boom of the mid 1970's and foretold the rise of Album Oriented Rock and Classic Rock formats.
Clyde Clifford was the prototype of the laid-back late-night FM DJ. His on-air comments and music introductions were delivered softly and deliberately over a background of space music and eerie sound effects.
Beaker Street can still be heard today. It airs every Sunday night from 7 p.m. until midnight Central Time, on Magic 105.1 FM KMJX. And it is also streamed live via the internet, from the Beaker street homepage (see External Links below).
Beaker Street Trivia
- The man behind the microphone at Beaker Street was Dale Seidenschwarz, aka Clyde Clifford. The inside joke at KAAY was that the on-air personalities took their stage names from the board of directors of LIN broadcasting, the owners of KAAY. Clyde W. Clifford was the comptroller general of LIN.
- KAAY would not pay for both an overnight broadcast engineer and an announcer so Clyde did double duty and broadcast from the transmitter room. The spacey background music of Beaker Street was used (in part) to mask the noise of the transmitter.
- The original background music came from the dream sequence in the movie Charade, whose soundtrack was composed by Henry Mancini.
- The name Beaker Street was an oblique reference to LSD. The program featured Acid rock and its name alluded to the fact that "Acid" ( i.e., LSD ) was created in a laboratory beaker. [1]
- The station tried to be as mysterious as possible, at one time even running a contest for listeners to try to guess how to spell Beaker, suggesting that it was spelled in some unconventional fashion.
