Beaker Street
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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 Little Rock, Arkansas clear channel, 50,000 watt AM radio station KAAY late in 1966 and ran through the mid-1970's, when the rise in popularity of FM radio began to impact the operations of many AM stations. 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.
[edit] History
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. After leaving KAAY, Beaker Street remained a fond memory for many fans. When KAAY was sold and converted from a rock music to a religious format in 1985, Clyde Clifford was invited back to handle the final hours of rock music programming on March 3, 1985, before the station converted to a religious format. At the conclusion of this melancholy and somewhat emotional program, considered by many to be the last Beaker Street, the final song played by Clyde Clifford was 'The Circle Game' by Joni Mitchell.
Years later, Beaker Street returned to the airwaves every Sunday night from 7 p.m. until midnight Central Time, first on KZLR (KZ-95) and later on Magic 105.1 FM KMJX. During that time the show was also streamed live via the internet, from the Beaker street homepage. As a result of a change in station programming format, the final Beaker Street on Magic 105 was broadcast February 17, 2008. Beaker Street begin broadcasting from its new home at The Point 94.1 FM on Sunday March 9, 2008, continuing to occupy the 7:00pm-midnight time slot on Sunday evenings. Ironically, the studio of The Point 94.1 FM is located in the same building (2400 Cottondale Lane in Little Rock, Arkansas) where Clyde Clifford broadcast the last hours of rock music programming on KAAY twenty-three years earlier. The first song of the new Beaker Street was, appropriately, the last song from KAAY, 'The Circle Game' by Joni Mitchell.
[edit] 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.
- Later the background music was changed when an album by a group called Head was released in 1970. Side 1 of the album contained one track titled "Cannibis Sativa" which became the new background "music". The same background "music" is still in use on the show today.
- 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.
- For fans of Beaker Street, many album cuts became favorites over the years. One such song was a melancholy rendition of a Tom Paxton song, Cindy's Cryin, performed by the Little Rock band Deepwater Reunion with vocalist Barbara Raney. Very few original tapes of this performance exist, but a similar version of Cindy's Cryin was recreated by talented fans of the music.
