Turn Me On, Dead Man

I grew up in a small town in southern Minnesota and, as you might imagine, I didn’t have much access to cool record stores or radio stations. The one radio station in town devoted quite a bit of airtime to the farm reports, which are so monotonous that they can bring the listener to an almost Zen-like state after a time. Then one night I was changing the stations on my radio and I tuned in 1090 AM, KAAY from Little Rock, Arkansas, and I heard the program “Beaker Street”.

“Beaker Street” ran from 1966 through the mid-1970s and was patterned after underground radio shows that existed in large cities at the time, but the 50,000 watt KAAY was directionally aimed to up the midsection of the United States. “Beaker Street” was broadcast in a makeshift studio at the transmitter just outside of Little Rock and Clyde Clifford served as both the DJ and the engineer for the program. KAAY did this to save money, because stations like KAAY with directional antennas were required to have an engineer at the transmitter around the clock. “Beaker Street” was broadcast in the wee hours of the morning and KAAY let Clyde Clifford play whatever he liked. He played all sorts of hippie and progressive music (the name “Beaker Street” is supposedly a reference to LSD being made in beakers, as the show played plenty of acid rock), particularly longer album tracks seldom heard on AM radio. “Beaker Street” anticipated the FM AOR and classic rock formats, but the show didn’t adhere to any sort of format constraints. “Beaker Street” was one of those maverick shows where you might hear anything.

I thought (and still think) "Beaker Street" was the coolest thing I had ever heard.  One distinctive thing about the show was the background music used as an audio bed for voiceovers between tracks. Years later I wrote to Clyde Clifford and asked him where he got that music.  He told me that it was  “Cannabis Sativa” by Head, a spacey 17-minute electronic track. Though this track added enhanced Beaker Street's ultracool atmosphere, it had a functional purpose, too.  He used this as  an audio bed to drown out the sound of the transmitter’s cooling fans, which could be heard in the poorly insulated studio.

I got this poster from KAAY before they pulled the plug on "Beaker Street."  I wrote Clyde Clifford and asked him to play something by the MC5 (he chose “Ramblin’ Rose” off of Kick Out the Jams) and I requested a poster.  I kept it over the years and scanned it to use as a cover image for a tribute compilation I posted on the mixtape sites "Art of the Mix" and "Zen Running Order."  It's interesting to see how many other websites my scan has popped up on.

"Beaker Street" has been the subject of a Ph.D. dissertation and a fanclub on Facebook.  “Beaker Street” was resurrected several years ago and is now streamed on the Internet on Sunday evenings on The Point 94.1, which you can hear through the Beaker Street website.