July 24, 2007

• Great moments in Radio, pt 1

       Great Moments In Radio, pt. I 

   

  There used to be a fast-food chain called Burger Chef. And, behind the counter of the Panama City outlet, there used to be a tall, skinny, naive but earnest young fellow taking your orders. That was humble narrator, working after school, sometimes until 11 p.m., to earn gas money and independence. The drive home after work was about 20 minutes every night until Doug Nolin, a fellow worker, told me about Beaker Street. We were both 12th-graders, but at different schools, and I thought Doug was so cool; he showed me a pot-seed once, and his daddy owned a bar in town. One night after closing, he told me to tune in 1090 AM. "It's KAAY in Little Rock, but it comes in pretty good, and this guy, Clyde Clifford plays some heavy stuff." 

  Doug didn't say "stuff", of course. he said "XXXX". So wanting to be cool, like Doug, and wanting to find out what "heavy" was before he found out that I didn't know, I twisted the dial from WGNE 1490(Mellow Sounds of the Night), and heard ,for the first time, "You Shook Me", by Led Zeppelin. It shook me all right, what the heck kinda music is that? The song ended, and there were weird sounds coming from my speaker, electronic whines, beeps and whirs, fading in and out. Not loud, but spacy, like something from a Star Trek encounter with friendly aliens. Over the background noise came a deep, soft, almost bored voice telling us what we had just heard. I had never heard a dj talk like that; normal dj's talk like they are covering the Hindenburg disaster, only louder and more frantic.

  "This is Clyde Clifford, and this is Beaker Street. Now Some Grand Funk" and the next song starts. No commercial, no build-up, it was all about the music. Music that didn't get played in Panama City until years later. My ride home that night, and every night thereafter was a bit less direct. That first night, to my best recollection, I first heard Grand Funk Railroad, Jethro Tull, Rod Stewart, King Crimson, and  a guy who deserves a whole blog entry unto himself, Exuma, the Obeah Man. "XXXX!", said I. Needless to say, my Herb Alpert albums never sounded as "neat" after that. I got home quite a bit later than normal that night, as I was too busy listening to my musical universe expand in the manner of a rose in a time-lapse film. My schoolwork suffered after that night, as I started falling asleep in class, so I quit the job and eked out a diploma. But there was always Friday night.....

  Clyde had 3 hours, 5 nights a week, from 11 p.m. until 2 in the morning to play whatever he liked. KAAY had a directional signal license, meaning that they could  transmit at a higher-than-normal power, as long as they placed nulls in the direction of other stations on the same frequency. So they had a 50,000-watt transmitter at KAAY, beaming north and south. They could be heard from Montana to South America, it was said. I personally picked up the show in Key West one night, static-filled but beautiful. To this day, when I meet someone of my tender years, I ask them if they ever heard of Beaker Street. The ones who have usually say, "Clyde Clifford? Hell yeah, whatever happened to him?"

  Clyde(not his real name), started at KAAY about 1962, as an engineer. Along the way, he picked up an FCC broadcasting license, but he didn't use it much until 1966. That was when he and friends at the station started listening to promo albums sent by the record companies, albums that were not getting airplay, except at some FM stations on the west coast. AM radio was very tightly formatted back then, like FM is now(again, another day, another blog), and it was hard to break new acts, or any song over 3 minutes long.

  Now, due to regulations, KAAY had to keep their transmitter, and the generators that powered it, on 24 hours a day, even though they signed off at 11 pm. Clyde was the night engineer at their tower, and he talked the owner into letting him put on a show at night from 11-2am. The boss figured, why not? It didn't cost any more, Clyde was already there, so Beaker street was born. The name came from the fact that what he played was called "acid rock" by some, and acid (LSD, for you innocent, dewey-eyed ones out there) was made in a beaker. He was broadcasting from the noisy room that housed the equipment under the tower, so , between songs, he played tapes of weird sounds to mask the background din. Some sounds came from a Henry Mancini LP,  a fact which thrills me to no end. Mancini was, along with the aforementioned Tijuana Brass, my musical hero before my introduction to Rock. Nice little dovetail there; cosmic, almost.

  The show's popularity spread, mostly in the same manner as I got the news, and soon, Clyde was getting baskets of fan mail from around the world. That late at night, the signal would bounce off the ionosphere, and land haphazardly anywhere in world. He got requests from G.I.'s in Vietnam, who would prove they were listening by sending him a playlist from a previous night. There was never much advertising, for which I was grateful. Most of the ads that got played were by businesses that begged for the opportunity. The ad guys at the station had expected the show to tank, and never tried to sell airtime on the show. Also, they were pretty square, and didn't know how to market this phenomenon. But there was enough income to justify continuing the show until the station was sold to a Christian broadcasting network. The "mighty 1090" became the "Almighty 1090".

  By this time, Clyde had moved on, But he was called in to do one last show before the format change. Oh, if only a tape of that night was available! So, whatever happened to him?

  Well, good news, he is still on the air, albeit at a different station, an FM station in Little Rock, still playing and breaking new groups like it mattered, and it does. Better still, he is on the internet now, so no longer do we have to worry about losing the signal to the vagaries of weather. If I managed to pique your interest, and you want to learn more, such as his real name, and intricacies of  '60's radio, go here

  • 9:35 pm
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