Beaker Street with Clyde Clifford

Airs every Sunday night from 7pm-12am.The longest running radio program in
Arkansas history is still on the air… and now with The Point 94.1 !

Beaker Street 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 The Point 94.1.

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 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.

This is a history of the events leading up to the creation of Beaker Street, and then
as much of the history of things as I can remember.  Beaker Street was the first
"Underground Music" program broadcast regularly on a commercial AM radio
station in the central US. KAAY was (and still is) a 50,000 watt, class 1C AM
|station licensed on 1090 KHz, to Little Rock, Arkansas.
 
Beaker Street began on KAAY late in 1966 and ran through 1972. Then, years
later I was asked to join the old KAAY gang for one last show, the day KAAY was sold into religious servitude. I was touched by being given the honor of being the last jock, with the last rock programming to air on "The Mighty 1090". I had been pursuing the idea of returning to the air with Beaker Street on KAAY shortly before learning that the station had been sold. Now, it seemed that the night that I delivered that great old rocker to the evangelists that I, too would become history. That last hour, the thought that was ever present, was "tonight is the last time I'll ever do this
do this." And there the matter stood.
 
Then, years later, I was approached by KZLR-FM (KZ-95) wanting to know if I
would like to return Beaker Street to the air. By that time, many of the things I had
been playing as Underground, had rightfully been recognized as the rock classics
they were, and were in play on any number of stations. I was not sure there was any place for an ageing "Super-hippy", and an ageing 60s show. Remarkably, there was.
I stayed with KZ-95 about 3 years, and when they changed call letters, and format,
I was welcomed by Magic 105, and when they changed format, I was welcomed by The Point 94.1.

On Air Details

Beaker Street with Clyde Clifford airs every Sunday night from 7pm-12am.

The longest running radio program in Arkansas history is still on the air.