Here is more than an hour of untelescoped Beaker Street with
Clyde Clifford on Friday night, June 26 1970, from 11:00pm to 12:14am. This is submitted by Thomas Connelley of
Carbondale, IL.
This aircheck has surfaced before -- it was posted in
September 2008 on the old AJ Lindsay KAAY Blog. However, that aircheck was of lower audio quality and contained
some music spliced in at the beginning and end, perhaps as a reconstruction of
the original aircheck.
This new aircheck submittal is longer and superb quality, it
sounds like an in-studio tape of the show.
Tom sent us a few comments about the aircheck:
“The history of how this made it onto CD can only be
speculated. This was among my younger
brother’s music collection when he passed away. He and his roommate had a CD recorder. There are a couple of short glitches in the audio that sound like
a tape deck auto-reversing or the CD recorder being paused to resume with
another tape. The show is uncut other
than the short glitches where practically no music was even lost. The last song is a 19+ minute song, so only
the first couple of minutes are on this CD.
But it is a Beaker Street classic, so please include the part that is
there.” (note: it is India, by The
Corporation).
“As a matter of personal history, I grew up in Little
Rock. And as with others that I have
spoken with, Beaker Street changed my life.
The music on the show prompted me to become a professional
musician. I played my first
professional (paying) gig in the seventh grade in 1968! I also had dreams of being on the radio
which I accomplished later in life. I
wish that I still had the armful of cassette tapes that I had back in the day
of KAAY and Beaker Street. Little did I
know how important the memory of this radio station would be to me and so many
others 45 years later!”
Beside the question of how this aircheck originated, there
is also a mystery over Clyde Clifford’s opening remark where it sounds like he
is saying goodbye to another jock at the station.
Clyde: “Hmmmm, you
say this is your last night, eh?”
Unidentified voice: “Ah, feels like it”.
Clyde: “Feels like
it.”
Unidentified voice: “Feels like it, man…”
Clyde: “Well, that’s
the way it goes. So let’s go…”
Does anybody know who this guy was???
A big thank-you to Tom for submitting this aircheck, and for
compiling a discography of the music:
Sugarloaf –
Green Eyed Lady
Sugarloaf –
Train Kept a Rollin’
Temptations
– Ball of Confusion
East of
Eden – Xhorkom/Ramadhan/In the Snow For a Blow
Flow –
Arleen
East of
Eden – Gum Arabic/Confucius
Grand Funk
– Hooked on Love
MC5 – Rambling Rose
Bob Dylan – Like A Rolling Stone
John Hartford – To Say
Amboy Dukes – Prodigal Man
The Corporation – India
This was originally recorded on an 80 minute 8-TRACK tape cartridge! How cool! Listen closely and you can hear the machine switch tracks at 20:19, 40:41, and 1:00:52.
ReplyDeleteAWESOME!
DeleteOriginally recorded on 8-Track. How awesome is that?
ReplyDeleteAlso, for what it's worth, MC5 plays Kick Out the Jams, right after Rambling Rose and the Amboy Dukes song is Prodigal Son, not Prodigal Man. ; )
ReplyDeleteThanks for the info! I also was not sure of the song Flow - Aleen which I don't remember hearing before.
DeleteActually, you know what? According to wikipedia's track listing for the Amboy Dukes album 'Migration,' the song IS called Prodigal Man. Clyde introduces it as Prodigal Son and fooled me. ; )
ReplyDeleteFantastic! Thanks so much!!
ReplyDeleteJust so cool and sad too. I spent many a night with a transistor radio under my pillow on school nights listening to Beaker Street, the only source of cool, dark, non-mainstreamed music of that era and where I Iived.in a very rural ,remote, country setting.Thanks for this and thank you Beaker Street.
ReplyDeleteI can echo your exact emotions down to the settling down at night with a transistor radio (my mom had given me one year for my birthday)..
DeleteThose days are so special to me. Where has time gone? I can see in my minds eye my younger self trying to get the exact position so no static would be herd while listening to KAAY before I fell asleep.
I did this many years.. many years later I’d remember Becker Street and look it up online only to be surprised that so very many my age had been doing the same thing I had been doing too! I’m so happy many people have fond memories of this radio station. Life is so short.
Hey y'all I live in south Mississippi about 80 miles from the gulf coast and got it down here loud and clear on most nights. Loved it to that's where I first heard Rush and none top 40 hits for the first time. Those where the good days back then. Smoking and drinking with beaker street playing on the am radio.
DeleteI actually know the man who recorded this broadcast. His name is Ray. He and his brother John would stay up late at night as teenagers and record these broadcasts (there are MANY of them) on an 8-track recorder in the front seat of their 1957 Chevy in their parent's garage. Ray originally started the transfers in the mid 1990's from 8-track to cassette tape as the 8-tracks were becoming brittle at that point. So, many of the recordings are actually transfers on CD from cassette transfers of the original 8-Tracks. If you're ever in the Little Rock area, you can get far more of the story and history by visiting Been Around Records on University Avenue.
ReplyDeleteThis is great. I spent many a long night sitting in my '66 Chrysler Newport, listening to Beaker Street until it went off. This was around 1974 through 1977. I lived in Marshfield, Missouri, where KAAY came in nice and strong after dark. I long to recapture that rapture that I felt, discovering music I'd never hear otherwise, and feeling like part of a secret, very cool club. Thank you, Beaker Street!
ReplyDeleteWell, me too. KAAY was my lifeline during the summers of 1970 and 1971 in central Illinois, when I was home from college, and with nothing else remotely worth listening to on the radio. Whenever I could, I would hunker down in the basement of my parents' house and get my fix of psychedelia interspersed with the spacey background music behind Clifford's spellbinding between-songs patter. The AM signal would fade in and out on my radio, enhancing the otherworldly vibe. Thank you for this!
ReplyDeleteAfter losing our home when I was 12 in Waveland, Miss. to hurricane Camille (on the weekend of Woodstock) we ended up in Bogalusa, LA. It was there I was introduced to Beaker Street and a little later, getting stoned. Spent a lot of time on my own in that town and Beaker Street was my asylum. Lucky for me my older brother and his friends would let me go with them to New Orleans to the Warehouse On Tchoupitoulas to see some of the music I heard on Beaker Street.Late nights were great listening to Clyde and the music. Ooooh,what a lucky man I waaas. Thanks for letting me get stoned on the memories.
ReplyDeleteFor everyone here on Beaker Street, here is a whole bunch of Beaker Street airchecks I wanna share with you all from my Dropbox. It starts in 1970 and goes all the way to the very last B.S. show in 2011 (Clyde Clifford will be missed)! You don't need a Dropbox account to access, download, and listen to the tracks! The link is below for you to either click or copy and paste it to another browser! ENJOY AND RELIVE BEAKER STREET!
ReplyDeletehttps://www.dropbox.com/sh/7t7y9fpgsrdsvd7/AAB6a5F4Eh_M_jB38a5JrIvJa?dl=0
Thank you very much.
DeleteI too used to listen late at night on a small transistor radio. Does anyone remember where the spooky stories came from. I think it was KAAY also. Stories about ghost trains etc
ReplyDeleteWouldn't it be so cool to have a Beaker Street reunion to connect with fellow Beaker Streeters, swap stories, and reminisce!
ReplyDeletewe used to listen to beaker street when we camped out on the hill above algonquin park. it was the only place high enough to get the signal and we had to use a huge radio that used c cells and had a really wide tuner
ReplyDeleteI listened to Beeker Street starting in the summer of '73 in Richfield Mn. It was at the time the coolest station on the airwaves. I miss that time so much. All my relatives were still alive and I was a 17 year old kid with no responsibilities. How time goes so fast. The friends O listened with are mostly dead now. Thanks Beeker Street for the memories.
ReplyDeleteI listened all the way through high school. Rural central IL nobody in my school listened to anything like Beeker Street. I also enjoyed Beeker Theater.
ReplyDeleteJanuary 1971 we moved to Kansas from Fayetteville, N.C. Fayetteville wasn't a beautiful town. But, because of Vietnam the town had an influx of young blood from all over the states, it was shaking. So, it was pretty Kool back then as there were Hippie clothing shops and head shops. I actually bought my first pair of bell-bottoms downtown. But, As an Army Brat in Kansas just removed from the mist of My Generation, Beaker Street was an extension line of freedom for me. Kansas was so isolated, it was like being sentenced to purgatory. Man, I needed Beaker Street because the times were a changing as BD would say. You could feel it and taste it. I don't know what these times are, now. But back then, Beaker Street would take you there.
ReplyDeleteListened to KAAY in rural southeast Wisconsin late sixties, early seventies. Still remember BloodRock, Arlo's "Alice's Restaurant," late nights in a van of people high up on hills where we could get in-and-out reception. Clyde was so understated cool, too!
ReplyDeleteAll I can say is I am grateful to join your family. I remember back in 1969/1970, picking up BS around 1100pm CST, and it would come booming in, in Kansas City/Independence, Missouri. Such good times, I am sure when we cross to the "other side" that we can witness another kind of Beeker Street, called Nirvana! Rock on!!
ReplyDeleteFWIW our local FM station has a Beaker Street tribute hour. It's
ReplyDeleteKCCK-FM in Cedar Rapids IA. kcck.org is the website. It's on at
9:00 PM Friday's CST. John Hein has Clyde's blessing as he has appeared on the show. I love it, Steve
My buddies Carl Paul and I would listen to BS in the big Parking lot by Henninger/Bayliss dorms at WIU because that was the best open space for reception, after coming back from town on Saturday nights, dates, a few uptown (MACOMB)beers, or a LAKER(beer bash at LAKE ARGYLE STATE PARK), BYE BYE MISS AMERICAN PIE/BALLAD OF THE USS TITANIC ETC!!!!!
ReplyDelete