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Other Mixes By Dead Man

Artist	Song	Buy
MC5 (buzz)	Ramblin' Rose Kick Out the Jams (1969)
Buffalo Springfield (buzz)	Bluebird Buffalo Springfield (long version from the Atco compilation) (1973, originally recorded in 1967)
Jefferson Airplane (buzz)	Have You Seen the Saucers Early Flight (1974, originally released in 1970)
Butterfield Blues Band (buzz)	East West East West (1966)
Deep Purple (buzz)	Hush Shades of Deep Purple (1968)
Jerthro Tull (buzz)	A New Day Yesterday Stand Up (1969)
Pink Floyd (buzz)	Astonomy Domine Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967)
Jimi Hendrix (buzz)	Freedom The Cry of Love (1971)
King Crimson (buzz)	Starless Red (1974)
Head (buzz)	Cannabis Sativa Head (1969)

Comment:

This mix is a nostalgic look back at a radio show that I listened to when I was first discovering music. 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 (I still don’t know quite what “pork belly futures” are). 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 broadcasting primarily to small towns in the Midwest. “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 Clifford play whatever he liked. Clifford 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 that would never be heard otherwise on AM radio (four of the tracks in this mix are over nine minutes long). “Beaker Street” anticipated the FM AOR format, 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.

One distinctive thing about the show was the background music Clyde Clifford used for his voiceovers. “Cannabis Sativa” by Head, the spacey 17-minute electronic track that closes this mix, gave the program even more of an aura. Initially, however, Clifford used this for an audio bed to drown out the sound of the transmitter’s cooling fans, which could be heard in the poorly insulated studio.

I thought “Beaker Street” was the coolest thing I had ever heard. My taste in music has changed somewhat since those days but discovering that show gave me a sense that there was great music to be heard if you knew where to find it. "Art of the Mix" was a similar sort of discovery for me, and this mix marks my three-year anniversary on AotM. By the way, “Beaker Street” was resurrected several years ago and is now streamed on the Internet on Sunday evenings, which you can hear through the Beaker Street website.

The cover image is a poster I got from the station sometime just before the show closed down. The “Beaker Street” poster only cost a quarter, so I wrote and asked them to play something by the MC5 (Clyde Clifford chose “Ramblin’ Rose”) and I taped a quarter to the letter. Best money I ever spent.

So just out of curiosity, did anyone else ever catch “Beaker Street”?

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