Classic rock fans rejoice at return of Beaker Street

By Stan Caldwell

stanmansportsfan.com

One of the most influential people in the history of rock music is a modest gentleman from Little Rock, Arkansas, named Dale Seidenschwarz.

That name doesn’t ring a bell? OK, maybe you know him by his stage name, Clyde Clifford.

Still not coming to you? Then you probably weren’t a teenager growing up in the middle of North America during the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

For the young folks out there – young being defined as anyone under age 45 – Clyde Clifford created the legendary Beaker Street radio show that blasted underground rock music across much of North America under the auspices of KAAY-AM in Little Rock.

KAAY was what is known as a clear-channel station, which are stations licensed to broadcast at the maximum power allowed under law for the AM band, 50,000 watts.

Radio waves work in several different ways. Amplitude modulation waves – otherwise known as AM – are shorter waves, which are subject to all sorts of atmospheric interference, especially sun rays.

That means an AM station’s range during the day is limited to whatever can push through the daytime interference, but without that interference at night, AM radio waves are restricted only by the power of the station’s output.

Stations with the maximum output of 50,000 watts are known as clear-channel stations because at night their broadcast range can extend for hundreds of miles, resulting in a clear signal from as far away as 1,000 miles from the station of origin.

Just how far can a clear-channel AM station be heard? Well, one night in early 1978, I was working a job that required me to travel between small towns in western Kansas, sometimes late at night.

One clear, icy-cold night I was driving along a highway in a company car that only had AM radio, so I was fiddling with the dial to battle boredom. I came across a clear station that had an odd weather report, temperatures in the upper 60s.

This was in mid-February on the high plains, so I stopped and paid attention. Turns out I was picking up KNX out of Los Angeles, way on the other side of two significant mountain ranges and a lot of dark desert highways in between.

Clear-channel stations were the backbone of so-called Golden Age of Radio, which lasted from the infancy of radio in the mid-1920s until the advent of television in the 1950s. Some of those stations became legendary.

The reason so many baseball fans in the Deep South were (and still are) supporters of the St. Louis Cardinals is because for many years the only major-league baseball fans in this area could listen to on a regular basis were Cardinal games broadcast on St. Louis’ KMOX.

Fans all across the nation became country music fans on Saturday nights after tuning in the Grand Ole Opry on WSM out of Nashville or the Louisiana Hayride on KWHK from Shreveport, Louisiana.

And many people in remote parts of the country could only get national news, coverage of national events and other national entertainment by listening to clear-channel radio stations.

In the 1960s, as nighttime entertainment and national news turned to television, AM radio stations turned to music in a big way, and again, clear-channel stations played a big role.

When I was growing up in Kansas, my brother and I would listen at night to the top hits on stations such as WLS, out of Chicago, KOMA, from Oklahoma City and KAAY, the Mighty 1090 out of Little Rock.

KAAY had a signal that stretched in a wide diagonal path from Montana to Miami and beyond, and in 1966, Seidenschwarz came up with the idea of a show featuring rock music that was way outside of the Top 40, the so-called underground rock format.

Seidenschwarz wasn’t the first to come up with this format. That honor probably goes to the late Tom Donahue, who started playing such music on a San Francisco FM station in early ’66.

But Seidenschwarz looked at the reach of KAAY’s signal and saw potential to bring a deeper appreciation of the rock music sweeping the land to a huge national audience, and nobody else on AM radio was doing anything like it. So, he created Beaker Street and the Clyde Clifford persona to bring that idea to life.

Clyde broadcast the show from the station’s transmitter on the outskirts of Little Rock, and the hum from the huge machine was so loud that he had to find some incidental music to cover the noise during the spoken portions of his show.

Somewhere he found a spacey bit of music that muffled the ambient sound and set just the right mood for the show called Cannabis Sativa by a band called Head. Take from that what you will.

The show came on at 11 p.m. (Central), long after the younger fans of pop music had gone to bed, and rocked until 2 a.m.

The program became an immediate hit with older teens and college-age youngsters who loved the music and could identify with Clyde’s laid-back, conversational approach when introducing songs.

Clyde Clifford played deep, and sometimes long, cuts from records by the major groups such as the Beatles, Rolling Stones and the Who, but also introduced fans who didn’t live on either coast to bands such as Santana, Ten Years After and Fleetwood Mac.

Plus, he also played music that most people had never heard before, and that most of us haven’t heard much of since.

One Beaker Street classic was The Ballad of the U.S.S. Titanic, a 13-minute long romp by a fellow named Jamie Brockett, who, to my knowledge, never surfaced with anything noteworthy again.

It was just him telling a wild story, with only his guitar as accompaniment, that referenced Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion, landlubbers battening down hatches on the Titanic and 497½ feet of rope, which sounds quizzical until you remember that traditional rope is a product of the hemp plant. Hmmmm.

KAAY’s reach spread the word of underground rock to a vast audience that even included listeners in Cuba, who secretly tuned in to Beaker Street in defiance of the Fidel Castro’s Communist regime.

One of the things that helped bond my wife and I when we first met was that we had both listened to Beaker Street when we were growing up, me in Kansas and Stephanie in her hometown of Pascagoula.

The growth of FM rock stations in the early 1970s spelled the beginning of the end of Beaker Street. FM – that is frequency modulation – signals are longer and less subject to atmospheric interference than AM signals.

Thus, the sound quality on FM stations is significantly better than on AM stations. The tradeoff, though, is a much more limited reach for FM stations than AM. Even the most powerful FM station only has a reach of about 100 miles from its source.

But the richer stereophonic quality on FM stations gave the ever-more complicated and sophisticated rock music of the ‘70s an advantage in sound over the often-haphazard, monotone signal of AM stations, and music on the radio soon passed from AM to FM.

Seidenschwarz moved on from Beaker Street in 1974, taking a job at a Little Rock FM station doing the same thing he’d done on Beaker Street. He later got out of broadcasting altogether, working at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

Beaker Street lasted on KAAY until the late ’70s with several others at the mike, and it was periodically revived over the years after that, usually with Clyde at the controls, but it had been dormant since 2011.

Now, however, Beaker Street is back, and in a form much like its former glory. In 2018, a group of veteran Little Rock radio figures got together to form Arkansas Rocks, a group of about a dozen stations across the state.

Like everyone, they saw over-the-air radio losing listeners to internet radio, satellite radio and other forms of broadcasting.

The idea behind Arkansas Rocks is to take classic rock radio beyond the same 300 songs by the same 50 or so artists that make up the bulk of what has become the classic rock formula and bring it back to a more freer form.

This being 2020, though, the group has the availability of the World Wide Web to send its signal well beyond Arkansas. The group’s website is arkansasrocks.com, and it’s just one easy click to the livestream of the broadcast.

This past New Year’s Eve, Arkansas Rocks brought Clyde Clifford out of retirement for an encore of Beaker Street, and the program was so well received that he was talked into reviving it on a regular once-a-week basis.

On May 15, the first show of the new Beaker Street aired, and the show has gotten more and more support as the weeks have passed.

Every Friday night at 9 p.m., listeners log into the Arkansas Rocks website and commune with the past for three hours of some really great music.

The show is the centerpiece of an entire evening that they call the Friday Night Chill. The Magical Mystery Tour, an hour of all Beatles music, starts the night off at 8 p.m., and the Midnight Snack, a full complete vintage album, follows Beaker Street.

The Beaker Street/Clyde Clifford Fans page on Facebook has become the go-to community for fans to groove to the music and swaps stories while listening in real time.

Among those who check in on the Beaker Street page on Facebook are a couple of us from Hattiesburg, me and my friend Scott Dossett, who undoubtedly especially enjoys the hour of nothing but the Beatles that leads into Beaker Street.

Thanks to the internet, the Beaker Street listenership includes hippies, old ones like me and youngsters with an appreciation for deep classic rock, from all over the country and, indeed, all over the globe.

A couple of fellows who used to listen to the original Beaker Street in Cuba check in from their current locations. There are American expatriates from Thailand, the Philippines and Australia, and a scattering from all over the U.S. in places like Denver, San Diego and Massachusetts.

A fellow named Kenneth Hawkins records the broadcasts from his home in St. Louis for internet availability on an MP3 format. A nice young man named Tyler Vincent from Cedar Falls, Iowa, has a related website (beakerstreetsetlists.com) that live-blogs the song list, so songs that are unfamiliar can become familiar.

And there is a lot of stuff that is unfamiliar. I mean, I call myself a fairly knowledgeable connoisseur of rock music, but in the two months since I started listening to the new Beaker Street, I’ve heard stuff – really good stuff – by artists I’d never heard of before.

For instance, one band that I’ve heard more than once is a group from Chicago called Sonia Dada. It’s hard rock with more than a hint of prog. Another band that has gotten some play is Without Temptation, a group out of the Netherlands that is, apparently, quite big in Europe.

We’ve also heard such delicious, but nearly forgotten, vintage performers such as Country Joe and the Fish, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, and Renaissance.

The show has also featured such oddities as a 1970 cover of King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King by Doc Severinsen, who later fronted Johnny Carson’s band on The Tonight Show. I kid you not. It was actually quite good.

And, of course, Clyde has revived some of the Beaker Street classics like the Ballad of the U.S.S. Titanic.

I say it’s Clyde. Right now, it’s Tom Wood, a mainstay in Little Rock radio for decades, who stays on the air after his regular gig hosting Magical Mystery Tour to broadcast Beaker Street while Seidenschwarz recovers from some serious medical business.

Seidenschwarz has been battling cancer since about the first of the year, and recently took a few weeks off for a procedure that his wife Trish hopes will give him a few more quality years of life.

She says doing Beaker Street and bringing Clyde Clifford back to life has had a therapeutic effect on his health, and that he’s eager to get back at the controls. He was hoping to get back on the air this Friday, but he’s still not quite up to it, so he’s hoping for his comeback next week.

Naturally, we all hope Clyde returns, and can stay with it for as long as possible.

But if he doesn’t, Wood and the folks at Arkansas Rocks understand what a phenomenon Beaker Street was – and what it can be again – and the program has such momentum now that it will undoubtedly continue after Clyde can no longer do it.

Clyde Clifford and his family of fellow Little Rock broadcasters are bringing back a fondly remembered part of the past for a few of us old hippies that never quite left Woodstock. And that’s a bright spot in what has been tough year.

Stan Caldwell is a 35-year veteran sportswriter in the Hattiesburg area. One of his trips of a lifetime was last summer with his wife to the celebration for the 50^th anniversary of Woodstock at the festival site in New York.