Most Americans became aware of Kraftwerk when “Autobahn,” the pioneering German electronic band’s first U.S. single, hit Top 40 playlists in 1975. But not fans of Chicago’s Triad Radio: they’d known about Kraftwerk for years, because the nightly radio show had been programming tracks from the group’s first three albums since 1971. Triad on-air host and program director Saul Smaizys had even played “Autobahn” in 1974—not the 3:27 single edit but the nearly 23-minute album version, from a test pressing of the Autobahn LP delivered by a record-company representative. “We put that on,” Smaizys says, “and the phones went crazy.”
Given the Internet’s thorough transformation of music discovery, it takes a little mental labor to imagine being a Chicago music buff, scanning the AM and FM bands in the early 70s in hopes of finding something interesting. But when those folks landed on Triad, it was as though they’d become Dorothy stepping out of black-and-white Kansas and into Technicolor Oz.
Triad Radio air checks, interviews, station IDs, promos, and advertisements, as well as scans of monthly radio guides and other ephemera, may be freely downloaded here.
The archive also contains many “air checks,” which allow a present-day audience to hear exactly what Triad broadcast 45 or even 50 years ago. They’re snippets of live radio, often an entire segment or show, and Smaizys’s tapes include not just music but also DJ patter, station IDs, interstitials, and sometimes commercials.
To cover initial costs—mostly airtime, since in the early days nobody working for Triad was paid—Bacin cobbled together money borrowed from family. In summer 1969, he and Aldona generated additional income by selling waterbeds at the Illinois State Fair. “It was a heck of a lot of work and really hot!” Bacin recalls. Thankfully, advertising revenue eventually paid for the daily airtime.
Bacin and Smaizys had met years earlier at a Lithuanian youth center on the south side, and they’d bonded over music, spending weekends listening to records at Smaizys’s apartment near Clark and Surf. “We’d listen to the Rolling Stones, Frank Zappa,” Smaizys says. “I had some electronic-music records. I had knowledge of a lot of weird sounds.”
At first, Triad had little local competition in the free-form sphere. Smaizys recalls an underground progressive-rock show called Spoke that debuted on WLS-FM in 1968 with the tagline “The flesh that holds the wheel of life together.” It featured music by the likes of Savoy Brown, the Rolling Stones, and Jefferson Airplane, but by 1969 it was gone. In January 1970, WGLD-FM began broadcasting a progressive rock format (including the show Psyche), and Bacin admits that it was competition—but “only to a certain extent. You have to have confidence in your own approach.” Triad was steadily building an avid listenership, and record companies were starting to pay attention.
