Watts Up at KALX

This 28×11 cm flyer is among a collection of punk flyers and posters that arrived at Letterform Archive in late 2022. KALX is a student- and volunteer-run radio station at the University of California, Berkeley. This promotion announces the moment that they were to upgrade from 10 to 500 watts of broadcasting power after a successful fundraising campaign: July 8, 1982 at 10 minutes to 5:00pm. The text is set with rubdown Banco and ITC American Typewriter with a sharpie-scribble border and hand-lettered KALX logo, complete with an anarchist A. Banco had already established itself in punk culture as the typeface for Thrasher magazine (1981–).

In 1980 Ronald Reagan, nemesis of all good Berkeleyites, was elected president of the United States. This may or may not have been bad for the country – they’re still arguing that one and always will be – but in a perverse way it was good for KALX, which had started to go punk in the late ’70s and now had something to really be pissed off about.

Reagan went nuts cutting budgets for social programs and the arts but by 1982, his second year in office, KALX had moved to relatively stable studios at 2311 Bowditch and increased its power to 500 watts. The station’s combative nature thrived in the hostile context of Reagan’s America, and KALX remained a dependable voice of noisy opposition throughout the Reagan era (and into the Bush, Sr. era, if that really deserves to be called an era). — The Full and Unabridged History of KALX