High Street Forever

Classic Improv on Freeform Radio

Well, the cannabis leaf is added, but there was a certain sense of the psychoactive in the performances of High Street, the Colorado improvisational theater company that cut a very wide swath through the freeform radio scene back in the day. This was well before Firesign Theater but very much in the same vein, brilliant, inventive, more than a little crazy, spontaneous, and always hilarious. Improv on radio for 100,000 people and all of it off the top of their very creative heads.

They were four: Jim Clancy, Budge Threlkeld, Bodie Allen, and Kirby Johansen, and they bounced off each other like pinballs in a beautifully manic game, lights flashing, bells ringing, and one glib comment after another rolling off their tongues out into the ethers. If you turned on the 10:00 pm movie on Channel 2 in Denver, turned off the sound, and turned up the radio at KFML AM&FM, High Street would ad lib the entire movie, commercials and all, for your listening pleasure. They were hysterically funny and everybody loved it. Well, everybody except the folks at Channel 2.

They took exception and High Street’s best efforts to collaborate with them were for naught. It came to pass that the TV station would advertise one movie and then show something else to confuse everybody. High Street didn’t care. They were making it up on the spot anyhow. It was all the same to them. In all the conversations we’ve had with folks about Freeform Radio and the glory days of that great era of broadcasting genius, people consistently mention High Street among their favorite memories of that incredibly creative time. You can hear Jim Clancy tell the High Street story HERE.