It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part V

It was Monday, October 7, 1985. One week until I was going to leave for the Twin Cities.

One more week to kill.

Killing time back then was harder than ever. Two nights a week, "Fred's Den" - a bar on mainstreet in Jamestown - had Open Stage nights. Mondays was acoustic night, while Wednesdays they'd drag up a drum kit and some amps and guitars, and people'd jam all night. The whole panoply of Jamestown musicians would show up, if they didn't have a paying gig (and most of them were in that awkward time when they were starting to realize that an A and R man from Epic Records wasn't going to drop through Jamestown, North Dakota and catch their gig at the Albatross or the Gladstone or Fred's in Jamestown, or the T&T or Mick's in Fargo, or any of the other places they'd gig; they were starting to ponder the notion of getting straight jobs they'd actually have to keep. They were some amazing nights out, by the way - I'd be playing on stage with Bill Weber and the Gilbertson brothers (Ken and Paul) and the host, a guy who'd attended Berkeley (in Boston, not the Bay area) for voice and hung around the songwriter scene in Manhattan with the likes of Springsteen in the early seventies (but had apparently had drug problems or mental illness or something, and had come back to North Dakota, as so many people did who left town), and even the legendary Don Salting on guitar, the great Tim Cross on drums, Ken Aune on a beat-up old upright piano, and...

...well, finding a bass player was always tough. Usually it was some guitar player who'd fudge it. I was probably better than most at that - 12 years of playing cello gave me a pretty fair idea about holding down the bottom of a group. But by this point I was sneaking my pal Scott Massine in - he was 19, but hey, the bartender was a musician, too, and he knew how bad the joint needed a real bass player.

And we'd jam. And jam and jam and jam. We did all the standards; "12 Bar Blues in E", "12 Bar Blues in A", "12 Bar Blues in G" (I had a "C" Marine Band harmonica, so I could actually blow some harp on that one), and one magical evening, "12 Bar Blues in F". Occasionally we'd do actual songs - "All Along the Watchtower" was a regular, and Scott and Tim and I did a pretty mean "I Will Follow" - but actual "songs" made a lot of the guys uncomfortable. They just wanted to jam - none of that silly singing, y'know.

So we jammed.

To this day, playing on a stage with a bunch of other musicians - no matter what the genre - is one of my favorite things in the world. In some ways, Mondays were even better; I'd bring a "wood" (or borrow the host's Martin D-45) and play and sing a couple of songs on my own. The deal was this; everyone got three songs, no questions asked (unless you sucked and got booed off the stage, although let's be clear - this was not the club scene in Eight Mile - although I do remember the bartender, Blaine Steller, jumping up an the bar and yelling at some old railroad guy who'd started the same song four times and kept forgetting the words and singing out of key, "You F*****g Suck, Get Off The Stage"). Then you got a drink; after a few weeks, they limited it to beers and weak bar pours, after a few unfortunate incidents with people who played five sets and got "paid" in Long Island Teas.

I usually played a couple of covers and, if I was feeling brave and the crowd was either good or too sparse or drunk to care, one of my own songs.

I went up there that last Monday in town, October 7. As I was walking past the stage, Don Salting said "I'm gonna play a Bruce Springsteen song". "Which one?" I shouted. "Thunder Road".

"Mind if I join you?"

He didn't. I grabbed a guitar, and for once in my life hit all the harmony parts, dead-on (or so my memory tells me). It rocked.

I got another set, and I played a couple of songs; as I sat, figuring out what was going to be #3, somebody yelled out of the dark "Play Darkness On The Edge Of Town". It was a song I'd been doing as a solo number off and on for months. I was kind of amazed that anyone had heard me at all.

Boded well, I thought, for my move to the Twin Cities, where the plan was to become the next Paul Westerberg. So far so good.

Today, Tim Cross is a high school music teacher in southwestern North Dakota. I think Ken teaches music somewhere, too. Don Salting is, I think, a computer guy, and plays some bagpipes as well - birds of a feather, I suppose. Blaine the bartender married a girl I'd had a mondo crush on in high school, and moved to Montana, where I hear they still live, building log cabins for superstars (or, again, so my memory says). Most of the rest of the guys are at the town's State Hospital - mostly as orderlies and attendants. It's been the town's biggest employer for a while now. I don't know if any of them plays anymore.

Fred's Den became a teen club a year or so later, and has sat largely defunct for most of these last twenty years. The current owner - she runs a couple of restaurants next door - rents it out as a banquet hall and party room. Four years ago, my high school graduating class had its twentieth reunion party there.

I was doing the "entertainment" (A game of The Weakest Alumnus, which was a gas, although I'm sure the fact that most everyone was bombed didn't hurt). I stood on that same stage, looking at about half of my class gathered in the booths, and flashed briefly back to a darker, smokier time.

In the past twenty years, my sense of place has pretty much moved to the Twin Cities. But that night, on that stage, a little of it flickered for my old hometown.

But that was all 16 years in the future. In October of 1985, I had a move to plan.

"Plan". Heh.

Posted by Mitch at October 7, 2005 07:40 AM | TrackBack