Shot In The Dark

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today (or Yesterday), Part XXXVI

It was Wednesday, October 29, 1986. It was time to become a rock star. After a manic blast of auditioning for bands when I'd first moved to the Cities - in the winter and spring of '85-'86 - I figured...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXXV

It was Wednesday, October 8, 1986. It was time for a remote. A bit of history here: Southdale was the first enclosed shopping mall ever. August 8 1986 was the thirtieth anniversary. And as part of the mall's celebration, they...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXXIV

It was Thursday, August 7, 1986. The latest battle in the culture war had just been joined. Some disk jockey somewhere had "back-masked" the theme for the "Mister Ed" show - played it backwards on a turntable or reel-to-reel tape...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXXIV

It was Thursday, July 24, 1986. A week or so earlier, Don had put out the call - we needed a new theme song. He had sown the wind. He was reaping the whirlwind. We had been deluged with tapes...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXXIII

I didn't need an alarm to wake up the morning after the first "Mitch Berg Show". I drove out to the station a little early, to bask in a little of the reflected glory of my morning's work. I walked...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXXII

Tonight was the big night. Sunday, July 13, 1986. The debut of "The Mitch Berg Show" on KSTP-AM. At 2AM, Monday morning....

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXXI

Scott Meier had had my tape for about a month. Or four, the way it felt to me. Finally, today, Monday, July 7 1986, it was time to make my move. Or so I thought, as I sat at my...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXX

My Malibu was dead. No, not dead. Just terminal. I thought. It was Wednesday, June 25, 1986. It had been a wettish spring, which meant my trusty '73 Malibu wouldn't start for love or money within eight hours of any...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXIX

It was Monday, June 23, 1986. My audition tape had been sitting on Scott Meier's desk for well over a week. I figured that was plenty of time. Today was the day to start the big push. Assuming I could...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXVIII

It was my first summer in the Twin Cities - and life was looking fairly decent. I was entering my third month living in the basement - and enjoying it a lot. My routine; get up around seven, take a...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXVII

Life had settled into a modestly pleasant routine. I was happily living in a basement in a nice little bungalow in South Minneapolis, with a total of five women, three of whom I'd gone to college with. Life had improved...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXVI

I was getting ready to move into the house in South Minneapolis with the three women I'd known in college (and one of their sisters). But first, there was the matter of getting out of the place I was in....

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXV

It was Friday, February 21, 1986. A friend of mine from college invited me - along with a couple of other college friends - to her place in the South 'burbs for dinner. It'd been a long day. Oh, who...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXIV

I'd been in the Twin Cities for a little over three months, going on four, on Thursday, February 6, 1986. When I'd moved to the Cities, I'd had a short checklist of to-dos:Get a job I liked. Check. While I...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXIII

It was Wednesday, January 16, 1985. But not just another day at work. A few weeks back, I'd taken on an assignment on the Vogel show; look into the tape that "Major Bill Smith" of Fort Worth had sent us...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXII

I'd been at KSTP a little over two weeks. The job was settling into a bit of a routine. I got up at 8:30 or 9AM, got to work around 10:30, ran the board for two hours during the syndicated...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXI

It was Christmas Eve, 1985. I'd been working at KSTP-AM for a week. The bad news: it was a part-time job that started at $3.35 an hour. The good news: I'd managed to find a mid-day board-operator shift that the...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today (and the two days before) Part XX

It was Wednesday, December 18, 1985. I'd spent the long weekend in Jamestown, hanging out with friends and my family, catching up with the few friends I still had in Jamestown, just relaxing - satisfied at least to know that...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XIX

It was Friday, December 14, 1985. After my interview at KSTP earlier in the week, I'd decided I could stand a long weekend. It'd been almost two months of constant interviewing, scrimping, trying to figure out ways to parlay my...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XVIII

Wednesday, December 12, 1985. I'd turned 23 the day before. Winter had struck, a warmish October yielding to a wet, chilly, snowy November that included a bit of a blizzard the previous weekend. I'd driven to a band audition in...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XVII

December 4, 1985. A Wednesday. I was closing in on two months in the Twin Cities. No job yet - no real nibbles, really. A job as a technical writer at a local defense-related contractor flared briefly in November -...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XVI

There was genuinely not much to report in the three weeks since the last "Twenty Years Ago..." piece. Life had basically fallen into a very predictable routine:Mondays and Thursdays were for job-hunting. The Sunday and Wednesday Stribs had all the...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XV

It was Monday, November 4, 1985. I haven't posted much about the week and a half since my (I later learned) fateful encounter with Tom Myhre. There's really just not much material. The days after the demonstration were a blur;...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XIV

It was October 25, 1985. A Friday, the end of my first full "work" week in the Twin Cities. Well, I was learning that looking for a job was hard work, anyway....

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XIII

Monday, October 21 1985. Beginning my second week in the Twin Cities. It was starting to dawn on me that the city wasn't necessarily going to carry me in on its shoulders....

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XII

Unspoken - to most people - among my motivations for moving to the Twin Cities was a craving to get into the Twin Cities music scene. Whatever it was. Sunday, October 20, I drove downtown to try to find it....

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XI

On October 19, 1985, I was wrapping up my first partial week in the Twin Cities, after moving here on Tuesday the 15th....

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today (Or Yesterday), Part X

I woke up on the morning of October 15, 1985 knowing that I wasn't going to get any last-minute stalls like unplanned federal holidays. Nope, it was the REAL D-Day. I went to the bank - open, today - and...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part IX

It was D-Day, October 14, 1985. My late-night, inebriated promise of only 17 days before had come to this; it was time to load up the car and start going for the Twin Cities. I got up early, and loaded...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part VIII

My last Sunday night in Jamestown, October 13, 1985. Mom made dinner. Took a drive around town. Suddenly felt very nostalgic. I called down to the Twin Cities, telling one of the friends who'd volunteered a couch that I'd be...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part VII

It was Saturday night, October 12, 1985. Two days until the big move. The best rock and roll bar in Jamestown had closed the previous summer; there really were no decent bands playing that night. No matter, though, I thought;...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part VI

It was the final week of my getting ready to move to the Twin Cities, after my rash promise a little over a week earlier. I got up every morning to go to my job, which was... ...well, not the...

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....

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part IV

Resumes in hand - and an actual job lead clipped from the Sunday Star/Tribune (which, I didn't yet know, didn't put all of its job leads in the outstate edition), I set my date: Monday, October 14. I had a...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part III

It was a little afternoon on Wednesday, October 3, 1985. I drove up to my old college - where I'd graduated about five months earlier - and saw the "career counselor", Mrs. Gump (the name has been changed, not so...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part II

After the little outburst on Friday, September 28, 1985, I had a weekend to think about it. I didn't. I did the whole homecoming thing. I told everyone that I thought would care about the plans (which amounted to maybe...

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

I graduated from college in May of 1985 - and spent the next four months basically trying to figure out what do to next. It was twenty years ago tonight - Friday, September 28 - that it all started to...