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 I’d take some time off, concentrate on work (which needed quite a bit of concentration, at the time), and work on music in my spare time.

Given my intermittently obsessive nature, that involved getting home from work much of the summer and curling up in front of my Fostex X-15 four-track cassette player (it looked a lot like this), a drum machine, an electronic organ (which when miked properly did a passable Farfisa impression, and after a couple of beers sounded more and more like a Hammond B3), and my guitars and bass, and cutting demo tapes).

And cutting.  And cutting.

Over the summer – starting in May, running through September – I must have recorded 60 or 70 songs; a few were covers (I was unaccountably proud of my version of “Skateaway”), most were things I’d written.  Of the stuff I wrote, most was crap, and I knew it even then.  I’d exhumed a few things I’d jotted down in college (bathetic crap mixed with derivative crap), and wrote tons more crap (a combination of contrived crap and slapdash crap) after I moved to the Cities.

But in and among the crap were a few bits and pieces, maybe five songs, that I was fairly proud of, and that I’d done some decent demos for.

So I took out an ad in the City Pages’ “Musicians Wanted” section.

“Musicians Wanted” was pretty much where the whole lower range of the Twin Cities’ music scene vented its hopes, desires and fears in those days.  Ads from brash bands of teenagers pulsed with desire to rock the entire world; fatigue and smoke wafted from bar-band guitarists looking for a paying gig; synth-pop artistes oozed bemused contempt for whatever mainstream they recognized;  punks’ ads read like old Replacements records sounded.  There was one ad that must have run for two years; I still remember it well enough to paraphrase closely:

NuDu Seeks Keyboardist

NuDu; pure wave, pure noise, pure attitude.  Do you DARE?  Call 612-555-5555

I don’t know if NuDu ever found their keyboard player.  I’m loathe to say they passed into unknown band history, keyboardless, and are all working as mortgage underwriters and school principals; I remember reading a listing in New Yorker when I was in high school, in about 1980, for a group playing at CBGB.  The name struck me as so relentlessly dumb, I figured they could never make it big.

My prediction was, unfortunately, wrong.

Where was I?  Oh, yeah.  City Pages.

Me?  I’d wanted something different.  The previous week, I wrote an ad and carried it down to the City Pages’ office.

The actual ad is long lost to  history, but I remember trying to write it.  The key point to writing a “Musicians Wanted” ad was not so much to say what you were about, it seemed (at least, if you wanted to do your own music); rather, you were about your “influences”.  Since nobody knew you (or your music, if you were trying to write your own), then “Influences” were sort of a lingua franca; if you listed Brian Ferry as an influence, you were likely not going to joining a bunch of New York Dolls fans in a band.  T

Of course, interpretations of influences varied widely.  Listing “Bono”, for example, might mean you were into raw, passionate delivery, or it could imply artiness (especially if you listed Echo and the Bunnymen or The Cure along with Bono), or perhaps an interest in gleefully bombastic music.  And of course, listing any big name – Prince, Springsteen, Paul Westerberg, Bob Mould – was a kid’s desperately-uncool mistake, unless you were starting a straight-up cover band (playing nothing but stuff off the radio to, y’know, make real money or something).

Me?  I had to be crafty.  I took the oblique route.  I listed “Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, the Iron City Houserockers, Richard Thompson and Hemingway”.  My strategy was ingeniously clever; the Jukes and Houserockers would show that I was a Springsteen buff, but knew the genre better than most (or was merely cooler than the average fan); the Thompson reference was a back-door reference to the bombastic Celtic/Gaelic revisionism of U2, the Alarm and Big Country; Hemingway just showed how dang cool I was.  And above all – if I found someone out there who’d heard of the Houserockers or the Jukes, I’d be most likely among friends.

That was the theory.

And today – Wednesday – the ad came out.

I stopped at the record store on the way home to see if the ad made it in; it had.  I read it dozens of times as I walked back to the jeep and sped home.

I got into the house, and rolled tape on the answering machine.

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 wanted the Don Vogel show to do a live broadcast from the mall’s old atrium.

Live remotes are a big job even today; back then, doing a good remote was a huge job. Engineers had to get the phone company to run special high-bandwidth phone lines (this was a decade and a half before DSL and Broadband were everywhere, so it was expensive) to the remote site, haul a station wagon full of gear to the site…

…and, hardest of all, getting the air talent to come on out.

I’m a mutant in radio – I have always loved doing remotes. I’m a vanishing minority in the business. Most radio people detest leaving the comfort of their own studio.

Vogel was worse than most; it’s harder to work a room when you’re blind. Don hated remotes. But he was a great showman, and he realized what a great promotion tool they were. So he worked to minimize the impact of his blindness on the show when we went out on remotes.

Which was a big part of my job.

Continue reading →

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 – or as close as any station drawing a four share ever gets to being deluged with anything.

Some of the tapes were obviously the work of very talented musicians, who did the work in actual recording studios, and put serious time into writing and arranging their efforts.

Totally wrong. Dave and I – both of us actual musicians who appreciated the effort that’d gone into the productions – shuffled uncomfortably as Don flipped past them. “It’s just not right for the show.”

On the other hand, some were too low-fi – a guy had written a fair long, involved, folky song which he’d recorded and sung on, apparently, a cassette tape. Hissy, with mistakes and missed notes and about two minutes too long…

Close!

And then – on the second-to-last day of the contest – we cued up a cassette. Over the home-cassette hiss, we heard a needle cueing up on a turntable – the guy was obviously sitting in front of a record player with a cassette deck…

…and the opening strains of the Bonanza theme, swelled up to the familiar tune…

…over which a schlemiely-sounding guy began singing with comic gusto

“Don da da Don da da Don da da Don Don Vogel, it’s the Don da da Don da da Don da da Don da da Don Don Vogel Show!

(then up a fourth)

“Don da da Don da da Don da da Don Don Vogel, it’s the Don da da Don da da Don da da Don da da Don Don Vogel Show!

(then into the bridge)

Oh ah uh, oh ah uh, the Round Mound of Sound,
Oh ah uh, oh ah uh, the Round Mound of Sound!

(then back to the tune)

“Don da da Don da da Don da da Don Don Vogel, it’s the Don da da Don da da Don da da Don da da Don Don Vogel Show!

You could tell when Don liked something – he’d start laughing with this sudden, sharp cackle, and then keep guffawing uncontrollably.

“That’s the one!”

There were two more days to the contest, but Bill Kramlinger of White Bear Lake had us at “Don da da Don…”

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 deck.  Somehow, “A horse is a horse is a horse of course, unless of course it is the hourse is the famous Mister Ed” turned into “Song to Satan”.

Supposedly.

We were on the air that Thursday afternoon, taking calls on the topic. I was screening, Dave Elvin was on the board.

I listened to the purportedly-offending tape.

Mra mra mra mra sheeee ashoooaaaah uh shaaaaaaayn mooooaaaah mra mra mmmmmmmuaaaaa”

I just wasn’t hearing it.

This was, of course, during they heyday of the Peters Brothers, Twin Cities-area evangelists whose assaults on satanic influences in rock and roll, movies and other pop culture made them national celebrities.  Someone, somewhere in their church, had thought to play the “Mister Ed” theme backwards, found that little snippet of pseudo-scary sound, and made a big stink about it in the media.  In a few weeks there’d another controversy, another book, another rumor…

We took a caller.

“Hey, Don – why don’t you see if your new theme song has any satanic messages in it?”

Don chuckled.  “Yeaaaaah.  Good question…”

Dave Elvin didn’t need to be told twice.  He played the theme song onto a reel to reel tape on an off-air “audition” circuit (a feature on control boards that allows a moderately-talented operator to do two things at the same time).  He recorded the song, then stopped the reel recorder, and swapped the reels.  The tape was ready to play backwards.  I passed the word to Don.

“Ladies and Gentlemen”, Don started, “we’re now going to investigate our new theme song for satanic messages”.  Dave rolled the tape.

Nud nud nud ah ma nud nod aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah ma…

Nothing remarkable.

“Oh, yeah”, Don chuckled, “I hear something…satanic…” he vamped as the tape played, in the chuckle-y voice he had when something was on the verge of amusing him.

I listened carefully to the tape as Don talked.

Nud nud nud awwwwwwwwwwww, sit on my rod

“Dave!”, I yelled.  “It said ‘sit on my rod’…”.  I punched the talkback button, into Don’s headphones on the air.  “Don!  It said ‘sit on my rod!”.

Don chuckled.  “We have word that there’s a…message…”

Nud nud nud awwwwwwwwwwww, sit on my rod

Don caught it this time.

Don had several levels of laughter.  There was his mild chuckle, when someting amused him.  There was his explosive chucke – “g-HAAAAAAAAA” – when something caught him by surprise.  And then there was the final, highest level; you’d hear a high-pitched wheeze, and then silence punctuated by a high-toned groan as Don struggled to regain control of his rampant funny bone.

We weren’t doing much better in the control room.  We had a few seconds of dead air, punctuated by Don’s wheeze.  Then Dave replayed the song again.  And we heard it again:

Nud nud nud awwwwwwwwwwww, sit on my rod

And Don broke up again.

It took a few minutes, but Don finally got back on the mike. “Well, there you have it.  Bill Kremlinger’s Don Vogel theme has a backmasked message!”

Kremlinger called a few minutes later.  “You’re on to me”, he chuckled.

Of course, it was random – Kremlinger’s Vogel theme was the lowest-tech piece of “music” ever recorded.

I think of that every time someone swears they found some evil intent in something that someone else says…

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 in. Janice, the receptionist – a recent college grad who was not a Jersey Girl, but could have been – was reading a magazine behind the desk.

“Hey, Janice”.

“Hi”.

Not a word.

Oh, well.

I turned and walked over to General Manager Scott Meier’s office. He was reading the paper.

“Hey, Scott. Catch the show last night?”

“Uh, sorry, Mitch. Wasn’t up at 2AM. How’d it go?”

Guh. “Really, really well!”

“Great!” And it was back to the paper.

I walked through the door to my little desk.

Continue reading →

Tonight was the big night.  Sunday, July 13, 1986.  The debut of “The Mitch Berg Show” on KSTP-AM.

At 2AM, Monday morning.

I’d had about five days to get ready to do the show.  I had started the week reading voraciously, had taken a folder full of notes – and realized that I was probably overpreparing just a bit.   So I backed off – and felt like I wasn’t doing enough.  Still, my biggest fear was having two hours of air time to fill – and fifteen minutes of material to fill it with, and having to fall back on playing the music we had stashed on tape around the studio to kill miserable, talkless time until 4AM.

But now it was Sunday, and it was too late to worry about such things.  I had some notes typed up (like, Friday), a few topics in my head, and Don Vogel and Geoff Charles as my role models – both of whose preparation seemed to involve hanging around the kitchen yukking it up with the rest of the staff.

There was one minor complication – Don Vogel had gone to Chicago for the weekend, and asked if I could pick him up at the airport and drive him home (to North Saint Paul, about a mile from the station).  I met him at the gate at about 10PM…

…after (this is one of those “how things have changed in the past twenty years” stories) leaving a big lockblade knife in the basket by the metal detector – and picking it up on my way back out.

We settled into my car.  “So – all set for the big show?” Don asked.

“I think so”, I said, running down a few ideas.

Don nodded.  “That’s a lot of material.  I remember when I did my first show, I brought in enough stuff for about twenty hours.  When you’ve done this a time or two, you’ll calm down and not overprepare so much…”

I dropped him off at his house; it was around 10:30.  Only three and a half hours to go until air time.  Naturally, I drove to the station.

KSTP at the time was in a rehabbed transmitter building on Highway 61 in Maplewood.  I’ve described it elsewhere.  The building is still there, although the studios are back in Saint Paul.

But one thing that’s very, very different is the laws governing how stations are staffed.  Today, a station will run all night, and sometimes all day as well, with nobody in the studio.  In 1986, a station the size of KSTP (50,000 watts) needed to have not only a board operator, but an engineer in the building 24/7.  I met them both for pretty much the first time that night.

The board operator was “Griff”, a black guy who looked a little like a beer-gutted “Lamont” (from Sanford and Son) with a short afro.  Griff, I had learned, was not happy to see me; the overnight shift was where he got his office work done for his real gig, managing bands.  He made phone calls, dubbed demo tapes, stuffed envelopes, drank enough Mountain Dew to set all of northern California swinging into ponds on ropes, and, when needed, play commercials and read the weather.  Usually.

The engineer was Ray Brown, a sixtyish guy who’d been with Hubbard since the end of World War II.   Literally.  Short, with a Van Dyck beard and rumpled hair, Ray was a character.

We’ll get into that later.

I sat down in the newsroom, and began getting my stuff together.  I had pages and pages of typewritten notes, news clippings, and bits of drop-in audio dubbed to “cart” (tape cartridges; they looked like eight-track tapes, and worked about the same, but were loaded with anywhere from 20 seconds to five minutes of tape; in the days before computers, it was what we put commercials, news stories, and anything we didn’t want to have to futz with rewinding onto).  It was a lot to sort out…

…but by midnight or so, I was done.

And getting nervous.

So I sorted them all out again.

And again.

Finally, it was 1AM.  Nothing but the sound of Doctor Harvey Ruben on the monitor, and Ray puttering on something back in the relay stack.

I walked into the studio.  Griff looked at me, disapprovingly.

“So why are they putting a show on at this time of night?”  he quizzed me; I could tell from the tone that he already knew the answer, “they’re idiots”.

“Fairness Doctrine.  Too many liberals on the station – they needed someone to balance things out a bit”.

Griff shook his head.  “So I’m supposed to screen calls”, he asked, sounding like I’d asked him to pick up cat litter with his mouth.

“Well, yeah.  I can do the weather…”

“Gonna do any sports?”

I stood for a second.  Sports?  I wanted to do a show about politcs, media criticism, pop culture, media bias…basically exactly what I do on my blog today…but sports?

Griff continued – sounding a little excited for the first time since we’d met, “Lotta guys up this late at  night want their scores”.  He seemed genuinely interested.

I thought; there’s nothing worse than having a board-op/screener who couldn’t give a crap about the job.  If this keeps him from keeling over from boredom…”

He continued “maybe at the top and bottom of the hour?”

“Er…How about at the forty?” I asked – put the sportscast after our break at :40 after both hours.  “It’ll make the news breaks shorter…”

“Well”, he said, “Let’s see how that goes for starters”.

“For starters?” I thought.  “He is going to angle for more airtime!”  “Yeah.  For starters.  Let’s see how it goes…”.  Pick your battles.

I bought my third Mountain Dew of the evening, and went into the studio.  45 minutes early.

And I waited.  And waited.  And slugged down the Dew, and another…until the top of the hour ABC News came on, signalling “three minutes”.

“…for ABC News, I’m John Skibbenes.  And then, Griff tripped the opening theme – the standard “ABC Talk Radio Program” theme, a piece of generic jingle-band filler that opened most of the shows on KSTP, both local and network.

And it was time.  I shuffled my papers, and hit the mike button.

“AM1500 The Talk Station“, I said, leaning into the foam-padded mike.  “I’m Mitch Berg“.

========

Truth is, I hardly remember what I talked about; I remember something about the TV movie “Amerika”, a little-remembered movie about a Soviet takeover of the US that the left was howling mad about (and actively trying to censor).  I think I still have the tape somewhere, on some ancient, cheap, think-stocked, 20 year old cassette tape somewhere in my basement.  I should try to listen to it someday, when I find a cassette deck.

What I do remember is that during my opening monologue – which I’d been rehearsing all week, and in which I set out the whole rationale for having an actual conservative voice on the air, the phone lines lit up.

As in five phone lines, lit up wall to wall, within a minute of my monologue starting.

And they stayed lit for the next two hours.  They were third-shifters, drunks, cops, cranks (including one guy who called every single day, on every single show from 5AM to, I guess, 2AM to declare Stanley Hubbard was Satan), insomniacs, night people, musicians loading out after gigs…

…and I had more fun than I’d ever had in two hours in my life.  Ever.

Even Griff had fun; the sportscast kept him occupied enough to pay attention to what was going on – no mean feat.

Finally, at 4AM, it was over.  The news came on.  Jim Bohannon’s show (which aired after the Larry King reruns) followed, echoing through the almost-empty station as I stepped out of the studio and dropped my stuff in my file drawer.  I was spent – totally fried – as I walked out the door, grinning ear to ear, and drove home to South Minneapolis.

The sun was coming up as I went to bed; I set my alarm for 9:30, to get back to work in time.

I woke up before the alarm.  I was dying to get to work and hear what the boss had to say.

But that was Monday. Continue reading →

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 desk.

Continue reading →

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 precipitation. Which played hob with my job schedule.

This week had been the worst; I’d had to get rides to work with Rob Pendelton two straight mornings.

I figured it was time for a change.

Continue reading →

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 get to work.

My old ’73 Malibu was hanging on, but was fading fast. Every rainstorm left it immobile for a day or so, until it dried out. An early-morning deluge left me calling Rob Pendelton for a lift to work. “I know, I know”, I said as I got into his car, “I gotta get a different ride…”

I got to the station, did my board shift during the Michael Jackson show, and walked into the production meeting with Don and Dave. It was Monday, so Meier – the station’s general manager and program director, would be in shortly.

Now, when I call Scott Meier a “program director”, I don’t mean in the sense that anyone who’s ever worked in radio, especially in the bigs, could possibly relate to. At most “real” radio stations, the PD is an pseudo-deity of format knowledge, an all-powerful dictator who can make or break careers on a whim; a person whose entire careers hinges on the whims of a market’s listening audience, and who passes that down to all who work for him, the station’s “air [programming, production, whatever] department”.

Meier, on the other hand, was a sales guy (although he’d had a brief air career) who got stuck with the job as a cost-cutting measure. He didn’t know talk radio, and – this is the part that astounds “real” radio people – assumed that his staff could figure out the technicalities and do the job they were hired for better than he could.

And it worked. The station was getting the best ratings it’d gotten since it had gone all-talk in 1981. Which wasn’t really saying much, but it was something.

The best thing about working at KSTP back then was its splendid isolation, on the edge of a swamp on Highway 61 (note to Bob Dylan fans – yes, that Highway 61) in north Maplewood, north of Saint Paul. The station sat in an old (as in 1930’s-era) transmitter shack that had been remodeled with some offices, a kitchen, and a studio/control room and a couple of crude but useful production rooms. The station had moved out there about a year earlier; rumor had it that Hubbard Broadcasting wanted to unload the AM station. In those days when the “Fairness Doctrine” ruled and when Rush Limbaugh was still working in Sacramento, the “conventional wisdom” was that AM radio was a dying band, populated by losers broadcasting to geriatrics. The station, a 50,000 watt blowtorch, was apparently on the market for five million dollars – and was getting no takers. Hubbard broadcasting poured all of its resources into the properties it kept down on University Avenue in Saint Paul – Channel 5 (then the #2 station in town) and KS95 FM with its well-connected Program Director and morning guy Chuck Knapp. All of corporate’s attention focused on the “downtown” properties downstairs from the executive offices. Out in Maplewood, we’d go months without hearing from anyone at corporate, except when the biweekly bag of paychecks arrived.

So we were pretty much left alone – to do what we had been hired to do, and to get the best numbers we could.

Bit by bit, it was working. Our Spring Arbitron book showed us in the mid 3-point range among people 12+, and better still among males aged 25-54, the key audience.

Things were good – which meant my timing was good, too.

Meier walked into the studio. “Hey guys”.

“Hey, Scott. Listen to my tape?”

He nodded. “Yep”.

“And…?”

“Interesting”

“So whatdya think?”

“There’s possibilities”.

Vogel chimed in. “Scott, you gotta put him on the air!”

“Yeah!”, I added. “Put me in, coach! I’m ready to play!”

Vogel laughed his unrestrained cackle.

“Yeah”, said Meier, “there’s possibilities there. But I’ll have to think about it…”

I pulled out the closest thing I had to a trump card: “And given that Edwards, Geoff Charles, Michael Jackson, Owen Span and Karen Booth are so far to the left, we have that whole Fairness Doctrine thing to think about…”

Meier nodded. “I’ll think about it”. He changed the subject to talk with Don about something or another. I didn’t pay much attention. I was figuring how to press the issue further.

It wasn’t everything that was on my mind, of course. I got home around 7 that night, spent an hour digging through the classifieds for cheap used cars…

…and then curled up in the basement with my “recording studio” for a couple of hours.

More on both later.

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 bike ride, come home, nosh with the roommates, take a shower, drive out to KSTP…

…assuming my car worked. My ’73 Malibu was acting weirder and weirder. It would flood on the flimsiest pretexts; I carried a BIG screwdriver with me to jam into the carb butterfly to let enough air in to start the car, something I had to do a couple of times a week. And for a day or so after a rainstorm, it wouldn’t start at all.

Anyway, it was off to work around 10. I’d do a little guest booking as I ran the board for the Owen Span show, then go into the Vogel show production meeting.

The routine was always the same; whomever walked into the room last would say “I’ve been having trouble with my bank lately”. One of the guys already there would say “Which bank is that?” The last person into the room would respond “The Sh*t P*ss F*ck bank…”

We’d start planning the show. We’d usually get a visit from our boss, Scott Meier, the general manager. Scott, in his mid-thirties at the time, was a very talented executive – he’d go on to start WFAN in New York, the nation’s first all sports station, and also could fart on command.

“Scott”, Dave Elvin would say as Meier stood in the studio, “fart!”. Meier would let a little “frrrrp” fly with no more effort than clearning his throat, as Vogel laughed – giggled, really – with glee. “Do it again”, Don would usually say, like a baby who’s discovered tennis balls. Meier would let another one fly. No problem.

But this day, Sunday, June 8, was different.

I’d convinced Don that the station really, really needed a conservative talk show, if only to keep the FCC happy back in the days of the “Fairness Doctrine” . He pondered the notion for a few days. “Mitch”, he finally said, “you need to get an audition tape to Meier. I’ll help you”.

So we arranged it. I picked him up at his house in North Saint Paul, and we drove to KSTP. We went into the studio – only I sat in the host’s chair this time. I felt like the first time I sat in my Dad’s car; the ratty swivel chair sat practically nose-to-nose with the glass window into the control room; there were controls for all four microphones in the room, plus the “telemixer” phone controller. I told the person on the board in the control room (who was running some syndicated show at the time) to patch the studio into a reel-to-reel deck and roll tape.

And we started talking. I forget what we talked about – politics of some kind, of course, I’m sure, but the tape is long lost. I also “took some calls” – I’d planted a couple of friends with a topic, and recorded a couple of brief flashes of phone interplay. It went well; I remember feeling exhilarated about it all. The whole thing took about an hour.

I drove Don home, and then came back to the studio. I curled up in a production room for about an hour, editing out the “umms” and “y’know”s. Then I dubbed the whole thing to a cassette tape, typed up a memo to Meier asking him to give it a listen, and stuffed the whole thing in his mailbox.

I drove home. The dice had been rolled.

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 a lot when I got my first raise; I’d been promoted sometime in late March or early April from “Intern” to “Associate Producer” of the Don Vogel Show. The title came with money – I was up to $4.25 an hour!

Laughable? Sure. But I was paying $135 for rent, my car was paid for (and insurance was fairly cheap for me), the commute bill had dropped down to $80 a month, and I made the occasional extra buck or two producing hockey games; I actually lived relatively large.

But not as large as I thought I could. From my introduction the previous fall, I’d learned that I kind of liked talk radio. And I’d heard stories – almost rumors – of political conservatives doing talk shows in other cities. I looked around – Morning guy Mike Edwards was center to slightly left (not that he ever had an opinion), Geoff Charles was a libertine, syndies Owen Spann and Michael “Not the singer, not the beer expert” Jackson both swerved left, Joe Soucheray was a Randy Kelly-style DFLer in those days, Pat Reusse was a seething commie, and while Don Vogel didn’t care much for politics, he trended toward the left and didn’t like Ronald Reagan at all.

I knew what the “Fairness Doctrine” was all about. I saw an opportunity.

I went to talk with the boss, general manager Scott Meier. “This station could use a conservative host”.

Meier looked at me – wild-haired, looking for all the world like James Honeyman-Scott (heroin addiction and all) – and said “I’ll think about it”.

I went into the production meeting afterwards, and told Vogel. “Cool! Our own fire-breathing gun nut!”

“Meier doesn’t sound too thrilled”.

“Well, I’ll talk with him…”

I left it at that.

The other part of my routine; I’d built a “recording studio”. I had a Fostex X-15 four-track cassette player, my guitars (the ’60 Fender Jazzmaster, an Ibanez SG with Seymour Duncan “Jeff Beck” pickups that played better than any Gibson SG I’ve ever played), my acoustic, a bass, and a Crumar T-1 organ that I’d picked up at one of Knut Koupee’s “Sunglasses Sales” (trade in a pair of sunglasses for an awesome deal on gear – the organ cost $50) which when miked properly and with a certain suspension of disbelief did a better-than-fair Hammond B3 impression. and a $100 drum machine.

I rigged the whole mess up in a corner of my basement hovel, and started learning how to do demo tapes on my own – from 7PM until 10PM every night (when the housemates insisted I turn the guitars down) I laid down tracks, and from 10 to 2-ish in the morning I tried bouncing and mixing and editing tracks to make my little four tracks sound bigger.

And I started writing music. Oh, in high school and college, I’d fantasized about being a rock star, and written a couple of puerile ditties. But for the first time in my life, I started writing music – writing anything, really – with a certain amount of drive and discipline.

Life was getting fairly good.

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 am I kidding – it’d been a long winter. My car, the ’73 Malibu, got really bad mileage in the winter; I figured it got something like eight miles per gallon; gas sucked up a quarter of my budget.

Something had to give.

There were four of us, three women and I. I’d graduated from college with two of them the previous spring. The other had been in our freshman class, and dropped out, and re-started our senior year, and dropped out again. We all lived in the Twin Cities; one was a programmer, one was a substitute teacher, and the other worked as a janitor in an office building downtown.

Dinner: homemade pizza. The crust was made from Bisquick. Picture Pizza Waffles at Denny’s, if they make such a thing (and Denny’s is about the only contender I can think of).

Then, we cut to the chase; they were going to rent a house in South Minneapolis. And they wondered if I’d be interested in moving in.

I laughed. I guess it made some sense; what house full of women wouldn’t want to have a 6’5″ guy with a couple of firearms in the hizzy? I was used to being the token guy; I had worked at a Waldenbooks in college where I was the only male employee; I noticed soon enough that I was the only person on the crew who changed light bulbs, or stocked and dusted the upper shelves. Any book that got sold from the upper shelves left a vacant spot until my next shift.

But it sounded like a possibility.

Especially when they mentioned the rent; it was a four-bedroom house that went for $700 per month. Programmer’s sister was going to be joining us, shortly; there’d be five of us.

The downside; the girls wanted the bedrooms. I was going to get the half-finished (paneled) south half of the basement.

Upside; my share of the rent would be $140 per month; $52 per month less than I was paying for my half of the dingy little apartment I’d been in since November. That was a lot of groceries; maybe even the occasional night out, in case I ever needed a night out.

We were going to check the place out tomorrow.

Til then – Bisquick Pizza!

By the way, I’ve long since lost track of janitor and substitute teacher. However, I ran into programmer’s sister and bro-in-law, as luck would have it, a couple of weeks ago.

After you live someplace long enough, I guess it’s inevitable you’re going to start running into people again…

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:

1. Get a job I liked. Check. While I was making exceedingly lousy money at KSTP-AM, producing the afternoon show with Don Vogel was better than a dream come true; it was a dream I didn’t even know I’d had. I got paid (not well, but paid) to be juvenline five hours a day.
2. Find a cool girlfriend. No luck there – but it didn’t matter, I was far too much a workaholic to care about such things. Much.
3. Start a band, become a rock star. No, not really a “rock star”, just a local/regional personality in the music biz, someone who could write and record stuff, play out locally, just do music.

I was going to work on that tonight.

Since the day I’d moved to the Cities, I’d been scanning the “Musicians Wanted” column in the City Pages’weekly want ads. I’d been to a few “auditions”:

• One ad sought a guitar player for an original/cover band. They talked a good game on the phone, but something seemed “off”. I trekked out to northeast-suburban White Bear Lake, where I met…a couple of high school kids. We played “Immigrant Song” and the inevitable “Sweet Emotion”. And that was it . Nobody knew any of the same songs; they didn’t know any Clash or Springsteen or Sex Pistols or Ramones; I knew no Metallica or Iron Maiden or Anthrax; I knew one Judas Priest song (“Living After Midnight”, from 1980’s “British Steel”; their knowledge of the Halford/Tipton oeuvre started with “You Got Another Thing Coming”, about the point where I, the purist, cried “Sell-out”). I tried playing them a few of my originals; my Joe Grushecky-like bar-rockdidn’t much mesh with their desire to be “Spinal Tap” but less funny.
• A very gay guy who wanted to be Bono. I went to his place to talk music one Sunday afternoon. Now, I don’t want to say I’d just fallen off the turnip truck – but I pretty much had. I was, at age 23, just starting to figure out what was up with the guys in my high school plays who sat around the piano after practice singing show tunes, and who were all the girls’ best friends. In four years of college in North Dakota, I’d known exactly one person who called himself “gay” – more about that when this series continues into the fall of ’86. The Bono wannabe – and when I say “Bono wannabe”, I don’t mean he looked like Bono (more like Bruno Kirby with excessive skin oil) or sang like him (not even karaoke-quality), just desperately loved Bono and his music – had an apartment off Loring Park that was stuffed with framed posters of David Bowie and Marlon Brando and Morrissey (not that one, this one). I didn’t know much about gay people, but I recognized stereotypes when I saw them. Speaking of which, he played no instruments. As mentioned already, he was an atrocioius singer. What he did was write. Constantly. He was a regular at the First Avenue, the club from the movie Purple Rain; he sat at a table in the balcony, drank house wine, and filled notebooks full of lyrics. I looked at them; they were the sort of self-absorbed (I’d hate to say “whiny”) free verse that’d make Sylvia Plath tell him to pull himself together and grow a pair. I passed.
• A keyboardist, drummer and bass player who lived in a warehouse downtown. I went to the audition, hauling my guitar, amp and harmonica, wearing my army-surplus jacket, through the battered bare-drywall hallways that reeked of cigarettes, cheap wine and urine, up the open-sided freight elevator, and to the fourth floor unit where the guys lived. Three guys that looked like Duran Duran opened the door. An hour of dismal synth-pop later, I grabbed my gear and left.

And so on. I probably did a dozen “auditions” in the first three months.

This night? Back to the dingy, badly-lit, dilapidated blocks of decrepit warehouses that were still about five years away from being called “The Warehouse District”.

I wheeled my old Chevy up Washington Avenue, past strib clubs and empty, seedy storefronts, to Third Avenue. I parked on a dingy street in front of a boarded-up, grafitti-covered building, and walked into the warehouse (leaving my guitar and amp locked in the trunk; I’d been warned about guys getting jumped and losing their gear in these places, and I wanted to check out the digs before I hauled my precious gear into the building), as newspapers blew past me and a drunk staggered down the cross street, kicking a can past vacant doorways.

I went up a rattling freight elevator to the fourth floor, then across creaking, timber floors to a door. The band inside were…a bunch of guys. They’d been playing out for years; they’d even played the First Avenue main stage. They had a few thousand dollars worth of gear, a rehearsal space with a small tab and a view of downtown (even though it smelled of spilled Mad Dog and rodent droppings) and an untold toll on their livers…and not a whole lot else.

I forget the details of the “audition”; it went well, but I suspect the band wanted what most bands that audition for new members wanted; someone who could play really well, and wanted to play someone else’s music, and not agitate to play any of their own music, and do it for next to no money for the foreseeable future. We all looked onward. I don’t think I saw any of them again.

But I saw the room again. In the summer of ’04, I worked for a company in the same, precise space, on the fourth floor of a renovated warehouse near the Monte Carlo bar and restaurant. The Warehouse District is a destination today; the ratty, deserted warehouses are full of trendy restaurants and chi-chi bars and lofts that go for six figures, and office space like the one that occupied what had been the ratty, putrid rehearsal space; the dirty windows were now sunny expanses of thermal glass with a view of downtown that cried “Jing! Jing!”; the dingy flooring, stained dark by decades of machinery oil and hobo vomit, was now blond and clean and had that fussy trendy air about it. The decrepitude on the street outside was carefully controlled – more for atmosphere than anything.

The old rehearsal space, like at least one of the guys who’d rehearsed there, shucked its air of studied rattiness and learned how to earn a living, somewhere along the way.

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 usthat purported to show Elvis Presley was alive and well in 1981. The tape – a noisy cassette with lots of background noise – features a dead-ringer voice:

[singing]I will spend my whole life through
loving you, loving you.
Winter, summer, spring-time, too,
loving you, loving you…[singing stops] 

I’m sorry…

I…

Uh…

I can’t go on.

I just heard that President Reagan…

…has been SHOT…

We booked “Major Bill” on January 8, Elvis’ birthday, to present his thesis. Predictably, he snuck in a plug for a new protege, “Kelli”, a rough-looking but well-endowed woman singing a version of “Last Kiss” that would have been at home at any karaoke night in Wyoming.

But I had another plan afoot. It involved justifying my English degree.

One of my favorite classes in college had been Linguistics – the study of language. One of the things I’d learned about had been voice spectroanalysis – then being researched for criminal prosecution (unsuccessfully, as it turned out). I remembered that one of the foremost practitioners was at the U of Minnesota.

Armed with a $50 talent fee and some gift certificates to a local restaurant, the Major Bill cassette and another with snippets of the real (?) Elvis saying similar words from one of his live albums, I went to the “U”. I met the professor involved (a charming woman who got the gag and jumped at the chance to publicize her program – especially for the $50 and the gift certificate). It’d take her about a week.

I the meantime, I re-booked Major Bill for January 16.

The day came; I got the Major on the line. Don got in the plug for the “Lovely Kelli”, and then played the Major’s tape.

Then, he introduced the professor. She explained her methodology; then, we played the tapes, one after the other.

“So, professor”, asked Don, as producer Dave Elvin cued “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (the dramatic theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey) in the background, “when all is said and done, is this tape the real Elvis?”

“There is an 85% chance that the voice on the tape is not that of the real Elvis Presley”

And, I swear, the big final “DA DUMMMMM” of the them dropped right as the sentence finished. Dave Elvin always had the best timing of anyone in radio.

Major Bill sputtered. Don, Dave and I laughed so hard we almost wet ourselves. And for the first time, I got the feeling I might just belong in this racket.

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 Owen Span show (a classic “Fairness Doctrine”-era talk show, simultaneously about everything and nothing, mushy-left but unwilling to say it), then into the “production meeting” with Don Vogel and Dave Elvin.

The meeting usually involved listening to Don bitch about his latest travails (the unreliability of his Metro Mobility driver was constant theme) and gush about his latest joys (food was a big, constant one) for about an hour, and then a frantic hour of getting stuff together for the show.

Thursday, January 3, 1985 was no exception.

“I got this tape in the mail”, said producer Dave Elvin. “It’s from a guy who claims Elvis is alive”.

The letter was from a “Colonel Bill Smith”, a Dallas man who claimed to have evidence that Elvis faked his death; the tape was from 1981, and purported to prove that Elvis was alive and well, and in hiding.

He popped the cassette into a player. There was some crowd noise, and then the sound of Elvis Presley over a strummed guitar:

I will spend my whole life through
loving you, loving you.
Winter, summer, spring-time, too,
loving you, loving you…

The guitar stopped. There were a few seconds of silence, broken only by a few mutterings from the crowd and what sounded like glasses tinkling.

Then, the voice of Elvis (?), speaking this time…:

I’m sorry… 

I…

Uh…

I can’t go on.

I just heard that President Reagan…

…has been SHOT…

The tape ended.

Don erupted in his deep-in-the-belly chuckle. “We gotta book this guy!”

“I’ll do it”, I said. It sounded interesting.

I walked out to my little desk – it was a little larger than a cutting board, its right wall was a rack of satellite demodulators, and I shared it with the morning show’s producer – and called the number on the “Colonel Bill Smith” letterhead.

Answering machine. I left a message.

The rest of the day? Do the show, get home around 7PM.

My biggest challenge, of course, was figuring out how to stretch my $3.35 an hour to cover my bills; $212.50 a month rent, probably $100 for gas (I put “move to Saint Paul”, a much shorter commute, high on my list of to-dos – once I could afford it), and that left about $100 of my $420 monthly take-home for food, clothing, and everything else.

I started scouting around for ways to supplement my income.

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 Executive Producer, Rob Pendelton, was working. “Why should a highly-skilled executive like yourself be working the board?” I asked; Rob agreed, which gave me two more hours a day.

My budget was looking like it was working out like this:

• Half of my money was going to my rent.
• A further quarter was going to my commute – from south Minneapolis to Maplewood, northeast of Saint Paul. As the weather got colder, my car’s mileage got worse; during one cold snap that first winter, I figured that I was getting about 8mpg.
• The rest of the budget – $100 a month – was for me.

I was so stoked!

I worked through the day – Vogel had a fill-in, as I recall. The snow started around mid-day; it was cold, and it began snowing heavily.

At the end of the day, the guest host took off like a shot. It was 6PM, and dark, and the only people left in the studio were producer Dave Elvin, newscaster Cathy Wurzer (yes, that Cathy Wurzer) and me.

I went out to start my car. Nothing. Zip. Not even a click.

I went back into the studio and started calling garages from the Yellow Pages (handicapped by my ignorance of the geography of the area; I had no idea what ‘burbs to look in, or for that matter that I was probably a mile from Saint Paul, or for that matter any idea of what part of Saint Paul was where). Nobody was available – or the ones that were cost a lost more than I could afford on Christmas Eve.

Dave offered to drive me home, and Rob Pendelton could give me a ride to work the next day, Christmas.

I took him up on it. Dave dropped me off at my apartment in a slushy, white-coated South Minneapolis, and I went inside.

My roommate was visiting family in Wisconsin for Christmas, so I had the place to myself. For that matter, I had South Minneapolis to myself; there was no traffic on Minnehaha Avenue to speak of.

I pulled out and baked a Tombstone pizza – at $3, a bit of a splurge – and a couple of beers (Stroh’s, as I recall), opened a couple of presents I’d gotten from my parents, and turned on the TV. I had two beers left, and ran through one of ’em as I called my family (my brother and sister were still living with my parents, whose divorce was still five years in the future).

By 9-ish, that was pretty much it. I kicked back on the couch, ate the pizza, drank the last beer, watched the Pope’s mass on TV, read the book Dad gave me…

By 11ish I was bored. The TV ran an ad for “Gab Line”, a phone chat line back in the era before Chat Lines got their seedy reputation (or at least when I was just off the turnip truck and didnt’ know about their seedy reputation). “Only 10 cents a minute”. I dialled in.

There were two people on the line; a very drunk-sounding black woman who’d just moved up from Chicago, and a guy who sounded like he’d lost all his teeth and could neither pronounce nor enunciate. I don’t remember what the conversation was about – and with a drunk and a guy who in retrospect was probably a meth addict, does it matter? – but it killed half an hour and $3, yet another big splurge on this red-letter Chrismas Eve.

I hung up and sat down on the couch, playing guitar for a bit, thinking about things.

Downside: I was nearly-broke, I was alone as I could be on Christmas Eve, and my car was an inert lump of rotting metal in a parking lot in Maplewood.

Upside: Things were moving, finally. I had a job – I knew that I could get a job, that I wasn’t completely unemployable and worthless – and I knew that I could get by for a while. I enjoyed the job, as crappy as the pay was. And after the holiday, I could approach the whole music thing with a clear mind and, now that I was employed (more or less), some mental energy.

All in all, not bad.

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 finally had a job to come back to – of which more later).

I went to a dance at the college on Friday night, caught up with a few people (including this person, who took over the college paper from me, if memory serves). It was a kick to tell people I had a job, even if I hadn’t started yet.

Sunday, I headed back to the Cities. I drove to Fargo, had dinner with a friend of mine who was still at North Dakota State, and set back out on ’94 to the East. Over dinnertime, a snowstorm caught up with me; visibility dropped to 1/4 mile. Which wasn’t bad, until a semi would pass on the left; the slipstream whipped up enough snow to make it feel like driving inside a ping pong ball. Time after time – two or three dozen times on the trip – I gripped the steering wheel and kept the car pointed as straight as I could, hoping the road would still be under me when I gout out the other side. Luckily, it always was – but compared to Thursday’s three hour jaunt, it took the better part of five and a half hours go to from Fargo to Minneapolis.

I spent Monday and Tuesday the 16th and 17th knocking around town, enjoying that most glorious of feelings; having a job, but not needing to be there yet.

Finally, it was the 18th; I showed up at the station at 12:30 in the afternoon. I met Dave Elvin, Don Vogel’s producer. He took half an hour to explain the arcane art of talk show phone screening while we waited for the cab to bring Don to the station.

“By the way”, said Dave, “I should explain; Don is blind”. This brought some twists to the job; beyond answering the phone and screening out boring, repetitive and dull callers, I was supposed to pass the next caller to Don through the “talkback” into his headphones, preferably right around the time he needed them.

Don showed up around 1 to begin the daily ritual. Tapping his cane in front of him, jovially bitching about the cold, he made his way back through the “hall” between the backup transmitter and the studio equipment stack, back to the talk studio. I’d grown up working at stations with spartan appointments; KSTP-AM, in its old studio on Highway 61, felt like working in a submarine; cramped, equipment everywhere, some rooms actually with waffleplate floors and steel stairs.

Dave led me into the studio – a cramped little room, maybe 12 by 5, with a glass window along the long side that looked into the control room. There were three seats with microphones along a desk in front of the window. Don sat at the host’s seat, with an ancient push-button telephone controller and a large, gray steel braille machine.

Don sat down heavily. “Sorry I’m late, gentlemen. I was at the bank. The woman behind the window was…” Don switched into a John Houseman accent “…an idiot. A moron“.

I spoke up. “I’ve been having trouble with my bank, too.”

Dave turned to me. “What bank’s that?”

“The S**t P**s F**k Bank”.

Don broke up laughing, with the gusto that so many native Chicagoans bring to laughing about scatology. “I think you’re going to fit in just fine!”

The rest of the meeting was taken up with Dave and I tossing out topic ideas, and Don knocking most of them down. Finally we settled on some things – a few newspaper articles and magazine pieces Dave had come across. The last half hour involved dictating the ledes of the articles, and things like the weather forecast, to Don, who typed them out in braille and arranged them on the desk in front of him.

Then, Dave took me into the control room. I sat down at a little chair wedged between Dave’s control panel and the glass wall of the studio, with a five-line telephone and a microphone. “Just answer the phone, screen them, write down the ones we want to take, and pass them through to Don”, Dave instructed as ABC News played on the monitor overhead and a large man who looked for all the world like Tip O’Neill ambled heavily into the studio. “Mitch, this is John MacDougall”, Dave announced. “News Guy”.

Mac flipped his glasses down his gin-blossomed nose. “You’re Don’s new screener?” he asked in a crotchety-sounding baritone, glaring over his glasses frames.

“And here we go”. Dave at the control board fired off the theme song.

I don’t remember much about that first show – it was the same as most of the subsequenct 13 months’ worth of shows that Don, Dave, John MacDougall, sports guys Bruce Gordon and Mark Boyle and I did; juvenile banter, heckling, mocking and ridicule of the news and the people in it.

I do remember that about a minute into the show – before Mac had finished the newscast – line 1 on the phone lit up. I picked up; “Don Vogel Show”.

“We are not of this world” said a raspy, geriatric-sounding voice. “We are of the infinite world”.

I hesitated. “Excuse me?”

“Stanley Hubbard is the devil! He will be sent to hell with all the other evil sinners!”

My first call was an insane crank.

I knew I was going to love this job.

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 fairly limited job experience (a couple of years at three radio stations, along with stints as a stagehand, remedial English tutor, bellhop/banquet setup, roofing and siding, landscaping, and…er, my paper route, basically) and, when all else failed, waiting. The kind of waiting you do when you’re hoping for something, but not really expecting it.

A look in the papers showed there was plenty of work for security guards and waiters; I gave myself three more weeks, until after New Years.

And I figured I’d take a long weekend. I might not get another for a while.

Yesterday – December 13, a Thursday – I drove back to North Dakota. Now, a couple of friends and I – friends of mine from college who’d hailed from the Cities but went to college in North Dakota – had a bit of a competition; who could make it from the cities to Jamestown in the fewest road hours? We had a consistent speed course marked out; one end was the 694/River bridge, and the other was the easternmost of Jamestown’s three exits on I94. Jeff Sisk had the current record, 4 hours and 30 minutes for the 335 mile course.

I left a message for Rob Pendelton at KSTP (he’d told me to call Thursday), and then set out in my old Malibu – with 175,000 miles on it, and an outer door panel flapping in the wind from salt damage – around 1 or 2PM, after allowing myself the rare luxury of sleeping in until ninish (I may have been an unemployed bum, but I was a bum with a ton of self-discipline; I was up and on the phone by 8AM every single weekday during those two months)…

…and I punched it. I kept it around 75 in Minnesota, keeping a keen eye out for cops (of whom I saw none), making it from The Bridge to the Red River in a shade over three hours. Then, once I got through Fargo’s traffic and go-slow zone, it was out onto the open prairie.

Back then, North Dakotans had a custom; if it was daylight and they passed a cop or a trooper in daylight, they’d flip on their lights and keep them on for a few miles, to warn oncoming traffic. If it was broad daylight and you saw lights? Dial it back (I don’t know if this still happens, because I pretty much drive close to the speed limit these days, and the limit has gone up from 55 to 70 on the open freeway, which is just fine by me). Once I got past the West Fargo exits headed west, the lights were out. I punched it up to 85. 23 year olds are immortal, of course; thinking back, the thought of pushing that rotting old jalopy with its rattly bearings and flapping door panels and iffy tires past 40 makes me blanche. But I kept it over 80 all the way to Jamestown, except for a stretch near Casselton, when the oncoming lights came on; I passed the trooper doing a perfect 55, two miles later.

It was a cold day out – probably a bit below zero. The air had the beginnings of that crystalline quality it gets when it’s very cold – once you got to the Red River Valley with its pool-table topography, you could see forever. The clouds were high and piled on top of each other, just like the day I’d moved to the Cities, almost two months earlier. And as I nosed out onto the prairie, the sun was just starting to dip below the horizon. I was treated to one of nature’s most glorious spectacles – a sunset on a cold day. Yellow, then pinkish-orange, then a glorious red as the light dipped below the long, gently undulating horizon to the west.

Finally – sixish, I think, around dinner time – I made it back to Jamestown. I spent the evening at some friends’ dorm room up at the college – Rich Larson and Scott Massine, I think – and hung out with a few of the people I’d known who still remembered me from the year before.

“So you’re still down in the Cities!”, Scott said. “Wow. My mom said you’d have given up and moved back by now!”

Looking back, that was one of the things that always pissed me off about the place. “You might move elsewhere, but you’ll be back. It’s a big, ugly world out there, it’ll eat you alive. Just like [fill in name of high school basketball star who’d gone to Fargo or Denver or Minneapolis or Boston or Des Moines, and moved back after a year or five]; he just decided the big city was too crazy for him. ” The unstated coda: “And so will you!”

I fulminated on that one for a while. Slights like that made a lot more difference to me back then.

The next morning, at my Mom and Dad’s place, I had breakfast, relaxed a bit – and, almost as an afterthought, made a call to the Cities, to KSTP-AM, to follow up from yesterday’s call.

“Yes, Mitch – we were wondering if you’d like to start next Tuesday?”

I figured I would, yes, thanks.

So maybe I wouldn’t come crawling back to Jamestown just yet. “In your face“, I thought as a silent message to Scott’s mom.

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 White Bear Lake, from an ad in the City Pages. The ad said they – a bass player and a drummer – wanted to start a good rock and roll band with some room for originals. The ad didn’t say they were a couple of high school kids playing in their mom’s basement. As the blizzard formed, I drove out to White Bear – it might as well have been Wisconsin – slogged through “Immigrant Song” and “Sweet Emotion” and a little very uninspired jamming, and then picked my way home through near-zero visibility (my car nearly bottomed out – in the middle of 35W!), cold, tired, crabby, and out a couple of bucks on gas that needn’t have been burned in the first place.

I’d been in the Twin Cities almost two months, and with the exception of Wednesday (today!) and my interview at KSTP-AM, I really didn’t have a thing going on. My resolution was to find a job – any job, no matter how crappy, just to pay the bills, if I didn’t have something else by New Years.

I also resolved that I was going to go back to Jamestown for a long weekend, starting tomorrow, December 13.

But first things first; the interview.

I drove out to KSTP; successfully, this time. I was ushered into the kitchen area – same as my previous interview. I met Rob Pendelton, the “Executive Producer”, at the time a 31 year old guy who looked like he’d be more comfortable in sandals and shorts, with a laid-back attitude to match; we went through the basics of the job (I’d be a call screener; minimum wage; three hours a day plus the two-hour production meeting; no guarantees of going anywhere). I nodded enthusiastically, smiled, and kept my eye contact without flinching; I’d learned! By this point, I didn’t care; anything was better than nothing.

Then, I met with David Elvin, the producer for a guy named Don Vogel.

We chatted for a bit. The cast of the Vogel Show had just had a minor local “hit” in the novelty song market, “Like A Roving Coach”; I’d caught it on the show the previous week as I was doing my “research”, listening to the program; it was Don’s take on Lou Holtz scramming for Notre Dame (done in Don’s impeccable Bob Dylan impression). “Yep, I heard it”, I allowed. “I do a lot of music; I play guitar”.

That brightened Dave up a bit. “Cool! I kind of suck on guitar…”

The interview went uphill fast from there – and for the first time since I’d moved to the city, after umpteen interviews, I was finally starting to smell paydirt.

Where “paydirt” is $3.35 an hour.

But no matter. I drove home feeling an exhilaration that had long deserted me, at least on the job-hunting front. Maybe this can work after all.

I got home and started thinking about the trip back to North Dakota. Or as I put it in my mind as I thought about it, “home”. I was acutely aware that NoDak was still the home base.

It was fading, but still there.

It was getting cold out.

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 – and flamed out as the company imposed a hiring freeze that lasted the better part of a decade. I ended up working in tech writing – starting in 1993. But that would wait.

And wait.

And wait.

I’d been to a bunch of band auditions. I figured the best way to get into the music scene was to get into a band that was sort of, kind of, like what I wanted to do.

My first audition was sometime in mid-November, after I’d moved into my apartment in South Minneapolis. It was in a warehouse on and Washington Avenue North. I parked my car in a trash-strewn dirt lot abutting a railroad track, and hauled my gear – my guitar and amp – up a cement stairway onto a ratty loading dock that smelled of grease and urine. A bum was passed out in a neighboring doorway. I took a ricket freight elevator up to a drafty room that smelled like rodent droppings with a couple of hanging 110 volt outlets and fist holes in the wallboard, in a warren of similar little spaces housing small bands and wheezing artists. The audition? A couple of synth-pop dweebs from Woodbury-via-The Wedge. Dreadful music, worse “audition”. Hated it. I only bring it up, really, as a way of noting that I walked by that same building about a year ago. It’s been renovated into lofts that start around $375,000; the building next door where the drunk was passed out is a chi-chi office block. I barely recognized the place.

The other event was “Today”, Wednesday. After a bunch of tries, I got a hold of Rob Pendelton at KSTP-AM. “Sorry, I’ve been so busy – but we have a job working as a screener for the…” I didn’t catch the host’s name. “We’d like you to come in for an interview next Wednesday”.

I accepted, naturally. The bank account was in free fall. My goal; if I didn’t have a job I actually wanted by New Years, I was going to take the first security job that I could get.

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 new job listings. I diligently trekked up to the library at Lake and Minnehaha both mornings, read the paper, copied down the information, then walked home to my apartment on 37th and cranked out cover letters.
• Most mornings I’d go to the Rainbow on Lake and Minnehaha. I’d wear a couple layers of clothes – jacket, sunglasses, etc; I’d walk around the store and graze on all the samples once, then shuck the jacket and shades and go back around again. I’d get a fair-to-middlling meal out of the circuit. I doubt I fooled anyone.
• Saturdays, I’d take the 38 bus over to Little Tin Soldier for a day’s worth of wargaming; Saturdays usually had some sort of “modern micro-armor” (little lead models of World War II or Cold War tanks and other equipment) battle; it was always open-play, and someone’d always lend me a company or two of vehicles. It was the cheapest eight hours of entertainment going.
• In the evening, I’d play guitar and try to write music around my roommate’s kitchen table; he worked swing shift, so it was easy; my upstairs neighbors were (apparently) Ukranian squat-dancers who jumped around on their linoleum floor all day in wooden clogs, and then either fought or had loud sex on mattresses made out of old transmission parts all night, so I figured I could get away with a little acoustic guitar and quiet warbling. I figured since I’d moved here in part to be a rock star, I’d better write some music.
• Sundays, I’d take a hike. On days like this – chilly, foggy, a stiff wind – I’d hike down Hiawatha to Minnehaha Park, walk down the endless wooden stairways to the creek, and walk down the stream course through the woods to where Minnehaha joined the Mississippi River, by the Vets hospital. It was cold, and fairly quiet (only the cars on the Ford Bridge and, occasionally, the horns of passing tugs; I’d sit against a tree for an hour or two and watch the river go by and just think, the chill settling into my bones in a way that felt almost satisfying after a week’s worth of the burning anxiety of being in my sixth week of looking for a job.
• I’d call KSTP every Wednesday, more to keep a routine going than out of any expectation for a job.

After my encounter with Tom Myhre at the demonstration a month earlier and the unsuccessful interview with Jean the Producerthree weeks earlier, my contact – executive producer Bruce Huff – told me to call back periodically. I did – weekly, on Wednesdays. I never actually reached him again. It was on November 27 that I finally got through to someone.

“Bruce Huff is no longer at the station”.

My heart didn’t especially slump; this was typical of radio, people disappearing from stations on no notice. I’d pretty much given up radio as a career – in fact, part of me didn’t want to work in the racket again.

“But I’ll put you through to Rob Pendelton”.

I waited a few minutes on hold, and Pendelton came on the line, in a voice that didn’t sound especially made for radio in the classical sense. He was the new “Executive Producer” – Huff had left…

…and there was a chance that another position was going to open up.

“Call back next week”, he told me. I made a note.

Next Wednesday.

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; a long, beige blur. Most of the time, I sat at my host’s kitchen table, poring over want ads, making phone calls, bundling resumes into envelopes. Noon, if I was lucky, meant a trip to the post office to mail a couple of rap sheets out. But nothing much came back.

After my initial flurry, there weren’t many job interviews, although not for lack of trying. I remember the occasional foray out onto the freeways, whose pace and idiosyncrasies I was slowly starting to figure out.

The thing I most remember from the next ten days was music; while the actual goings-on of that week and a half are lost to mundane, beige history, I can remember the songs I heard on the radio, each associated with some thing or activity or place or feeling: “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits, which I heard for the first time ever on WLOL-FM with Hines and Berglund as I turned out onto 494 for my first rush hour; “Shout” by Tears for Fears, driving down Cedar Avenue, dejected after another loser job interview; “Kyrie” by Mr. Mister, in the background after my host left for work and I started getting down to business; “I Just Died In Your Arms” by, er, Cutting Crew, in the same chair six hours later after probably a dozen phone calls and a few abortive conversations with disinterested hiring managers who’d no doubt heard from plenty of unqualified college grads already that day; “If You Love Somebody” by the newly Police-free Sting, as I sat and stared at MTV and wondered how Sting had gone from the great Police frontman to being perhaps the blandest presence in pop music; last, and worst, “We Built This City”, which was everywhere – on MTV, on all the top-forty stations, at gas stations, everywhere. Hearing it, I wondered if the Cold War were perhaps lost after all; the notion that in 1985 a video director would think twenty seconds of footage of Craig Chaquico playing a guitar solo compelling struck me as oddly East German. I shivered and moved on.

There had really only been two big events: On Wednesday, November 30, I got a call back from Bruce Huff, the executive producer at KSTP, asking me in for an interview on Monday. And on Friday, November 1, I moved from the couch in Burnsville to an apartment on 37th and Minnehaha in South Minneapolis. The move, natch, was no big shakes; all my stuff fit in the back seat, with probably enough room left over for a passenger or two, if I’d needed. The guitars, of course, rode in front with me. It took me two trips to get my stuff stowed in my room, followed by a trip to a ratty mattress surplus joint on Lake Street, where thirty (of my rapidly-dwindling store of) dollars got me a single mattress, no box. I took it home, flopped it on the floor, and took a nap.

That night, of course, came the first big culture shock. There was a little hole-in-the-wall bar across the street, “Jimmy’s Steaks and Spirits”. I walked across Minnehaha for my first big one-beer night out – and figured there was no better way to break in my new place than to store my first six-pack in my first fridge. I flagged down the bartender. “Could I get a six to go?”

He laughed and kept moving.

Huh? “Do you do off-sale?”

He looked at me like I’d asked for an oil change. Asking for a six-pack to go – the great North Dakota after-bar-trip tradition – was illegal?

Friggin’ nannystate, I thought as I paid my $1.75 tab and left.

The interview was scheduled for Monday at 3PM. I got a nice, early start – which was a good thing, since true to my rapidly-developing tradition of incompetence at navigating in the ‘burbs, I got lost, taking Highway 36 to Snelling (AKA “MN 51”) instead of Highway 61. 51, 61, what’s the difference, right?

But I regrouped, got to the interview on time, and was escorted back to talk with a woman, Jean, who was the producer for a guy named Geoff Charles. Geoff wasn’t there, so Jean – a thirtyfivish redhead with a manner that could charitably called “flinty”, took over. The job she described – call screener for Charles – was a new one. While I’d prided myself on having done just about everything one could do in a radio station, talk radio was a whole new animal for me.

The interview went well, but not spectacularly. I walked out of the station telling myself you said you were done with radio. This interview probably makes it official. I didn’t expect I’d gotten the job.

A phone call from Jean a couple of days later confirmed this. I pretty much gave up on the idea of radio – especially talk radio, which just didn’t look like my thing. No big.

I hunkered down for a long-term search.

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.

A bit of background; my first radio job was at KEYJ in Jamestown, ND, in 1979, starting the summer before my junior year of high school. My first boss, Bob Richardson, had a great philosophy; the community kept him in business, so he was going to give back by (among other things) teaching the young ‘uns how to do radio. He made a pretty strict point of keeping a couple of high school or college kids on the part-time staff. And it was a great part-time job. Bob was gruff enough to make Lou Grant run yipping up a tree, but a kid coming out of his station knew a lot about how radio was done. High school kids could find themselves covering the news (I did), calling play by play, learning sales or engineering or pretty much anything you could do in a station. Many people went on from KEYJ to big careers.

In 1980, a couple of slick late-twentysomething weasels who’d been knocking around the business for a few years bought the station, changed the call letters to KQDJ – and, a few weeks, later, fired most of us locals and brought in a bunch of their own people. It was a valuable lesson at 17 – never get attached to a job. It was a lesson I learned 10 years before most of the workforce; it was a crappy feeling at the time, but it’s served me well.

I went on to work at a couple more stations during college – KDAK in Carrington, ND and then back to KQDJ, which was under new management. But while it was still a decent part time job, the horizons were decidedly narrower. Part time announcers…announced. Part time. No play by play, no news – and barely any disc jockeying; much of the nighttime lineup was via satellite. I began to learn the misery of so many radio gigs in the eighties and nineties – the “Live assist” job, better known as “watching the needle bob” in those days when a radio station still needed to have a live human in the building when it was on the air.

So I was pretty well sick of radio by the time I got out of college. I figured (except for one brief, miserable job interview for a news gig in Fargo) that my radio days were over.

==========

Another long day on the road; I made plans to meet my host for a demonstration later in the day. More on that later.

I started out the day with another job interview, again over in Edina, but this one – a switch! – a solo interview with one person!

The gig was with a personnel service; I’d be working as a recruiter. The interviewer was a late-twenty-something guy who looked like he’d already been eaten and crapped out; pale, ulcerous, he looked like a poster child for excessive job stress. Immaculately dressed and wearing tinted glasses, he also seemed to be doing fairly well in the headhunting business.

We talked for half an hour. I was slowly learning – I thought – the big lesson of job hunting; tell them what they want to hear.

At the end of the interview, he looked at my resume, grimaced like he had something wrong with his stomach, and groaned as much as said “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Huh? “I beg your pardon?”

“Well, it’s just that you’re from a small town. Maybe you should find a job that’s more suited to that sort of background”

I sat, more or less shocked into silence. “OK…any suggestions?” I asked, not really listening to the reply. I politely waited for him to finish, and took my uncomfortable leave.

Driving away, I punched the steering wheel the way I wished I’d punched the interviewer. I resolved that my jitters and inferiority complex about being just off the turnip truck had to turn into something else. I sprouted a huge chip on my shoulder that day; no more passive-aggressive Scandinavian nice guy. It served me well in coming months.

I killed a few hours in a library, and went to my next appointment, to check out another “Roommates Wanted” lead. I’d been to a few of these the previous week; this was the last remaining ad.

========

The stop was a huge improvement; the guy, a late-twentysomething who I remember only as “Dave”, was a nice enough guy, who’d had a roommate bail on him; he needed someone to help share the rent in a two-bedroom basement apartment in South Minnepolis, and pronto. $212.50 a month, all utilities except phone paid, $175 deposit, preference to people who wanted to get moved in in time to pay October rent. I peeled off $175 and made a reservation on October 1.

Apartment? Check. Now there was the little matter of a job.

========

My host – a college friend – had parents who ran a mission in the inner city of Minneapolis. Among their goals was to get the pr0n industry out of the inner city.

Mildly libertarian as I was, I had a qualm or two about the goal of forcing legal businesses out of town, and the infringement on property rights – but I figured after a week and a half of squatting on the couch for free, I owed everyone some shoe leather.

Everyone was picketing the Rialto Theatre, an old theatre at the corner of Lake and Chicago that had long since gone to seed; it was an XXX theatre, along with peep shows and a bookstore.

Outside, my host’s parents were joined by two dozen other people; I was one of about four males there, the only one under age 50, one of two taller than 5’10. One could say I stood out in the crowd.

I picked up a sign, and started pacing in the oval with the rest of the protesters, mostly older women. The traffic raced past on Lake; some people honked; others gave one figure salutes and taunts. Someone leaned out of one of the upstairs windows and dropped a water balloon – or at least I remember hoping it was water – which landed on the sidewalk between a couple of protesters, splattering several. However, having a 6’5 guy in a bandanna and a battle jacket was making the response a tad more polite than it usually was on a Friday night, some of the marchers told me.

Another sign that I was conspicuous? A reporter (who I later learned was Alan Costantini, long-time reporter at KARE11, which at the time was still WUSA11) crossed the street with a cameraman and a microphone. “Mind if we ask you a few questions?” So I did my first standup interview, there on Lake Street, looking a little goofy and disheveled in my Union Jack bandanna.

After Costantini left, I realized – “Crap! Networking opportunity lost!

As I mentally kicked myself, I heard a sonorous voice. “Excuse me, sir. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions”.

It was a shorter guy, with longer, non-TV hair. He carried a professional-grade cassette recorder – the kind only radio reporters and anthropologists carried.

“Sure”, I replied. “But I have a question for you, first. I’m just down from North Dakota, and I need a job, and I’ve worked in radio, and I was wondering if you could take me to your leader?”

The guy’s eyes widened. “North Dakota? Where?”

“Jamestown”.

“Ah. I’m from Casselton”, a little town 15 miles west of Fargo.

He introduced himself as Tom Myhre, and we did an interview. I must have done a good job; at the end, he snapped off the cassette and handed me a business card. “I’ll tell my executive producer, Bruce Huff, about you. Call him on Monday, OK?” I wrote the name on the card as Tom went back to his car.

I finished out the protest, and we adjourned to someone’s house for pizza and pop and the 10PM news, where I got to watch my weird-looking mug try to equivocate about property rights and the neighborhood’s right to deal with nuisances.

And I nearly wore the card out, checking and re-checking it, memorizing the phone numbers and names and addresses.

And before I went to bed that night, I took out my old portable typewriter and re-wrote a resume that read less like a 1930’s perfume ad and more like a radio guy. I was ready for Monday.

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.

9AM job interview in Edina. It was another “group interview”, this time for a gig selling Encyclopedia Brittanica, door to door through the suburbs. I went because I figured I should – any kind of job interview was better than nothing, and it’s all good practice. Right?

I sat for two hours, listening to the ins and outs of the job, and finally figured “Even I’m not this desperate”. I left without accepting a position.

I had a few hours to kill before my next appointment, to check out a “roommate wanted” ad over by Powderhorn Park, in south Minneapolis. I found my way in to Uptown Minneapolis, and killed an hour at the old Odegaard’s books, at the new Calhoun Square. In a state full of Waldenbooks and B. Daltons, I’d never imagined such a thing – a big, huge store where you could browse, read, sit! I dragged myself away and chugged slowly down the decaying morass of West Lake Street, getting to the appointment just in time.

The ad said they were looking for a Christian guy, to pay 1/4 of the rent for a room in an upstairs duplex just off Powderhorn Park, a pretty little urban park surrounding a curious little lake, right in the middle of a neighborhood that was well on its way toward becoming one of Minneapolis’ biggest, nastiest crack dens. I didn’t know this at the time.

I rang the doorbell, and the guy – six-footish, late twenties, wearing a full beard and mustache, answered. He showed me around the place – kitchen privileges, one bathroom, smallish but cozy bedroom, not much storage (not that it mattered to me), $175 a month, heat included. “Nice”, I said. “I’m interested!”.

“Well, we gotta talk first. Let’s go take a drive”.

Unusual.

We walked out to his Chevette, climbed in, and took a turn around the neighborhood. “So – where are you at with your faith”.

“Um…” – Huh?

Now, bear with me a bit, here. I’m pretty articulate about a lot of things. Religious faith is not one of them. I certainly have a lot of it, but expressing it is one of those things I pay ministers to do in church.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Wrong question.

“Look, me and my roommates are charismatic Catholics. We need to make sure you’re in kind of the same place on your religious journey as we are. So – have you ever had a charismatic experience?”

“Well, I haven’t – but then, I’ve never seen anything that says one needs to, to be a Christian”.

“But you do!”, he said, emphatically.

“But what about…”, I started, quoting a verse from Corinthians that says, in about as many words, that each of us is called to faith with different gifts; speaking in tongues is one of many; mine was…

“Look, I’m just covering my ass here”, he said, turning back up the street to the duplex.

Wasn’t aware there was a biblical injunction to cover your ass, I thought, and have wished for twenty years that I’d said.

I am pretty sure I shook my head visibly as I took my leave and walked to the car. I’d imagine he did the same.

Then it was back to Burnsville for more job hunting. It was looking like it was going to be along, dry autumn.