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.

In ’84 and ’85, Minneapolis’ musical output was peaking. For white-boy punks like me, the likes of the Replacements and Hüsker Dü were breaking out of the regional ghetto, even getting on the national charts.

And then, there was Purple Rain. To a guy who was used to playing in high school gyms and divey bars, the “First Avenue” in Purple Rain – Prince’s one good movie, and it was a great one – was irresistable; a kaleidoscope of colors, styles, attitudes; people break dancing in the balconies!; a stage with actual lights and a sound system that sounded like it worked; Apollonia running out of a cab and straight into your gig!. Even the seamy, seedy underbelly of Minneapolis music looked good. Jeebus, I was so looking forward to being in a music scene with a seamy underbelly! At gigs in North Dakota, the seamy underbelly was someone selling angel dust in the parking lot.

I went downtown that night; I had to make it an early one, because I had a 9AM job interview the next morning. but I had to get to the First Avenue and see what the fuss was all about!

Eyes darting between the road and the map, I found my way downtown. I took the first parking spot I could find – it was on Eighth Street over by the Normandie Inn, probably a mile from the First Avenue, but I didn’t want to take any chances. I parked, plugged the meter (it was at the end of the evening that I read the meter and noticed that they were not enforced on Sundays, to a dollar’s worth of chagrin), and started walking.

First stop – Northern Lights records, on Hennepin and Seventh. I walked inside and took my first deep drag of the gloriously skanky, funky miasma of a big-city underground record store. Heaven!

I browsed the aisles, seeing vinyl wonders that never made it west of Saint Cloud; Throbbing Gristle! Black Flag! Pigbag! Pure farging heaven!

There was a bulletin board in the back, crammed with posters for bands looking for people, people looking for bands, bands looking for gigs; I tore off a couple of phone numbers, carefully put them in my wallet, and killed a couple of hours in dank, skeezy style.

Finally, it was closing time. I bought a copy of the new Replacements album (Tim, still one of my favorites, partly because of its association with this whole time, mostly because it’s just a freaking great record), walked out and turned down Seventh.

And then I saw the sign – the same big, black edifice from the movie, the “First Avenue and Seventh Street Entry”.

It was a Sunday night; I don’t think any bands were playing in the Entry; the Main Room had a DJ playing music and vids (I remember some Sonic Youth song, although not the name – not that it makes a lot of difference – and the vid for the Replacements’ “Bastards of Young”). Nobody was on the floor. The balcony had a couple of tables full of people, drinking and smoking and talking. Not a break dancer to be seen.

I walked through the door, around the edge of the huge dance floor, past a couple of pinball machines, and the little pizza bar that used to be just off stage left, on the ratty, dark carpet, past innumerable sparsely-populated stools. I looked around the joint – at the dingy rafters, the large but oppressively flat-black stage, the tile floor and the ratty risers. And I thought…

…”It’s just a bar“.

Just a big, dark, dirty, smoky bar!

I laughed. What did I expect, Graceland? I certainly should have known better than to expect Apollonia, break dancers; I was less crestfallen than mentally kicking myself for falling for a movie image.

I kicked myself a few more times, ordered a beer, and plotted my band’s first gig on the mainroom stage. And how I was going to put that band together.

After I got a job, of course.

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

It had been a long, long week.

• After spending Wednesday trolling through want ads for both roommates and jobs, I had a couple of bites. Thursday was a big day!
• You should be getting the impression by this point in the series that I was pretty much straight off the turnip truck. At no time was this more evident than my first Thursday in the Twins, the 18th. I had to get from Burnsville, in the far south ‘burbs of Minneapolis, to the northeast end of Roseville, a north suburb of Saint Paul. And I had to be there by 8AM. I maneuvered out onto Cedar Avenue, and drove north to 494…
•  …and instantly felt like Jed Clampett going out on the 405 for the first time. People were barrelling along at 70 miles per hour, practically bumper to bumper (by my bucolic rural experience); I hit my target heart rate by the time I got to Portland Avenue, then doubled it…
• …just in time to run smack into my first traffic jam. Almost literally I was trying to find a place to merge into the center lane, and turned my head to see a river of red brake lights around Diamond Lake Road. I had to slam on my brakes and shimmy into the breakdown lane, probably two feet behind the car in front of me. I broke into a cold sweat.
• I’d left plenty of time to get to Roseville, though – which is a good thing, because my habit of always, always getting lost in the ‘burbs, which had started on Tuesday, was already firmly established. Oh, I got to Highway 36 and made the turn toward east Roseville just fine – but I didn’t notice until I was even with the lane that “Rice Street” was the same as the highway number I was looking for. I had to cloverleaf around…
• …and come back to my first “group interview”. It was with a financial services company, for an all-commission telephone sales job. Even right off the turnip truck, the job screemed “scam” to me, and the “interviewer” (an early-thirtysomething who fairly screamed “snake oil” – let’s call him “Mr. Oily”) seemed like a used-car salesman who’d just gotten paroled for fraud. There were 24 of us in the room. At the end of a 45 minute presentation about the company, Mr. Oily asked everyone to write down a number between 1 and 10, with 10 being very interested in the company and 1 being not so much. I hedged on the number. “Everyone who wrote a six or less, you’re free to go”, he said with an air of almost spiteful finality. About half of the room got up, seemed confused, and walked out the door past Mr. Oily’s almost-angry glare. “Now, for the rest of you…”, he continued, and talked for another hour about the gig. I figured I’d have written a “3” before, but my curiosity got the better of me – and what little common sense I had at that time of my life drove the number down to a negative 10. I slipped out of the building during a break, feeling vaguely guilty about walking away from a potential job.
• I next drove to an appointment with someone in the “Roommates” column in the Strib. It was for a house on 33rd and Colfax, deep in the heart of what later became Minneapolis’ crack alley. On the way there, I noticed that it was just south of “Little Tin Soldier”. Now, for those of us who grew up playing Avalon Hill wargames in North Dakota, “Tin Soldier” was legendary; a store that sold games, and actually had tables where you could find other people to play the games with!. Jeeeeeeez. How perfect! I made a mental note to return after I saw the place…
• …to which I got, right on time. It was a nice place, a four-bedroom house with three other twenty-something guys. I thought it was perfect– but they seemed to grow disinterested when I told ’em I didn’t have a job yet. Mental note to self…
• …and then, off to Tin Soldier, where I killed a happy couple of hours, in hog heaven, awash in military history books, games, miniatures – I felt like a kid in candyland. Friday morning – a day of job hunting and phone calls. I landed another interview for Monday!

It was Friday night. I think I made spaghetti for my host, just about the only thing I knew how to cook (besides bitchin’grilled cheese). The week was over; no more job hunting until the Sunday Strib came out.

It was time for a weekend in the Cities!

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 pulled out my cash. I loaded all my stuff back into my car, shook Dad’s hand, hugged Mom goodbye, and drove off up Second Avenue, the street I’d lived on for 14 years. It was about 11AM. I saw Mom crying in the rear-view mirror. I kind of understood – and as I am four-eight years away from my own oldest leaving, I know I do, today.

Anyway, I turned onto main street. The freeway was off to the left.

I took a right. I wasn’t done yet.

I topped up my gas tank, stocked up on munchies for the road, and took one last drive around town. I drove up main street; the old post office was in the process of being converted into some sort of senior citizen’s home; the JC Penney’s that had replaced my grandmother‘s old photography studio was shuttered (it had moved to a mall on the “South Hill”); most of the other old stores were either closed or reeling from years of lousy farm prices.

Up the hill, through the college one last time, then out on Airport Road to the long-cut to the freeway, the ten-mile back-road detour that led through durum fields and along the Northern Pacific tracks to the Ladish Malting Barley plant, a huge concrete monolith that looks like a three-times-larger, Soviet grain elevator. I used to bike out there all the time; it was a strip of Old Highway Ten, a road that used to link Billings with Chicago, but these days was mainly a utility road. It was a gorgeous fall day, chilly and windy, but with a deep blue sky and cumulus clouds that piled up in serried waves, 180 degrees across the sky from horizon to horizon.

I slipped a cassette of John (nee“Cougar”) Mellencamp’s “Scarecrow” in the tape player as I gunned down the access road to the Spiritwood exit, a little truck exist off I-94 that really connects the freeway to, almost literally, nowhere. “Minutes to Memories” came on:

On a greyhound thirty miles beyond jamestown
He saw the sun set on the tennessee line
He looked at the young man who was riding beside him
He said I’m old kind of worn out inside
I worked my whole life in the steel mills of gary
And my father before me I helped build this land
Now I’m seventy-seven and with God as my witness
I earned every dollar that passed through my hands
My family and friends are the best thing I’ve known
Through the eye of the needle I’ll carry them home 

Chorus:
Days turn to minutes
And minutes to memories
Life sweeps away the dreams
That we have planned
You are young and you are the future
So suck it up and tough it out
And be the best you can

In that adolescent way that music acts, that song (like the whole album, the best rock and roll album ever about small-town America) had been a hammer to my forehead all the previous summer.

The rain hit the old dog in the twilight’s last gleaming
He said son it sounds like rattling old bones
This highway is long but I know some that are longer
By sunup tomorrow I guess I’ll be home
Through the hills of kentucky ’cross the ohio river
The old man kept talking ’bout his life and his times
He fell asleep with his head against the window
He said an honest man’s pillow is his peace of mind
This world offers riches and riches will grow wings
I don’t take stock in those uncertain things

What were those “uncertain things?”

I mean, I knew all sorts of people who were happy living on the Plains – Blue-state fantasies aside, many of them were sharp, sometimes brilliant people. Many of my college professors had been leaders in their respective fields, hardly intellectual slouches – what did they know that I didn’t?

How could my father, no dummy himself, be so happy there?

The old man had a vision but it was hard for me to follow
I do things my way and I pay a high price
When I think back on the old man and the bus ride
Now that I’m older I can see he was right 

Another hot one out on highway eleven
This is my life it’s what I’ve chosen to do
There are no free rides no one said it’d be easy
The old man told me this my son I’m telling it to you

Chorus:
Days turn to minutes
And minutes to memories
Life sweeps away the dreams
That we have planned
You are young and you are the future
So suck it up and tough it out
And be the best you can

I’d have to figure it out later. I had a life to try to start.

—–

I stopped for gas and said hi to some friends in Fargo, and then kept going – and I was about to learn a key truth of life in the upper midwest. Over the years, I’ve driven that same route a couple of dozen times; while the Dakotas are beautiful driving, once you get between Fergus Falls and Saint Cloud, probably a 150 mile stretch, one gives up all hope of getting oxygen to one’s brain. No radio, no scenery (“Ooh. More trees”). No nothing. I got a vague sense of ennui on my first trip. It’s become an iron law of physics since then.

—–

It was strange; in 1985, there was a point where you could say “The Twin Cities metro starts here”. There was a sign on I94 on the west edge of Maple Grove, MN, by a grove of trees in the middle of some farm fields. A mile from the sign was an abandoned barn. It had been there three years earlier, when the college choir bus had passed through town; it was still there. And over the next rise, you could see rows of beige suburban ramblers marching off toward the east along the freeway. The barn is long gone – since before 1990, I suppose – but for the first several years I lived in the metro, that barn was the sign that I was home again.

The road got wider; the traffic got busier. I was coming in just after the afternoon rush hour. The sun was just starting to amble down behind me as I made the broad ,swooping turn onto I494, the south bypass, which curls down past the southwest corner of the Cities, then swerves left through the Bloomington Strip, which even in those days before the Mall of America was a major commercial center. I’m sure my eyes goggled as I drove down the mainstreet of the south metro, past rows of tall, gray buildings and tall soundwalls that never seemed to end, to my just-off-the-turnip wagon consciousness at the time.

Then, the cloverleaf south onto 35E, the broad avenue across the Minnesota River into the leafy beige ocean of Burnsville…

…where I began a streak that lasted ten years. For that whole time, I never once found a place in the suburbs on the first try. The streak kicked off in style; I zigged when I should have zagged on some suburban side street, and ended up somewhere in Eagan (ironically, right by what are now the Patriot studios, although that meant nothing to me at the time). It took me 40 minutes and a phone call to unscramble things, and arrive at my college friend’s house…

…where I met the couch that’d be my home for the next two weeks.

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 up my ’73 Malibu. My guitars, naturally, rode in the passenger seat, surrounded by blankets and a pillow. In the back, a gym bag, an army-surplus duffel, a guitar amp, and my interview suit (nee my graduation suit) in a laundry bag. And not much else.

I climbed into the car; not quite ready to head out yet. One last errand to run; withdraw my money from the bank.

And then I’d be ready to go.

I walked out the front door of Dad’s house, and down to the street, where my car – in whose safety I was a lot less sure than before – sat. I started up, and drove over to Metropolitan Federal Savings and Loan to pull my money out and get on the road.

I parked on the street in front of the bank, checked my passbook inside my jacket pocket, walked up to the front door, and pulled.

And nearly wrenched my hand. The door didn’t move.

Huh?

I focused on the door. Locked.

I looked through the window. It was dark inside.

A sign was taped to the door;

Metropolitan Federal Savings and Loan Will Be Closed On Monday, October 14, for the Columbus Day Banking Holiday. 

We will re-open on Tuesday, October 15

I stood for a moment, slack-jawed, mind reeling. Huh? Closed? Whaaaa?

 All the planning, and I hadn’t remembered that it was Columbus Day.

Dejected, hoping it wasn’t a sign from above, I drove home to Mom and Dad’s place, broke the news, called my friend in Burnsville, and spent the evening laying very, very low.

Tomorrow, I thought.

October 13, 2005

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; I’d go up to the college and visit my friends. Surely, I thought, my last night in the Twin Cities would draw someone out for a night on the town. Right?

Not so fast.

School up at my alma mater, Jamestown College, had been in session for about six weeks. Most of my friends – the ones who hadn’t graduated or dropped out – were thoroughly involved in class work. A brief thought on the part of a couple of them to throw a “going away party for Mitch” came in a distant fourth to “a date”, “another party” and “studying”.

I walked up to the North Hill, up the steps, to the college. I wandered through my old dorm, around the chapel (the HQ of the music department which, majors aside, is where I spent most of my time in college). Most of my friends – Rich Larson, Beth Erickson, Ray Zentz, Joe “Spanky” Knowski, Scott Massine – were either occupied, or too trashed from a week of school (and/or a Friday night of binge-drinking) to want to do much. I ran into a few, of course – Rich Larson (on his way to a date), Ray Zentz (practicing one instrument or another); I think I may have even run into this person, to whom I’d handed over the school paper, although memory fails me at the moment.

I hung around for half an hour, amazed at all the Freshmen who had no idea who I was, my attitude souring by the minute, until I walked out of the student union, back to the stairs that descended the North Hill, and back into town.

By the way – you caught that? I called it the “North Hill”. Jamestown is in the valley of the James River, at its confluence with Pipestem Creek. There are three major parts to Jamestown; the “Valley”, below the river bluffs; the “South Hill”, mostly stores and cheap hotels and some humongous trailer parks and the State Hospital; and the “North Hill”, home of the college, the city hospital, and some of the town’s nicest real estate, especially “Skyline Drive”, with its gorgeous overlook of the river valley, the dam (a big reservoir upstream from the town) and the rest of the city. Of course, neither “North Hill” nor “South Hill” are hills; they are the level of the prairie itself. The town is below ground level. Such is perception in a place like that.

“Ratzen fratzen “friends”. If I could count all the “going away parties” I’d been to for the other rat bastards, I could probably buy a round at my own party, for @#$#@^%’ s sake”, I grumbled, feeling sorrier and sorrier for myself as I went. “I’m so @#$#@^%@# glad I’m moving…”

There was one more hope for the evening. I walked back down the hill…er, you know…and back toward the middle of the little town, across from my grandmother’s old house, to The Club.

The Club was a room in the basement of J.I. Stocking, a guy who’d graduated from high school and college about five years earlier than I. He and a couple of his classmates – John Johnson and Pat Flannery – had built a semi-replica english hunting lodge in the basement, complete with a kegerator, dartboard, comfy sofas, the works. The room was J.I’s, but the idea was Pat’s. Pat was the sort of eccentric genius that every small town seems to breed. He was a model builder; more than that, he was a “scratchbuilder”; he’d build models out of lost and founds, bric-a-brac, bits and pieces of found treasure.

What kind of models? Whatever caught his fancy. One day it was a scale cutaway model of the Captain Nemo’s submarine Nautilus. Another week it’d be “every experimental German jet aircraft of the ’30s and ’40s that was ever committed to blueprint”, out of bits and pieces of plastic; another month, it’d be a working replica of an eighteenth-century nine-pounder naval gun, firing homemade cannon balls (this was an interesting one; yes, it worked). He built ’em all. Sometime just out of high school, a company in Los Angeles got wind (so the story went) of Pat’s talents, and hired him to come to LA to work on a show they were working on, “Project UFO“. The series was cancelled shortly before Pat was going to start his job building UFO models; no matter, he turned his talents to building more…stuff.

One weekend in, I think, 1979 or 1980, boredom overtook him, and he built The Club; he built (reportedly in one manic binge) a kegerator, a wine rack ( from scratch, natch), a bar, panelling…I think the only thing bought in a store was a dart board.

The Club met three nights a week. You’d drop a couple of bucks in the stein by the kegerator, you could drink and eat peanuts and talk sci-fi until 1AM (house rule – same closing time as the bars). It was a good, cheap, regular buzz.

I walked down to The Club, walked down the narrow stairway, pitched in a couple of bucks, and laid into a beer with gusto. It was warm, the conversation was geeky and well met, and pretty soon the evening was starting to work itself out. “Who cares if my college pals are a bunch of total let-downs? I’m leaving!” I smiled a sloppy smile and handed my mug to J.I., behind the bar, who had tap duty that evening. A few other people – John’s brother Mark, and Mike Fischer, who’d just moved back to North Dakota from Los Angeles, where he’d worked making lenses in an optometry shop (among his clients; Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys).

I looked around the room after a while; Fischer, Pat, John and Mark had all left Jamestown at one point or another, and all had returned. J.I. had always been in Jamestown. I tried to think of any from our little circle of people who had left and stayed gone; I couldn’t.

The evening kept on; I kept drinking. As 1AM came around, I walked out onto Fourth Avenue, and started walking home to my Mom and Dad’s place. I wondered, as I shuffled down the street (not terribly drunk, mind you; I had quite a tolerance built up after a summer of three nights a week at The Club and a couple more at Fred’s and an odd night or two out drinking with the friends) and wondered:

I know what it is that makes people wanna leave this place. The big question is, what is it that makes people want to come back?

Was there some inexorable gravity that tugged people, plans and dreams be damned, back to this little dip in the drift prairie? Something I didn’t know about, but that would jump out at me in six or nine or twenty-four months, and send me packing back to this cold little outpost on the Plains?

I got to Dad’s place – everyone was long asleep – and went to bed.

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 worst roofing and siding job ever; the weather was gorgeous, and it didn’t involve hot tar or metal shingles.

I drove with my boss (and contractor, and only other guy on the site) out to a garage in Cleveland, North Dakota, about 20 miles from Jamestown, every morning around 7, roofed and sided and did other miscellaneous carpentry work until about fivish. Then we drove home.

It was a September and early October a lot like this one, actually; it started out very, very hot in mid-late September, blazingly warm and, by North Dakota prairie standards, humid. By early October, a little nip crept into the air, and by the near-eve of my move, mornings were downright cold, and mid-days were a little chilly. And it was North Dakota, so always, always, the wind.

The garage belonged to a woman who was the ex-wife of one of Jamestown’s great guitar players, and (I learned while taking a break in her living room) mother of one of my best friend’s girlfriends, although I didn’t know it at the time. See, I told you it was a small town…

As I worked, I plotted and planned. And when I say “plan”, it was less a matter of making plans I could use to actually make life easier when I got to Minneapolis. No, it was more like “Xtreem Daydreaming. The thoughts centered around a couple of things: the job I’d get, the place I’d live in, the life I’d have.

The job was the hard part. The 10-12 days since I’d told everyone in the world I was moving to Minneapolis hadn’t brought me any revelations. My daily trawls through the Star/Tribune at the bookstore found me a few intrigueing leads, to which I promptly dispatched my groaningly florid resume – but nothing really jumped out at me, because at 22 I really had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I had a degree in English, with minors in History and German, and enough credits for minors in Music and Theatre (but they were almost all performance, so it didn’t count) and one course shy of a minor in Computer Science. This last had been a long journey in college; I’d actually double-majored in English and Computer Science until the end of my junior year, when I realized with impeccable timing that I hated Computer Science. I dropped, knowing full well that I was never going to pass “Operating Systems”, much less figure out a Senior Project that would interest me, much less anyone else. But I figured – more a vague sense than a plan – that with my background in journalism and the added computer experience, I could get a job as a technical writer. To the extent that I thought at all, that was my “plan”.

One thing I knew; my career would not be radio. At 22, I’d worked at three stations since I was 16. I hated spinning records, and knew I’d never get a news gig in a big market. I kissed my radio “career” goodbye.

The place I’d live? That was easier. A cool place. I figured once I got a job, I’d get a cool, funky apartment over some store somewhere (although not in Saint Paul. I only got the vaguest sense of Saint Paul from the maps I daily pored over. The city was an inscrutable enigma to me until long after I moved). Everyone had told me those were the coolest apartments. I’d get a two-bedroom; one for me, one for a home-made “quiet” recording studio that I planned to build, with (I had it all sketched out in my head) an Ensoniq Mirage sampler board, a Yamaha D-9 synth, a Mesa Boogie (that I’d only play at gigs) and a couple of Scholz Rockman and Bassman boxes to run into the four-track cassette deck (and eventually eight-track tape deck) on which I was going to record all the music I was writing.

But my life? That, I had figured out. I knew that once I landed a place, I was going to crank into full song-writing mode – and once I got a job, I was going to start a band, and embark on the real reason for the move; becoming the next Paul Westerberg-via-Joe Grushecky. I didn’t know Phillips from the Near North Side, but I knew that the big three bars were the First Avenue, the Uptown and the Cabooze – and exactly who to talk to to get bookings at each. I had no idea what I was going to do for a living, but I knew exactly what I was going to do for a life.

(And the girlfriend I was gonna meet, too; I had her figured out down to a T. Not tall, not blond, not the kind of girl you find in North Dakota. A mixed grab-bag of brunette and auburn hair, brown eyes, darker-veering-toward-olive skin and a bunch of other non-Scandinavian traits danced through my head as I hammered shingles into that cold roof in Cleveland, ND.

I got a lot of daydreaming done that week.

Cleveland was a little town of about 100 or so people in 1985; it’s probably not that big now, although I’m sure its cheap property has made it a desirable exurb for people who want to work in Jamestown, so who knows. One thing it had was a gorgeous view of the prairie, since nothing really separated it from the land; it was really an island of little wooden houses and eighty-year-old, mostly-deserted brick storefronts in the middle of a sea of cut stalks and dirt.

My “boss” and I worked late that last Thursday, October 10, 1985, so that Friday – my last day on the gig – wouldn’t hold any surprises for us. It was getting late when we packed up; the first purple tinges of the autumn sunset were starting to leak out over the prairie as I gathered the last of my tools and craps from the roof. I sat back for a moment as my “boss” jawboned with the owner of the house (as he seemed to do a lot), and looked into the infinite sky to my west, and felt the wind – 15 gusting to 25, as usual on the prairie – in my face. It was those moments when I felt the place tug on me; sitting in the rawish open air, the wind in my face, the smell of loam and diesel and manure and sawdust on the air, that I forgot my plans for a moment and felt some connection with my anscestors, the Norwegians who climbed off trains in northeastern North Dakota and went on to raise (so the family legends tell me) bumper crops of rocks, decade in, decade out, looking at the same sunset in October, smelling the same smells, feeling the same eternal wind. It’s a feeling I still occasionally get when I’m up there, this time of year, that kind of night.

We drove home. The tang of fall was in the evening air; a tang that had told me, the four previous years, “Somewhere, in some dorm, there’s gonna be a party going on!”

I think I went to bed early that night.

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

One more week to kill.

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

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

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

So we jammed.

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

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

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

“Mind if I join you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Plan”. Heh.

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 couch or two to stay on. I had a company in the Twin Cities that was interested in talking with me when I got to town.

I had a goal!

I had nine days to kill before I could blow out of town, outside of work (which at that time was doing roofing and siding in the tiny town of Cleveland, North Dakota). But I had a little spring in my step that I hadn’t had before my impulsive decision to move.

Did I mention that I had nine days to kill?

I spent part of it working on my car.

Of course, my car needed at least that long to be ready to go.

I was driving my first car at this point – a 1973 Malibu that I’d bought from my pal Rich Larson. I’d paid $125 and a case of beer for it. (Don’t laugh – I think at that point North Dakota title transfer forms had space for things like beer and cattle along with money). It had been a “farm car” in Northern Minnesota (from whence Rich hailed). This was important; in the winter, Minnesota salted its roads, while North Dakota used some sort of chemical or another. As a result, fifteen year old cars in North Dakota were frequently pretty pristine, while Minnesota cars tended to get mottled with rust. The Malibu? Well, it has gotten me through a year and a half of college, and even a couple of trips to Fargo – 90 miles, no accidents or breakdowns. She ran great, but rust had eaten most of the side panels up to the two foot level. The driver’s side door panel flapped in the breeze; if I got going much more than 20 miles per hour, it picked up a bit of an airfoil effect; I’m sure if I could have gotten it up to 150 it might have taken flight (and rolled me over clockwise, since the left door panel was either fine or completely rusted away; I can’t remember).

But it had a 350, and it could still go plenty fast. Although the tires were bald and, not being much of a mechanic, the thing was pretty much running on faith.

I bought a couple of new used tires, changed the oil, and got ‘er ready for the trip.

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 much to protect her identity as because I’ve completely forgotten it).

Mrs. Gump was a flinty, late fortyish woman who had a reputation as a businesswoman; she’d worked for several years for a regional clothing chain based in Fargo. She was working at the college part-time, after having moved to Jamestown to…

…well, that part of the story was a little fuzzy.

But I went in feeling very confident; while I didn’t have a lot of work experience (a couple years at three radio stations, three years as a stagehand at the college theater, two years as a computer tutor, two more as a remedial english tutor, and a bunch of odd jobs), I at least knew how to write. If nothing else, I figured I could write a pretty mean resume.

The woman tore my typewritten rough draft to shreds. The red ink on my draft resume looked like the Valentine’s Day Massacre. Worse, I made the mistake – according to Mrs. Gump – of writing in fairly natural English. Her suggested rewrites…

…sounded like something out of a nineteenth century broadsheet. Lots of passive tense, lots of referring to myself in the third person (“Mr. Berg is considered an excellent…”), lots of superlatives that, in her examples, seemed to dangle in sentences for no more reason than, say, Kevin Federline’s existence (“Excellent references available upon request”) – the sort of stuff that made my news-writing head spin.

“The people you’re writing to aren’t news people. They’re business people. They write and read different”, said Mrs. Gump.

“Like what? Like extras in a community theatre melodrama?” I silently wondered.

So I rewrote my resume. She gave it her stamp of approval, and I walked down to the local printer to get them photocopied on heavyweight paper (“Absolutely vital!”, said Mrs. Gump. “If you don’t use 60-pound ivory-laid paper, you’ll never even get an interview!”) at about a hard-earned buck a pop.

And I looked at them, when they came back the next day (!) and thought “I’m a fine candidate for a Horace Greeley review, anyway…“. And I rewrote my resume in regular English, just to be safe…

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 15 people).

But now it was Monday, October 1. It was back to work.

I set to things with a resolution I’d gotten out of the habit of, during the past five months. I gave notice at my various jobs. I figured out what kind of money I had. I got my car – a very beat-up ’73 Malibu that was, in retrospect, not even roadworthy – ready for the drive. I called my friends in the Cities, arranging couches to crash on.

And I went to the library to look at the Sunday Star/Tribune’s want ads, looking for anything an English major with a putative talent for writing could do – and came away feeling just a tad depressed.

I needed a resume.

Now, my obscure little college wasn’t much on career counseling – a sore spot among a lot of graduates of the day. The college was, to be fair, trying to stay solvent (it came within 24 hours of closing the following year). But they had just hired a woman to help out in that department – a woman who had had an executive job at a small clothing-store chain in Fargo, and so knew the world of business. She worked like ten hours a week, out of a little office in the back of the cafeteria.

I made an appointment for Wednesday to get a resume whipped into shape.

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 resolve itself.

I really loved college. Despite the maniacal pace I kept (I averaged like 23 credits a semester), I enjoyed it; after the penal drudgery of the lock-step high school curriculum, the idea of charting ones’ own course and learning it all just for the sake of learning it all was a dream come true. I loved it so much, I never got around to making a plan for what to do afterwards.

I went to an obscure college in my hometown, Jamestown ND. I was in the horns of a dilemma; my grades weren’t spectacular enough to make anything like law school or graduate school a viable option – even if I’d been interested in either. Which I wasn’t. The other traditional option with a BA in English was teaching – but I had absolutely no interest in that, and had never taken an education class.

So.

I spent the summer working a bunch of crummy jobs – roofing and siding, delivering water beds, the local Waldenbooks – during the day, and usually drinking at one place or another all night (as I’d been doing for the whole summer after graduation, five or six nights a week), while I tried to figure out what I was going to do. In those days when only Al Gore had access to the Internet, it was hard to find out what was happening elsewhere, as far as applying for jobs and trying to launch a career elsewhere (even if I’d had a career in mind).

And “elsewhere” was another interesting topic. Where was I going to go? Because staying in North Dakota certainly wasn’t an option. I didn’t know what I wanted to do – but I surely knew what I didn’t; pretty much any job I could get on the Great Plains, certainly the ones I was qualified to do – which with my B.A. in English wasn’t a whole lot.

Time crawled forward. My alcohol tolerance crawled upward. Life, however, did’t.

Finally, it was Homecoming time. It was the last week of September. All my friends from the class of ’85 came back to Jamestown, talking about their fun jobs (computer programmers were the big export from Jamestown College back then, but there were nurses, teachers, management trainees, doctors, law students – the whole post-grad works) and cool cities (Chicago, Denver, Portland, Seattle and, of course, the Twin Cities) and their cool lives.

And I wanted one of those.

We were down at the Elks Club for the “Over 21” Homecoming Dance, a table full of my classmates and I. As we launched into our assortment of drinks with great gusto, we went around in a circle, talking about who was doing what.

Finally, they got around to me. “What are you up to, Mitch?”

“Ummmm…”. There was no varnishing the state I was in. “I’m doing some roofing and siding work, that kind of thing. But…”

I’d had probably five drinks – not that much, given the tolerance I’d built up over the summer, but it was enough to make me pretty toasty. “I’m going to move soon.”

“Aw, awesome!”, they said, happy for my sudden burst of resolution. “Where to?”

I sat and thought for a moment. Where did I want to go to that I could afford to get to? New York and Chicago were out. Fargo was still North Dakota. The Twin Cities, with their music scene peaking at the time and only 350 miles away and relatively cheap at the time by major-metropolitan areas, beckoned.

“Minneapolis”, I blurted out, draining the last of a Vodka Kamikaze.

“Cool!”, they said, nodding their heads.

“Don’t let them ask when. Don’t let them ask when“, I silently begged.

“When?”

“Oh, crap. OK. How long’ll it take me to get this together. Must…be…deliberate…”

“Two Weeks”.

“Awesome!”

I wandered around the rest of the night, euphoric as much from the weight that lifted over having finally made a decision as from the booze. I danced until the band unplugged. I finally had something, at least for the evening; I could tell all my old friends that I, finally, was getting underway. And, I figured, there was no way anyone’d remember the next morning, anyway.

They did, of course. I was cornered. A couple of friends in the Cities offered to put me up on their couches for a bit, while I got going. A few other had some people I could talk to about jobs.

So like so many things in my life, my move to the Twins started as a rash, impulsive response to an unexpected challenge, under the influence.

Not bad, all in all.

More later.