Monday.  April 6, 1987.

I woke up.  A restless, miserable weekend was over.  It was time to get back to business – finding myself both a living for the short term, and my next talk radio job. 

Preferably at the same time.

On the plus side:  I’d been through this before.  I’d gotten whacked at radio jobs, starting when I was 17, at KQDJ in Jamestown.  A couple of slickeeboys had bought KEYJ, changed the call letters, and tried to make it sound like a big-market middle-of-the-road station.  Along the way, they fired a bunch of the locals, me included.  I’d gotten diced four years later – at the same station, different reasons, same basic deal.

And now, KSTP.  I was getting used to one one of radio’s great truths; you never quit a job on your own.

Other pluses:  when I heard that the firings were coming, I’d snagged an old copy of the “Standard Rate and Data Service” directory – the SRDS, or “Serds”, a telephone-book-thick listing of every radio station in the country by market, format, power, coverage and rough ad rate.  The book was about 700 pages thick, I think, and covered literally every radio station in the US and its territories (as of November, 1986, anyway). 

I took a highlighter and started going through the book, starting with the markets I wanted to take a shot at.  I focused on finding talk stations in mid-sized markets – Madison, Columbus and the like – as well as suburbs of bigger markets (places like New Bedford MA, Santa Rosa CA and Aurora IL), the kind of place that used to hire 24-year-old kids for peanuts, put them on mid-days or evenings or wherever they felt a need for a solid, reliable local show – and let ’em get some experience.

And of course, I marked down all the talk stations in big markets.  While I figured I had a very long shot of getting an actual on-air job there, I’d certainly take another producer gig. 

Any port in a storm.

I took a legal pad and started my list; stations, markets, and program directors (where they were listed in the SRDS), all in pencil, since I knew the list would change.

And at 9AM, I started cold-calling.  And I stayed on it until lunchtime.

After lunch, I spent a couple of hours cold-calling some of the Saint Paul and Minneapolis neighborhood newspapers.  I’d done some writing for a few of them the previous year, trying to stretch my Hubbard paycheck.  I’d be stretching even further, now.  But I landed a little assignment – worth about $60 – that afternoon from one of the neighborhood papers, which was worth a little celebrating.

And then, back to cold-calling radio stations.  And, briefly, a shot of pay-dirt.  The program director at WSME in New Bedford, Massachussetts was looking for someone – cheap – to do a mid-day show.  He wanted my tape.

I had a cassette and an envelope ready to go.  I typed out a cover letter, ready to go out the next morning.

I crossed my fingers.  For tomorrow, I was going to call the headhunter for the job in Orlando. 

One day of looking.  Two solid leads. 

My panic was starting to wane, just a little bit.

(more…)

Periodically, I take out (rhetorical) contracts on bits and pieces of the English language that need to be communally expunged. 

Every once in a while, it seems to work.  A few years ago, I demanded that the word “bloggy” disappear from the language.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen that linguistic abomination in print.

So it’s time for another round of linguistic executions. 

1. “Internets”:  Usually used ironically – to show how very much more clever the user is than the madding hordes on the “internets” – the term is an offshoot of the ancient (in Internet terms) Usenet habit of taking a newbie mistake and making it part of the vocabulary (“This is sucks” – alt.aol.sucks, 1993).  The problem is, to be anything but ironic, these turnabouts are predicated on the user actually being more clever than the person committing the malaprop.  A casual reading shows this rarely to be the case.  Please stop.
2. “Truthy” (“truthiness”): When everything is “ironic” all the time, then nothing is ironic.  And if we extinguished not only the word but the concept, perhaps John Stewart would be able to do something other than the same show, week in, week out, forever and ever, amen…
3. “Dee di deeeee!”: Unless you are Carlos Mencia, using this phrase suits you better to be a target than a user of the phrase.  You’ve been warned.  Not Carlos?  No se va.
4. “Hel-looooo?”:  Time for a new phrase to indicate your nonplussment at your fellow human’s concentrated denseness (in your enlightened opinion).
5. “It Is What It Is”: Like “going forward” and “at this point in time”, after about two trillion uses, It Is meaningless.

Carry on. 

It was Friday, April 3, 1987.  

As people got done with their various shifts, Pervy LeDouchebag [1] gave them the news; they were getting let go. 

A rumor spread around that Pervy had a gun stashed away in case someone got out of hand.  I silently hoped he’d fly off the handle; I had my own gun in the car, after the weekend’s anti-semitic fun. 

But it wasn’t all that terribly dramatic.

Hubbard in its infinite wisdom got rid of a lot of us – the most successful staff it’d have in a decade, and certainly the only one it had in the pre-Limbaugh era that day.

Morning Producer Allison Brown – who’d worked with Mike Edwards and Lee Valsvik – is still in the market, producing Gopher Hockey if memory serves. 

Tom Myhre – the morning news guy and the station’s assignment editor, and the guy who I’d met in October of 1985 who had gotten me in the door at the station – opened a metal detector shop in South Minneapolis right around the time KSTP fell apart.  I think he still runs it – I haven’t seen him in a few years. 

I last talked with mid-morning producer John Barnier – who’d been producing Pat Milan, who’d replaced Geoff Charles from 9-11 – about fifteen years ago.  He was a photographer – both a working one and an academic with a yen for work in the Holy Land – and was running a photography studio in downtown Saint Paul. 

Executive Producer Rob Pendelton, the guy who hired me after Myrhe got me in the door, went on to be a producer at WCCO (he beat me out for a job there in a few months, actually), then returned to KSTP to work with Barbara Carlson.  I lost track of him for the better part of a decade after that, until, oddly, he spent a few months at The Patriot producing “The Stitch”, a weekly hockey broadcast on Saturdays.  He jumped from there to produce “Janecek and Lambert” at KTLK, which didn’t last all that long.  I need to drop him a line; he always lands on his feet.

Reporter Tom Rivers – who’d come to KSTP from a “pirate” radio station in the English Channel – returned to the UK, where he took over as London Bureau correspondent for UPI Radio News.  I think he’s with CBS, now.  You can still hear “Tom Rivers in London” reporting on one story or another, occasionally – I’ve heard him in the past year.

Reporter Karen Booth went on to MPR, then spent some time as the DFL’s communications director, then some PR work.  The last I heard she was with the State Department, somewhere in Eastern Europe.

(For those who might ask – Kathy Wurzer had gotten caught in an earlier budget cut.  She went to Channel 9, then (allowing for a diversion to Channel 4 a few years back) to a long career as Morning Edition host at MPR.

Reporter Peg Sneden?  She went back to Grand Rapids.  I think she got married.

Sports Director Mark Boyle?  He went to KMOX in St. Louis, then to work for Scott Meier to help launch WFAN in New York for a while, and has been the voice of the Indiana Pacers since the early nineties.

Sports producer Doug Westerman didn’t get whacked – they kept him around to finish out North Stars season.  In the end, he wound up hanging around, producing Bob Yates and some other shows for several more years, until he went over to KFAN in the late eighties/early nineties.  Today, he’s program director at KTLK, where the Northern Alliance is kicking his station’s ass in the all-important Saturday Mid-Day ratings war.

Dave Elvin got out of radio, pretty much.  One of the best jazz bass players in the Twin Cities, he did some knocking around (including, he once mentioned, a tour or two around the US and Australia backing Gene Pitney).  He got his MA in Journalism at the U of M and moved to Boston, where the last I heard he spent years working as a PR guy for the Big Dig, and even wrote a book on the subject.  We traded emails a couple of years (and two or three hard drives) ago; he’s a freelance PR guy in the greater Boston area.  It sounded like he was doing well.

There were other people, of course; a couple of sales guys, some back-office people, two weekend producers,  an engineer, none of them that I remember by name.  I remember it coming to a total of around fifteen, from a staff of around thirty.

Me?

I took my shot at Pervy LeDouchebag as I got my check and left the building.  “Give me a call when you need  a morning show that doesn’t suck ass”, I said.  He wasn’t impressed.  Not that it mattered in the long run; he lasted a little less than a year at KSTP, before a series of sexual-harassment suits (he hadn’t fired all of his litigants!) and the station’s free-falling ratings (from a 4.4 at one point – the station’s best pre-Limbaugh performance ever – down to the low “2” range) sent his alcoholic butt packing.  I have no idea what became of him, but I wouldn’t bet against jail time and cirrhosis.

———-

I left the building that day feeling completely hollowed out.  I’ve only felt that way a few times in my life – all of them involving divorces or breakups. 

I drove back to St. Paul, had a couple of beers, and started figuring out what I was going to do next. 

(more…)

It was Thursday, April 2, 1987.  And I hadn’t slept at all.

I tossed and rolled about most of the night, pondering the imponderable.

Why did this keep happening to me?

Hadn’t I done my best?

 Why wasn’t I good enough?

Why was this happening?

Maybe if I tried really hard to make things right…?

Screw it.  I’m better than that.  I’ll bounce back, and fast.

God.  God god god god god god.  Why?  Didn’t I work hard enough at it?

Shit.  Shit shit shit shit shit.  How was I going to get by?

I was so close.  I had – well, not everything I wanted in the world, but bits and pieces of it, and the potential for so much more.  Why?

Screw it.  I’m going to show them.

What am I going to do?

You know.  Sort of the same tossing and turning and cold-sweating and wandering wondering you do when you go through a big breakup.  Which was kind of what it was like for me. 

Although I didn’t really know that for a few years. 

———-

Word finally leaked down from Corporate.  They were basically going to whack all but one of the producers, all but one of the news people, all but one of the sports people, and consolidate a bunch of the station’s support staff (scheduling, etc) in the corporate office. 

They were going to replace the producers with a bunch of newbies just out of Brown Institute (the local DJ factory, which still exists, and is still in the business of convincing kids that they can be the next Dave Ryan) – kids who’d be happy to work for their first “big break” at $4.25 an hour, as opposed to the $6-8 an hour that most of us were getting at the time.

Of course, nobody was saying anything official. 

———-

On the Charles show that afternoon, depression reigned supreme.  I sat in the studio during a commercial break with mid-morning producer John Barnier and Dave Elvin – my senior in terms of time at KSTP, but only on his first radio job (KSTP was #4 for me) grumped about what a crappy deal it was, getting whacked – especially by someone as stupid as Pervy LeDouchebag [*].

I smiled.  “Hell, Dave – until you’ve gotten gassed at least once, you’re not even a member of the fraternity!”.

John had been diced a couple of times; this was my third go-around.  We grinned a grim grin.

Which was one grin more than I had in me at the moment, but you gotta hang on to something. 

(more…)

…26 years ago, I was unloading a bass amp from a pickup truck outside Jamestown High School.  The school’s stage band had just played a noon-hour gig at a Rotary Club meeting, and was coming back to school.  It was a warm, pleasant March day, my senior year of high school, and I really wasn’t interested in going back to class.  I was much more interested in chatting up this really hot trumpet player…

Suddenly, someone said out the door – “President Reagan’s been shot“.

I was still a Democrat back then, and had been very nervous about Reagan winning the presidency; I figured he’d reinstitute a draft and have us all fighting in Saudi Arabia before I could get to college.  I didn’t cheer on getting the news, of course (someone in the band did, although I can’t remember and don’t care who it was), while others groaned; to most of the kids, it didn’t matter that much. 

Still, Reagan’s behavior during and after the crisis helped accelerate my slide to the right. 

More on that later…

Jazzed from the weekend – great first date, moved into a cool new place, word that my band would be opening for “Hanover Fist” at the Entry, my interview with Ernst Zündel was the best (and infuriating and controversial) I’d ever done – I drove to work on Monday morning, March 30, 1987.  I was too “up” to even feel tired from having been on the air until 4AM.

I was on top of the world.

I walked into the station, and back to the little mail alley behind the generators to check my mail bin.  I saw Doug Westerman, the station’s sports producer.

“How’s it going, Doug”.

“Time to start saving pennies”.

I remember wrinkling up my face – Doug was usually pretty upbeat about things.  “Howzat?”

“Rumor has it they’re going to fire everyone”.

I stood for a moment, felt my jaw tighten, and noticed my stomach curdling into a sour, painful ball.

It was Sunday, March 29, 1987.

It had been the best month of my life.

The month had started with our production of the Minnesota State High School Hockey Tournament.  KSTP-AM was the flagship station for a statewide network; Mark Boyle called the games; Bruce Gordon was down on the benches and in the locker rooms with a mobile mike; I was either up in the booth, rotating board-op duty with Rob Pendelton and Dave Elvin, or roaming the St. Paul Civic Center looking for interviews for Bruce.  Highlights of the night: 

1. Grabbing the MVP for the winning team (Bloomington Jefferson, I think) out of a setup for Channel 4 and getting him on the air (making me very much persona non grata with the Channel 4 sports people, but who cared?  Even the terminally-crusty Boyle, with whom I had a relationship based mostly on ribbing and needling, said I did a great job.
2. For the championship game, we’d been told the puck would drop at 7:30.  At 7:18, the referee skated out onto the ice, puck in hand, and someone annnounced in the press booth that the game was going to start at  7:20.  Rob Pendelton and I looked at the schedule sheet from the tournament staff – seven friggin’ thirty!  No time to file an appeal, though – as Rob got things set up at the studio and Dave raced out to get Boyle onto the mike, I got on the line and called to the affiliates that we were starting ten minutes early – in, like, one minute.  And via the grace of God and adrenaline, we pulled it off; Boyle called the drop, and as far as we knew, most of the stations down the line had gotten my loud, fast call, dispensed with their pre-game shows, and gotten online.  Success, sometimes, is not letting them see how close you came to really screwing the pooch…
3. Going out to Doyle’s in South Minneapolis after the game with Rob, Mark, Bruce and Dave. 

It was one of those nights when everything just felt right.  Like…I’d arrived, sort of.

A Few Weeks Later, it was Tuesday, March 17.  It was an arrival of a different kind.

My band had landed a coveted “New Band Night” slot at the Seventh Street Entry.  Of course, they were “coveted” only because the Entry was the place to see and be seen.  It certainly wasn’t the money; “New Band Night” bands got 45 minutes, $20, and a couple of free drink tickets (and 10 slots on the guest list).

But this was no ordinary New Band Night.  The day had started auspiciously – on the way to work, I’d gotten one of the first copies of U2’s new album The Joshua Tree out of the box at Garage D’Or Records, at 26th and Nicollet, and had been marinading my brain to “In God’s Country” – still one of my favorite songs of all time – all day long.

The key at New Band Night was timing.  We got a key part of the timing right – we were the first band to show up, so we were the last band of the evening.  Everything built up to us! (Those of you who’ve played New Band Night know that there’s an implied snicker there…).

But that bit of timing was bolstered by the part we had no control over; it was, indeed, Saint Patrick’s Day.  Partly, it got my bass player and drummer good ‘n jazzed – they were both 100% Irish.  The big break, though, was that Boiled In Lead always played the First Avenue main stage on Saint Pat’s day.  Which meant a huge crowd in the Main Room.  Which meant…

…pandemonium.

The first three acts that night were…acceptable.  But the crowd was huge; most people can only handle so much purely-Irish folk music before they need a breather, so the Entry – a converted bus station luggage handling room – was jammed to the rafters with curious, Gaelic-fatigued people. 

And then we took the stage. 

And it was the best night I’ve ever had playing to a crowd in my life. 

For the first time in our three gigs, we were clicking on all eight cylinders.  We played ten songs.  To this day, I remember the set list:

1. Tiger Tiger (Bill the drummer’s song – yes, it was a William Blake reference.  I told you he was Irish).
2. Five Bucks and a Transfer (My song about having…well, the title says it. It shamelessly stole the beat from The Pretenders’ “Message of Love”, but it was a way better song, if I say so myself.  And I do say so myself).
3. Switchyard Blues (think The Who covering Mose Allison.  I played a VERY mean harmonica that night)
4. Espresso Casey (Casey the other guitar player’s ode to working in a crappy coffee shop back before everyone was doing it)
5. Ride Shotgun (wherein I pilfed the riff to “Jackson Cage” and the harmony guitar part from Big Country’s “Tall Ships Go” to grand effect)
6. Blood On The Bricks (the Iron City Houserockers’ classic)
7. Oh Suzanne (a bald-faced mash note)
8. Fourth Of July (a song I still play at the occasional open stage night)
9. Long Gray Wire (a song I’d written in about five minutes in the car on the way to practice one night.  Still one of the coolest experiences of my life.  Great tune, too)
10. Great Northern Avenue (a song I’ve quoted on this blog before, and still by a long shot the favorite song I’ve ever written)

The crowd – well, they didn’t know what to do.  Our nerves still had us playing a little fast, and we were very loud and raw-sounding.  But we were tight – finally playing like a band, instead of four guys.  We were tight and sharp enough that of the people in the crowd started slam-dancing; we probably were bordering on speed-punk noise and tempo.  I windmilled and jumped about the place and cut my finger open on my pickup switch and bled all over the damn place (just like Pete Townsend! I was so jazzed about that injury!).  I left it all out there on the stage that night.

I don’t think I’ve had a night like that, ever, in my life before, and very, very few since. 

Whatever.  The response was immense, the crowd dug us, and, best of all, a guy with a band that had just had a regional hit in Chicago talked with us after the gig, wondering if we’d be interested in opening for them in June.

I started allowing myself to think “maybe this rock and roll thing could work”.

Things Were Happening On The Side.  I’d put together a tape of some of my voice-over work, at KSTP as well as at the stations I’d worked in high school.  An agent had called me back – blazingly fast – and asked if I wanted to go do a spot.  The strange part – they needed someone who could do in industrial training video – in a Canadian accent. Having grown up listening to CBW Radio in Winnipeg (the closest my mom could find to NPR in North Dakota in those days), I refrained from asking “why not hire a Canadian” – in fact, I didn’t to think aboot it loang to fit it into my sssshedule, eh?  I earned a wondrous $200 for about four hours’ work.  I figured I could learn to like this.

When I’d Moved To The Twin Cities, I’d wanted three things; a fun job, a good band, and a cool girlfriend.  The job was going great.  The band – well, you know.

And Saturday night – the night before –  I had my first date in probably nine months.  Someone funny, cute, interesting, smart…someone who seemed to get me…

Oh, there was plenty of potential. 

The lease on the house in South Minneapolis was up on April 1, and the five roommates and I were ready to call it quits. Friction had been building, and I think we’d all had enough of each other. 

As luck’d have it, another college friend of mine (let’s call her “Liz”) and her pal from high school (how about we call her “Brenda”) were tired of living in their crummy apartment down by Saint Kate’s, so we found our dream joint together; a duplex in Saint Paul.  Perfect for all of us – it was 1/3 the commute to KSTP for me, it was close to where High School Friend was going to college, and it would allow everyone a bit more of a personal life. 

It was Sunday, and after a strenuous weekend of moving (for them; everything I owned in the world fit into two trips in my Jeep), we were moved in.  It was a side-by-side duplex on Minnehaha Avenue near Snelling in Saint Paul. 

It was a beautiful old place; neat woodwork, fun neighborhood, plenty of room for everyone.   And best of all – the rent was $500 a month, which, split three ways, allowed my monthly paycheck to stretch a loooong way.

Although I noticed some of the neighbors giving us the stinky eye as we wandered around the block.  I filed that question in the back of my mind.

My Producer Mojo was boiling red hot.  I pitched an idea to Geoff Charles and Dave Elvin – the “Talk Radio Beach Party”.  The idea – set us up on a beach somewhere in the Twin Cities from 3 to 6PM.  Do the show in swim suits and sandals.  Invite our guests to appear dressed appropriately.  Book a band to play.  Get some food out there. 

They loved it.  In short order, we found a beach (Phalen, not far from the station), the food (Church’s Fried Chicken!), a date (end of May), and a band (I called and booked The Clams, on whose drummer I had a monstrous crush).

We were gonna be so friggin hot.

Finally – the Mitch Berg Show was kicking ass.  Sunday night (or Monday morning, really) March 29, I interviewed Ernst Zündel, a German native who was among the world’s foremost Holocaust deniers. 

We had a slam-bang 60 minute interview that was among the most fun times of my life; we had people claiming to be JDL calling to threaten Zündel, people claiming to be Aryan Nations calling to threaten to kill me (although my last name is Berg, I’m as Jewish as a bacon cheeseburger.  However, Alan Berg’s murderers were pretty new in jail at this point, so I didn’t totally laugh it off.  But I did play it for all it was worth), and a call board so busy that it seemed to hop and skitter from the static electricity.

Needless to say, it went on my audition reel…that I was planning to send to a radio head-hunter that had called me at the office a week ago, wondering if I’d be open to a full-time talk-host gig at a station in Orlando, Florida. 

“Yes”, I said, looking at my paltry Hubbard paycheck, “I believe I’d be interested”. 

This, I was keeping under my hat.

So to sum up:  My daily commute cut from 17 to seven miles, my bills lowered, me living out of the basement for the first time in a year and a half, my band taking off, the show clicking, the radio career starting to click…

…life was damned fine.

As Tom Petty might say, “the sky was the limit”.

And we all know how that song turned out.

If it weren’t Friday today, I swear, I’d walk down to the High Bridge and just end it all right now.

Thank goodness it’s Friday, though.

(more…)

March 27, 2006:  Walk down the long, beige hall of the long, beige McOfficePlex in the beige western suburb, to the beige break room, to nuke a can of soup that was, if memory serves, beige (corn chowder).   Sit at cube, listen to the hum of the HVAC, dream of having oxygen in my brain, look forward to four hours of phone meetings capped with a forty-minute drive home.

 March 27, 2007:  Walk out the front door of the office onto a busy, downtown street.  Grab a sandwich and a newspaper, walk to the riverfront.  Grab a bench, read, eat, soak up the sun, feel the thrum of the traffic re-energize me, breathe, watch the river go by.  Walk back to the office, design stuff, look forward to my ten-minute commute home.

It was the biggest news in my then five-year-old life; the big, hulking old Gladstone Hotel, the architectural lynchpin of the north end of Jamestown’s downtown (the part north of the tracks), an old hotel dating from the 1880’s that had hosted presidents and foreign royalty, had caught fire. 

I knew it had to be big; as I walked with Dad out to our ’60 Mercury, bits of charred newspaper and stationery fell from the sky.  Our house was probably ten blocks from the blaze. 

We drove down toward the tracks, parked somewhere near an abnormally-crowded First Avenue, and walked in front of Gun and Reel Sports, and stood with a crowd of gawkers and watched the old hotel blazing away, all three floors being fully consumed, flames licking out the windows and smoke billowing out the roof.  Several other buildings, small businesses around the old hotel, were also on fire.  I remember (or at least I think I remember) seeing Bob Richardson, who ten years later would hire me for my first radio job, broadcasting live from the street.

And I also remember waving toward the top floor of Jamestown Hospital, dimly visible over the trees and through the smoke, thinking that my new little brother, Jim, might just see me saying “hi” for the first time.  Dad had told me sometime before we left to see the fire that I had a new baby brother (Mom had left for the hospital the previous day, which didn’t faze me, since Grandma was staying over, and whenever Grandma came over there were cookies and lefse and other goodies!). 

In that slower-paced time, it took him a couple of days to come home – I remember waiting on the front steps for him, on a gorgeous, balmy, late-March day, a scene my dad managed to capture on film that is happily preserved on DVD today.  

The funny part?  While my parents’ wish – like that of every parent – that I grow up to have a kid just like me may or may not have come true, Karma (or “what goes around comes around”) has certainly given me a cosmic re-run; Bun and Zam are about the same age gap and distribution as my little sister Barb and little brother Jim – and they have the precise same relationship.  They – brother and sister or daughter and son – can be ripping each others’ hair out one minute and giggling with maniacal delight the next.  And then the cycle repeats.  And repeats. 

And slowly, I go mad.  Again.

Not that I mind it all that much worse now than I did then. 

Anyway – happy birthday, Jim!

The song from that car ad – I wanna say it’s Mazda, but they’re all “zoom zoom zoom”, so it must be some other brand – with the jungle beat and the chorus of audibly-disheveled guys who are apparently chanting…

“Sky Cannabis – Green light.

Sky cannabis in-spi-RAY-shun…”

…or something like that.

And yes, it has been an earworm for the past two days.  Why do you ask?

This August it will be 28 years since I first started in radio.

There’s been a lot of water under the bridge – nine stations, huge hopes, big disappointments, and an entree into a life I loved.  Then hated.  And now kinda watch and take what I need and leave the rest.

And after all that, I gotta say it’s still a kick to drive down the street and hear a commercial with your voice on it on the air.

Don’t know that I’ll ever get tired of that.

Comment-section gadfly gadflea gadmite gadamecium RickDFL wrote:

On behalf of the younger generation can I just say that watching all you old baby boomers re-fight the war protests of your youth, only this time without the cool soundtrack and hot women, is really boring.

I pointed out that I’ve banned people for less than calling me a baby boomer. His response:

From wikipedia, “There is little agreement as to the exact beginning and end dates of the baby boom, but it is commonly identified as starting in 1946 and ending in 1964.” So, if you were 38 on 9/11 2001, you were born at the tail end of the baby boom. Hate to break it to you.

Well. Wikipedia says so. I guess that settles it!

Rick – didja catch that whole “there is little agreement” bit at the beginning of your pullquote? Slapping an arbitrary date on something that subjective is inherently unclear and lazy.

Fortunately, that’s why I’m here.

Baby boomers were the children of the World War II generation. While they largely started having their kids nine months after VJ day, and kept right on breeding into the early sixties, their Boomerhood was a factor of being children of the “Greatest Generation”.

On VJ day, my dad was nine and my mom was five. They might have been old enough to fight in the Volkssturm, but not for the US. Demographically, socially and morally, I am not a baby boomer. Never have been, never will be.

But – and again, with apologies to Jeff Foxworthy – here’s a little quiz to help you decide what generation you really belong to.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: you have more Clash, Springsteen and Sex Pistols than Beatles and Stones in your music collection.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: you have never used the term “Camelot” unironically to refer to anything after the 13th Century. Or if the word “Camelot” to you means dancing knights who push the pram a lot, rather than Jackie Onassis.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: the Teheran Hostage Crisis is more prominent in your memory than Kent State.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: you think Dennis Miller was a better Weekend Update host than Chevy Chase.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: “Quadrophonic” and “Eight Track” mean the same thing as “Edsel”.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: “Woodstock” was a bird.

Carry on.

Commenter Fresch Fisch left this in the comments section yesterday – one of the latest treasure trove of YouTube vids I’ve started obsessing over.  Only this one – a “Darkness”-era version of “Backstreets”, the best break-up song of all time – is astounding.

I like just about everything Springsteen’s done, from the great stuff (Born to Run, Tunnel of Love) to the not so great stuff (Tom Joad, Greetings from Asbury Park, Human Touch).  But as I’ve written before, Darkness On The Edge Of Town is still my favorite.

And the concert vids from the era – much more raw than from the Born In The USA tour, but just plain better and more polished than the Born To Run-era shows – are just stunning.  This version of “Backstreets” was from the era where Bruce would launch, more or less ad-lib (or so it seemed) into snippets of different songs during the bridges; “Backstreets” swerves through Manfred Mann’s “Pretty Flamingo”, an early version of “Drive All Night” (which’d come out two years later on The River), and something else that, in typical Springsteen form, has probably been part of a couple of different songs during his career.

I may meander around this subject some more in the next week.

…that I dragged an old guitar out of a closet in my dad’s house, and walked down to Midwest Music to buy strings, a couple of tuning machines, and a book on how to make chords.

A girl in my church youth group whom I hated with whom I fought constantly – Cindy Soper – had brought a guitar to the last meeting.  And I figured if she could play it, I could, too.

So I put the guitar – which had probably come from a department store, and had been left in my dad’s classroom years before (he’d brought it home the day Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, and had been sitting in one closet or another ever since)  – back together, strung, and started paging through the Gene Leis “Nexus” chord book and a book of seventies song sheets, trying to piece one and two together. 

It was terrible.  The damn thing wouldn’t stay in tune for love or money.  With its crack down the bottom of the front panel, it sounded like a truckload of steel wire on a gravel road. 

Fortunately, I was able to borrow a decent guitar from one of my dad’s college students, someone who didn’t play much – a Yamaha classical.  And it eventually worked.  And the following winter, I put my paper-route money into my first real guitar of my own, a little Ventura acoustic that I still play.

It was probably two years before I told anyone that I played; I wanted to be real, real good – or at least not embarassing – before anyone found out.

Years later, I told Cindy that I’d started playing guitar largely because of her.  She rolled her eyes and laughed.  “I quit playing probably a few months after you started!”

Life lesson; anger is the best motivator!

It was thirty years ago today that my oldest, best friend – the guitar – dropped into my life.

Steve thought he’d surprise his wife with an anniversary gift.  He went to the travel agency, and bought tickets for a sea cruise from his agent, Rajiv.

Sarah was ecstatic.  She’d always wanted to take a sea cruise.

On the day they were supposed to sail, they went to the docks.  A man in a turban took their ticket – and then ran up the gangplank, and, as Steve and Sarah looked on dumbfounded, hoisted it.  Other swarthy turban-clad men cast off the lines and fired up the engines.  The ship set sail without Steve or Sarah (or any of the other passengers).

“Damn”, said Steve.  “It was a Sikh ruse”.

…and I’ve been enjoying my annual bout of “sleeping until seven AM”.

More later.

Backstory: In 21 years of living in the Twin Cities, I’ve met quite a number of fellow expat North Dakotans. Whereever they’re from, no matter what the age difference, it matters not – rarely can we talk for more than a minute without coming up with at least one common acquaintance or friend.
So I was on a date the other night. In and among the other conversation, my date mentioned “my sister’s husband is from North Dakota”.

ME: “Really? Where?”

SHE: “I don’t know. But his last name is [very common name in ND]

ME: “Really? What’s his first name?” [I ask, remembering that I knew a Todd [very common name in ND]]

SHE: “James”

ME: “Ah, Well, it could be…”

SHE: “But everyone calls him Todd”

I made her call her sister on the cell phone. Sure enough, it was the very same Todd [very common name in ND] that I used to walk to school with, thirty years ago. He lives in the Metro, runs a business, is apparently quite a guy.

It’s hard to explain to other people, sometimes…

Some things Bruce says better than I do.

It was Wednesday, March 4, 1987. I was driving to work at KSTP. I stopped at a store to pick up a few things, and picked up a City Pages on may way back to the jeep.

Backstory: A few weeks earlier, a writer for the CP had come out to the station to interview, mainly, Geoff Charles – most of us called him “Chaz” – the booming-voiced, leather-skinned, comically-narcissistic former mid-morning host who’d fleeted up to afternoon drive with Don Vogel’s departure in January. Geoff was an interesting guy – claimed to be a former state swimming champion, a former Marine who taught SEALS to swim, and a former, successfully recovering heroin addict. Many of our longtime callers reveled in trying to disprove any or all of those claims; one, “Steve from Roseville”, constantly demanded that Chaz produce a copy of his “DD214” discharge papers to prove he’d been a Marine at all.

Chaz got an endless laugh out of that.

I do know Chaz was a bodybuilder, a guy who effected a boundlessly self-adoring, arrogant-with-tongue-firmly-in-cheek on-air personality that irritated people so badly they tuned in in droves – including me. He was also, once you got to know him, a warm, personable guy who stopped by Lunds to pick up a baked chicken and veggies to share with Dave and I, his grossly underpaid producers, nearly every day. He was a change in pace from working with the zany Vogel, but it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot about talk radio from Geoff; perception, in radio, is reality; relentless earnestness is boring; above all, have a lot of fun with it.

Anyway.

The reporter had hung around the station for the better part of a day. He talked with just about everyone in the place – myself, the lowliest peon of the bunch, included – but spent a lot of time, including an on-air interview (if memory serves, and it very well may not) with Chaz.

Skip ahead a few weeks.

I walked out of the store, leaned up against the grill of the jeep, and started reading.

I flipped back a few pages, and found the article – complete with interior shot of the old KSTP talk studio. And I read the article.

Skimmed, really. It focused heavily on Charles, who was indeed the station’s most interesting host.

Skim ahead.

It touched briefly on the morning show, with the interminable Mike Edwards and his newly-acquired co-host Lee Valsvik, in her first full-time radio gig.

Didn’t care. Skim ahead.

He ripped, hard, on the station’s array of tedious network hosts – Michael Jackson, Owen Span, Bruce Williams, Harvey Ruben, Sally Jesse Raphael…

Zzzzzz. Skim ahead…

Paydirt!

He wrote; “Mitch Berg, a painfully polite man and unreconstructed rock and roller who thinks anyone to the left of Genghis Khan is a Trotskyite, does a conservative show from 2 to 4 Monday mornings…”

Booyah! My first press coverage!

I pasted the clip to the wall of my “office” – my coffee-table-book-sized surface jammed against a stack of satellite demodulators – as soon as I got to work.

Next stop, the big time!

—————-

The writer, of course, was James Lileks. It was his first encounter, if I recall correctly, with Chaz – which led to a series of regular guest shots (including one that will be subject for a future installment of this series), which led to a series of substitute hosting gigs, which led to a full-time show, which led back to “The Diner” in its various incarnations, which led to his weekly appearances on the Hugh Hewitt show.

And a bunch of writing, too.

I think I still have that copy of the March 4, 1987 City Pages stashed away.

Somewhere. I’m sure I do.

(more…)

Stuff I’ve found pertaining to today’s snowstorm:

• Roads are closing all over the state of Minnesota.
• Schools, businesses, and state offices are shutting down faster than Hardees restaurants.
• The roads are jammed with people leaving work early because of the “weather”.
• I’ll be joining a group of fellow North Dakota expats to play some sand volleyball at Thomas Beach, on the south end of Lake Calhoun, after work.  I’m bringing the beer!

That is all.

Here’s my new niece, Naomi, when she was about a day or so old, a few days ago:

Just ‘dorble.

There are times I miss having babies.

Especially when other people get to take care of the diapers and waking up.

…is 7 lbs 9 oz, and healthy, and has one really proud uncle today.

Oh, and kudos to my brat little sister Barb and her hubby Jeff – AKA “Mom and Dad” – too. 

And I’m only bummed I didn’t think of it first.

I’ll be on BlogTalkRadio at 6:30 AM…

…talking about Nick Coleman and education. Join me at 646 652 2923.
If you’re a reader of Twin Cities conservative blogs, Coleman is a regular kicktoy. If you’re from out of state, you’re in for a treat.