In an open thread at Clots Nation Kool Aid Report, Sisyphus – the Paul McCartney to the Nihilist’s John Lennon at putatively-conservative, City Pages-endorsed “Nihilist in Golf Pants”, left a chilling portent:

Mitch Berg better watch his step, because I’ve found the perfect Separated At Birth for him and I’m just waiting for the perfect moment to unleash it.

Pre-emptive action is in order.

I’ve been given a number of “Separated at Births” in my life.

In high school – when I was a tad thinner and hairier, of course – I got compared with this guy quite a bit:

That’d be James Honeyman-Scott of the Pretenders, and a couple of people back then noticed a resemblance – a similitude which, unfortunately, extended to looking like I had the same drug habit as did the Pretenders’ guitarist.  (For the record, no, I didn’t.  I’ve never used an illegal drug in my life.  I just looked I was shooting up).  On the upside, at least I didn’t look like Pete Farndon.

A little later?  Well, let’s stay among guitar players.  I was told, a little more recently, that I resembled this guy:

The guy on the left, I mean – Dan Kramer of Soul Asylum.  That’s the good news.  The bad news – that’s more or less how I looked in college, 20-odd years ago, while that’s a pretty recent picture of Kramer.  (The black guy, second from right, has appeared in this blog before, too).

Time choogled on.  And the one separated at birth I’ve gotten lately – from cow-orkers, friends, even my own daughter – would be this guy:

That’s Jim Kramer, of CNBC’s “Mad Money”, and yes, that’s a spitting image, for better or worse. I could almost use his face on the online personals and not be guilty of any fraud, quite frankly. 

So which of us is this?

I’ll never tell.

So what does Sisyphus have in mind for an SAB? 

Does it matter? 

I think not.

Join me on BlogTalkRadio at 6AM CT on Wednesday.

I’ll be ripping on Nick Coleman, and the stupid assumptions about the inner-city school crisis that he mindlessly parrots.

Call me at 646 652 2923.

UPDATE:  Unless I have one of my two oversleeps a year.  Blah.

Tomorrow for sure.

One of my new years’ plans is to get, at long last, into some sort of shape (other than blob). 

To that end, and with the generous assistance of one of my company’s benefit features, I signed my family up in the YMCA last month.  I’ve been hitting the gym every other day for the past four weeks. 

And I’ve been doing some comparing and contrasting.  Like White Castles and Taco Bells, YMCAs in the suburbs and the city are very, very different.

(more…)

Let’s be clear on this – I’d love my job, which I started in early December, no matter what.  It’s an amazing opportunity.

One more thing I love – that I didn’t know about until this past Thursday?  We get Presidents’ Day off.

I haven’t had this day off since high school.  Pretty cool!

I’ll be on the “air” at 7AM Central with my first attempt a regular morning BlogTalkRadio show.

Click here…:

…to listen, and call (646) 652-2923 to join me.

Thinking about talking about the City Pages’ take on Governor Pawlenty, and relating that to things that matter to the national audience – but that could change…

Join me!

UPDATE: Well, that was fun! I think I’ll do the show in the morning for a while, just to see how it goes…

One thing about BlogTalkRadio – everyone seems to want to do their webcasts in the evening.

Contrarian that I am, I had to ask myself – why?

So, as an experiment, I’m going to try something else; a morning webcast. My current plan is to do something early in the AM, somewhere between 2-5 mornings a week (the time when I’m usually blogging anyway), where people can either tune in and listen live, and/or download and play it on their ‘pods during the day.

Current plan is to start tomorrow morning at 7AM (usually it will be 6AM); I’d like to talk about the City Pages’ hack job on Governor Pawlenty.

Tune in!

…the long-awaited, long-promised podcast site has nearly come to fruition.

More details next week.

It was Sunday night (really Monday Morning, February 15-16, 1987. I was in the studio at KSTP, getting ready to do the “Mitch Berg Show”.

I was talking with one of our engineers. Most of the station’s engineering staff was in their sixties, and had been with Hubbard Broadcasting since the late forties. Between them, they had eighty-odd years of engineering experience.

I was sitting up, killing time with one of them. My confidence level was up to the point where I could actually sit and talk before a show, rather than frantically planning and making sure I had every conceivable base covered.

The thing about engineers (back in the days when stations still had to have them) was that there was no keeping secrets from them. In an industry where air talent and salespeople had about a 100% annual turnover, engineers – who tended to survive cutbacks in those days – provided the institutional memory for most radio stations.

We got to talking about the boss, Pervy LeDouchebag [1].

The engineer told us a story from Pervy’s past.

“Back when he was working at (a Hubbard station) in about ’74 – no, ’75…no, I think it was ’74. I should ask [another engineer], he’d know if it was ’74 or ’75…”

The engineer tended to fly easily off onto his own tangents. But he came back on point eventually.

“Anyway, Pervy was working news back then. He left the studio after his 3PM newscast to go get lunch.”

“And he didn’t come back at 4. Or 5. Or 6…”

“He didn’t come back the next day, or the next day, or all weekend, or the first two days of the next week. Finally, the following Wednesday, he comes back to the studio in time for his 4PM newscast – reeking of booze, wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing when he left. He grabs some copy , and tries to walk into the studio to do his next newscast, like he’d never left. He got really pissed when they wouldn’t let him on the air”

“The checked him into detox. He had no idea where he’d been!”

“Finally, they went over his credit card receipts. He’d been in Detroit, then New Orleans, and then Memphis, and finally back to the Cities.”

I’d started in radio when I was 16. It’s not like I’d not run into egregious alcoholics in the business.

But this was the guy running the station.

I shook the story off and did my show. And had a ball with it.

(more…)

It was Valentines’ Evening, 1987.

Another gig!

My band had had the worst gig ever – no, the worst. gig. ever. – about a month earlier, at the old “McReedy’s Pub”, in downtown Minneapolis.  We’d schlepped our gear in, set up, and played three sets of music.

Actually, the story of the three sets of music was better (much better) than the gig itself.  We’d absorbed our new guitar player, “Casey”, the hard way; we practiced four hours a night, four nights a week, every week from New Years on. 

And it wasn’t just covers, either.  We learned three hours of originals – mostly my stuff, but Casey had five or six tunes that people kinda liked, and Bill and Mark (the drummer and bass player) each contributed a song.  Out of thirty songs, we played maybe five covers – “Gimme Some Lovin'” (I could fake the keyboard parts really well back then), a badly-misbegotten rap version of “You Shook Me All Night Long” (which was a funny idea that we could never pull off), a country-western version of Prince’s “Erotic City”, a bad-jazz reading of “Bastards of  Young”, and – what doesn’t fit into this picture? – a very straight version of Badfinger’s “Baby Blue”.  The rest – 18-20 songs – were all mine. 

So we played.  To a house with maybe three people in it.  We didn’t bother charging at the door, naturally – why?  And the sound system – a creaking antique with a reverb tank possessed by demons – gave us hell.  In one song, I sang “you can be a very big fish…”.  As I finished the next line of the song, I could still hear the system echoing “fish fish fish fish fish” from the speakers.  We gradually got things squared away, though – so by the end of the night, near the end of the third set, as we were playing to one guy and his girlfriend, things came across well enough when we did “Baby Blue” that he stood up after the song, walked up to the stage, and handed us $10.  “That was my favorite song of all time”.

That was our take for the whole night.

But it was a month later.  We were a lot tighter.  A lot better.  We knew more stuff (the rap cover was gone, although “Erotic County” survived in our repertoire for a few more years). 

Tonight’s gig – “Fernando’s”, on 15th and East Lake Street. 

Things got off to a rocky start; the bar was supposed to advertise the gig in City Pages.  We’d opened it up the previous Wednesday, to see us plugged as…”TBA”.  (To be fair, Fernando’s screwed up the ad every time we played there, ever.  We thought about changing the band’s name to “TBA”, eventually).

We took the stage at 9:30, ready to go…

…and played to almost as bad a crowd we’d had the previous month.  Casey’s girlfriend Rachel.  Bill and Mark’s sister.  A couple of friends from college, who had agreed to help “work the door”, but quickly wound up as audience, since there was no “door” to “work”.  They left after a set.

And, by the end of the evening, one lonely, broke bartender who cheered gamely along (I ended up leaving a couple of 100% tips out of thanks and sympathy), and a couple of very drunk guys who yelled “Play Comfortably Numb” so many times…

…that we finally gave up and did it.

Who’da thunk – people not wanting to go to a ratty bar in a crime-infested toilet of a neighborhood?  On Valentine’s Day?

We loaded out at the end of the evening and wondered what we were doing wrong.  I resolved to try to get us into a better grade of crappy bar.

As a side note:  One of those college friends who gutted out the first set is not only an occasional reader of this blog, but in fact one of the purchasers of my classic old “What Would Reagan Do” bumperstickers. 

Hiya, Mike!

In honor of Valentine’s Day, this is a follow-up to one of my most popular posts.

CASE 1: Flinty fortysomething executive type – let’s call her “Lynnette”. Kicks off a conversation with “I tend to be too direct”. As she’d only been divorced less than a year, after nearly twenty years of marriage, I expressed some concern – I’ve been bitten by that whole “rebound” bug too many times. This brought on a litany of pique, the upshot of which was her contention that, despite conventional wisdom, plenty of research, and oodles of my own personal experience, she really was an emotionally-available, completely-recovered outlier to reality.

WHAT I SHOULD HAVE SAID: “Er, what you call “Direct” most of us call “rude and self-absorbed. And I don’t think you’re nearly as squared away as you think you are. Check please…”

CASE 2: Cute, if somewhat way-too-thin-for-my-tastes accountant. Let’s call her “Ann”.

After two fairly nice dates, a phone call. “I’m narrowing down my list of guys to [names another guy she’s also been going out with]. Sorry”.

WHAT I SHOULD HAVE SAID: “Are you Paula, or Randy? Because I do a much better Simon…”

CASE 3:  “I am crazy about vampires”

WHAT I SHOULD HAVE SAID: [clattering of chair, cloud of dust as I ran for door].

Sisyphus, from City-Pages (R)-endorsed Nihilist in Golf Pants, notes:

Whenever the mercury dips below zero here in Minnesota, two things are certain:
1. Minnesotans will whine about the cold
2. Mitch Berg, of Jamestown North Dakota, will mock said Minnesotans for being weather wimps on his blog and radio show

Dang skippy.

Now, Sisyphus trumps up some bogus “evidence” of his claim that southern Minnesota is warmer than North Dakota; cooking the case with all the grace of the Broward-County Democratic Party, he takes temperatures from Saint Cloud (which, given that city’s inferiority complex, are probably cooked to begin with), and ignores wind-chill (note to Minnesota conservatives, or City-Pages-endorsed “conservatives”:  pull your collective head out of Joe Soucheray’s butt.  Wind chill is cold, if it’s real wind and not these dulcid little south Minnesota breezes you’re talking about).

So let’s settle this the right way. 

If you are a North Dakota native transplated to the Twin Cities:  Compare and contrast.  Where did you genuinely feel colder, there or here?

If you’re a Twin Citian or Southern Minnesotan transplanted to NoDak:  Ditto. 

I’m talking southern Minnesota, here, not Embarass or Hinkley or International Falls. 

Sound off.  What’s colder? 

It was fourteen years ago yesterday that Zam came into the world; two weeks late, crabby from being covered in a head-to-toe rash, and with  the biggest gopher cheeks in the history of babydom.

Zam has never been the oblique one.  When he was three years old, we were teaching him about prayer.  Late one clear summer night, as we were walking into the house from the car, he stopped in the middle of the lawn.  “GOD!  HEY, GOD!” he yelled.

He’s still kind of that way.

Happy birthday (a day late in blog terms) Zam!

It was five years ago today that I first posted on this blog.

When I started this thing up, I never expected to find an audience. And for eight months, I was right – I averaged under ten visits a day, in those days when most people thought “blogging” was something that happened after cheap beer and burritos.

Things evolved nicely from there, of course. This blog – and blogging – has taken me from being a cranky single dad and frustrated former pundit writing about the Minnesota legislature in his home office to…well, more or less the same thing, but with a much bigger audience!

And I’ve loved just about every minute of it.

Marty Andrade – celebrated his third blog anniversary this past Thursday – had a superb observation:

It’s hard to maintain a blog for a long period of time. It even looks like that at least in the United States blogging is starting to plateau as more people abandon their blogs. Blogging done right can be very rewarding, but if one focuses too much on traffic and linking and puts their expectations too high they won’t be blogging long. There’s sort of a Zen to blogging, you become a good blogger once you let go of you worldly wants.

Marty’s very right. I sometimes ask myself – would I still enjoy this if my readership dropped back to two a day? Or if, worse, the City Pages endorsed me?

Yes. To the first one, anyway.

If my grandmother were alive, she’d be 102 today. 

I grew up four blocks from Grandma Bea, in Jamestown, until she died in October of my senior year of high school.

In this piece, on what would have been her 100th birthday, I wrote about her claim to fame.  It’s still a fun story.

…until Reagan’s Birthday, the official holiday of Shot In The Dark.

I’m laying in jelly beans for the office, and getting ready to take the kids out for dinner to celebrate.

I urge real Americans to do the same. 

Another busy morning.  More posting later.

…has turned out to be a bruiser of a day.  Posting likely light until much later.

A little background.

Over the previous summer, my first General Manager at KSTP, Scott Meier, had left. He eventually wound in New York, where he started WFAN, the first station in the wave of all-sportstalk stations that have swept the nation. For this, he may still be held accountable.

But I digress.

We went without a GM for the better part of four months. Stuck out in Maplewood on Highway 61, far from corporate, we might as well have not existed. The checks showed up every two weeks, and we pretty much did what we did best; produce and host talk shows.

We got the best ratings the station had had as a talk station, from a 2.2 share when I’d started 13 months earlier to a 4.0 in our latest book. We were like a radio Lord of the Flies, stuck in our claustrophobic little bunker in the ‘burbs, like we were putting something over on The Man.

It couldn’t last, naturally.

In mid-October, Hubbard Broadasting sent us a new GM and Program Director, Pervy LeDouchebag [*]. Mr. LeDouchebag had a long pedigree in radio – as an alcoholic with a long history of legendary blackouts.

To make a long ordeal short, Pervy made his presence felt.  On the first day on the job, while talking with the sales manager, he saw one of our news reporters – a very attractive strawberry blonde who was also a very orthodox ultrafeminist, and fairly yelled “Jeezus Christ, look at the t__s on that one!”.  A few moments later, while giving dictation to our receptionist, he apparently made rather forward proposal.  In his first day, he started on his way toward two of the (it was later related) seven sexual harassment suits that eventually helped get him shown to the door.

But that was the future.

Pervy was also a very “hands-on” program director.  One day in late November, we used “Play That Funky Music” by Wild Cherry for a bumper.  Mr. LeDouchebag ran into the control room, face purple with rage.  “Get that *****mn song off the air! It says “Play that Fu****g Music…”

The problem was not that he was a crappy manager.  Most general managers in radio are awful (and no, my current GM John Hunt at the Patriot isn’t one of them).

So it was Monday, January 12, 1987.  The “Mitch Berg Show” had been going great.  I felt it was time for things to move to the next level.  I walked into Mr. LeDouchebag’s office.

“Mr. LeDouchebag”, I started, “my show’s been going well.  I’m wondering – since there’s nothing going on on Sunday mornings, I was wondering if I could take that 2 to 4 AM slot, too…?”

LeDouchebag looked at me, his dead, soulless eyes peering through the leathery mask of his face.  “It all depends on what Don wants.  Your job is to make Don sound good.  Clear it with him!”.

No problem, I thought as I walked into the talk studio for the production meeting.

“Don?”, I asked, “Remember how we’ve been talking about me taking Sunday mornings?  Pervy says it’s up to you.  What to you say”.

Dave, my co-producer, shook his head and chuckled.  Don laughed too – one of the laughs you heard less often from him back then, his sarcastic titter.  “I don’t think that’s going to be an issue”.

“Huh?”

Dave smiled awkwardly at Don.  “Ummmmm…”, he started, “Don’s leaving.

I think I did a spit-take.

“Huh?”

“I’m going to WMAQ.  I gave my notice today.”  Dave shook his head, resignedly.

“I just can’t stand working with LeDouchebag”, he said, laughing.  “It’s too good a deal to pass up”.

The production meeting was strained.  I’d never worked with a lame duck before; it was strange.

The show started at three, and Don made the announcement.  The control room, usually buzzing with energy, seemed drained.

We all had a bad feeling about things.
(more…)

…I’ve declared “this is the week I’m getting down to Keegans!”; inevitably, something came up at the last minute, every week.

Last week I said nothing.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

…that’ll work.

I just wanna bang on the drum all day.

I actually slept until seven today. I never do this; I normally wake up without the benefit of an alarm clock around 5:30 – but it’s been a crazy couple of weeks.

More posting later today.

I had a band.

We’d had one gig – and now, another.

It was Saturday, January 3, 1987, and what we didn’t have was a guitar player.

After our gig at Williams Uptown, two of the three brothers I was playing with seemed interested in progressing with things. The other – the eldest of the three, the other guitar player – on the other hand, was not interested. My Houserockers-Via-Clash vibe rankled his Prince-like sensibilities; he wanted to play dance music that’d reel in the babes; I wanted to create a loud, angry wall of sound.

It wasn’t going to work out.

The other two brothers, the bass and drum players, huddled in the basement the previous night, Friday, and tried to figure out what we were going to do. We had a gig in about two weeks. Our options were:

1. Go as a “power trio”; guitar, bass and drums. I didn’t want to do that; I wanted a bigger sound, plus I was really enjoying doubling on keys.
2. Bag the gig. Not a chance; I wanted to play.
3. Find another guitar player, fast – someone who could learn three sets of material in like two weeks.

If you have known me for any time at all, you know that there was only one option for me; #3 it was.

I dug back through the lists of guys who’d contacted me when I took out my ad in the City Pages. There was one – a guy from Jamestown we’ll just call “Casey” (I’m changing the names, since the story gets a little dicey in the next year or so).  He’d contacted me just after I’d settled on the other guys, a little over a month earlier.

And yes, he was still available.

So it was tonight, January 3, that we all got together and started learning our stuff.  We had three sets to fill at McCready’s – three hours of playing.  And the other three of us – the bass and drummer and I – were closing in on having enough stuff, most of it originals.

We got together at five o’clock Saturday afternoon and played for about five hours, until the noise ordinance said we had to shut down.     then, we sat in the filthy living room of the ratty house and drank Carlings Black Label until about 2AM talking music and musicians.

We were going to do it again, five days a week until we had all four of us ready to go.

I frequently say “I don’t believe in Karma, but I think what goes around comes around”.

In a similar vein, I don’t really believe in New Years’ Resolutions – but I have a bunch of goals for the next year that I really want to hit.

Let’s start at the top:

1. I’m in vastly better shape than I was a year ago. Now is no time to backslide; joining the “Y” (for the kids and I) in about two weeks.
2. In a similar vein, now that I’m working in downtown, I will be well able to bike to work when the weather improves, especially in the summer (when I don’t have to drive kids to school and I can get as early a start as I want). That’s the goal for the summer; bike it to work every day weather permits.
3. My daughter has had a blinding flash of epiphany re school in this past three months. Need to facilitate my son’s having the same thing.
4. My house is the next priority. Going to improve the overall level of housekeeping quite a bit. Even if I have to pay for the help.
5. Also re the house – I’m going to build that patio I’ve been yammering about for the past two years.
6. In many ways, the job I have now is the one I’ve been hoping to find ever since I left StorageTek in 2000; I am, at least nominally, in a leadership position. I’m going to make the most of that in the coming year.
7. The blog – there are a number of things I’ve been dying to do with this blog as it approaches its fifth anniversary, in about a month. More later.
8. Also – after nine months of thinking about it, I’m going to try to get my podcast site finally up and on the air in the coming weeks. There’s a technical issue I have to work out – but it’s finally doable.
9. As re the NARN – well, the status quo isn’t half bad. We’re starting to see how well the show’s actually been doing; continuing to clobber the competition in head-to-head radio combat. Next year will bring even more fun stuff.

Anyway, I’d like to thank all of you readers and commenters. Your feedback and support have been one of the highlights of recent years for me. As to the criticism – well, it’s given me people to laugh at, which is also valuable.

Hope you and yours have a great 2007!

It was Thursday, January 1, 1987.  I’d worked probably twenty hours in the past two days, plus probably at least as much over the Christmas break.  It was going to be a great paycheck.

And I’d gotten a call back from a bar, McCready’s Pub in downtown Minneapolis.  They wanted to book us for January 16.  I’d accepted the gig.

The year was getting off to a grand start.