…this news would have kept me jazzed for a whole week.

Devin Hester ran into the record book again. Ricky Manning Jr. returned an interception for a touchdown, and the Bears claimed their second straight NFC North title with a 23-13 victory over the Minnesota Vikings on a frigid Sunday afternoon.

And by golly, it still does!

Now that they’ve clinched their second straight division title, the Chicago Bears can focus on bigger goals: a No. 1 seed and, maybe, the conference championship.

And then a Super Bowl.  Don’t forget the Super Bowl.

Via Stainless Steel Droppings

1.How old were you when you learned to read and who taught you?

I was four or five, I think.  Not sure who taught me, but I distinctly remember the  first word I ever read; my dad was in grad school in Fargo, and my mom, her parents and I were driving there to see him.  I remember looking at a road sign and sounding out “F…AR…Go!   FARGO!”.  They  were pretty excited.

2.Did you own any books as a child? If so, what’s the first one that you remember owning? If not, do you recall any of the first titles that you borrowed from the library?

“My” first book was a little pocket book of World War II airplanes that had been my dad’s when he was a kid.  I read it constantly for years.  My first library book was actually the American Heritage history of the Civil War when I was in first grade.  It was a little over my reading level – I remember proudly reading about the “UNN-yun” and “con-FEED-rate” armies – but the pictures of uniforms were soooo cool…

3.What’s the first book that you bought with your own money?

A book of Civil War stories.

4.Were you a re-reader as a child? If so, which book did you re-read most often?

There were books I read many times.  I probably re-read “The Wooden Horse” at least a dozen times.

5.What’s the first adult book that captured your interest and how old were you when you read it?

That’s a tough one.  I hardly ever read “kids'” books.  I was pretty much checking all my books out of the adult section by third grade. 

6.Are there children’s books that you passed by as a child that you have learned to love as an adult? Which ones?

Winnie the Pooh, and the whole Madeleine series.

Bonus Question: Are there books you remember reading as a child that you either can’t find now or can’t remember the title?

Nope!

I’m not one of those people who gets all depressed and weird about Christmas.  In fact, I make a pretty, um, religious point of keeping me and the kids focused on what the season is about; its religious roots, the fun of being together with one’s family, just plain being happy.  With kudos to Dennis Prager, it’s actually something I got from an old Hungarian saying – “the best way to become wealthy is to appear that you already are” – probably a decade or two before I ever heard Dennis Prager.

In all, Christmas is close to the perfect season.  I love it.

But…

…there are a few Chrsitmas songs that simplly have to go.

Don’t get me wrong; I can’t think of a single traditional Christmas song that I don’t like.  No, it’s the pop-oriented Christmas songs of the last fifty years that truly sap that holiday cheer from my soul.

The worst offenders:

• Jingle Bell Rock: Every version.  But especially Wayne Newton.
• Sleigh Ride, by some schlock lounge singer of the fifties and sixties.  Not sure which one – it’s the one where the singer sings “…our freinds are calling YEEEEE-HOOO!”.  That’s a spirit killer right there.

More as I remember them – not that I’ll be trying that hard.

Chad the Elder has a cri de coeur that is music to my ears. 

He’s talking about “e-business” sites – shopping sites for places like Amazon, Best Buy, yadda yadda – and a key problem many of them have; they’re just not designed for real people to use them.

He wants the companies to…:

Make it Easy to use: The other day I was trying to find some information on a local hotel/water park. The web site was chock full of neat looking Flash animation and graphics. But when I tried to find out how much it would cost to use the water park on a particular day I entered a cyber-hell of being forced to follow link upon link upon link (while animation played for each one) until I was finally able to find what I was looking for. And then, when I was curious about the room rates, I had to go through the same rigmarole again only to eventually be instructed to “call for information.” Arghhh! If I wanted to call, I would have done that in the first place. The whole idea of visiting the web site was so that I didn’t have to make a fargin’ phone call.

This sort of thing tells me I’ll have work to do for a long, long time.  It’s almost a game, trying to guess why a “e-business” site turns out like that. 

The usual suspects:

• Management thinks “usability” means “sizzle”.
• Management thinks graphics artists are qualified to design human-computer interaction.
• Management are former programmers, who think “user centered design” is some touchy-feely commie fad – where it is, in fact, a highly empirical, indeed scientific, approach to making software, including web sites, usable.

Elder enjoins business to…:

Think about the top two or three reasons that customers are visiting your site and make that information as easy to find as possible. Fancy graphics are nice, but what I really care about is finding what I’m looking for as quickly as possible.

It shouldn’t be all that complicated…make it easy to find critical information. It ain’t rocket science, it’s just the internet.

If it were easy, anyone could do it.

Fortunately, this town is crawing with people who do just that.  Some even write about it.  Myself occasionally included. 

(Merry Christmas, fellow HCI geeks)

Busy this morning, getting my little editing gig wrapped up before my real new job starts on Monday.

Light posting for a bit here.

Blogads.com is the vendor that puts the advertising in the right margin of this blog. Selling ads via blogads has made this blog self-supporting to slightly profitable (if you leave out the time spent actually writing) for the past couple of years.

They’ve made some changes. Most of them were good.

One, I found out today, is not so much. While blogads used to pay up within a month of the ad starting, now they’re on a much-looser, net plus a couple of months arrangement.

Which I didn’t figure out ’til yesterday.

So the couple of hundred bucks in blogad revenue that was going to Christmas presents this year is…not.

Yet.

I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, I guess.

There was genuinely not much to report in the three weeks since the last “Twenty Years Ago…” piece.

Life had basically fallen into a very predictable routine:

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

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

“Bruce Huff is no longer at the station”.

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

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

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

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

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

Next Wednesday.

…the less I notice the difference.

This one never seems to get any less dead-on.

…is the one you get even though you haven’t had a drink in weeks.

It was four years ago, during this blog’s first Thanksgiving, that I wrote what is still my favorite Thanksgiving post, one that reads like one of my “Twenty Years Ago Today” posts (indeed, probably served as the prototype for that endless series of mine).

So rather than write a whole lot, I’m just going to quote a chunk of it, a look back at my first Thanksgiving in the Twin Cities.

I still had no job, I was broke and malnourished and cold. I’d had a few interviews, but no bites. I had dinner at a friend’s place. And on the way home, I drove downtown, and walked out onto the Central Avenue bridge, and looked out over the city in the dark. If you’ve never seen it, looking at downtown Minneapolis in the dark, when everything’s all lit up, is stunning; for someone just in off the prairie, it was like looking at Manhatten. I was cold, and scared out of my shorts about my short-term prospects – and for the first time, I felt strangely at home in this new city.

And every since then, Thanksgiving has seemed like the turning of the new year for me – the time when I reflect on the past year’s agonies and flubs and successes, and look forward to the next year. Much more so – for me anyway – than New Years’ Eve, which is more decompression from Christmas than anything.

I remember each Thanksgiving in the last 17 years – the giddiness of feeling like I was on the edge of something big in 1986, confident in my ability to pull it all together in ’87, shell-shocked and depressed and contemplating the implosion of my radio career in ’88, crazy in love in ’89, a harried but happy but broke newlywed in ’90, a new dad digging out of deep snowdrifts in ’91, broke and on the brink of eviction with two kids and another on the way in ’92, in a new house in ’93…wondering how long my marriage would last in ’98, being able to answer the question “not long at all” in ’99…

…and today. I sat for a while by the Cathedral of St. Paul, looking down Summit over downtown Saint Paul. The giddy, heady uncertainty of the thanksgivings of my first years as an adult, the throat-clutching terror of my divorce-era holidays, and the weary relief of my first thanksgivings as a divorced dad…well, little bits of all of them are still there. But there’s the emerging sense that my life really is mine, and that I’d better get on with it.

But I forgot one. I’m thankful to be here. Now. Doing what I’m doing, and with the chance to be doing the same thing – or better – next year.

The following year, of course, was 2003 – one of the most harrowing years of my life. So I’m thankful things got better – much better.

I’m thankful today for:

• A new job, starting in a week and a half, which may be the one I’ve been hoping to find all these years.
• The little editing job I picked up last week, which will mean a nice extra chunk of change coming in in January.
• The show. I’ve perhaps gotten a bit spoiled; after years of pining for that little piece of myself I lost when I got blasted out of talk radio nearly 20 years ago, I simply revel in having it back, if only for a day a week.
• All the people in my life. You know who you are.
• Above all, my family – Bun and Zam, with all their maddening teenagerisms and budding eccentricities.

I hope you all have a great Thanksgiving.

I have to credit this little pan full of heaven to my ex-mother-in-law.  It’s “corn pudding” – basically a corn casserole, served as a side dish, as a substitute or (if you love your corn and stuffing as much as I do) supplement to stuffing (and you can have my corn pudding or my stuffing when you pry them from my cold, dead, carbo-bloated fingers).

I’ll be churning this out by the panful tomorrow.  The kids and I will no doubt fight over it:

Corn Pudding

1 large can  whole kernel corn, undrained
1 large can creamed corn
1 8 oz carton sour cream/yogurt
1/2 C melted butter
1 pkg Jiffy cornbread mix.

pour into buttered 8″ casserole or cake pan

bake 45 min at 350

top with grated cheddar cheese and bake 15 more min

if you do not want cheese topping bake the pudding for a total of 60 minute

The rest of Thanksgiving dinner?  I wised up and ordered the turkey and all the fixings from Kowalski’s this year.  Mmm Mmm Good!

I’m scanning down the list of possible events in my life, sorted in order of likelihood. I finally got to the very bottom:

#6,784,777,653 – Re-animating the dead with my smile
#6,784,777,654 – Me pitching a called third strike against A-Rod

#6,784,777,655 – Staying up to watch Joey reruns

#6,784,777,656 – Setting off the heat death of the universe via chain of events started by my sipping a cup of hot chocolate

#6,784,777,657 – Voting for Alice Hausman.

And at the very bottom of the list:

#6,784,777,658 – Ever buying anything from CompUSA.

It’s right there on the list!

It’s been a while, but I got this one from Red:

Words that always look misspelled to me:

Sergeant, Weird, cemetery

Words I enjoy saying:

buncombe, barrage, scabrous, hamster, bollocks, vacuous, lambaste, donnybrook.

Words I enjoy hearing:

“You were right all along”, “On the house!”,

Abbreviations I dislike:

“nbr” for “number”, “etc”.

Proper nouns I enjoy:

Phuket, Bannockburn, Ouistreham, Zap, Amelie,

Words I associate with happiness:

guitar, vacation, talk show (I know, a phrase. So sue me).
Words I always misspell:

Weird, Vacuum (whaddya mean there’s only one “c”?).

Words I enjoy spelling correctly, every time:

Sphygmomanometer.

Words that, though I love their meaning, I’m too embarrassed to say out loud:

Can’t think of any.

Words I can never remember the meaning of no matter how many times I look them up:

Syllogism, Teleology.

Words that sound like what they mean:

goulash, leprosy, abortion, phlegm, vellum, invincible, velvet.

Words that sound like something other than what they mean:

Enervating. Gets me every time.

What are some of your favorite words?

ethereal, ether, fart, guffaw, chard, talus, scree, chum, warm.

Your least favorite?

Nubbin, Tomkat, Bebop (and Bebopareebop), boogie.

It was Sunday, November 16, 1986. I had gotten a ton of responses from my City Pages ad.

Oh, some of them were doozies. High school kids, guys just out of rehab, a stripper who figured she was Leta Ford…

…in short, people who answered every ad in the City Pages. Because not a one of them knew who Southside Johnny or Joe Grushecky were – and the one person who’d heard of Richard Thompson, thought he was heavily influenced by the Cure.

But after a week or so, I got a call from a guy, a drummer, who not only knew each of them – he and his brother, a bass player (!) owned a copy of Love’s So Tough, the Iron City Houserockers’ debut album.

I then spent a week and a half trying to find the drummer – his phone got cut off for a week or so, which was pretty typical for drummers, but still.

Finally – the week after Halloween – we got together. He came over to my basement hovel/studio on 46th and Wentworth, I popped a couple of beers, we talked music (he was into Springsteen, the Jukes, the Heartbreakers, the Clash, the Pistols, Stiff Little Fingers, Thompson (good), as well as Lou Reed and the Screaming Blue Messiahs (not quite as good)). Then, finally, the moment of truth. I popped the demo cassette with the five best songs I’d written and recorded into the stereo.

He dug it.

I was getting pretty jazzed by this point. An instant rhythm section? Almost too good to be true.

We arranged to meet the following week – Saturday night, the 15th of November – at their older brother’s place, which doubled as a rehearsal space, which tripled as part of the basement of a warehouse in downtown Minneapolis. Better still? Older brother played guitar.

We wound up jamming, the four of us, until about 2AM, when my voice and fingers gave out. We agreed we had to give this a shot.

——

It was Sunday. A pretty typical winter Sunday, all in all; I drove out to the station that night for an anything-but-typical Mitch Berg Show.

My relationship with my “producer”/”engineer” Griff was, as noted before, dicey at best. One needed to keep him entertained, or he’d wander off to the transmitter shack and forget about screening calls. The sportscasts helped a lot. But he wanted more. He wanted to book guests.

Not just any guests. Guests that’d help out with his real career as a band agent.

So that night, we were going to be talking about Twin Cities Rock and Roll with an all-star panel; Skip Waslaski from Southern Thunder Sound, Larry Sahagian of the band “Urban Guerrillas”, and a couple of guys whose names I don’t remember…no, whose names I doubt I retained even then, but were members of one of Griff’s bands.

At least Griff was excited.

I don’t remember much of the interview, except that Skip knew everyone that had ever played in a band in the Twin Cities, and that Larry…well, in addition to playing in a band that made The Doors look like “Up With People”, Larry was the booker for a bar.

“So, Larry – I have this band…”

Laptop is in the shop again.

So I’m enjoying the delightful repast of posting from a coffee shop. Mmmm, coffee!

Have to rig my Plan B machine back home.

Got the offer.

Thanks to all for the various metaphysical or merely sotto voce encouragement.

(In a semi-related question – anyone need a tech writer or usability guy for a 1-2 week project?)

I’m currently waiting (on pins and needles, no less) on word for a darned-near perfect job. Interview was last week, final word is (supposedly) today.

If you would, please keep your fingers crossed in whatever way you are metaphysically inclined.

Thanks.

After a few months of mucking about with the idea, I figure the best way to get the site switched, once and for all, to WordPress is to up and switch it to WordPress.

I haven’t gotten the import process to work yet, unfortunately, so I’m going to have a link to the old site until I can get that figured out.

Update: At present, the system makes you “log in” to leave comments. I may be re-evaluating this.

It was Wednesday, October 29, 1986.  It was time to become a rock star.

After a manic blast of auditioning for bands when I’d first moved to the Cities – in the winter and spring of ’85-’86 – I figured I’d take some time off, concentrate on work (which needed quite a bit of concentration, at the time), and work on music in my spare time.

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

And cutting.  And cutting.

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

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

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

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

NuDu Seeks Keyboardist

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

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

My prediction was, unfortunately, wrong.

Where was I?  Oh, yeah.  City Pages.

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

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

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

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

That was the theory.

And today – Wednesday – the ad came out.

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

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

It was Wednesday, October 8, 1986. It was time for a remote.

A bit of history here: Southdale was the first enclosed shopping mall ever. August 8 1986 was the thirtieth anniversary.

And as part of the mall’s celebration, they wanted the Don Vogel show to do a live broadcast from the mall’s old atrium.

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

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

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

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

Which was a big part of my job.

(more…)

It was Thursday, July 24, 1986.

A week or so earlier, Don had put out the call – we needed a new theme song.

He had sown the wind. He was reaping the whirlwind.

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

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

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

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

Close!

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

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

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

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

(then up a fourth)

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

(then into the bridge)

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

(then back to the tune)

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

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

“That’s the one!”

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

It was Thursday, August 7, 1986.  The latest battle in the culture war had just been joined.

Some disk jockey somewhere had “back-masked” the theme for the “Mister Ed” show – played it backwards on a turntable or reel-to-reel tape deck.  Somehow, “A horse is a horse is a horse of course, unless of course it is the hourse is the famous Mister Ed” turned into “Song to Satan”.

Supposedly.

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

I listened to the purportedly-offending tape.

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

I just wasn’t hearing it.

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

We took a caller.

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

Don chuckled.  “Yeaaaaah.  Good question…”

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

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

Nud nud nud ah ma nud nod aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah ma…

Nothing remarkable.

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

I listened carefully to the tape as Don talked.

Nud nud nud awwwwwwwwwwww, sit on my rod

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

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

Nud nud nud awwwwwwwwwwww, sit on my rod

Don caught it this time.

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

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

Nud nud nud awwwwwwwwwwww, sit on my rod

And Don broke up again.

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

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

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

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

I didn’t need an alarm to wake up the morning after the first “Mitch Berg Show”.

I drove out to the station a little early, to bask in a little of the reflected glory of my morning’s work.

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

“Hey, Janice”.

“Hi”.

Not a word.

Oh, well.

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

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

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

Guh. “Really, really well!”

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

I walked through the door to my little desk.

(more…)

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

At 2AM, Monday morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll get into that later.

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

…but by midnight or so, I was done.

And getting nervous.

So I sorted them all out again.

And again.

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, yeah.  I can do the weather…”

“Gonna do any sports?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

========

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that was Monday. (more…)

Scott Meier had had my tape for about a month.  Or four, the way it felt to me.

Finally, today, Monday, July 7 1986, it was time to make my move.

Or so I thought, as I sat at my desk.

(more…)