My Malibu was dead.
No, not dead. Just terminal. I thought.
It was Wednesday, June 25, 1986. It had been a wettish spring, which meant my trusty ’73 Malibu wouldn’t start for love or money within eight hours of any precipitation. Which played hob with my job schedule.
This week had been the worst; I’d had to get rides to work with Rob Pendelton two straight mornings.
I figured it was time for a change.
It was Monday, June 23, 1986. My audition tape had been sitting on Scott Meier’s desk for well over a week.
I figured that was plenty of time. Today was the day to start the big push.
Assuming I could get to work.
My old ’73 Malibu was hanging on, but was fading fast. Every rainstorm left it immobile for a day or so, until it dried out. An early-morning deluge left me calling Rob Pendelton for a lift to work. “I know, I know”, I said as I got into his car, “I gotta get a different ride…”
I got to the station, did my board shift during the Michael Jackson show, and walked into the production meeting with Don and Dave. It was Monday, so Meier – the station’s general manager and program director, would be in shortly.
Now, when I call Scott Meier a “program director”, I don’t mean in the sense that anyone who’s ever worked in radio, especially in the bigs, could possibly relate to. At most “real” radio stations, the PD is an pseudo-deity of format knowledge, an all-powerful dictator who can make or break careers on a whim; a person whose entire careers hinges on the whims of a market’s listening audience, and who passes that down to all who work for him, the station’s “air [programming, production, whatever] department”.
Meier, on the other hand, was a sales guy (although he’d had a brief air career) who got stuck with the job as a cost-cutting measure. He didn’t know talk radio, and – this is the part that astounds “real” radio people – assumed that his staff could figure out the technicalities and do the job they were hired for better than he could.
And it worked. The station was getting the best ratings it’d gotten since it had gone all-talk in 1981. Which wasn’t really saying much, but it was something.
The best thing about working at KSTP back then was its splendid isolation, on the edge of a swamp on Highway 61 (note to Bob Dylan fans – yes, that Highway 61) in north Maplewood, north of Saint Paul. The station sat in an old (as in 1930’s-era) transmitter shack that had been remodeled with some offices, a kitchen, and a studio/control room and a couple of crude but useful production rooms. The station had moved out there about a year earlier; rumor had it that Hubbard Broadcasting wanted to unload the AM station. In those days when the “Fairness Doctrine” ruled and when Rush Limbaugh was still working in Sacramento, the “conventional wisdom” was that AM radio was a dying band, populated by losers broadcasting to geriatrics. The station, a 50,000 watt blowtorch, was apparently on the market for five million dollars – and was getting no takers. Hubbard broadcasting poured all of its resources into the properties it kept down on University Avenue in Saint Paul – Channel 5 (then the #2 station in town) and KS95 FM with its well-connected Program Director and morning guy Chuck Knapp. All of corporate’s attention focused on the “downtown” properties downstairs from the executive offices. Out in Maplewood, we’d go months without hearing from anyone at corporate, except when the biweekly bag of paychecks arrived.
So we were pretty much left alone – to do what we had been hired to do, and to get the best numbers we could.
Bit by bit, it was working. Our Spring Arbitron book showed us in the mid 3-point range among people 12+, and better still among males aged 25-54, the key audience.
Things were good – which meant my timing was good, too.
Meier walked into the studio. “Hey guys”.
“Hey, Scott. Listen to my tape?”
He nodded. “Yep”.
“And…?”
“Interesting”
“So whatdya think?”
“There’s possibilities”.
Vogel chimed in. “Scott, you gotta put him on the air!”
“Yeah!”, I added. “Put me in, coach! I’m ready to play!”
Vogel laughed his unrestrained cackle.
“Yeah”, said Meier, “there’s possibilities there. But I’ll have to think about it…”
I pulled out the closest thing I had to a trump card: “And given that Edwards, Geoff Charles, Michael Jackson, Owen Span and Karen Booth are so far to the left, we have that whole Fairness Doctrine thing to think about…”
Meier nodded. “I’ll think about it”. He changed the subject to talk with Don about something or another. I didn’t pay much attention. I was figuring how to press the issue further.
It wasn’t everything that was on my mind, of course. I got home around 7 that night, spent an hour digging through the classifieds for cheap used cars…
…and then curled up in the basement with my “recording studio” for a couple of hours.
More on both later.
It was my first summer in the Twin Cities – and life was looking fairly decent.
I was entering my third month living in the basement – and enjoying it a lot. My routine; get up around seven, take a bike ride, come home, nosh with the roommates, take a shower, drive out to KSTP…
…assuming my car worked. My ’73 Malibu was acting weirder and weirder. It would flood on the flimsiest pretexts; I carried a BIG screwdriver with me to jam into the carb butterfly to let enough air in to start the car, something I had to do a couple of times a week. And for a day or so after a rainstorm, it wouldn’t start at all.
Anyway, it was off to work around 10. I’d do a little guest booking as I ran the board for the Owen Span show, then go into the Vogel show production meeting.
The routine was always the same; whomever walked into the room last would say “I’ve been having trouble with my bank lately”. One of the guys already there would say “Which bank is that?” The last person into the room would respond “The Sh*t P*ss F*ck bank…”
We’d start planning the show. We’d usually get a visit from our boss, Scott Meier, the general manager. Scott, in his mid-thirties at the time, was a very talented executive – he’d go on to start WFAN in New York, the nation’s first all sports station, and also could fart on command.
“Scott”, Dave Elvin would say as Meier stood in the studio, “fart!”. Meier would let a little “frrrrp” fly with no more effort than clearning his throat, as Vogel laughed – giggled, really – with glee. “Do it again”, Don would usually say, like a baby who’s discovered tennis balls. Meier would let another one fly. No problem.
But this day, Sunday, June 8, was different.
I’d convinced Don that the station really, really needed a conservative talk show, if only to keep the FCC happy back in the days of the “Fairness Doctrine” . He pondered the notion for a few days. “Mitch”, he finally said, “you need to get an audition tape to Meier. I’ll help you”.
So we arranged it. I picked him up at his house in North Saint Paul, and we drove to KSTP. We went into the studio – only I sat in the host’s chair this time. I felt like the first time I sat in my Dad’s car; the ratty swivel chair sat practically nose-to-nose with the glass window into the control room; there were controls for all four microphones in the room, plus the “telemixer” phone controller. I told the person on the board in the control room (who was running some syndicated show at the time) to patch the studio into a reel-to-reel deck and roll tape.
And we started talking. I forget what we talked about – politics of some kind, of course, I’m sure, but the tape is long lost. I also “took some calls” – I’d planted a couple of friends with a topic, and recorded a couple of brief flashes of phone interplay. It went well; I remember feeling exhilarated about it all. The whole thing took about an hour.
I drove Don home, and then came back to the studio. I curled up in a production room for about an hour, editing out the “umms” and “y’know”s. Then I dubbed the whole thing to a cassette tape, typed up a memo to Meier asking him to give it a listen, and stuffed the whole thing in his mailbox.
I drove home. The dice had been rolled.
Life had settled into a modestly pleasant routine.
I was happily living in a basement in a nice little bungalow in South Minneapolis, with a total of five women, three of whom I’d gone to college with.
Life had improved a lot when I got my first raise; I’d been promoted sometime in late March or early April from “Intern” to “Associate Producer” of the Don Vogel Show. The title came with money – I was up to $4.25 an hour!
Laughable? Sure. But I was paying $135 for rent, my car was paid for (and insurance was fairly cheap for me), the commute bill had dropped down to $80 a month, and I made the occasional extra buck or two producing hockey games; I actually lived relatively large.
But not as large as I thought I could. From my introduction the previous fall, I’d learned that I kind of liked talk radio. And I’d heard stories – almost rumors – of political conservatives doing talk shows in other cities. I looked around – Morning guy Mike Edwards was center to slightly left (not that he ever had an opinion), Geoff Charles was a libertine, syndies Owen Spann and Michael “Not the singer, not the beer expert” Jackson both swerved left, Joe Soucheray was a Randy Kelly-style DFLer in those days, Pat Reusse was a seething commie, and while Don Vogel didn’t care much for politics, he trended toward the left and didn’t like Ronald Reagan at all.
I knew what the “Fairness Doctrine” was all about. I saw an opportunity.
I went to talk with the boss, general manager Scott Meier. “This station could use a conservative host”.
Meier looked at me – wild-haired, looking for all the world like James Honeyman-Scott (heroin addiction and all) – and said “I’ll think about it”.
I went into the production meeting afterwards, and told Vogel. “Cool! Our own fire-breathing gun nut!”
“Meier doesn’t sound too thrilled”.
“Well, I’ll talk with him…”
I left it at that.
The other part of my routine; I’d built a “recording studio”. I had a Fostex X-15 four-track cassette player, my guitars (the ’60 Fender Jazzmaster, an Ibanez SG with Seymour Duncan “Jeff Beck” pickups that played better than any Gibson SG I’ve ever played), my acoustic, a bass, and a Crumar T-1 organ that I’d picked up at one of Knut Koupee’s “Sunglasses Sales” (trade in a pair of sunglasses for an awesome deal on gear – the organ cost $50) which when miked properly and with a certain suspension of disbelief did a better-than-fair Hammond B3 impression. and a $100 drum machine.
I rigged the whole mess up in a corner of my basement hovel, and started learning how to do demo tapes on my own – from 7PM until 10PM every night (when the housemates insisted I turn the guitars down) I laid down tracks, and from 10 to 2-ish in the morning I tried bouncing and mixing and editing tracks to make my little four tracks sound bigger.
And I started writing music. Oh, in high school and college, I’d fantasized about being a rock star, and written a couple of puerile ditties. But for the first time in my life, I started writing music – writing anything, really – with a certain amount of drive and discipline.
Life was getting fairly good.
It was Friday, February 21, 1986. A friend of mine from college invited me – along with a couple of other college friends – to her place in the South ‘burbs for dinner.
It’d been a long day. Oh, who am I kidding – it’d been a long winter. My car, the ’73 Malibu, got really bad mileage in the winter; I figured it got something like eight miles per gallon; gas sucked up a quarter of my budget.
Something had to give.
There were four of us, three women and I. I’d graduated from college with two of them the previous spring. The other had been in our freshman class, and dropped out, and re-started our senior year, and dropped out again. We all lived in the Twin Cities; one was a programmer, one was a substitute teacher, and the other worked as a janitor in an office building downtown.
Dinner: homemade pizza. The crust was made from Bisquick. Picture Pizza Waffles at Denny’s, if they make such a thing (and Denny’s is about the only contender I can think of).
Then, we cut to the chase; they were going to rent a house in South Minneapolis. And they wondered if I’d be interested in moving in.
I laughed. I guess it made some sense; what house full of women wouldn’t want to have a 6’5″ guy with a couple of firearms in the hizzy? I was used to being the token guy; I had worked at a Waldenbooks in college where I was the only male employee; I noticed soon enough that I was the only person on the crew who changed light bulbs, or stocked and dusted the upper shelves. Any book that got sold from the upper shelves left a vacant spot until my next shift.
But it sounded like a possibility.
Especially when they mentioned the rent; it was a four-bedroom house that went for $700 per month. Programmer’s sister was going to be joining us, shortly; there’d be five of us.
The downside; the girls wanted the bedrooms. I was going to get the half-finished (paneled) south half of the basement.
Upside; my share of the rent would be $140 per month; $52 per month less than I was paying for my half of the dingy little apartment I’d been in since November. That was a lot of groceries; maybe even the occasional night out, in case I ever needed a night out.
We were going to check the place out tomorrow.
Til then – Bisquick Pizza!
By the way, I’ve long since lost track of janitor and substitute teacher. However, I ran into programmer’s sister and bro-in-law, as luck would have it, a couple of weeks ago.
After you live someplace long enough, I guess it’s inevitable you’re going to start running into people again…
I’d been in the Twin Cities for a little over three months, going on four, on Thursday, February 6, 1986.
When I’d moved to the Cities, I’d had a short checklist of to-dos:
I was going to work on that tonight.
Since the day I’d moved to the Cities, I’d been scanning the “Musicians Wanted” column in the City Pages’weekly want ads. I’d been to a few “auditions”:
And so on. I probably did a dozen “auditions” in the first three months.
This night? Back to the dingy, badly-lit, dilapidated blocks of decrepit warehouses that were still about five years away from being called “The Warehouse District”.
I wheeled my old Chevy up Washington Avenue, past strib clubs and empty, seedy storefronts, to Third Avenue. I parked on a dingy street in front of a boarded-up, grafitti-covered building, and walked into the warehouse (leaving my guitar and amp locked in the trunk; I’d been warned about guys getting jumped and losing their gear in these places, and I wanted to check out the digs before I hauled my precious gear into the building), as newspapers blew past me and a drunk staggered down the cross street, kicking a can past vacant doorways.
I went up a rattling freight elevator to the fourth floor, then across creaking, timber floors to a door. The band inside were…a bunch of guys. They’d been playing out for years; they’d even played the First Avenue main stage. They had a few thousand dollars worth of gear, a rehearsal space with a small tab and a view of downtown (even though it smelled of spilled Mad Dog and rodent droppings) and an untold toll on their livers…and not a whole lot else.
I forget the details of the “audition”; it went well, but I suspect the band wanted what most bands that audition for new members wanted; someone who could play really well, and wanted to play someone else’s music, and not agitate to play any of their own music, and do it for next to no money for the foreseeable future. We all looked onward. I don’t think I saw any of them again.
But I saw the room again. In the summer of ’04, I worked for a company in the same, precise space, on the fourth floor of a renovated warehouse near the Monte Carlo bar and restaurant. The Warehouse District is a destination today; the ratty, deserted warehouses are full of trendy restaurants and chi-chi bars and lofts that go for six figures, and office space like the one that occupied what had been the ratty, putrid rehearsal space; the dirty windows were now sunny expanses of thermal glass with a view of downtown that cried “Jing! Jing!”; the dingy flooring, stained dark by decades of machinery oil and hobo vomit, was now blond and clean and had that fussy trendy air about it. The decrepitude on the street outside was carefully controlled – more for atmosphere than anything.
The old rehearsal space, like at least one of the guys who’d rehearsed there, shucked its air of studied rattiness and learned how to earn a living, somewhere along the way.
It was Wednesday, January 16, 1985. But not just another day at work.
A few weeks back, I’d taken on an assignment on the Vogel show; look into the tape that “Major Bill Smith” of Fort Worth had sent usthat purported to show Elvis Presley was alive and well in 1981. The tape – a noisy cassette with lots of background noise – features a dead-ringer voice:
[singing]I will spend my whole life through
loving you, loving you.
Winter, summer, spring-time, too,
loving you, loving you…[singing stops]I’m sorry…
I…
Uh…
I can’t go on.
I just heard that President Reagan…
…has been SHOT…
We booked “Major Bill” on January 8, Elvis’ birthday, to present his thesis. Predictably, he snuck in a plug for a new protege, “Kelli”, a rough-looking but well-endowed woman singing a version of “Last Kiss” that would have been at home at any karaoke night in Wyoming.
But I had another plan afoot. It involved justifying my English degree.
One of my favorite classes in college had been Linguistics – the study of language. One of the things I’d learned about had been voice spectroanalysis – then being researched for criminal prosecution (unsuccessfully, as it turned out). I remembered that one of the foremost practitioners was at the U of Minnesota.
Armed with a $50 talent fee and some gift certificates to a local restaurant, the Major Bill cassette and another with snippets of the real (?) Elvis saying similar words from one of his live albums, I went to the “U”. I met the professor involved (a charming woman who got the gag and jumped at the chance to publicize her program – especially for the $50 and the gift certificate). It’d take her about a week.
I the meantime, I re-booked Major Bill for January 16.
The day came; I got the Major on the line. Don got in the plug for the “Lovely Kelli”, and then played the Major’s tape.
Then, he introduced the professor. She explained her methodology; then, we played the tapes, one after the other.
“So, professor”, asked Don, as producer Dave Elvin cued “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (the dramatic theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey) in the background, “when all is said and done, is this tape the real Elvis?”
“There is an 85% chance that the voice on the tape is not that of the real Elvis Presley”
And, I swear, the big final “DA DUMMMMM” of the them dropped right as the sentence finished. Dave Elvin always had the best timing of anyone in radio.
Major Bill sputtered. Don, Dave and I laughed so hard we almost wet ourselves. And for the first time, I got the feeling I might just belong in this racket.
I’d been at KSTP a little over two weeks. The job was settling into a bit of a routine. I got up at 8:30 or 9AM, got to work around 10:30, ran the board for two hours during the syndicated Owen Span show (a classic “Fairness Doctrine”-era talk show, simultaneously about everything and nothing, mushy-left but unwilling to say it), then into the “production meeting” with Don Vogel and Dave Elvin.
The meeting usually involved listening to Don bitch about his latest travails (the unreliability of his Metro Mobility driver was constant theme) and gush about his latest joys (food was a big, constant one) for about an hour, and then a frantic hour of getting stuff together for the show.
Thursday, January 3, 1985 was no exception.
“I got this tape in the mail”, said producer Dave Elvin. “It’s from a guy who claims Elvis is alive”.
The letter was from a “Colonel Bill Smith”, a Dallas man who claimed to have evidence that Elvis faked his death; the tape was from 1981, and purported to prove that Elvis was alive and well, and in hiding.
He popped the cassette into a player. There was some crowd noise, and then the sound of Elvis Presley over a strummed guitar:
I will spend my whole life through
loving you, loving you.
Winter, summer, spring-time, too,
loving you, loving you…
The guitar stopped. There were a few seconds of silence, broken only by a few mutterings from the crowd and what sounded like glasses tinkling.
Then, the voice of Elvis (?), speaking this time…:
I’m sorry…
I…
Uh…
I can’t go on.
I just heard that President Reagan…
…has been SHOT…
The tape ended.
Don erupted in his deep-in-the-belly chuckle. “We gotta book this guy!”
“I’ll do it”, I said. It sounded interesting.
I walked out to my little desk – it was a little larger than a cutting board, its right wall was a rack of satellite demodulators, and I shared it with the morning show’s producer – and called the number on the “Colonel Bill Smith” letterhead.
Answering machine. I left a message.
The rest of the day? Do the show, get home around 7PM.
My biggest challenge, of course, was figuring out how to stretch my $3.35 an hour to cover my bills; $212.50 a month rent, probably $100 for gas (I put “move to Saint Paul”, a much shorter commute, high on my list of to-dos – once I could afford it), and that left about $100 of my $420 monthly take-home for food, clothing, and everything else.
I started scouting around for ways to supplement my income.
It was Christmas Eve, 1985. I’d been working at KSTP-AM for a week.
The bad news: it was a part-time job that started at $3.35 an hour.
The good news: I’d managed to find a mid-day board-operator shift that the Executive Producer, Rob Pendelton, was working. “Why should a highly-skilled executive like yourself be working the board?” I asked; Rob agreed, which gave me two more hours a day.
My budget was looking like it was working out like this:
I was so stoked!
I worked through the day – Vogel had a fill-in, as I recall. The snow started around mid-day; it was cold, and it began snowing heavily.
At the end of the day, the guest host took off like a shot. It was 6PM, and dark, and the only people left in the studio were producer Dave Elvin, newscaster Cathy Wurzer (yes, that Cathy Wurzer) and me.
I went out to start my car. Nothing. Zip. Not even a click.
I went back into the studio and started calling garages from the Yellow Pages (handicapped by my ignorance of the geography of the area; I had no idea what ‘burbs to look in, or for that matter that I was probably a mile from Saint Paul, or for that matter any idea of what part of Saint Paul was where). Nobody was available – or the ones that were cost a lost more than I could afford on Christmas Eve.
Dave offered to drive me home, and Rob Pendelton could give me a ride to work the next day, Christmas.
I took him up on it. Dave dropped me off at my apartment in a slushy, white-coated South Minneapolis, and I went inside.
My roommate was visiting family in Wisconsin for Christmas, so I had the place to myself. For that matter, I had South Minneapolis to myself; there was no traffic on Minnehaha Avenue to speak of.
I pulled out and baked a Tombstone pizza – at $3, a bit of a splurge – and a couple of beers (Stroh’s, as I recall), opened a couple of presents I’d gotten from my parents, and turned on the TV. I had two beers left, and ran through one of ’em as I called my family (my brother and sister were still living with my parents, whose divorce was still five years in the future).
By 9-ish, that was pretty much it. I kicked back on the couch, ate the pizza, drank the last beer, watched the Pope’s mass on TV, read the book Dad gave me…
By 11ish I was bored. The TV ran an ad for “Gab Line”, a phone chat line back in the era before Chat Lines got their seedy reputation (or at least when I was just off the turnip truck and didnt’ know about their seedy reputation). “Only 10 cents a minute”. I dialled in.
There were two people on the line; a very drunk-sounding black woman who’d just moved up from Chicago, and a guy who sounded like he’d lost all his teeth and could neither pronounce nor enunciate. I don’t remember what the conversation was about – and with a drunk and a guy who in retrospect was probably a meth addict, does it matter? – but it killed half an hour and $3, yet another big splurge on this red-letter Chrismas Eve.
I hung up and sat down on the couch, playing guitar for a bit, thinking about things.
Downside: I was nearly-broke, I was alone as I could be on Christmas Eve, and my car was an inert lump of rotting metal in a parking lot in Maplewood.
Upside: Things were moving, finally. I had a job – I knew that I could get a job, that I wasn’t completely unemployable and worthless – and I knew that I could get by for a while. I enjoyed the job, as crappy as the pay was. And after the holiday, I could approach the whole music thing with a clear mind and, now that I was employed (more or less), some mental energy.
All in all, not bad.
It was Wednesday, December 18, 1985.
I’d spent the long weekend in Jamestown, hanging out with friends and my family, catching up with the few friends I still had in Jamestown, just relaxing – satisfied at least to know that finally had a job to come back to – of which more later).
I went to a dance at the college on Friday night, caught up with a few people (including this person, who took over the college paper from me, if memory serves). It was a kick to tell people I had a job, even if I hadn’t started yet.
Sunday, I headed back to the Cities. I drove to Fargo, had dinner with a friend of mine who was still at North Dakota State, and set back out on ’94 to the East. Over dinnertime, a snowstorm caught up with me; visibility dropped to 1/4 mile. Which wasn’t bad, until a semi would pass on the left; the slipstream whipped up enough snow to make it feel like driving inside a ping pong ball. Time after time – two or three dozen times on the trip – I gripped the steering wheel and kept the car pointed as straight as I could, hoping the road would still be under me when I gout out the other side. Luckily, it always was – but compared to Thursday’s three hour jaunt, it took the better part of five and a half hours go to from Fargo to Minneapolis.
I spent Monday and Tuesday the 16th and 17th knocking around town, enjoying that most glorious of feelings; having a job, but not needing to be there yet.
Finally, it was the 18th; I showed up at the station at 12:30 in the afternoon. I met Dave Elvin, Don Vogel’s producer. He took half an hour to explain the arcane art of talk show phone screening while we waited for the cab to bring Don to the station.
“By the way”, said Dave, “I should explain; Don is blind”. This brought some twists to the job; beyond answering the phone and screening out boring, repetitive and dull callers, I was supposed to pass the next caller to Don through the “talkback” into his headphones, preferably right around the time he needed them.
Don showed up around 1 to begin the daily ritual. Tapping his cane in front of him, jovially bitching about the cold, he made his way back through the “hall” between the backup transmitter and the studio equipment stack, back to the talk studio. I’d grown up working at stations with spartan appointments; KSTP-AM, in its old studio on Highway 61, felt like working in a submarine; cramped, equipment everywhere, some rooms actually with waffleplate floors and steel stairs.
Dave led me into the studio – a cramped little room, maybe 12 by 5, with a glass window along the long side that looked into the control room. There were three seats with microphones along a desk in front of the window. Don sat at the host’s seat, with an ancient push-button telephone controller and a large, gray steel braille machine.
Don sat down heavily. “Sorry I’m late, gentlemen. I was at the bank. The woman behind the window was…” Don switched into a John Houseman accent “…an idiot. A moron“.
I spoke up. “I’ve been having trouble with my bank, too.”
Dave turned to me. “What bank’s that?”
“The S**t P**s F**k Bank”.
Don broke up laughing, with the gusto that so many native Chicagoans bring to laughing about scatology. “I think you’re going to fit in just fine!”
The rest of the meeting was taken up with Dave and I tossing out topic ideas, and Don knocking most of them down. Finally we settled on some things – a few newspaper articles and magazine pieces Dave had come across. The last half hour involved dictating the ledes of the articles, and things like the weather forecast, to Don, who typed them out in braille and arranged them on the desk in front of him.
Then, Dave took me into the control room. I sat down at a little chair wedged between Dave’s control panel and the glass wall of the studio, with a five-line telephone and a microphone. “Just answer the phone, screen them, write down the ones we want to take, and pass them through to Don”, Dave instructed as ABC News played on the monitor overhead and a large man who looked for all the world like Tip O’Neill ambled heavily into the studio. “Mitch, this is John MacDougall”, Dave announced. “News Guy”.
Mac flipped his glasses down his gin-blossomed nose. “You’re Don’s new screener?” he asked in a crotchety-sounding baritone, glaring over his glasses frames.
“And here we go”. Dave at the control board fired off the theme song.
I don’t remember much about that first show – it was the same as most of the subsequenct 13 months’ worth of shows that Don, Dave, John MacDougall, sports guys Bruce Gordon and Mark Boyle and I did; juvenile banter, heckling, mocking and ridicule of the news and the people in it.
I do remember that about a minute into the show – before Mac had finished the newscast – line 1 on the phone lit up. I picked up; “Don Vogel Show”.
“We are not of this world” said a raspy, geriatric-sounding voice. “We are of the infinite world”.
I hesitated. “Excuse me?”
“Stanley Hubbard is the devil! He will be sent to hell with all the other evil sinners!”
My first call was an insane crank.
I knew I was going to love this job.
It was Friday, December 14, 1985.
After my interview at KSTP earlier in the week, I’d decided I could stand a long weekend. It’d been almost two months of constant interviewing, scrimping, trying to figure out ways to parlay my fairly limited job experience (a couple of years at three radio stations, along with stints as a stagehand, remedial English tutor, bellhop/banquet setup, roofing and siding, landscaping, and…er, my paper route, basically) and, when all else failed, waiting. The kind of waiting you do when you’re hoping for something, but not really expecting it.
A look in the papers showed there was plenty of work for security guards and waiters; I gave myself three more weeks, until after New Years.
And I figured I’d take a long weekend. I might not get another for a while.
Yesterday – December 13, a Thursday – I drove back to North Dakota. Now, a couple of friends and I – friends of mine from college who’d hailed from the Cities but went to college in North Dakota – had a bit of a competition; who could make it from the cities to Jamestown in the fewest road hours? We had a consistent speed course marked out; one end was the 694/River bridge, and the other was the easternmost of Jamestown’s three exits on I94. Jeff Sisk had the current record, 4 hours and 30 minutes for the 335 mile course.
I left a message for Rob Pendelton at KSTP (he’d told me to call Thursday), and then set out in my old Malibu – with 175,000 miles on it, and an outer door panel flapping in the wind from salt damage – around 1 or 2PM, after allowing myself the rare luxury of sleeping in until ninish (I may have been an unemployed bum, but I was a bum with a ton of self-discipline; I was up and on the phone by 8AM every single weekday during those two months)…
…and I punched it. I kept it around 75 in Minnesota, keeping a keen eye out for cops (of whom I saw none), making it from The Bridge to the Red River in a shade over three hours. Then, once I got through Fargo’s traffic and go-slow zone, it was out onto the open prairie.
Back then, North Dakotans had a custom; if it was daylight and they passed a cop or a trooper in daylight, they’d flip on their lights and keep them on for a few miles, to warn oncoming traffic. If it was broad daylight and you saw lights? Dial it back (I don’t know if this still happens, because I pretty much drive close to the speed limit these days, and the limit has gone up from 55 to 70 on the open freeway, which is just fine by me). Once I got past the West Fargo exits headed west, the lights were out. I punched it up to 85. 23 year olds are immortal, of course; thinking back, the thought of pushing that rotting old jalopy with its rattly bearings and flapping door panels and iffy tires past 40 makes me blanche. But I kept it over 80 all the way to Jamestown, except for a stretch near Casselton, when the oncoming lights came on; I passed the trooper doing a perfect 55, two miles later.
It was a cold day out – probably a bit below zero. The air had the beginnings of that crystalline quality it gets when it’s very cold – once you got to the Red River Valley with its pool-table topography, you could see forever. The clouds were high and piled on top of each other, just like the day I’d moved to the Cities, almost two months earlier. And as I nosed out onto the prairie, the sun was just starting to dip below the horizon. I was treated to one of nature’s most glorious spectacles – a sunset on a cold day. Yellow, then pinkish-orange, then a glorious red as the light dipped below the long, gently undulating horizon to the west.
Finally – sixish, I think, around dinner time – I made it back to Jamestown. I spent the evening at some friends’ dorm room up at the college – Rich Larson and Scott Massine, I think – and hung out with a few of the people I’d known who still remembered me from the year before.
“So you’re still down in the Cities!”, Scott said. “Wow. My mom said you’d have given up and moved back by now!”
Looking back, that was one of the things that always pissed me off about the place. “You might move elsewhere, but you’ll be back. It’s a big, ugly world out there, it’ll eat you alive. Just like [fill in name of high school basketball star who’d gone to Fargo or Denver or Minneapolis or Boston or Des Moines, and moved back after a year or five]; he just decided the big city was too crazy for him. ” The unstated coda: “And so will you!”
I fulminated on that one for a while. Slights like that made a lot more difference to me back then.
The next morning, at my Mom and Dad’s place, I had breakfast, relaxed a bit – and, almost as an afterthought, made a call to the Cities, to KSTP-AM, to follow up from yesterday’s call.
“Yes, Mitch – we were wondering if you’d like to start next Tuesday?”
I figured I would, yes, thanks.
So maybe I wouldn’t come crawling back to Jamestown just yet. “In your face“, I thought as a silent message to Scott’s mom.
Wednesday, December 12, 1985. I’d turned 23 the day before. Winter had struck, a warmish October yielding to a wet, chilly, snowy November that included a bit of a blizzard the previous weekend. I’d driven to a band audition in White Bear Lake, from an ad in the City Pages. The ad said they – a bass player and a drummer – wanted to start a good rock and roll band with some room for originals. The ad didn’t say they were a couple of high school kids playing in their mom’s basement. As the blizzard formed, I drove out to White Bear – it might as well have been Wisconsin – slogged through “Immigrant Song” and “Sweet Emotion” and a little very uninspired jamming, and then picked my way home through near-zero visibility (my car nearly bottomed out – in the middle of 35W!), cold, tired, crabby, and out a couple of bucks on gas that needn’t have been burned in the first place.
I’d been in the Twin Cities almost two months, and with the exception of Wednesday (today!) and my interview at KSTP-AM, I really didn’t have a thing going on. My resolution was to find a job – any job, no matter how crappy, just to pay the bills, if I didn’t have something else by New Years.
I also resolved that I was going to go back to Jamestown for a long weekend, starting tomorrow, December 13.
But first things first; the interview.
I drove out to KSTP; successfully, this time. I was ushered into the kitchen area – same as my previous interview. I met Rob Pendelton, the “Executive Producer”, at the time a 31 year old guy who looked like he’d be more comfortable in sandals and shorts, with a laid-back attitude to match; we went through the basics of the job (I’d be a call screener; minimum wage; three hours a day plus the two-hour production meeting; no guarantees of going anywhere). I nodded enthusiastically, smiled, and kept my eye contact without flinching; I’d learned! By this point, I didn’t care; anything was better than nothing.
Then, I met with David Elvin, the producer for a guy named Don Vogel.
We chatted for a bit. The cast of the Vogel Show had just had a minor local “hit” in the novelty song market, “Like A Roving Coach”; I’d caught it on the show the previous week as I was doing my “research”, listening to the program; it was Don’s take on Lou Holtz scramming for Notre Dame (done in Don’s impeccable Bob Dylan impression). “Yep, I heard it”, I allowed. “I do a lot of music; I play guitar”.
That brightened Dave up a bit. “Cool! I kind of suck on guitar…”
The interview went uphill fast from there – and for the first time since I’d moved to the city, after umpteen interviews, I was finally starting to smell paydirt.
Where “paydirt” is $3.35 an hour.
But no matter. I drove home feeling an exhilaration that had long deserted me, at least on the job-hunting front. Maybe this can work after all.
I got home and started thinking about the trip back to North Dakota. Or as I put it in my mind as I thought about it, “home”. I was acutely aware that NoDak was still the home base.
It was fading, but still there.
It was getting cold out.
December 4, 1985. A Wednesday.
I was closing in on two months in the Twin Cities. No job yet – no real nibbles, really.
A job as a technical writer at a local defense-related contractor flared briefly in November – and flamed out as the company imposed a hiring freeze that lasted the better part of a decade. I ended up working in tech writing – starting in 1993. But that would wait.
And wait.
And wait.
I’d been to a bunch of band auditions. I figured the best way to get into the music scene was to get into a band that was sort of, kind of, like what I wanted to do.
My first audition was sometime in mid-November, after I’d moved into my apartment in South Minneapolis. It was in a warehouse on and Washington Avenue North. I parked my car in a trash-strewn dirt lot abutting a railroad track, and hauled my gear – my guitar and amp – up a cement stairway onto a ratty loading dock that smelled of grease and urine. A bum was passed out in a neighboring doorway. I took a ricket freight elevator up to a drafty room that smelled like rodent droppings with a couple of hanging 110 volt outlets and fist holes in the wallboard, in a warren of similar little spaces housing small bands and wheezing artists. The audition? A couple of synth-pop dweebs from Woodbury-via-The Wedge. Dreadful music, worse “audition”. Hated it. I only bring it up, really, as a way of noting that I walked by that same building about a year ago. It’s been renovated into lofts that start around $375,000; the building next door where the drunk was passed out is a chi-chi office block. I barely recognized the place.
The other event was “Today”, Wednesday. After a bunch of tries, I got a hold of Rob Pendelton at KSTP-AM. “Sorry, I’ve been so busy – but we have a job working as a screener for the…” I didn’t catch the host’s name. “We’d like you to come in for an interview next Wednesday”.
I accepted, naturally. The bank account was in free fall. My goal; if I didn’t have a job I actually wanted by New Years, I was going to take the first security job that I could get.
There was genuinely not much to report in the three weeks since the last “Twenty Years Ago…” piece.
Life had basically fallen into a very predictable routine:
After my encounter with Tom Myhre at the demonstration a month earlier and the unsuccessful interview with Jean the Producerthree weeks earlier, my contact – executive producer Bruce Huff – told me to call back periodically. I did – weekly, on Wednesdays. I never actually reached him again. It was on November 27 that I finally got through to someone.
“Bruce Huff is no longer at the station”.
My heart didn’t especially slump; this was typical of radio, people disappearing from stations on no notice. I’d pretty much given up radio as a career – in fact, part of me didn’t want to work in the racket again.
“But I’ll put you through to Rob Pendelton”.
I waited a few minutes on hold, and Pendelton came on the line, in a voice that didn’t sound especially made for radio in the classical sense. He was the new “Executive Producer” – Huff had left…
…and there was a chance that another position was going to open up.
“Call back next week”, he told me. I made a note.
Next Wednesday.
It was Monday, November 4, 1985.
I haven’t posted much about the week and a half since my (I later learned) fateful encounter with Tom Myhre. There’s really just not much material. The days after the demonstration were a blur; a long, beige blur. Most of the time, I sat at my host’s kitchen table, poring over want ads, making phone calls, bundling resumes into envelopes. Noon, if I was lucky, meant a trip to the post office to mail a couple of rap sheets out. But nothing much came back.
After my initial flurry, there weren’t many job interviews, although not for lack of trying. I remember the occasional foray out onto the freeways, whose pace and idiosyncrasies I was slowly starting to figure out.
The thing I most remember from the next ten days was music; while the actual goings-on of that week and a half are lost to mundane, beige history, I can remember the songs I heard on the radio, each associated with some thing or activity or place or feeling: “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits, which I heard for the first time ever on WLOL-FM with Hines and Berglund as I turned out onto 494 for my first rush hour; “Shout” by Tears for Fears, driving down Cedar Avenue, dejected after another loser job interview; “Kyrie” by Mr. Mister, in the background after my host left for work and I started getting down to business; “I Just Died In Your Arms” by, er, Cutting Crew, in the same chair six hours later after probably a dozen phone calls and a few abortive conversations with disinterested hiring managers who’d no doubt heard from plenty of unqualified college grads already that day; “If You Love Somebody” by the newly Police-free Sting, as I sat and stared at MTV and wondered how Sting had gone from the great Police frontman to being perhaps the blandest presence in pop music; last, and worst, “We Built This City”, which was everywhere – on MTV, on all the top-forty stations, at gas stations, everywhere. Hearing it, I wondered if the Cold War were perhaps lost after all; the notion that in 1985 a video director would think twenty seconds of footage of Craig Chaquico playing a guitar solo compelling struck me as oddly East German. I shivered and moved on.
There had really only been two big events: On Wednesday, November 30, I got a call back from Bruce Huff, the executive producer at KSTP, asking me in for an interview on Monday. And on Friday, November 1, I moved from the couch in Burnsville to an apartment on 37th and Minnehaha in South Minneapolis. The move, natch, was no big shakes; all my stuff fit in the back seat, with probably enough room left over for a passenger or two, if I’d needed. The guitars, of course, rode in front with me. It took me two trips to get my stuff stowed in my room, followed by a trip to a ratty mattress surplus joint on Lake Street, where thirty (of my rapidly-dwindling store of) dollars got me a single mattress, no box. I took it home, flopped it on the floor, and took a nap.
That night, of course, came the first big culture shock. There was a little hole-in-the-wall bar across the street, “Jimmy’s Steaks and Spirits”. I walked across Minnehaha for my first big one-beer night out – and figured there was no better way to break in my new place than to store my first six-pack in my first fridge. I flagged down the bartender. “Could I get a six to go?”
He laughed and kept moving.
Huh? “Do you do off-sale?”
He looked at me like I’d asked for an oil change. Asking for a six-pack to go – the great North Dakota after-bar-trip tradition – was illegal?
Friggin’ nannystate, I thought as I paid my $1.75 tab and left.
The interview was scheduled for Monday at 3PM. I got a nice, early start – which was a good thing, since true to my rapidly-developing tradition of incompetence at navigating in the ‘burbs, I got lost, taking Highway 36 to Snelling (AKA “MN 51”) instead of Highway 61. 51, 61, what’s the difference, right?
But I regrouped, got to the interview on time, and was escorted back to talk with a woman, Jean, who was the producer for a guy named Geoff Charles. Geoff wasn’t there, so Jean – a thirtyfivish redhead with a manner that could charitably called “flinty”, took over. The job she described – call screener for Charles – was a new one. While I’d prided myself on having done just about everything one could do in a radio station, talk radio was a whole new animal for me.
The interview went well, but not spectacularly. I walked out of the station telling myself you said you were done with radio. This interview probably makes it official. I didn’t expect I’d gotten the job.
A phone call from Jean a couple of days later confirmed this. I pretty much gave up on the idea of radio – especially talk radio, which just didn’t look like my thing. No big.
I hunkered down for a long-term search.
It was October 25, 1985. A Friday, the end of my first full “work” week in the Twin Cities.
Well, I was learning that looking for a job was hard work, anyway.
A bit of background; my first radio job was at KEYJ in Jamestown, ND, in 1979, starting the summer before my junior year of high school. My first boss, Bob Richardson, had a great philosophy; the community kept him in business, so he was going to give back by (among other things) teaching the young ‘uns how to do radio. He made a pretty strict point of keeping a couple of high school or college kids on the part-time staff. And it was a great part-time job. Bob was gruff enough to make Lou Grant run yipping up a tree, but a kid coming out of his station knew a lot about how radio was done. High school kids could find themselves covering the news (I did), calling play by play, learning sales or engineering or pretty much anything you could do in a station. Many people went on from KEYJ to big careers.
In 1980, a couple of slick late-twentysomething weasels who’d been knocking around the business for a few years bought the station, changed the call letters to KQDJ – and, a few weeks, later, fired most of us locals and brought in a bunch of their own people. It was a valuable lesson at 17 – never get attached to a job. It was a lesson I learned 10 years before most of the workforce; it was a crappy feeling at the time, but it’s served me well.
I went on to work at a couple more stations during college – KDAK in Carrington, ND and then back to KQDJ, which was under new management. But while it was still a decent part time job, the horizons were decidedly narrower. Part time announcers…announced. Part time. No play by play, no news – and barely any disc jockeying; much of the nighttime lineup was via satellite. I began to learn the misery of so many radio gigs in the eighties and nineties – the “Live assist” job, better known as “watching the needle bob” in those days when a radio station still needed to have a live human in the building when it was on the air.
So I was pretty well sick of radio by the time I got out of college. I figured (except for one brief, miserable job interview for a news gig in Fargo) that my radio days were over.
==========
Another long day on the road; I made plans to meet my host for a demonstration later in the day. More on that later.
I started out the day with another job interview, again over in Edina, but this one – a switch! – a solo interview with one person!
The gig was with a personnel service; I’d be working as a recruiter. The interviewer was a late-twenty-something guy who looked like he’d already been eaten and crapped out; pale, ulcerous, he looked like a poster child for excessive job stress. Immaculately dressed and wearing tinted glasses, he also seemed to be doing fairly well in the headhunting business.
We talked for half an hour. I was slowly learning – I thought – the big lesson of job hunting; tell them what they want to hear.
At the end of the interview, he looked at my resume, grimaced like he had something wrong with his stomach, and groaned as much as said “Are you sure you want to do this?”
Huh? “I beg your pardon?”
“Well, it’s just that you’re from a small town. Maybe you should find a job that’s more suited to that sort of background”
I sat, more or less shocked into silence. “OK…any suggestions?” I asked, not really listening to the reply. I politely waited for him to finish, and took my uncomfortable leave.
Driving away, I punched the steering wheel the way I wished I’d punched the interviewer. I resolved that my jitters and inferiority complex about being just off the turnip truck had to turn into something else. I sprouted a huge chip on my shoulder that day; no more passive-aggressive Scandinavian nice guy. It served me well in coming months.
I killed a few hours in a library, and went to my next appointment, to check out another “Roommates Wanted” lead. I’d been to a few of these the previous week; this was the last remaining ad.
========
The stop was a huge improvement; the guy, a late-twentysomething who I remember only as “Dave”, was a nice enough guy, who’d had a roommate bail on him; he needed someone to help share the rent in a two-bedroom basement apartment in South Minnepolis, and pronto. $212.50 a month, all utilities except phone paid, $175 deposit, preference to people who wanted to get moved in in time to pay October rent. I peeled off $175 and made a reservation on October 1.
Apartment? Check. Now there was the little matter of a job.
========
My host – a college friend – had parents who ran a mission in the inner city of Minneapolis. Among their goals was to get the pr0n industry out of the inner city.
Mildly libertarian as I was, I had a qualm or two about the goal of forcing legal businesses out of town, and the infringement on property rights – but I figured after a week and a half of squatting on the couch for free, I owed everyone some shoe leather.
Everyone was picketing the Rialto Theatre, an old theatre at the corner of Lake and Chicago that had long since gone to seed; it was an XXX theatre, along with peep shows and a bookstore.
Outside, my host’s parents were joined by two dozen other people; I was one of about four males there, the only one under age 50, one of two taller than 5’10. One could say I stood out in the crowd.
I picked up a sign, and started pacing in the oval with the rest of the protesters, mostly older women. The traffic raced past on Lake; some people honked; others gave one figure salutes and taunts. Someone leaned out of one of the upstairs windows and dropped a water balloon – or at least I remember hoping it was water – which landed on the sidewalk between a couple of protesters, splattering several. However, having a 6’5 guy in a bandanna and a battle jacket was making the response a tad more polite than it usually was on a Friday night, some of the marchers told me.
Another sign that I was conspicuous? A reporter (who I later learned was Alan Costantini, long-time reporter at KARE11, which at the time was still WUSA11) crossed the street with a cameraman and a microphone. “Mind if we ask you a few questions?” So I did my first standup interview, there on Lake Street, looking a little goofy and disheveled in my Union Jack bandanna.
After Costantini left, I realized – “Crap! Networking opportunity lost!
As I mentally kicked myself, I heard a sonorous voice. “Excuse me, sir. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions”.
It was a shorter guy, with longer, non-TV hair. He carried a professional-grade cassette recorder – the kind only radio reporters and anthropologists carried.
“Sure”, I replied. “But I have a question for you, first. I’m just down from North Dakota, and I need a job, and I’ve worked in radio, and I was wondering if you could take me to your leader?”
The guy’s eyes widened. “North Dakota? Where?”
“Jamestown”.
“Ah. I’m from Casselton”, a little town 15 miles west of Fargo.
He introduced himself as Tom Myhre, and we did an interview. I must have done a good job; at the end, he snapped off the cassette and handed me a business card. “I’ll tell my executive producer, Bruce Huff, about you. Call him on Monday, OK?” I wrote the name on the card as Tom went back to his car.
I finished out the protest, and we adjourned to someone’s house for pizza and pop and the 10PM news, where I got to watch my weird-looking mug try to equivocate about property rights and the neighborhood’s right to deal with nuisances.
And I nearly wore the card out, checking and re-checking it, memorizing the phone numbers and names and addresses.
And before I went to bed that night, I took out my old portable typewriter and re-wrote a resume that read less like a 1930’s perfume ad and more like a radio guy. I was ready for Monday.
Monday, October 21 1985. Beginning my second week in the Twin Cities.
It was starting to dawn on me that the city wasn’t necessarily going to carry me in on its shoulders.
9AM job interview in Edina. It was another “group interview”, this time for a gig selling Encyclopedia Brittanica, door to door through the suburbs. I went because I figured I should – any kind of job interview was better than nothing, and it’s all good practice. Right?
I sat for two hours, listening to the ins and outs of the job, and finally figured “Even I’m not this desperate”. I left without accepting a position.
I had a few hours to kill before my next appointment, to check out a “roommate wanted” ad over by Powderhorn Park, in south Minneapolis. I found my way in to Uptown Minneapolis, and killed an hour at the old Odegaard’s books, at the new Calhoun Square. In a state full of Waldenbooks and B. Daltons, I’d never imagined such a thing – a big, huge store where you could browse, read, sit! I dragged myself away and chugged slowly down the decaying morass of West Lake Street, getting to the appointment just in time.
The ad said they were looking for a Christian guy, to pay 1/4 of the rent for a room in an upstairs duplex just off Powderhorn Park, a pretty little urban park surrounding a curious little lake, right in the middle of a neighborhood that was well on its way toward becoming one of Minneapolis’ biggest, nastiest crack dens. I didn’t know this at the time.
I rang the doorbell, and the guy – six-footish, late twenties, wearing a full beard and mustache, answered. He showed me around the place – kitchen privileges, one bathroom, smallish but cozy bedroom, not much storage (not that it mattered to me), $175 a month, heat included. “Nice”, I said. “I’m interested!”.
“Well, we gotta talk first. Let’s go take a drive”.
Unusual.
We walked out to his Chevette, climbed in, and took a turn around the neighborhood. “So – where are you at with your faith”.
“Um…” – Huh?
Now, bear with me a bit, here. I’m pretty articulate about a lot of things. Religious faith is not one of them. I certainly have a lot of it, but expressing it is one of those things I pay ministers to do in church.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Wrong question.
“Look, me and my roommates are charismatic Catholics. We need to make sure you’re in kind of the same place on your religious journey as we are. So – have you ever had a charismatic experience?”
“Well, I haven’t – but then, I’ve never seen anything that says one needs to, to be a Christian”.
“But you do!”, he said, emphatically.
“But what about…”, I started, quoting a verse from Corinthians that says, in about as many words, that each of us is called to faith with different gifts; speaking in tongues is one of many; mine was…
“Look, I’m just covering my ass here”, he said, turning back up the street to the duplex.
Wasn’t aware there was a biblical injunction to cover your ass, I thought, and have wished for twenty years that I’d said.
I am pretty sure I shook my head visibly as I took my leave and walked to the car. I’d imagine he did the same.
Then it was back to Burnsville for more job hunting. It was looking like it was going to be along, dry autumn.
Unspoken – to most people – among my motivations for moving to the Twin Cities was a craving to get into the Twin Cities music scene. Whatever it was.
Sunday, October 20, I drove downtown to try to find it.
In ’84 and ’85, Minneapolis’ musical output was peaking. For white-boy punks like me, the likes of the Replacements and Hüsker Dü were breaking out of the regional ghetto, even getting on the national charts.
And then, there was Purple Rain. To a guy who was used to playing in high school gyms and divey bars, the “First Avenue” in Purple Rain – Prince’s one good movie, and it was a great one – was irresistable; a kaleidoscope of colors, styles, attitudes; people break dancing in the balconies!; a stage with actual lights and a sound system that sounded like it worked; Apollonia running out of a cab and straight into your gig!. Even the seamy, seedy underbelly of Minneapolis music looked good. Jeebus, I was so looking forward to being in a music scene with a seamy underbelly! At gigs in North Dakota, the seamy underbelly was someone selling angel dust in the parking lot.
I went downtown that night; I had to make it an early one, because I had a 9AM job interview the next morning. but I had to get to the First Avenue and see what the fuss was all about!
Eyes darting between the road and the map, I found my way downtown. I took the first parking spot I could find – it was on Eighth Street over by the Normandie Inn, probably a mile from the First Avenue, but I didn’t want to take any chances. I parked, plugged the meter (it was at the end of the evening that I read the meter and noticed that they were not enforced on Sundays, to a dollar’s worth of chagrin), and started walking.
First stop – Northern Lights records, on Hennepin and Seventh. I walked inside and took my first deep drag of the gloriously skanky, funky miasma of a big-city underground record store. Heaven!
I browsed the aisles, seeing vinyl wonders that never made it west of Saint Cloud; Throbbing Gristle! Black Flag! Pigbag! Pure farging heaven!
There was a bulletin board in the back, crammed with posters for bands looking for people, people looking for bands, bands looking for gigs; I tore off a couple of phone numbers, carefully put them in my wallet, and killed a couple of hours in dank, skeezy style.
Finally, it was closing time. I bought a copy of the new Replacements album (Tim, still one of my favorites, partly because of its association with this whole time, mostly because it’s just a freaking great record), walked out and turned down Seventh.
And then I saw the sign – the same big, black edifice from the movie, the “First Avenue and Seventh Street Entry”.
It was a Sunday night; I don’t think any bands were playing in the Entry; the Main Room had a DJ playing music and vids (I remember some Sonic Youth song, although not the name – not that it makes a lot of difference – and the vid for the Replacements’ “Bastards of Young”). Nobody was on the floor. The balcony had a couple of tables full of people, drinking and smoking and talking. Not a break dancer to be seen.
I walked through the door, around the edge of the huge dance floor, past a couple of pinball machines, and the little pizza bar that used to be just off stage left, on the ratty, dark carpet, past innumerable sparsely-populated stools. I looked around the joint – at the dingy rafters, the large but oppressively flat-black stage, the tile floor and the ratty risers. And I thought…
…”It’s just a bar“.
Just a big, dark, dirty, smoky bar!
I laughed. What did I expect, Graceland? I certainly should have known better than to expect Apollonia, break dancers; I was less crestfallen than mentally kicking myself for falling for a movie image.
I kicked myself a few more times, ordered a beer, and plotted my band’s first gig on the mainroom stage. And how I was going to put that band together.
After I got a job, of course.
On October 19, 1985, I was wrapping up my first partial week in the Twin Cities, after moving here on Tuesday the 15th.
It had been a long, long week.
It was Friday night. I think I made spaghetti for my host, just about the only thing I knew how to cook (besides bitchin’grilled cheese). The week was over; no more job hunting until the Sunday Strib came out.
It was time for a weekend in the Cities!
I woke up on the morning of October 15, 1985 knowing that I wasn’t going to get any last-minute stalls like unplanned federal holidays. Nope, it was the REAL D-Day.
I went to the bank – open, today – and pulled out my cash. I loaded all my stuff back into my car, shook Dad’s hand, hugged Mom goodbye, and drove off up Second Avenue, the street I’d lived on for 14 years. It was about 11AM. I saw Mom crying in the rear-view mirror. I kind of understood – and as I am four-eight years away from my own oldest leaving, I know I do, today.
Anyway, I turned onto main street. The freeway was off to the left.
I took a right. I wasn’t done yet.
I topped up my gas tank, stocked up on munchies for the road, and took one last drive around town. I drove up main street; the old post office was in the process of being converted into some sort of senior citizen’s home; the JC Penney’s that had replaced my grandmother‘s old photography studio was shuttered (it had moved to a mall on the “South Hill”); most of the other old stores were either closed or reeling from years of lousy farm prices.
Up the hill, through the college one last time, then out on Airport Road to the long-cut to the freeway, the ten-mile back-road detour that led through durum fields and along the Northern Pacific tracks to the Ladish Malting Barley plant, a huge concrete monolith that looks like a three-times-larger, Soviet grain elevator. I used to bike out there all the time; it was a strip of Old Highway Ten, a road that used to link Billings with Chicago, but these days was mainly a utility road. It was a gorgeous fall day, chilly and windy, but with a deep blue sky and cumulus clouds that piled up in serried waves, 180 degrees across the sky from horizon to horizon.
I slipped a cassette of John (nee“Cougar”) Mellencamp’s “Scarecrow” in the tape player as I gunned down the access road to the Spiritwood exit, a little truck exist off I-94 that really connects the freeway to, almost literally, nowhere. “Minutes to Memories” came on:
On a greyhound thirty miles beyond jamestown
He saw the sun set on the tennessee line
He looked at the young man who was riding beside him
He said I’m old kind of worn out inside
I worked my whole life in the steel mills of gary
And my father before me I helped build this land
Now I’m seventy-seven and with God as my witness
I earned every dollar that passed through my hands
My family and friends are the best thing I’ve known
Through the eye of the needle I’ll carry them homeChorus:
Days turn to minutes
And minutes to memories
Life sweeps away the dreams
That we have planned
You are young and you are the future
So suck it up and tough it out
And be the best you can
In that adolescent way that music acts, that song (like the whole album, the best rock and roll album ever about small-town America) had been a hammer to my forehead all the previous summer.
The rain hit the old dog in the twilight’s last gleaming
He said son it sounds like rattling old bones
This highway is long but I know some that are longer
By sunup tomorrow I guess I’ll be home
Through the hills of kentucky ’cross the ohio river
The old man kept talking ’bout his life and his times
He fell asleep with his head against the window
He said an honest man’s pillow is his peace of mind
This world offers riches and riches will grow wings
I don’t take stock in those uncertain things
What were those “uncertain things?”
I mean, I knew all sorts of people who were happy living on the Plains – Blue-state fantasies aside, many of them were sharp, sometimes brilliant people. Many of my college professors had been leaders in their respective fields, hardly intellectual slouches – what did they know that I didn’t?
How could my father, no dummy himself, be so happy there?
The old man had a vision but it was hard for me to follow
I do things my way and I pay a high price
When I think back on the old man and the bus ride
Now that I’m older I can see he was rightAnother hot one out on highway eleven
This is my life it’s what I’ve chosen to do
There are no free rides no one said it’d be easy
The old man told me this my son I’m telling it to youChorus:
Days turn to minutes
And minutes to memories
Life sweeps away the dreams
That we have planned
You are young and you are the future
So suck it up and tough it out
And be the best you can
I’d have to figure it out later. I had a life to try to start.
—–
I stopped for gas and said hi to some friends in Fargo, and then kept going – and I was about to learn a key truth of life in the upper midwest. Over the years, I’ve driven that same route a couple of dozen times; while the Dakotas are beautiful driving, once you get between Fergus Falls and Saint Cloud, probably a 150 mile stretch, one gives up all hope of getting oxygen to one’s brain. No radio, no scenery (“Ooh. More trees”). No nothing. I got a vague sense of ennui on my first trip. It’s become an iron law of physics since then.
—–
It was strange; in 1985, there was a point where you could say “The Twin Cities metro starts here”. There was a sign on I94 on the west edge of Maple Grove, MN, by a grove of trees in the middle of some farm fields. A mile from the sign was an abandoned barn. It had been there three years earlier, when the college choir bus had passed through town; it was still there. And over the next rise, you could see rows of beige suburban ramblers marching off toward the east along the freeway. The barn is long gone – since before 1990, I suppose – but for the first several years I lived in the metro, that barn was the sign that I was home again.
The road got wider; the traffic got busier. I was coming in just after the afternoon rush hour. The sun was just starting to amble down behind me as I made the broad ,swooping turn onto I494, the south bypass, which curls down past the southwest corner of the Cities, then swerves left through the Bloomington Strip, which even in those days before the Mall of America was a major commercial center. I’m sure my eyes goggled as I drove down the mainstreet of the south metro, past rows of tall, gray buildings and tall soundwalls that never seemed to end, to my just-off-the-turnip wagon consciousness at the time.
Then, the cloverleaf south onto 35E, the broad avenue across the Minnesota River into the leafy beige ocean of Burnsville…
…where I began a streak that lasted ten years. For that whole time, I never once found a place in the suburbs on the first try. The streak kicked off in style; I zigged when I should have zagged on some suburban side street, and ended up somewhere in Eagan (ironically, right by what are now the Patriot studios, although that meant nothing to me at the time). It took me 40 minutes and a phone call to unscramble things, and arrive at my college friend’s house…
…where I met the couch that’d be my home for the next two weeks.
It was D-Day, October 14, 1985. My late-night, inebriated promise of only 17 days before had come to this; it was time to load up the car and start going for the Twin Cities.
I got up early, and loaded up my ’73 Malibu. My guitars, naturally, rode in the passenger seat, surrounded by blankets and a pillow. In the back, a gym bag, an army-surplus duffel, a guitar amp, and my interview suit (nee my graduation suit) in a laundry bag. And not much else.
I climbed into the car; not quite ready to head out yet. One last errand to run; withdraw my money from the bank.
And then I’d be ready to go.
I walked out the front door of Dad’s house, and down to the street, where my car – in whose safety I was a lot less sure than before – sat. I started up, and drove over to Metropolitan Federal Savings and Loan to pull my money out and get on the road.
I parked on the street in front of the bank, checked my passbook inside my jacket pocket, walked up to the front door, and pulled.
And nearly wrenched my hand. The door didn’t move.
Huh?
I focused on the door. Locked.
I looked through the window. It was dark inside.
A sign was taped to the door;
Metropolitan Federal Savings and Loan Will Be Closed On Monday, October 14, for the Columbus Day Banking Holiday.
We will re-open on Tuesday, October 15
I stood for a moment, slack-jawed, mind reeling. Huh? Closed? Whaaaa?
All the planning, and I hadn’t remembered that it was Columbus Day.
Dejected, hoping it wasn’t a sign from above, I drove home to Mom and Dad’s place, broke the news, called my friend in Burnsville, and spent the evening laying very, very low.
Tomorrow, I thought.
My last Sunday night in Jamestown, October 13, 1985.
Mom made dinner. Took a drive around town. Suddenly felt very nostalgic.
I called down to the Twin Cities, telling one of the friends who’d volunteered a couch that I’d be there tomorrow afternoon. I got the directions to the apartment – it was in Burnsville, a big ‘burb about 10 miles south of Downtown Minneapolis. I marked the exact location on the map, and memorized exactly how to get there.
I pictured the route in my mind; the long churn down I94, followed by the slow, curvy glide of the 494 South Metro bypass, to the gastric-shunt-straight blast down 35W, to Cliff Road, then over to River Hills Drive…I could recite it in my sleep. I thought.
I went to bed early that night.
It was Saturday night, October 12, 1985. Two days until the big move.
The best rock and roll bar in Jamestown had closed the previous summer; there really were no decent bands playing that night. No matter, though, I thought; I’d go up to the college and visit my friends. Surely, I thought, my last night in the Twin Cities would draw someone out for a night on the town. Right?
Not so fast.
School up at my alma mater, Jamestown College, had been in session for about six weeks. Most of my friends – the ones who hadn’t graduated or dropped out – were thoroughly involved in class work. A brief thought on the part of a couple of them to throw a “going away party for Mitch” came in a distant fourth to “a date”, “another party” and “studying”.
I walked up to the North Hill, up the steps, to the college. I wandered through my old dorm, around the chapel (the HQ of the music department which, majors aside, is where I spent most of my time in college). Most of my friends – Rich Larson, Beth Erickson, Ray Zentz, Joe “Spanky” Knowski, Scott Massine – were either occupied, or too trashed from a week of school (and/or a Friday night of binge-drinking) to want to do much. I ran into a few, of course – Rich Larson (on his way to a date), Ray Zentz (practicing one instrument or another); I think I may have even run into this person, to whom I’d handed over the school paper, although memory fails me at the moment.
I hung around for half an hour, amazed at all the Freshmen who had no idea who I was, my attitude souring by the minute, until I walked out of the student union, back to the stairs that descended the North Hill, and back into town.
By the way – you caught that? I called it the “North Hill”. Jamestown is in the valley of the James River, at its confluence with Pipestem Creek. There are three major parts to Jamestown; the “Valley”, below the river bluffs; the “South Hill”, mostly stores and cheap hotels and some humongous trailer parks and the State Hospital; and the “North Hill”, home of the college, the city hospital, and some of the town’s nicest real estate, especially “Skyline Drive”, with its gorgeous overlook of the river valley, the dam (a big reservoir upstream from the town) and the rest of the city. Of course, neither “North Hill” nor “South Hill” are hills; they are the level of the prairie itself. The town is below ground level. Such is perception in a place like that.
“Ratzen fratzen “friends”. If I could count all the “going away parties” I’d been to for the other rat bastards, I could probably buy a round at my own party, for @#$#@^%’ s sake”, I grumbled, feeling sorrier and sorrier for myself as I went. “I’m so @#$#@^%@# glad I’m moving…”
There was one more hope for the evening. I walked back down the hill…er, you know…and back toward the middle of the little town, across from my grandmother’s old house, to The Club.
The Club was a room in the basement of J.I. Stocking, a guy who’d graduated from high school and college about five years earlier than I. He and a couple of his classmates – John Johnson and Pat Flannery – had built a semi-replica english hunting lodge in the basement, complete with a kegerator, dartboard, comfy sofas, the works. The room was J.I’s, but the idea was Pat’s. Pat was the sort of eccentric genius that every small town seems to breed. He was a model builder; more than that, he was a “scratchbuilder”; he’d build models out of lost and founds, bric-a-brac, bits and pieces of found treasure.
What kind of models? Whatever caught his fancy. One day it was a scale cutaway model of the Captain Nemo’s submarine Nautilus. Another week it’d be “every experimental German jet aircraft of the ’30s and ’40s that was ever committed to blueprint”, out of bits and pieces of plastic; another month, it’d be a working replica of an eighteenth-century nine-pounder naval gun, firing homemade cannon balls (this was an interesting one; yes, it worked). He built ’em all. Sometime just out of high school, a company in Los Angeles got wind (so the story went) of Pat’s talents, and hired him to come to LA to work on a show they were working on, “Project UFO“. The series was cancelled shortly before Pat was going to start his job building UFO models; no matter, he turned his talents to building more…stuff.
One weekend in, I think, 1979 or 1980, boredom overtook him, and he built The Club; he built (reportedly in one manic binge) a kegerator, a wine rack ( from scratch, natch), a bar, panelling…I think the only thing bought in a store was a dart board.
The Club met three nights a week. You’d drop a couple of bucks in the stein by the kegerator, you could drink and eat peanuts and talk sci-fi until 1AM (house rule – same closing time as the bars). It was a good, cheap, regular buzz.
I walked down to The Club, walked down the narrow stairway, pitched in a couple of bucks, and laid into a beer with gusto. It was warm, the conversation was geeky and well met, and pretty soon the evening was starting to work itself out. “Who cares if my college pals are a bunch of total let-downs? I’m leaving!” I smiled a sloppy smile and handed my mug to J.I., behind the bar, who had tap duty that evening. A few other people – John’s brother Mark, and Mike Fischer, who’d just moved back to North Dakota from Los Angeles, where he’d worked making lenses in an optometry shop (among his clients; Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys).
I looked around the room after a while; Fischer, Pat, John and Mark had all left Jamestown at one point or another, and all had returned. J.I. had always been in Jamestown. I tried to think of any from our little circle of people who had left and stayed gone; I couldn’t.
The evening kept on; I kept drinking. As 1AM came around, I walked out onto Fourth Avenue, and started walking home to my Mom and Dad’s place. I wondered, as I shuffled down the street (not terribly drunk, mind you; I had quite a tolerance built up after a summer of three nights a week at The Club and a couple more at Fred’s and an odd night or two out drinking with the friends) and wondered:
I know what it is that makes people wanna leave this place. The big question is, what is it that makes people want to come back?
Was there some inexorable gravity that tugged people, plans and dreams be damned, back to this little dip in the drift prairie? Something I didn’t know about, but that would jump out at me in six or nine or twenty-four months, and send me packing back to this cold little outpost on the Plains?
I got to Dad’s place – everyone was long asleep – and went to bed.
It was the final week of my getting ready to move to the Twin Cities, after my rash promise a little over a week earlier.
I got up every morning to go to my job, which was…
…well, not the worst roofing and siding job ever; the weather was gorgeous, and it didn’t involve hot tar or metal shingles.
I drove with my boss (and contractor, and only other guy on the site) out to a garage in Cleveland, North Dakota, about 20 miles from Jamestown, every morning around 7, roofed and sided and did other miscellaneous carpentry work until about fivish. Then we drove home.
It was a September and early October a lot like this one, actually; it started out very, very hot in mid-late September, blazingly warm and, by North Dakota prairie standards, humid. By early October, a little nip crept into the air, and by the near-eve of my move, mornings were downright cold, and mid-days were a little chilly. And it was North Dakota, so always, always, the wind.
The garage belonged to a woman who was the ex-wife of one of Jamestown’s great guitar players, and (I learned while taking a break in her living room) mother of one of my best friend’s girlfriends, although I didn’t know it at the time. See, I told you it was a small town…
As I worked, I plotted and planned. And when I say “plan”, it was less a matter of making plans I could use to actually make life easier when I got to Minneapolis. No, it was more like “Xtreem Daydreaming. The thoughts centered around a couple of things: the job I’d get, the place I’d live in, the life I’d have.
The job was the hard part. The 10-12 days since I’d told everyone in the world I was moving to Minneapolis hadn’t brought me any revelations. My daily trawls through the Star/Tribune at the bookstore found me a few intrigueing leads, to which I promptly dispatched my groaningly florid resume – but nothing really jumped out at me, because at 22 I really had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I had a degree in English, with minors in History and German, and enough credits for minors in Music and Theatre (but they were almost all performance, so it didn’t count) and one course shy of a minor in Computer Science. This last had been a long journey in college; I’d actually double-majored in English and Computer Science until the end of my junior year, when I realized with impeccable timing that I hated Computer Science. I dropped, knowing full well that I was never going to pass “Operating Systems”, much less figure out a Senior Project that would interest me, much less anyone else. But I figured – more a vague sense than a plan – that with my background in journalism and the added computer experience, I could get a job as a technical writer. To the extent that I thought at all, that was my “plan”.
One thing I knew; my career would not be radio. At 22, I’d worked at three stations since I was 16. I hated spinning records, and knew I’d never get a news gig in a big market. I kissed my radio “career” goodbye.
The place I’d live? That was easier. A cool place. I figured once I got a job, I’d get a cool, funky apartment over some store somewhere (although not in Saint Paul. I only got the vaguest sense of Saint Paul from the maps I daily pored over. The city was an inscrutable enigma to me until long after I moved). Everyone had told me those were the coolest apartments. I’d get a two-bedroom; one for me, one for a home-made “quiet” recording studio that I planned to build, with (I had it all sketched out in my head) an Ensoniq Mirage sampler board, a Yamaha D-9 synth, a Mesa Boogie (that I’d only play at gigs) and a couple of Scholz Rockman and Bassman boxes to run into the four-track cassette deck (and eventually eight-track tape deck) on which I was going to record all the music I was writing.
But my life? That, I had figured out. I knew that once I landed a place, I was going to crank into full song-writing mode – and once I got a job, I was going to start a band, and embark on the real reason for the move; becoming the next Paul Westerberg-via-Joe Grushecky. I didn’t know Phillips from the Near North Side, but I knew that the big three bars were the First Avenue, the Uptown and the Cabooze – and exactly who to talk to to get bookings at each. I had no idea what I was going to do for a living, but I knew exactly what I was going to do for a life.
(And the girlfriend I was gonna meet, too; I had her figured out down to a T. Not tall, not blond, not the kind of girl you find in North Dakota. A mixed grab-bag of brunette and auburn hair, brown eyes, darker-veering-toward-olive skin and a bunch of other non-Scandinavian traits danced through my head as I hammered shingles into that cold roof in Cleveland, ND.
I got a lot of daydreaming done that week.
Cleveland was a little town of about 100 or so people in 1985; it’s probably not that big now, although I’m sure its cheap property has made it a desirable exurb for people who want to work in Jamestown, so who knows. One thing it had was a gorgeous view of the prairie, since nothing really separated it from the land; it was really an island of little wooden houses and eighty-year-old, mostly-deserted brick storefronts in the middle of a sea of cut stalks and dirt.
My “boss” and I worked late that last Thursday, October 10, 1985, so that Friday – my last day on the gig – wouldn’t hold any surprises for us. It was getting late when we packed up; the first purple tinges of the autumn sunset were starting to leak out over the prairie as I gathered the last of my tools and craps from the roof. I sat back for a moment as my “boss” jawboned with the owner of the house (as he seemed to do a lot), and looked into the infinite sky to my west, and felt the wind – 15 gusting to 25, as usual on the prairie – in my face. It was those moments when I felt the place tug on me; sitting in the rawish open air, the wind in my face, the smell of loam and diesel and manure and sawdust on the air, that I forgot my plans for a moment and felt some connection with my anscestors, the Norwegians who climbed off trains in northeastern North Dakota and went on to raise (so the family legends tell me) bumper crops of rocks, decade in, decade out, looking at the same sunset in October, smelling the same smells, feeling the same eternal wind. It’s a feeling I still occasionally get when I’m up there, this time of year, that kind of night.
We drove home. The tang of fall was in the evening air; a tang that had told me, the four previous years, “Somewhere, in some dorm, there’s gonna be a party going on!”
I think I went to bed early that night.
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