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.

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.