It was Saturday, December 5, 1987.

I’d balanced my checkbook the previous Wednesday. Or tried. It’d earned about $75 in November. Things were getting dicey.

I needed to come up with something to help me stretch my voice-over and freelance writing income.

I looked in the Strib, and saw an ad; a company was looking for nightclub and wedding disk jockeys.

Of course, I’d always hated DJ bars; to my point of view, bars, should either have bands, jukeboxes, or nothing.

But money was money. And hadn’t I been a DJ at a bunch of radio station?

How hard could it possibly be?

I called the number in the ad; the guy told me to come out to Burnsville on Saturday afternoon for an interview.

I drove out to Burnsville, pulling into a leafy cul-de-sac.  I knocked on the door.  A pudgy guy with spiky, gelled hair answered the door.  “Hi.  I’m Biff”. [The name, obviously, is changed].  Biff invited me in.
The house – your standard Burnsville mini-mansion – was almost bare of furniture.  The living room had two armchairs, a TV on a cardboard packing box, and scattered piles of sound and light gear; amps, mixers, speakers, standards.  The kitchen, over the little bar area, looked messy and yet fairly bare.  The guy looked like he was running a DJ service out of his house.

“So”, said Biff in a Minnesota accent, “tell me about your experience as a DJ”.

I ran through my radio background, as well as my time as a musician.

“Do you know how to beat-mix?”

I sat for a split second.  “I know the basics”, I answered, thinking he was talking about cross-fading.

He looked like he thought I was completely clueless – as, as events showed, I was.

But we continued to talk, and he must have seen something he liked.  He explained his company’s operation; they had a couple of mobile rigs that worked weddings and parties, and they also supplied DJs to a bunch of area bars.

“We might start you out in one of our outlying bars”, he said, looking more or less thoughtful.  He told me to call back early next week.

We shook hands. I drove back to Saint Paul, hoping for a break that’d at least stretch my income a bit.

Just while I waited for another radio gig.  No more.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 5:01 am and is filed under Twenty Years Ago Today. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.