It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part LXIII
By Mitch Berg
It was Monday, December 7, 1987.
I got a call from the spiky-haired guy I’d interviewed with the previous week. They’d decided to hire me to work for their DJ service.
“Could you start Friday?” he asked.
“How about Saturday”, I countered, remembering Friday was my birthday.
“Saturday it is”.
He gave me the address to a bar. In Rosemount. I’d be meeting with one of his “assistants”, Scott, who’d “train me in” on being a nightclub DJ.
———-
I’ve reflected on that phone call and its aftermath many, many times in the past 20 years.
It was an expedient decision – the bills needed to get paid, and the voiceover and newspaper work was slumping bad.
But the effects on my life would be sweeping and all-consuming. I wouldn’t know that for over half a decade, of course, but it was the first step down a path with consequences I’m still dealing with today. Not all of them bad, of course – indeed, some of the most important, wonderful, precious things in my life started with that phone call on that cold, snowy December afternoon, twenty years ago today.
But on the way there, the tale wended past drugs, sex, rock and roll; it’d involve lawyers, guns and money (more the first two than the last); from clinical depression, love and self-rediscovery through fraud, gunplay and beating people with pool cues…
…but not so fast. We have a few years to go.
