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

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

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

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

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

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

He dug it.

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

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

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

——

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

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

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

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

At least Griff was excited.

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

“So, Larry – I have this band…”

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