It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XV
By Mitch Berg
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.
