In April, 1985, my college stage band went on its spring trip.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I played guitar on the jazz stuff (and percussion on the classical stuff), which was a fun stretch for me, since I’d not had a huge jazz background.\u00a0 Spring tour was usually a 2-3 day jaunt, playing 2-3 gigs a day at rural high schools in the Dakotas and, once, rural Manitoba.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But in ’85 – my senior year – the band’s director had a serious case of short-timer’s syndrome.\u00a0 A college music teacher since he’d graduated himself, 13 years earlier, he was burning out on the long hours and short pay at our tiny college; he’d spent the previous couple of years getting a BA in Computer Science in his off-hours.\u00a0 So instead of organizing a gruelling working tour, he took his tour budget and splurged on taking the band to Minneapolis to see the Dave Brubek Quartet at the Northrup Auditorium (and, unbeknownst to us, interview at Sperry\/Univac in Roseville, for a programming job he got and started shortly after I graduated).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Anyway.<\/p>\n
The host of the evening with Brubek was an MPR host named – and I’m not kidding when I say this – “Lake Hammond”.\u00a0 I thought it made sense as an air name for a Minnesota radio personality.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n