It was Saturday, December 5, 1987.<\/p>\n
I’d balanced my checkbook the previous Wednesday. Or tried. It’d earned about $75 in November. Things were getting dicey.<\/p>\n
I needed to come up with something to help me stretch my voice-over and freelance writing income.<\/p>\n
I looked in the Strib, and saw an ad; a company was looking for nightclub and wedding disk jockeys.<\/p>\n
Of course, I’d always hated DJ bars; to my point of view, bars, should either have bands, jukeboxes, or nothing.<\/p>\n
But money was money. And hadn’t I been a DJ at a bunch of radio station?<\/p>\n
How hard could it possibly be?<\/p>\n
I called the number in the ad; the guy told me to come out to Burnsville on Saturday afternoon for an interview.<\/p>\n
I drove out to Burnsville, pulling into a leafy cul-de-sac.\u00a0 I knocked on the door.\u00a0 A pudgy guy with spiky, gelled hair answered the door.\u00a0 “Hi.\u00a0 I’m Biff”. [The name, obviously, is changed].\u00a0 Biff invited me in.
\nThe house – your standard Burnsville mini-mansion – was almost bare of furniture.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The kitchen, over the little bar area, looked messy and yet fairly bare.\u00a0 The guy looked like he was running a DJ service out of his house.<\/p>\n
“So”, said Biff in a Minnesota accent, “tell me about your experience as a DJ”.<\/p>\n
I ran through my radio background, as well as my time as a musician.<\/p>\n
“Do you know how to beat-mix?”<\/p>\n
I sat for a split second.\u00a0 “I know the basics”, I answered, thinking he was talking about cross-fading.<\/p>\n
He looked like he thought I was completely clueless – as, as events showed, I was.<\/p>\n
But we continued to talk, and he must have seen something he liked.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
“We might start you out in one of our outlying bars”, he said, looking more or less thoughtful.\u00a0 He told me to call back early next week.<\/p>\n
We shook hands. I drove back to Saint Paul, hoping for a break that’d at least stretch my income a bit.<\/p>\n
Just while I waited for another radio gig.\u00a0 No more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-twenty-years-ago-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}