{"id":1727,"date":"2007-12-12T12:05:30","date_gmt":"2007-12-12T17:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1727"},"modified":"2007-12-12T13:09:32","modified_gmt":"2007-12-12T18:09:32","slug":"it-was-twenty-years-ago-today-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1727","title":{"rendered":"It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part LXIV"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was Saturday, December 12, 1987. It was a cold, sloppy Saturday night. I had gotten a call from the spiky-haired guy at the DJ service – be at the bar by 7:30 to learn how to get the equipment started up, and start playing. My training would be on the job. The bar was “City Limits” (a bar I’d never heard of) in Rosemount (a town in the southeast suburbs that, in fact, I’d also <\/em>never heard of in two years in the Twin Cities).<\/p>\n

I got into my car around 6PM and started driving. It was a good thing. One of the “quirks” I’d discovered in my first couple of years in the Twin Cities was that it always took me a minimum of two tries to find anything <\/em>in the suburbs. Every single time.<\/p>\n

And City Limits was no exception. I drove to Minneapolis, then down 35W and then Cedar all the way to County Road 42, and hung a left. And drove.<\/p>\n

And drove.<\/p>\n

And drove.<\/p>\n

The townhouses of Burnsville faded away into the background. I drove through farm fields, fallow for the winter, and the occasional warehouse or small business, until I got to “South Robert Trail”, a wan little intersection with “downtown” Rosemount just off to the left. I hung a right, and drove past a farm equipment dealership with a natty-looking beige outbuilding, through more fields. And more. And more.<\/p>\n

Finally, in Farmington (I think), I stopped and asked directions at a gas station. The guy knew City Limits (he said, with an “Oy, do<\/em> I know City Limits<\/em>!” kind of gusto), and pointed me back to the north.<\/p>\n

Sure enough, the natty gray outbuilding was <\/em>the bar.<\/p>\n

I walked in. The bar smelled like burned cooking oil and dry popcorn; it rumbled with the sounds of the bowling alley through the door to the back of the restaurant. A guy – early-twentysomething, blond, tall, looking a bit like a Hitler Youth but with wry smile – sat on one of the stools by the little counterette wrapped around the DJ booth, which sat at the edge of a small, tiled dance floor.<\/p>\n

“Scott?”<\/p>\n

“Hey!”, he said, with a voice that sounded like it’d been on the air.<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

He showed me how to “power up”;<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Turn the volumes down on all the mixers.<\/li>\n
  2. Power on the amps<\/li>\n
  3. Turn on the mixers<\/li>\n
  4. Turn on the lighting switchers<\/li>\n
  5. Turn on the power to the lighting rig – the various lights, flashers, and the all-important fog machine over the dance floor.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    “This bar is pretty dead, so it’ll be a great place to learn how to do this stuff”, Scott said, sipping a vodka kamikaze.<\/p>\n

    ———-<\/p>\n

    And so I did. The basics were nothing I hadn’t learned at my first radio job, eight years and change earlier; cue the records on the two turntables, fade between them, make announcements during the ramps and fades. I did that vastly better than most club jocks – Scott commented on it.<\/p>\n

    The harder part was “beat-mixing” – mixing the fade from one song into the ramp for the next one so their rhythms merge, making the transition seamless and giving the impression that the music never really stops. To help out, all the music in the vinyl bins was organized by speed, in beats per minute – from George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” (90BPM) through “Walking on Sunshine” (200 and change). In theory, you could start with a slower song, and – using the turntables’ variable speed controls, keep a continuous (if slowly speeding-up) beat going for the entire night.<\/p>\n

    But that was way in the future, as I fumbled at trying to get simple beats to match up in my headphones.<\/p>\n

    I needed some work, there.<\/p>\n

    ———-<\/p>\n

    But at least I had the basics down pretty quickly. Scott and I talked for a couple of hours; briefly about work; mostly about radio. He remembered my character from the Vogel show. He’d worked at a bunch of small stations in Wisconsin. He was starting to think about making another try at it.<\/p>\n

    The bar had customers. Bowlers mingled with rednecks, sprinkled with a couple of Apple Valley party girls, who occasionally staggered about the floor, dancing with each other (since none of the guys felt like it). The place pretty much emptied out at 10.<\/p>\n

    Scott showed me how to shut everything off at the end of the night, and wished me luck, leaving around 11.<\/p>\n

    And so I finished out the night, taking the odd request, playing to maybe three barstool-polishing people by the end of the evening.<\/p>\n

    And I made the long drive back to Saint Paul.<\/p>\n

    I had a pleasant feeling, knowing I’d earned $50 for the evening.<\/p>\n

    Like most of the times one walks off life’s metaphorical cliffs, I had no sense that I was falling.<\/p>\n

    Yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    It was Saturday, December 12, 1987. It was a cold, sloppy Saturday night. I had gotten a call from the spiky-haired guy at the DJ service – be at the bar by 7:30 to learn how to get the equipment started up, and start playing. My training would be on the job. The bar was […]<\/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-1727","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\/1727","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=1727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1727\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}