It was Saturday, October 29, 1988.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I’d taken a well-deserved night or two off from the bars the previous week to record the demo tape with Bill and Mark.\u00a0 But now it was back to work.\u00a0<\/p>\n
My employer, the sleazy DJ service, was putting me in a new bar tonight.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The sleazy DJ service’s “office staff” – Scott, really – could be pretty awful with directions back in those pre-Mapquest days.\u00a0 It didn’t help that I was pretty ignorant about the ‘burbs – what road went where, how everything was laid out.\u00a0 In three years of getting around the Twin Cities, I joked that every single time I tried to find something in the suburbs, I muffed it on the first try.\u00a0 It wasn’t far from the truth; whenever I had to find something in the far ‘burbs, I usually allotted an extra hour or two, since I almost inevitably needed to call for help or ask for directions somewhere<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n But this one was easy, said Scott.\u00a0 Go north on 35W to County Road H.\u00a0 Go west on H – the only option you have.\u00a0 “Look for the signs on your left”, he said, and if that failed “you’ll see the big naked Mermaid”.\u00a0<\/p>\n It was the fabled Mermaid Lounge, Supper Club, Lanes and Night Club, in Mounds view.<\/p>\n I parked out front, and walked in the front door.\u00a0 It looked pretty mild-mannered; mostly middle-aged folks sitting around drinking Schmidt, munching on popcorn and burgers and watching sports on the overhead TVs.<\/p>\n It looked very, very tame.\u00a0 Like, the tamest place I’d been in…well, ever.\u00a0<\/p>\n I looked around for the DJ booth.\u00a0 Nothing.<\/p>\n I walked up to the bar and flagged down the bartender, a short, stocky woman with dusty blond hair.\u00a0 “Where’s the DJ booth?”<\/p>\n “Oh, that’s downstairs”, she said in an accent straight out of “Fargo”, pointing over toward a staircase that led down.\u00a0<\/p>\n I walked through the bar and down the stairs.\u00a0 The smell of stale cigarette smoke reached out like the tentacles of the Hydra, beating me over the head and shoulders.\u00a0 I walked into the basement, the “Mermaid Nightclub”.\u00a0 Lit by a hundred flashing tubes of neon – overheads, beer lamps, whatever – it was dark, dank, smoky, and throbbed with a dismal energy I hadn’t felt in any of the many other dismal, reeking bars I’d worked in the previous…<\/p>\n …year<\/em>?\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 Almost a year.\u00a0 Damn.<\/p>\n It was a huge room, with three bars – two little satellite bars\u00a0at the ends; and a big one in the middle.\u00a0 The near end of the room was given over to nearly-empty tables; the far end, to pool tables, which seemed very, very busy.\u00a0 I walked to the main bar, where a couple of bartenders – a stocky, muscular guy with curly sandy hair, and a gorgeous woman with peroxide hair – were stocking up for the evening.\u00a0<\/p>\n The guy – Larry – walked me over to the DJ booth…<\/p>\n …that would be, I had no way of knowing at the time, my home away from home for the next two and a half years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was Saturday, October 29, 1988.\u00a0 I’d taken a well-deserved night or two off from the bars the previous week to record the demo tape with Bill and Mark.\u00a0 But now it was back to work.\u00a0 My employer, the sleazy DJ service, was putting me in a new bar tonight.\u00a0 The sleazy DJ service’s “office […]<\/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-1862","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\/1862","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=1862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1862\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}