It was Saturday, January 16, 1988.\u00a0 A bitterly cold night.<\/p>\n
And I was on my way to Fridley.<\/p>\n
Well, I was on my way to try to find <\/em>Fridley.<\/p>\n I’d gotten a call from Scott at the DJ service; they had a different bar for me to try, and they figured I’d be perfect for it.\u00a0 The bar was “George Is In Fridley”, usually pronounced “George’s In Fridley”.\u00a0<\/p>\n “The place is kinda funky”, Scott said.\u00a0 “Weird crowd – kinda half brothers, half northeast-side rednecks.\u00a0 It’s also kinda a weird situation; the dance floor is also restaurant space; your first two hours will be playing dinner music.\u00a0 Then they clear it off, and it’s dance time!”<\/p>\n “And the owners…”\u00a0 he said, describing the family that ran the place.\u00a0<\/p>\n We’ll get back to that.<\/p>\n It was Saturday.\u00a0 And in two and a half years in the Twin Cities, I’d never once driven to Northeast Minneapolis, other than whizzing through on 35W.\u00a0 Not knowing the freeway connections at all<\/em>, I drove down University for miles and miles, eventually hanging a left and going over to Marshall which, just at the Fridley\/Minneapolis border, turned into River Road.<\/p>\n And was where the bar stood, inches north of the inter-city border.\u00a0 Across River Road stood the huge FMC plant; you could see brand-new naval gun turrets, bound for the Navy’s latest class of destroyers, sitting on rail cars, the haze gray paint job standing out under the yard lights against the dismal industrial background.\u00a0 George’s looked like a big pole barn, with a gravel parking lot and shabby doors covered with beer ads.<\/p>\n I walked inside, and found “Tony”, the boss.\u00a0 He was a padded, businesslike-looking Greek man.\u00a0 “You are Mitch”, he said, sizing me up.\u00a0 “Mitch Berg”, I answered, shaking his hand.<\/p>\n We walked through the bar into the main room; it looked like it’d been a ballroom in the forties, with a slick wooden dance floor surrounded by raised restaurant seating on three sides (and covered with tables about 2\/3 full of diners), and, at the far end, a DJ booth towering high above a raised stage that looked like it was big enough to hold a small “big” band at one point.\u00a0<\/p>\n We walked to a long table, at the head of the room, set aside from the bar and across the floor from the booth.\u00a0 There were chairs only on the side away from the booth.\u00a0 At the center chair sat an elderly, swarthy-looking gentleman, who was talking with a couple of women in waitress uniforms and signing some piece of paperwork, looking a bit like Richard Blaine in the opening scenes of Casablanca<\/em>; the diners got progressively younger, the farther from the center you went.\u00a0<\/p>\n “This is my father, George, the owner of the bar.\u00a0 Papa, this is Mitch…Berg?” he said and asked.\u00a0 I nodded, and shook his hand.<\/p>\n “You do good job for us?\u00a0 This should be good night!” he said, smiling, in a manner that implied that it wasn’t a question.<\/p>\n “You bet!”<\/p>\n And then someone else – looked like a kitchen manager – got the floor, standing before Papa George as Tony led me to the booth.\u00a0 We climbed two levels of risers and a final set of steps – the floor of the booth was a solid seven feet above the dance floor – and he showed me how to turn all the equipment on.<\/p>\n “Hokay, you can do this.\u00a0 One thing”, he said, turning to me before climbing back down; “you will get people coming up here telling you what to play.\u00a0 You are the only one who decides, hokay?”<\/p>\n “Gotcha”, I replied, smiling, puzzled.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n I started out the evening playing dinner music – quieter stuff, light jazz, doo-wop and some slower oldies.\u00a0 After half an hour, a pudgy, scowling woman in a white service jacket threaded through the tables and climbed the risers with some difficulty.\u00a0<\/p>\n “I’m Jessica, the assistant kitchen manager.\u00a0 And you have to play some danceable stuff.\u00a0 You gotta start getting things going here…”<\/p>\n “Er, we have about half an hour of dinner left…”<\/p>\n “I’m not asking!\u00a0 I’m telling!\u00a0 Get things moving!” she said with executive finality as she turned and climbed back down the risers.<\/p>\n Remembering Tony’s dictum, I changed nothing.<\/p>\n About half an hour later, as the diners on the floor finished up and started dissipating, the bouncers and bussers started clearing and removing the tables from the floor.\u00a0 Another woman – taller, thinner, younger, in a white shirt and black skirt and with long auburn hair – climbed the risers.\u00a0 “You’re the DJ”, she asked.\u00a0 A name-tag on her blouse said “Tanya;\u00a0 Asst. Bar Manager”.<\/p>\n “Yes, Tanya, I am”.<\/p>\n “Hokay”, she slurred as I smelled booze on her breath, “I’m the assistant<\/em> bar manager, and you need to slow things down so the people can eat”.<\/p>\n “Will do”, I said, as she turned and hopped down the risers.\u00a0 I changed, again, nothing.<\/p>\n As the floor cleared, I started picking up the pace – more rock ‘n roll, a little accessible R’nB – and watched Papa George at the head table.\u00a0 Tony had joined him, sitting at Papa’s side.\u00a0 Another guy – looked like another of George’s sons – sat at the other side.\u00a0 Other couples flanked them all – there were probably a dozen people, all sitting on the same side, all facing me across the floor.\u00a0 It felt a little like playing to the Corleones.<\/p>\n Oh, I knocked it dead that night.\u00a0 Tony climbed the risers around midnight.\u00a0 “You good!”, he said, nodding approvingly at the packed dance floor and the crowded bar behind it.\u00a0 “You real good”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was Saturday, January 16, 1988.\u00a0 A bitterly cold night. And I was on my way to Fridley. Well, I was on my way to try to find Fridley. I’d gotten a call from Scott at the DJ service; they had a different bar for me to try, and they figured I’d be perfect for […]<\/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-1960","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\/1960","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=1960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}