Life had settled into a modestly pleasant routine.<\/p>\n
I was happily living in a basement in a nice little bungalow in South Minneapolis, with a total of five women, three of whom I’d gone to college with.<\/p>\n
Life had improved a lot when I got my first raise; I’d been promoted sometime in late March or early April from “Intern” to “Associate Producer” of the Don Vogel Show. The title came with money – I was up to $4.25 an hour!<\/p>\n
Laughable? Sure. But I was paying $135 for rent, my car was paid for (and insurance was fairly cheap for me), the commute bill had dropped down to $80 a month, and I made the occasional extra buck or two producing hockey games; I actually lived relatively large.<\/p>\n
But not as large as I thought I could. From my introduction the previous fall, I’d learned that I kind of liked talk radio. And I’d heard stories – almost rumors – of political conservatives doing talk shows in other cities. I looked around – Morning guy Mike Edwards was center to slightly left (not that he ever had an opinion), Geoff Charles was a libertine, syndies Owen Spann and Michael “Not the singer, not the beer expert” Jackson both swerved left, Joe Soucheray was a Randy Kelly-style DFLer in those days, Pat Reusse was a seething commie, and while Don Vogel didn’t care much for politics, he trended toward the left and didn’t like Ronald Reagan at all.<\/p>\n
I knew what the “Fairness Doctrine” was all about. I saw an opportunity.<\/p>\n
I went to talk with the boss, general manager Scott Meier. “This station could use a conservative host”.<\/p>\n
Meier looked at me – wild-haired, looking for all the world like James Honeyman-Scott (heroin addiction and all) – and said “I’ll think about it”.<\/p>\n
I went into the production meeting afterwards, and told Vogel. “Cool! Our own fire-breathing gun nut!”<\/p>\n
“Meier doesn’t sound too thrilled”.<\/p>\n
“Well, I’ll talk with him…”<\/p>\n
I left it at that.<\/p>\n
The other part of my routine; I’d built a “recording studio”. I had a Fostex X-15 four-track cassette player, my guitars (the ’60 Fender Jazzmaster, an Ibanez SG with Seymour Duncan “Jeff Beck” pickups that played better than any Gibson SG I’ve ever played), my acoustic, a bass, and a Crumar T-1 organ that I’d picked up at one of Knut Koupee’s “Sunglasses Sales” (trade in a pair of sunglasses for an awesome deal on gear – the organ cost $50) which when miked properly and with a certain suspension of disbelief did a better-than-fair Hammond B3 impression. and a $100 drum machine.<\/p>\n
I rigged the whole mess up in a corner of my basement hovel, and started learning how to do demo tapes on my own – from 7PM until 10PM every night (when the housemates insisted I turn the guitars down) I laid down tracks, and from 10 to 2-ish in the morning I tried bouncing and mixing and editing tracks to make my little four tracks sound bigger.<\/p>\n
And I started writing music. Oh, in high school and college, I’d fantasized about being a rock star, and written a couple of puerile ditties. But for the first time in my life, I started writing music – writing anything, really – with a certain amount of drive and discipline.<\/p>\n
Life was getting fairly good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Life had settled into a modestly pleasant routine. I was happily living in a basement in a nice little bungalow in South Minneapolis, with a total of five women, three of whom I’d gone to college with. Life had improved a lot when I got my first raise; I’d been promoted sometime in late March […]<\/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-48532","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\/48532","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=48532"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48554,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48532\/revisions\/48554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}