3:33⅓ - Vinyl from Deodato
Dropped a little Deodato on the turntable but I didn’t got to a tried and true one from the record, pulled out his Debussy cover of “Prelude to An Afternoon of a Faun”. Enjoyed it.
3:33⅓ - Vinyl from Kings Go Forth
Long live Milwaukee. I saw this group put on a great show at The Cedar back maybe 2011, 2012. It was an early date with my now wife then girlfriend Rachel. What a treat. This one of the first non-hip hop records I purchased. I just wanted to hear it at home and on vinyl.
3:33⅓ - Vinyl from The Three Sounds
I’m realizing some folks read this blog and also don’t want to get involved in social media more than they have to. So I’m going to share the vinyl I’m playing at Jazz88 right here.
Sean’s Unsolicited Advice for Doing Excellent Radio
I find it funny when people who I don’t think are seasoned and world-class at their craft provide advice or input on how to be excellent at something. But here’s the thing, I think I am quite excellent at being on the radio. I’m not seasoned (I believe in there being a ten year full time “seasoning” mark in most professional pursuits. I’ll explain in the bottom paragraph as a pseudo footnote.) But I also feel that if you have some skills, you should impart it. Do you ever think about the angels who make videos explaining shit on YouTube? Maybe that one video made them $425 dollars. But honestly, they did it because everyone should know how to spackle a hole in the ceiling or replace a garbage disposal. That’s beautiful, that’s generous. And there are very few things I feel I know well enough to provide advice for. But, as far as doing some good work on the radio, particularly in the music format, I have some advice that I think is helpful and not obvious.
No Audience Will Complain About You Talking Too Little
One time a fellow bass player talked about showing up a half hour late to a bar gig but "makig up for it” by adding some pretty “long bass solos”. My friend should’ve been fired that night. That’s a strike one, strike two situation. You shouldn’t show up late for a gig, but if you do, you shouldn’t overcompensate by dropping big bass solos. Moving that to a radio space: you shouldn’t show up late for gigs, you should avoid making mistakes, but there is no mistake you can cover up for by offering up more of your mouth opening and closing. We don’t get paid per word and the best in our business are generally the most efficient. Even if some of the best are long winded, they are still efficient. Their art is fitting an article into three paragraphs. But that is the rare breed in radio. for most broadcasters the art should be fitting a paragraph into a sentence, a sentence into a word, a word into a pause.
Be an Iceberg
Have you taken one of those diversity training events where they' show you the iceberg graphic? Here it is.
An Iceberg
So, the basic thing is that beneath the observable person you are interacting with there are layers of diversity, uniqueness and variety that you simply can’t ascertain from the bit of the iceberg that is poking out. This is a clunky analogy, but I believe a good broadcaster should know more than they let on. Let different tips of the iceberg come out each day, on different topics, at different times. If you want to say two smart things about an artist who you know very little about. . .you should learn nine things about that artist. I believe it is noticeable if someone is rattling off the entire contents of their knowledge about The Smashing Pumpkins, or Clifford Brown in twenty-two seconds. It rings a certain way and if one is just an inch deep about any topic, one is very prone to mistakes. Plus, you’re going to play this artist again, if you always spit out the same two facts, it’s tired, it’s not rewarding. Now, the ultimate goal should be to take those nine facts and establish something beyond any single fact about that artist. Perhaps a thesis, an opinion, a new thought about said artist. This does not have to be deep, but I think hosts who provide no context for the music they’re playing, I don’t know, I can’t understand that as acceptable. I believe that an intrinsic value add to radio listening is having a trusted narrator ushering listeners between hopefully somewhat disparate elements. . .a connective tissue that lets me know that even if I don’t love this song, I might love the next one. That connective tissue involves a lot more than just music criticism, it includes humanity, relatability et cetera but honestly. . .if you have no ability to metabolize the music and offer a through line with your presentation, I don’t know what you’re doing. I simply don’t think charming is enough, no matter how charming.
Have Utter Respect for the Time and Intelligence of Your Listener
If you don’t care about the people listening, I think you are just drawing a paycheck, and generally not a very big one. The honor in doing radio is in being the listener-in-chief. You should love what is happening on the station you work at and you should be humbled to get to toss in a couple comments in between to make it even better. You should believe that listening to this station is a gift even without your silky voice, and you should believe that the folks tuned in care about what is happening on the station. NOTE: This might not be true. But you should believe it. I understand that many people don’t care about who is talking on their favorite radio station unless they decide they don’t like that person. I understand that many people who are tuned into a radio station aren’t choosing to be tuned in, they are listening passively, maybe they have to listen to this cause it is on at their job. But, I believe in the philosophy of the customer is always right. And I don’t necessarily think of listeners like customers, but I think of them as always being right. Also, you’ll never meet the monstrous majority of the people who listen to the radio, if you’ve made an unfounded decision that they are unintelligent, what does that say about you? Seriously.
If You Win, You Lose
I had a conversation a long time back with Ant, the producer for the hip-hop group Atmosphere about his production style. In short he said that if a listener checks out Atmosphere and remembers the beat/production as opposed to Slug, the lyricist, they had both lost. The north star of most music is the vocals. That’s facts. The north star of music radio is music. In ratios it’s not even close right? The music you pick or present has a much bigger on your presentation than your witty banter. Now, you may be in a situation where you pick very little or none of the music you play. . .but. . .it’s still part of your presentation. If your presentation is not in service of the music it will not measure up to snuff. You can’t fight with music and win. Music is magical and humans are not. Music is otherworldly and spoken voice is not. We are lucky that there is some small way that human voices can enhance the joy of listening to music, something that can be added to the joy by your presence, but if you don’t respect the hierarchy I don’t think you’ll ever do your job properly.
Don’t Try to Out Alexa Alexa
If you asked a human being what the weather was like and they said “47 degrees with moderate winds coming in from the NW winds, blowing at 3.7 miles per cubic bionomineter” you would lose your shit right then and there and kill the robot infidel. We have robots in our house and people still turn on the radio. Most people turn on the radio not for another robot, but for another person. So tell them the weather like you would tell another person. NOW LOOK: it’s very possible if my wife asks me what the weather is I’d say “It’s cold as shit, I just froze my toes off putting something in the compost bin on the porch”. DON’T SAY ALL THAT ON THE RADIO. But, I think a little humanness, a little “probably a good day for layers” or “this is a bundle up situation” “I expect to see a lot of cargo shorts on the patios” to be completely legit, to be welcome. AGAIN, we have robots in our house, don’t be a robot on the radio.
Don’t Be The Same and Don’t Be Dumb Different
Don’t manufacture ways to be zany, but also don’t manufacture ways to be predictable and lame. You generally greet people a handful of ways, adjusting for things like the time of day, your mood, the location and some totally wild card combination of variables. Permit some of those variables to factor into your presentation, let Monday be a little different than Friday, let 5:15pm be a little more magical than 9:22am. Again, robots are readily available for our jobs, give them a reason to keep hiring us by staying human. BUT DON’T overdo it. People come to radio for some consistency, some reliability and if you fritter all of that way in just being a hot mess of unpredictability. . .who wants to bring that in to their house. So be consistent in a human way, with all the variabilities that that entails.
Slap Bass is Great
You should do everything within your power to get great at everything you can get great at. There are some “cheesy” radio skills that I think some of the high-minded hoity-toits that I’ve brushed shoulders with eschew, whether that be ramping a song (talking over the intro), talking over beds of music, editing promos or whatever. But it reminds me of a thing my very first bass teacher said. . . QUICK ASIDE: my very first bass teacher is the very successful very famous Sean Hurley who plays with John Mayer and others but when I knew him he was just a great bassist out of Massachusetts. He said “I used to think slap bass was lame so I didn’t work on it, until I realized that I wanted someone who called me for any opportunity to be glad they called me”. That stuck with me. If you can get your array of skills up to the point where they don’t have much reason to call somebody else, you’ll be all set to keep on getting those calls.
Don’t Confuse Success with Talent, Don’t Confuse Talent with Success
I am trying to sharpen my skills as a radio host with a different outlook than I approached my music making and most significantly bass playing in the earlier years of my life. I was by no means a child prodigy in anything, but I got the music stuff cooking professionally on the young side. I was playing legitimate gigs with bands that I was booking to audiences of 300-1200 by the time I was 21. There are all sorts of caveats to this. . .many of the gigs were opening for bigger bands, some of these gigs were definitely glorified high school parties that I had talked venues into having. . .but the record stands. My shit didn’t stink and you couldn’t tell me otherwise. The nucleus of my success during those years was Heiruspecs. Heiruspecs was (and is) filled with musicians and emcees who are more talented than me. This has been a wonderful thing for the band musically, but it has been intimidating to me. I am part of a bullet-proof band without being a bullet-proof instrumentalist myself. Instead of tending to my shortcomings, working on them, finding new paths, I wanted to stay doing what I knew I was great at. Even when I was practicing a lot, I wasn’t practicing the right shit, I wasn’t looking at where I was lacking and fixing it. I was just running down the lines I was already comfortable with in different keys. If my band wasn’t doing well. . .I would’ve known I needed to get better at bass. But instead, I took the success of a thing I was a part of and assumed I was as successful individually as I was as a part of that group. It was wishful thinking, it was foolish. I’m not being wishful or foolish in the radio chapter of my career. Some of the early stuff I got going on in radio was big, big time to me at least. Big radio station, positive comments, good feelings all around. But that didn’t mean I didn’t need to fill in things, if there was something I was bad at, I remained bad at it even if I had a desk at a cool radio station. If I couldn’t handle this or that element of the work, my profile didn’t matter, it didn’t matter that my neighbor thought it was cool she heard me on the radio.
You’re Always Auditioning
This is a Ray Browner. He’s the world’s best upright bass player of all time. I got to see him live once and I got to see him in clinic twice. He pointed out that “you’re always auditioning”. We’re sitting in Bandana Square in St. Paul at 4:15pm on a Tuesday and Ray’s in front of max 25 high school students and he said “look I don’t know if the guy walking in to deliver the mail right now is a cousin of Quincy Jones. . .you are always auditioning and you can always be judged”. I know some baller ass people listen to radio stations, sometimes I’ll meet amazing, unbelievably lettered people and they say they hear me on the radio. I never know who is listening, and I never know when they’re listening, if I’m working a shift on low sleep and handling the 1am hour. . .that still could be the one time when someone who could really change my life is listening. It’s just a fact with radio, you don’t know who is listening, so you can’t phone it in cause you think it’s bullshit. Today is the first day someone is hearing Miles Davis, and one of those packages sitting on my desk might contain the next artist to change the art form as much as Miles. You are always auditioning.
It Still Beats Work
I think being great at radio is quite a demanding job, I mean that in the amount of hours it takes to become talented, and I think it' also takes a lot of time to stay good, to stay pertinent, to be centered on that. But, you frequently receive health insurance, a steady pay check and a job you can explain to your in-laws more easily than playing bass or running a trivia company simply to try to communicate around music and the news of the day. If that doesn’t feel magical to you, you should step aside and let the people who it feels magical to keep on working. Music is a gift, it’s a magical gift. The job of radio isn’t magical, but it’s next to magic, so if you do it truly right, with true passion uninterrupted by distraction, you are in the magic. Sound like it.
TEN YEAR SEASONING: At the top of this blog I mentioned by idea that ten years is proper seasoning time for many creative pursuits. I believe that primarily because of a personal experience. In 2011 I played a show at the Southern Theater called the Southern Songbook with a bunch of great players. DeVon from Heiruspecs was handling the leadership alongside Adam Levy & Lily Troila. The band was the Heiruspecs band. And I remember just knocking the shit out of the park on that show. Well-rehearsed but not over rehearsed, excellent impassioned performances and the question marks we had during rehearsals were all about the actual needs of the songs, not a lot of getting mired in chord changes, tempo issues. The things we were trying to resolve were artistic and required expertise. And I don’t think you can really get that seasoned vibe until the technical side stops eluding you. Once you can make quick work of the fundamentals you can give more time to the things that distinguish between good and great. I remember Martin Devaney started to work with some more premier musicians a little bit into his career and I asked him if they required him to provide chord charts. He said “no, those guys can get the chords the first time I play it, they are asking questions about the themes, the nuances, what colors the song connotes”.* I remember thinking that those musicians had arrived at a higher level of craft than I had. I feel the sky is the limit for my potential as a broadcaster to be perfectly honest, but I know that a lot of my issues are still technical, they are still the equivalent of chord change type problems, not nuance type problems.
*Footnote to a footnote: I spelled connote correctly with no need for spell-check.
Saturdays Are In Big Trouble
Round about 2006/2007 I helped put together an instrumental group with my brother Steve and Josh and Peter from Heiruspecs. This lark of a band was built for two reasons: to make music with world class rapper and poet Alexei Casselle and get booked at restaurants and quieter spots to play long sets like my brother and I used to in the Berkshires. Through the past fifteen years the group has become like that warm hoodie that feels better than any garment of clothing in your house. And sort of, you don’t actually care how it looks, you love how it feels. . .but it really does look pretty good. We recently played a birthday party for our good friend and superfan Brenda at the White Squirrel and the vibe was right. I love close by, the room sounds awesome, Trivia Mafia’s office is upstairs in case I need a secure spot for a number 2. It checks all the boxes. So the booking person there, and a dear friend of mine, Laura, agreed to put us down for a couple Saturday gigs this year. WE WANT TO KEEP ON DOING THIS NEXT YEAR TOO. BUT I NEED THE OLD PEOPLE OF THE TWIN CITIES (and by old I mean 32-58) to come out, drink drinks, talk with friends and enjoy music from 6-8pm.
Listen, get your dinner going a little bit late, take in a set of music, have an adult cocktail or a hop water or something else off their awesome cocktail list. Whatever you do just come down and enjoy Big Trouble. We sound great, we are a band where you can dive in and listen to every note, you can also chill out, touch base with your friends and tune in from time to time and guess which pedal Steve is using. We have high energy jams, we have introspective jams. We dive in and deliver the goods, with no pesky singing. What an experience. Roll through and enjoy us. Come on Saturday October 29 from 6-8pm at White Squirrel.
A flyer for Big Trouble. Saturday October 29 and Saturday November 29 - 6-8pm, at White Squirrel.
Only Ten Dinners for the Rest of Your Life
You have been thrown into a terrible world where you can only have ten entrees for dinner. This doesn’t mean ten exact dishes, this means you can only order ten things in the universe of food for your dining after 5:30pm for the rest of your life. There is no money exchanged here, so you still have to cook if you don’t have restaurant money at the time, so you can’t pick a bunch of stuff you can’t eat. Here’s what I go with:
Spaghetti and meatballs
Cheeseburger and Fries
White Chicken Chili
Thai Green Curry w/ Tofu
Steak with predictable sides
Cobb Salad
Vegetarian Greek Dinner with Tempeh (this is a delicious workhorse dinner innovated by my wife Rachel)
Enchiladas
Salmon with Predictable Sides
Sushi Dinner
That’s it! I could live with that. I would agree to eat only those items for dinner for a one time payment of $75,000.
The Other Problem With Cancelled Musicians
Before I get to my main point: I disagree with the popular term “cancelled”. We often use the term cancelled for things we loved that were terminated by a faceless force like network TV, like Freaks and Geeks. You can’t cancel a person. And when we hear about a show being cancelled we think of it as outside of the control of the creators of the show. Freaks and Geeks got cancelled from on high by NBC. The musicians who got cancelled, they got cancelled not by NBC but by sexting 17 year olds, or by jumping out of closets naked with their hands on their junk. NBC wasn’t involved in your manual stimulation. The behaviors that caused them to be publicly reprimanded were not manufactured out of thin air. There may be details the musicians disagree with, there may be inaccurate statements, but I haven’t seen someone called out for absolutely nothing. My last bit on my soapbox: contrary to what the cancelled say, there is totally levels to this. People act like everyone is painted with the same brush. Are you serious? Some folks come out of serious allegations with a serious knock to their fame, to their respect, to their standing. Some folks get called out, but still navigate their way back into the conversation. And some people have done things that are horrendous, but they convincingly apologize, seek to repair the situation, take the allegations seriously. It is not one size fits all and if you think that I bet it is because that conclusion favors you and your situation.
But here’s the main thing. The biggest issue with terrible behavior of a sexual nature by musicians is that it has severely negatively impacted a fellow human’s life. Many, thought not all, of these victims are women. They have been violated and treated poorly, often by someone they formerly thought was a stand up, decent person. The accusations are almost never singular. They are almost always a part of a pattern. You can not believe in a lot of things, but I bet you believe in patterns. If you always get sick from eating the chili at Wendy’s you stop eating the chili at Wendy’s. If your friend says they went to Wendy’s once and they got sick off the chili it probably doesn’t change your chili outlook all that much. But six people got sick from the same chili? Fuck that chili. You really think 10 women got together to lie on you. . .to besmirch your semi-good name? Nope, I believe in patterns. Five women talking the same behavior, that behavior has some truth to it. And when I know it’s a pattern, I know it’s a part of your life. And here’s why after I hear these stories I have a hard time coming back to your music. . .you aren’t putting the you I now know about into your music. And you weren’t putting the you I now have to confront into the records I listened to before. If something that is part of your daily routine is sliding into DMs thousands of times with women decades younger than you, or hopping out of closets with your business in your hand. . .that never made it into a chorus? A bridge? An outro? No, you can’t engage your art with these behaviors. And everyone presents a different version of themselves on stage than the one as they truly are. But this is a gaping wide hole. This means that your presentation of your self is really selective. You don’t go deep into yourself. And the truth is, if you did, you’d be in even more trouble. But I’ve built up these expectations for my favorite artists: if you go through a divorce, I’m anticipating a divorce album. If you have a baby, baby album. Sober, sober album. Trading pills for sexual favors. . .probably gonna sing about something else. Forcing yourself on woman backstage. . .the songs will be about romantic love. I like to think with the really talented writers, I’m getting some takes on what is central to them, I’m getting songs that get to their core. And that’s what makes this triply scary. . .what if behaviors like this are things you do and it doesn’t even hit you in your soul? What if pouncing on an inebriated woman backstage is just another god damn Tuesday for you? It’s just a thing you do like buying a toothbrush when you need a new one. . .I don’t expect to hear a song about your toothbrush. But your abuses are so workaday. . .so quixotic that they won’t jump onto the page for you?
There is an honesty, rawness and an ability to share oneself that I expect from the writers in our world. I don’t love the folks who are pure craft. I love the folks who put themselves into their music, they grapple with their life in parts of their work. And when I think about these seismic accusations, these clarifying pieces of information about someone’s personal life. I then realize that all the records are going to come up short after this. You’re not going to talk about the behaviors, you’re not going to talk about the accusations. You’re not going to defend yourself, and you’re not going to condemn yourself. You’re going to ask everyone to believe that these patterns, these stories, believe that they’re cooked up, materialized out of thin air, that these patterns that last years, that span area codes, they’re bogus. You want to keep on writing the same kind of songs about the same kind of relationships you don’t seem to actually be having. There’s a disconnect. There’s a pattern. You’re not cancelled, you’re out in the light and you look worrisome. Worrisome.
Great Food in St. Paul
There’s a new food writer at the Pioneer Press and Jess Fleming asked readers to tell Jared where to eat in St. Paul. Bloggin’ to the rescue Jared, I got you.
Best Sandwich
The best sandwich in St. Paul is the surprise sandwich at the St. Paul Cheese Shop. It costs $10. If you want to get it on baguette it’s another $2. Don’t do it. The baguette actually isn’t spectacular. But they basically put together a couple sandwiches that generally contain a creamy cheese, a courageously fruitty jam and some delicious meat. There are minor variations and they almost never go wrong. If you also have a Jewish wife at home who doesn’t eat pork at home you can ask for it without pork. Not only it is a great sandwich, it’s a great conversation. For years I would pick up three of these to kick off the Trivia Mafia Monday lunch meetings. You could trade half sandwiches, you could discuss the spice level. It’s a conversation starter in a way that a sandwich that is described on a menu never could be.
Best Cup of Coffee
The best cup of coffee in St. Paul is at J&S at Randolph and Saratoga. I love a coffee shop with knick knacks, that has music every once in awhile but not all the time, that has big colorful mugs. I guess what I’m saying is I like a 90s coffee shop. And coffee shops were one of the things I missed the most during the throws of the pandemic. The bit of conversation with the barista, the ability to sequester yourself in a spot where suddenly your book, your taxes, your friend, your cafe are all easier to focus on than they are at your own home. And I do believe that a medium coffee is one of the perfect things on this earth. It’s the right size, it’s the right feel in your hand. You take one of those coffees outside and sit down and do ONE THING for 40 minutes, maybe it’s talk, maybe it’s read, maybe it’s write, but it’s something and you do it and you do it with your friend the coffee. Nothing better.
Best Ethiopian Food
This one isn’t even close to me. I just think Fasika makes the best Ethiopian food I’ve ever had anywhere. If you are going there with two hungry adults who both eat meat, get the Zilzil Tibs and the Veggie sampler. Share it all, eat it all. Love it. If you are going with someone who doesn’t like eating with their hands. . .consider going with someone else. . .but if you can’t. . .get the chicken tibs with rice, still legit amazing and less heavy than the veggie sampler or the Zilzil Tibs.
Best Cocktail
The Sazerac from Meritage is unfuckwithable. It is a delicious cocktail in an amazing environment. If you are sitting good financially I recommend buying a shrimp cocktail because honestly, you deserve it and you love shrimp. But that Sazerac does everything a cocktail is supposed to. You feel a little buzzed just sniffing it, and then you feel intrigued by the flavors, and then you feel like everything is simpler in your life for a couple minutes. And then you get another. And then you don’t feel so bad about spending $40 on shrimp.
Best Fish Situation
Not all Brasas are created equal. That’s just a fact. And the only Brasa you can get catfish at is on Grand Ave. It’s incredible. The sauce that comes with is incredible. And even though catfish isn’t kosher my wife lets me eat it at our house. Thank you Rachel. Catfish responds to breading in a very interesting way and it creates lots of different surfaces and crevices of salty fishy delishiosios. Plus it comes with a red sauce that has a bit of creamy and a bit of spice to it. And you might think. . .catfish. . .great, that’s enough, I don’t need dessert. Naw, you need dessert. I think pudding is mostly gross (I don’t want WET desserts, that’s why tiramisu can die slow). But, that butterscotch pudding? This particular pudding, spectacular. Killing it.
Best Appetizer
Italian fries can mean a lot of things. Many of those things suck. A pile of fries with oregano and parmesan tossed on top is not an upcharge I’m willing to deal with. BUT, the Italian fries at Italian Pie Shoppe are killing it. Spectacular. When I was in high school it was my favorite food on earth. But I’ve grown. Now it’s just my favorite appetizer in St. Paul, and I get em with broccoli and a touch of cheddar. These have nothing to do with potatoes. This is just pizza crust folded around mozzarella with a reasonable dusting of Italian seasoning. You step it up a bit going with the brocchi, like I said they sneak in a touch of cheddar and some finely chopped up broccoli. Get that shit.
Best Curry Dish
I love arguing about what the best Thai food in St. Paul is. Great. Awesome conversation, happy to have it. I’ll even listen to your suggestions. And I’ll even respect the new Thai places that just shot up in the last couple years. But I won’t entertain discussions about the best Green Curry. Because that matter is settled. It’s going down at Ruam Mit in downtown St. Paul! How’s the buffet at Ruam Mit? unlabeled and it feels risky! How’s the ambience? Kinda basic! It’s not that bad, but it’s not Instagrammable if that’s what you’re asking. But the team who runs the place is awesome. And the food off the menu is incredible. They raise they prices maybe every month and a half but I’ll be honest, I’m gonna keep going. That green curry is absolutely out of control. So delicious. The broccoli is perfect and plentiful. The tofu is crispy and then just a touch of creamy. The basil, the creamy sauce. I want it right now, and I had close to identical green curry from somewhere else tonight. But still, I’m in. If someone walked up to my house right now at 10:38 at night and said “give me a hundred dollars and I’ll give you this green curry” I would be asking if they accepted Paypal.
The Opposite of Black Lives Matter is Black Lives Don’t Matter
One year after trying to sue the Lakeville School District and failing, some residents are again suing the school district for distributing posters that share the slogan “Black Lives Matter” on them. The request from one taxpayer in the district was for “alternative ideological viewpoints” to be presented alongside the “Black Lives Matter” post. To some quite small extent, I can understand this request. I do believe that Black Lives Matter is a political statement, and it is a political statement I agree with. If this person asked for political statements to not be included in any school printed materials, perhaps there would be credence to their request. But, the request was to include “alternative ideological viewpoints”. The viewpoints suggested include “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter”. I find both of these “viewpoints” to be not reprehensible in a vacuum, but reprehensible as a counter-statement to “Black Lives Matter”. How are these alternatives? These are supplementary, right? Am I not able to believe that “All Lives Matter” while simultaneously believing that “Black Lives Matter”? Of course I am. I believe Black Lives Matter and I believe that that sentiment deserves proverbial highlighter right now. I believe it deserves highlighter in a way that “All Lives” do not. I do not believe that our country has an utter disregard for all human life. I do not believe that “All Lives Matter” is a justifiable rallying cry independent of the rallying cry it is a kneejerk reaction to. I also believe it is clear in many ways that police officers’ lives are valued, are revered, are treasured. I believe that if someone feels the need to demand respect for police officers’ lives as a reaction to people demanding respect for Black lives, it is a very telling kneejerk response.
The name of the taxpayer is Bob Cajune, he pays taxes in Lakeville and he and others want a say in what those tax dollars are doing. Has Bob Cajune complained that the Susan J. Kommen Race for the Cure should also fund research into other cancers? I would guess that he has not. Because focusing funding on a particular form of cancer does not cause the same jealousy, fear and illogical thinking that focusing attention on Black people does. It is laughably reactionary to believe that yelling “Blue Lives Matter” is some “alternative ideology” to “Black Lives Matter”. It’s just a thing people want to scream who believe that if you care about the lives of Black people you are committed to not caring about the lives of police officers. I believe the basic request by Mr. Cajune and the others plaintiffs is “don’t use my taxpayer to buy ink that spells the words black lives matter without reminding the babies that all lives matter”. What is so threatening about the term “Black Lives Matter”? What is so divisive about it? What is the resistance to the idea that Black Lives Matter? Humanity and reverence for the loss of life are not zero sum qualities. I can be concerned about Black people being killed by fellow civilians, be the assailants Black or not. I can be concerned about Black people being killed at disproportionate rates by police officers. If you believe that being concerned with the safety of police officers and being concerned with the safety of Black people are mutually exclusive or alternatives to one another, I sincerely hope you are not a police officer, and I sincerely hope you have an answer for why you think they are opposite sides of one coin.
Join Me Whilst I DJ at The Macanda HiFi Record Bar
Well friends, your prayers have been answered. This Sunday you get to witness the fun of a Sean McPherson DJ set. I stepped my game up to play a wedding earlier this summer and I’ve been jonesin’ to get back on the turntables in public, though it is an honor to serenade my dog Warren in my basement. But this Sunday I’m bringing the records out to Wayzata, I’ll be focusing on the groove side of my record collection and I’ve beefed that up in the past couple months. Prepare for some great jams off the turntables and enjoy a spot that is already building a great reputation in the Twin Cities dining scene.
I love the feeling of playing records for people and exploring how the songs sound in a new space. I hope you’ll come through if you’re free on Sunday.
A Thank You To Stage One
photo of Stage One, by Ben Kressel
This is a Thank You to a Twin Cities Hip-Hop Icon, Stage One, who will be on hand to see a series of photos he curated throughout the past decade inducted into the Minnesota Historical Society on Friday September 9, 2022 at 1pm.
Sometimes when influential people get something wrong about you, but still remember you, it still warms your heart. Chali 2na from Jurassic5 thinks I’m the drummer in Heiruspecs, I’m actually the bassist. And Aesop Rock thinks my own name is Heiruspecs, it’s actually Sean. Here’s video of us (Tasha, Peter, Josh, moi) playing together 20 years ago! You can find us at 19:22.
And for a time the Twin Cities icon and Sure Shot Brother Stage One thought my name was Heiruspecs, and I had zero complaints cause he was always a hero to me.
About 2001 I was part of a backing band that supported a bi-weekly open mic at the Dinkytowner hosted by Truth Maze and Stage One holding it down as the DJ. I think it was put together by MNSWA and E.G. Bailey and Sha Cage in particular. Before I had ever met him, I knew that Stage was a very important part of the story of Twin Cities hip-hop. I knew that from Felix in Heiruspecs, from Slug in Atmosphere, from New MC in Kanser. It was known that Stage’s homes throughout the years had been the epicenter for some great freestyling sessions, that Stage was on the turntables at some of the best events in the Twin Cities and that he was well-respected for his time as a graffiti writer as well. I had seen him DJ a handful of times before we worked together and I knew he was elite. When I did get to share a bill with him I was in awe of his presence and all I really got to know was his presence. The turntables were strangely far away from the stage at the Dinkytowner. Stage was quiet and I was scared as shit to bother him. He was older than me, he was a legend. But his support and respect was inspiring to me. He would tastefully join in just a bit on the turntables when our band was playing, adding a bit, commenting through his scratches on what we were doing. When we would deliver a well-known groove he would give us that knowing look that he saw what we were doing and he approved. Weeks of the gig went by before he just said “hey Heiruspecs” to just me as I was walking up those Dinkytowner stairs probably to have a cigarette. This greeting let me know that Stage was aware enough of what Heiruspecs was doing in town to know what our name was. I was absolutely elated. I had zero interest in correcting him and mentioning that my name was Sean or god forbid trying to explain to a grown ass DJ that my stage name was Twinkie Jiggles. I was just excited that this OG that I held in high regard knew the name Heiruspecs. The weeks went by and the open mic got real good. Imagine the firepower you have when Truth Maze is hosting, Stage One is DJing. . .and the band was nice?? We had a lot of fun. Poets pushing us to new heights, us doing the same. Known poets who were big on the scene making sure they got to our event. And Stage was the glue, chiming in during set breaks with full sets of incredible music but also making himself part of the open mic element as well. It was a magical run and I can’t really remember why we stopped.
This is a long way of saying that I’ve known Stage for a long time and I’ve had respect for him for even longer than that. Stage, like so many talented artists from the Twin Cities shipped off for Atlanta for an extended period of time. I didn’t have much opportunity to connect with Stage during that time but after he moved back to Minnesota he kept me informed of what was happening for him and his musical compatriots. By this time he knew my name was Sean and I was elated that he was eager to share his knowledge with me. He was connected with artists from the Twin Cities that weren’t on my radar and through our discussions I was able to feature them on the Current, celebrate their music and document the Twin Cities music scene more completely. And sadly, sometimes when I interviewed Stage during my tenure at the Current it was to cover a death of an icon from the Twin Cities. We spoke when the legend Disco T died here. Stage knew it was his duty to share insight about people from his world who passed, but he did it with a heavy heart, I knew it took a lot out of him to share his stories with me, and I appreciated him doing it. On a happier note, we worked it out to get some of Stage’s mixes on the air in the summer of 2021 and it was one of my proudest moments to hear his mixes blaring in my car on an FM dial. It was an honor to have a closer connection with him. He was always quick to talk about the younger and the older artists he cared about in the scene, he always pushed the spotlight off of himself and onto US, onto the Twin Cities hip-hop scene. It was clear he felt a sense of duty to try to lay the history down correctly. The man wrote a book about his life growing up in the Twin Cities and his connection to the Twin Cities hip-hop scene. Documenting this scene is part of his mission.
And a big part of that mission to celebrate and document Minnesota hip-hop has been his series of “A Great Day in Minnesota Hip-Hop” photos. Since 2010 Stage has placed open calls to graffiti writers, DJs, B-boys and girls, MCs and more to come together for a photo to document the scene. I say document as opposed to celebrate because I know it isn’t always simply a celebration. There are parts of the Twin Cities hip-hop scene that don’t deserve a celebration; they deserve accountability, they deserve contrition. But, in my opinion, the scene deserves documentation, and through years of effort we are seeing these photos get the treatment they deserve. I got out to the photo shoot for the 2021 picture but my four year old was on a departure schedule that didn’t line up with me being there for the actual photo. But frankly, it was enough for me just to see old friends meeting up after years, some visiting non-family members for the first time since the start of the pandemic. It was a beautiful morning in Minneapolis and to see Stage organizing, conversing and navigating the laundry list of issues that come up during a significant undertaking like a large scale portrait left me glowing.
On Friday September 9 at 1pm a handful of these portraits are going to go into the collection at the Minnesota Historical Society. I imagine this is a big moment for Stage, but really it’s a big moment for so many people. It’s a moment for every hip-hop artist who thought that their work, their sacrifices and their visions might never be saved for posterity. There are so many efforts to tamp down on black expression and there might be even more to tamp down on letting those documents of black expression share space in the hallowed halls of institutions like the Minnesota Historical Society. For decades now Stage One has been placing his thumb and his entire body weight on the opposite side, using his voice and his knowledge to document black expression by celebrating hip-hop, by being a mouthpiece for parts of the scene that are too often brushed over or dismissed and for making sure everybody gets in the frame. Thank you Stage.
Found Something to Do on Labor Day
I have a magical friend in Duluth named Steph who lives in a magical house. Every house she has ever lived in has been magical. I met Steph when she was a server at the Green Mill in St. Paul for a handful of months in 2006 maybe? Somehow a couple hangs turned into a lifelong friendship. She’s an artist. She’s an interior designer. She has a reverence and fascination with the world that constantly inspires me. You know how people mention a great singer and say “I could listen to that singer sing the phonebook!”? I have a similar thing with Steph, I could read the phonebook with her and we’d discover something together, something magical about it. She brings magic with her, to everything.
Anywho, Steph said that Rachel and I could bring the kids up to Duluth for part of the weekend cause she’d be out of town. It was just the invitation we needed because:
1) Have you tried to book a hotel in Duluth? It’s impossible.
2) There’s a reason! Duluth is amazing and we were very excited to get there
I’m sure I’m cursing it, but traveling with the kids is getting just slightly easier. My oldest is five, she doesn’t have absolute nonsense tantrums anymore. Her tantrums exist, they’re rare, and while not logical. . .they are explainable. For the two year old, they are still random and unexplainable, but they are getting a bit shorter and a bit more directable.
We got to Duluth in high spirits and enjoyed a visit to Lake Superior where despite the sixty degree weather and the frigid water my daughters adventured in with their toes, lost many of Steph’s cooking utensils we had taken for sand time and generally had the biggest smiles on their faces on planet Earth.
In the same way that I spent years programming myself for how to take some lived experience and force it into the size of a tweet, the size of a facebook post, the size of an instagram post I now have something healthier but it still synthesizing real life into communication. I breathe in my moments slower, I think about how I’ll talk about it on this blog, I’ll think about how I’ll remember it for myself. This moment from Saturday September 3rd 2022: we are at the Lift Bridge Beach in Duluth, a woman is spending 40 seconds trying to get her cigarette lit against the will of the winds coming off of Lake Superior. Parents are standing by the water, kids are dipping toes in. T-shirts are getting wet. Kids are getting cold. Young men in wet suits are leaving with the pride that comes from surviving something difficult. Dogs are on leashes. And Rachel, Sadie, Naomi and I are having a beautiful time. I’m making sure Sadie and Naomi are safe, but they are being safe. Rachel is also making sure the kids are safe. And we are spending a kind of simple time together that can’t be found without a body of water.
We made our way back up to Pizza Luce Duluth after that. I have a very intimate relationship with Pizza Luce Duluth which I know is a strange thing to say about a pizza place. But that room is the place where I felt the closest to being a rock star. Heiruspecs played there before there was a stage. And we built our crowd there from nothing, to a guaranteed sell-out. I signed a woman’s breast in that bar. That’s not a big thumbs up 2022 approved moment, but it’s a part of my story and at the time I thought it was the most amazing thing on planet Earth. Beyond any Sharpie/cleavage moments what I really felt about Duluth was that when Heiruspecs came to town it was exciting for Duluth. Heiruspecs would get recognized at restaurants, we’d get love walking into the Electric Fetus across the street. Luce would give us free dinner, free drinks and then give us free brunch the next day. The shows were legendary, at least to me and Duluth. We were in our element and the crowd was with us. I remember us playing the first weekend of UMD one year and I’m sure they turned away at least 250 people, it was just absolutely packed. The first person who brought Heiruspecs up there, long before they were doing much music at all is no longer with us. His name is Scott and he was a truly amazing dude. We then worked with Maria Hickey who was also an incredible leader at Luce. That probably all wrapped up by 2004 and every show we’ve done there since was booked by Paige Doty who is actually still there. I thought I would have no chance of seeing her there because generally if someone has worked at a spot for twenty years they are probably getting Labor Day Weekend off. Not Paige! So I got to see her which was magical.
Me McPherson Left, Paige Doty Right
My feelings with Pizza Luce Duluth are deep because at one point in my musical career I thought a spot liked Pizza Luce was a stop along the way to super stardom. The way it was for Trampled By Turtles. I thought I’d be back years later as a wildly successful critically acclaimed musician. I’d be sharing an artichoke dip with Al Sparhawk from Low discussing who should produce my next record. And the truth is, that’s not where I or Heiruspecs wound up. Heiruspecs is a part of the story of Minnesota music. There’s years where we were delivering the best live shows in the state. There’s years where we were delivering some of the best live shows in the country. We aren’t a household name. Next time I can talk five other men in their late thirties to drive two hours, stay up til one in the morning, split a pizza and make $150 a piece we’ll play to a reasonably full but not sold out Pizza Luce. I’ll love it, I’ll stay at Steph’s house, I’ll stay out too late, we’ll listen to a Leonard Cohen record in the morning, drink the greatest coffee I’ve ever tasted and I’ll feel all the complicated feelings I have about my life, my path and Duluth. And I’ll also feel all the pure feelings I have about a friend like Steph, about a band like Heiruspecs, about a city like Duluth. I’ve found something more sustainable and more rewarding both financially and emotionally than being a bass player. I am a part of beautiful music everyday. I am a part of a lot of people’s afternoons every day. I love it. But when I step back into Pizza Luce I’m reminded of the trajectory I thought I was on for a handful of years, and I’m reminded of the fact that Duluth thought I was on that trajectory too.
The next morning we got breakfast at the greatest restaurant with a name so awkward it makes Ruth Chris’s Steakhouse seem normal. It’s “At Sarah’s Table Chester Creek Cafe”. It’s a great spot to eat. To my St. Paul tastebuds it’s “Day by Day Cafe” combined with the “Birchwood Cafe”. The next stop was the most magical though. Felix from Heiruspecs told me about a spot way past Canal Park that has an amazing beach. I believe I have only been past Canal Park once in my life to drop a friend off at her house. HOLY SHIT! That is beautiful. And the beach we got to was amazing. Again, ignoring the mother-nature-supplied cues of temperature my children demanded entry into their semi wet swimsuits for another go round. But today the play was even more inspired. The sun was shining. Rachel and I sat far apart for much of the time. Rachel got some time to catch her breath and collect her thoughts. . .leaving a friend’s house in working condition while also getting hungry kids into the car is quite the feat. If you stay at a hotel you can just leave the place in a burning pyre behind you Keyser Soze style, but can’t do that with Steph’s house.
That time let me really hone in on the kid’s playing together. Watching Sadie explore new spaces is unbelievable. It’s as if she has this choreographed yet improvised spirit that I simply can’t take my eyes off. It looks like she knows exactly what she’s doing and has no idea what she’s going to do next. It’s this music of chance that is so inspired and so pure. It’s different than when she was two, it’s for sure different than what she’ll be as an adult. It’s a magic time of childhood, in a magical city, in Minnesota. I captured a totally “taken on an iphone” quality photo of her. It’s incredible. Duluth, thank you.
The Most Iconic Performers I’ve Ever Seen Live
I’m getting old enough where I realize I might lose track of some of the great musicians I’ve seen in my day. So I’m starting a list:
Prince
Elvin Jones
Earth, Wind & Fire
Beyonce
B.B. King
Ray Brown
D’Angelo
Erykah Badu
The Roots
The Isley Brothers
Herbie Hancock (w/ Dave Holland & others)
Etta James
Kendrick Lamar
Outkast
A Tribe Called Quest
De La Soul
Levon Helm
Pinetop Perkins
Mos Def (Yasiin Bey)
Kanye West
Pearl Jam
Christian McBride
James Cotton
Ahmad Jamal
Ice Cube
Lauryn Hill
Caetono Veloso
INXS
Sleater-Kinney
Bruce Springsteen
Wu-Tang Clan
Soundgarden
Method Man and Redman
I’ve seen a lot of other shows, some of them incredibly amazing, but I think this is relatively complete for the super iconic ones.
The Perils of Leadership
I got together with the old side project Big Trouble on Thursday at The White Squirrel. Big Trouble spent a shaky decade playing pretty often. I think we formed around 2007. We never made a proper record, I think we only set foot in a studio once. When we had the money/energy to record we were more likely to connect with our favorite vocalist, Crescent Moon, for a session. Those sessions turned into pretty amazing recordings. Check them out here:
Playing songs you used to play all the time feels a certain way. It feels familiar, and it also brings you back to the spirits, good and bad that you had at that time. And it helps you realize how the years have changed you. When I was playing bass with Big Trouble, I was playing music all the time. 2-3 shows a week, probably averaging 2 rehearsals a week. Making albums, writing songs, practicing to some extent. I spent a lot of years where music was my main source of income and Big Trouble was a part of that bucket. So my fingers had this dexterity, my ears were perked up. But, the downside of playing lots of music is that at times I failed to bring the reverence for the process that music really deserves. One can be overloaded with music, going from gig to gig without the appreciation the music deserves.
I also could feel some of the negative sides of my youthful spirit at play on stage. I’ve spent time in most projects I run feeling like the other members de facto know I’m going to do a lot of the ambassadorial lifting for the band. I’m gonna pay the taxes, I’m gonna cut the checks, I’m gonna book the gigs, I’m gonna call the set. I’ve gotten to quite a good spot about that in Heiruspecs. And I should actually say we have, not I have. There is both more shared duties and a very modest recognition financially of some of the extra roles that I and Felix carry on. That feels like pretty good terrain. Doing these things for Big Trouble is harder. It’s harder cause it’s less active and because my brother is in the band. I don’t even know how to explain it to somebody who doesn’t have a brother, but doing some kind of creative and business pursuit with a casual leadership model and your brother is involved, it’s complicated. It’s not even bad, it’s just complicated. And I can feel all my youthful tension inside my middle aged body while I’m trying to also respond to the moment musically. Different than I could’ve before, I was able to let that tension exist, look at it, and continue to explore it and the things surrounding it.
There’s a bigger question in these struggles, if you’re kind of the leader dude, what do you do? Do you embrace that? Do you force yourself out of that role? When are you being a good leader? And when are you being the extrovert white dude asking and answering every question? And when in my life has my willingness to be a leader actually been because I knew I couldn’t be a good worker bee? I’ve struggled with bad pitch as a musician. I’ve had bad practice techniques between rehearsals. I jumped on being a leader because it was in my comfort zone. Sing a third above you? Probably not! Talk to the irritable sound guy who hates rap? I got you. Transcribe that strange chord progression? I’ll try! Book an East Coast tour, I got you. I spent so much of my twenties pretending that I was just spectacular. I spent so much time bossing other people around when i should’ve looked inward to work on my craft, to humbly invest time in trying to be great. When Heiruspecs got to a certain level of fame I thought the only work I should do is get us to the next level by muscle. I never thought I could help get us to the next level by me making myself better as a bassist. I still practiced, but I don’t think my spirit was in improvement. I thought I could do my best work as a project manager. And maybe that’s true, but I project managed at the expense of actually working on the project. And I want to fix that, I want the next decades of my life to be aligned differently. I think that’s partially why I’ve been pretty resistant to working management in my radio career. It’s also not like I’ve been offered a bunch of management gigs and turned them down, it’s just not something I’m angling to do.
I want to fundamentally embrace the challenge of being better at the craft of being a radio DJ and music director. I don’t want to focus on pointing fingers, planning campaigns. I want to deliver excellent interviews, provide opportunities for folks who listen to Jazz88 to fall in deeper with the music we play, to feel compelled to take in a show, to buy a record, to recommend an artist because they feel a deeper connection to the music. I want to program the music in such a way that someone who is a casual listener of jazz goes deeper, finds new favorites, gets engaged with the music. And I want to give the type of experiences that I think the best Music Directors and DJs do, they make their cities better, not just cooler, better. It becomes a better city to start a band in, it becomes a better city to do a benefit in, it becomes a better city to be young in. It becomes a better city to be old in. I want to bring that all in. And I don’t want the fact that my career is off to a good start stand in the way of me bringing it to a great end.
Managing and fancying yourself a manager is a challenging place to be. I don’t think I’ve always done it well and I don’t think I’ve always done it for the right reasons. The next time I approach that work, I want to change somethings about how I do it.
Cucumber Library.
The Diamond Sea, A Merman I Should Turn To Be
The magical long rock song is an elusive thing. A lot of times it’s just a short rock song built wrong, with a half idea stretched too thin. A Chet Holmgren of a rock song. When I’m talking “long” I’m talking over ten minutes. Something that is over ten minutes is kind of by definition epic, but I don’t want a song that is “Bohemian Rhapsody” with another four minutes of fanfare sewn on. I want something that is more patient and is not epic in a narrative way. I want something that is epic that way a mountain is, by dint of majesty. Now that we’ve established that, here are the three best long rock songs of all time.
Jimi Hendrix - 1983. . .A Merman I Should Turn To Be
It’s the drum fills, it’s the intimacy. How do you make a song about a cursed future without sounding kind of like a pompous science fiction vibe? Jimi did it on this song. In one of my proudest moments on the radio I played this late into the night on a Saturday on the Current and encouraged everyone to turn off the lights and crank up the speakers with me. I’ve spoken to a couple people who did it. . .we all had an amazing time.
Sonic Youth - The Diamond Sea
This song is so close to being bad. It is a dirge, it is repetitive, I feel like Thurston Moore’s lyrics are just on the edge of being overly precious. But the totality of the song, the impact of the noisy parts, it adds up to something.
Television - Marquee Moon
I can’t really say if this song plays by any of the rules I talked about above. What I do know is that this is one of the best ways to spend ten minutes. As you come around every corner there is a feeling of each part meaning more, earning more attention and study. The writing of this song and the revelation of this song. I can’t point to many songs that laid the groundwork for some shit like this. What is the song that isn’t Marquee Moon from before Marquee Moon that sounds remotely like Marquee Moon? I can’t point to one.
Why I Want to Own a Liquor Store
Me by Brenna
Once the big record hits with Heiruspecs and I make my millions I want to own a liquor store. I’d play great radio stations, I’d play great records. I’d carry significantly less wine than most of these spots carry nowadays. That’s too much wine and you know it.
I think I’d like to stand around a liquor store and listen to records and sell people alcohol. There are so many things that might not be perfect about this situation. Running a business is hard. I don’t know anything about liquor. When I’m old will I want to stand up all day? My old roommate worked at Big Top and she said it was really hard to sell people liquor who she knew would be back later in the day for another little bottle.
But I have this strong feeling that I don’t want to do “knowledge work” cause it sounds like it is already terrible and getting more terrible. When I finish DJing I feel like I did a thing and that thing is done. There’s more work to go, there’s something else to do, but a couple hours of radio were crafted and delivered by me. I find that satisfying. It scratches a lot of the same itches that playing a live show does to be honest with you.
Frankly, I think it’ll take a lot to pull me away from DJing on the radio. I really love it, I feel quite talented on it and I think I can meet some of my larger life goals while doing this work. But if you want to sell me a liquor store, slide in the contact form my friends.
Long Live the New Twin Cities, Long Live Old Saint Paul
COVID is chasing my family. I caught COVID in Seattle at the beginning of August. Miraculously, none of my family caught it. Then, we bring the kids back to daycare and we find out on day one that our youngest had an exposure so she’s out for the rest of the week. This is a long way of saying I’ve been taking a lot of long walks lately which is what you do when the weather is nice and you can’t go to things as easily. I took both of my daughters down to the greatest park in the universe, Mattocks Park in St. Paul. Don’t tell anyone about it please, it’s perfect.
When you walk back to my house from Mattocks Park you get to see a nice slice of New St. Paul. First let’s go back at get some definitions.
There’s an exciting group of media professionals led by a guy named Fresh that work under the name Motivation to Hustle. Best place to follow them is Instagram. They share new artists, they share hilarious traffic interactions, they call out BS in the Twin Cities. The term they’ve coined and I’ve embraced is the “New Twin Cities”. I think this phrase can mean a lot of things but I take it to mean a more representative celebration of the Twin Cities. I’ve spent plenty of years living in and seeing a different Twin Cities than I was ever able to read about in major publications or here represented on the radio. To me “The New Twin Cities” celebrates the idea of actually celebrating, amplifying, and monetizing the truly diverse metro area we are. So, I love the phrase the New Twin Cities and I love Motivation to Hustle. Let me tell you what I love even more. . .old St. Paul.
There may be no better representation of old St. Paul than the yard behind Spyhouse at the corner of Palace and Snelling. Let’s cover some things.
It’s kind of a coup that Spyhouse is in St. Paul at all - I think of Spyhouse as specializing in coffee in fancy neighborhoods for fancy people who have 24-inch MacBooks and rode to the coffeeshop on a $1,000 bike while wearing a blazer. I believe Spyhouse in St. Paul replaced an antique shop that was open maybe twelve hours a week total. That place was old St. Paul. Spyhouse is all sorts of new St. Paul. It’s filled everyday with people I never see otherwise in my neighborhood, $500 eyeglasses, dogs that look like they have last names and wills, sandals with a single strap that seems to float above the toes et cetera. More power to them (and even more power to the dedicated employees who attempted to unionize Spyhouse). But here’s the great thing; the Spyhouse yard is a war between new St. Paul and old St. Paul and old St. Paul has won.
If you head to the backyard of Spyhouse what you are going to see is a beautiful angular, dark wood patio that occupies let’s say 44% of the grassy area. It is comfortably appointed with bolted down furniture that can accommodate skinny people drinking espressos while talking about “ideation”. It’s beautiful and the people who hang out there are beautiful. I’ve sat there, it feels spectacular, I felt beautiful.
Occupying the other 56% of the yard is presumably the domain of one of the renters who lives above Spyhouse. For years this backyard has belonged to this lady and she could give exactly zero shits that there is now a fancy coffeeshop taking up some of her real estate. She has one iron-wrought table out there with a couple of those iron-wrought chairs and the grand majority of weekend days you can find this sun-kissed early 40s blond sitting out there with a 72 oz. cup full of ice that is melting something, a hard pack of cigarettes with a lighter perched atop, and a full serving of “fuck off today is my day off and I’m smoking these cigarettes”. I LOVE HER AND EVERYTHING SHE STANDS FOR. Here’s why I love her:
she is the actual greener grass.
When I walk up Palace en route to Mattocks Park I first see the hipsters, the parking of bikes, the saucers, the full charged iphones sitting on notebooks with charcoal pencils. I think to myself, that’s the life, that’s what I need. I bet if I use that planning software I downloaded I’d truly be happy.
AND THEN I SEE MY SUNKISSED OLD ST. PAUL GODDESS and I think “screw you Koffeeboi, this is the life, catching a sunburn in the 55105, playing Thin Lizzy off of a cracked screen iphone from a free Spotify account while pulling on a couple Spirits before heading to Costco for reinforcements for the week ahead.”
Dear Snelling Ave Sun Goddess,
I love you, I want to spend my life at that table with you slightly irritating the hipsters. Can I bum a smoke? Can we spend eternity together. Can I borrow your lighter?
N.B. - If you are looking for the Old St. Paul coffeeshop in the neighborhood in humbly submit J&S Coffee on Randolph and Saratoga. Do they still sell CDs from local artists? Do musicians sometimes play shows there? Are there picture of people holding bags of J&S Coffee all over God’s Green Earth? Is the coffee incredible? Does a dude named Dakota work there who my daughter is obsessed with? The answer to all these questions are a definitive yes.
Now that we’ve established Old St. Paul let me tell you some of the Old St. Paul highlights of my life:
I was with a woman who tried to order a Budweiser at a brewery in St. Paul. Amazing.
I adore everyone who will not entertain the possibility of any better burger in the universe than the Nook. Old St. Paul
We have a grocery store in the neighborhood called Oxendale’s. Until maybe 2019 it was called Korte’s. If you’re new St. Paul you don’t even shop there, you go to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s if you have to. But if you have to utter the name of the grocery store you call it Oxendale’s. If you’re St. Paul you call it Korte’s. IF YOU ARE OLD ST. PAUL you call it Knowlan’s which is what is was called when I was in high school.
Old St. Paul doesn’t call it Ayd Mill Road, they call it the Short-line.
Martin Devaney’s dad is old St. Paul, he crosses himself when he goes into Minneapolis
I was with a dude who tried to order a whiskey-diet at a brewery in St. Paul. Also amazing.
If you see Betsy Hodges, Mayor Frey or any other Minneapolis mayor they are always doing something to be noticed. They are doing the electric slide poorly, or fake scooping food at a soup kitchen with a ring light next to them. One time I saw St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman just demolishing a plate of fried rice from Lee’s Express by himself at a random table in the skyway. Old St. Paul. I wonder if he wrote that off. Probably not. Old St. Paul.
If you’re old St. Paul you first park where the Cheapo used to be and then risk your god damn life crossing all four lanes of Snelling to get some record you wanted
If you’re old St. Paul you are still amazed at the route changes for the 21 that they introduced legitimately 10 years ago
If you’re old St. Paul none of your favorite places to see movies are still open.
If you’re old St. Paul you are unironically excited about meat raffles
Long live the New Twin Cities. Long live Old St. Paul and long live the suns out guns out goddess of the Spyhouse backyard.
It’s Hard to Find a Friend
Erick Anderson - Aka AfroKeys at the Blues Saloon 08/16/22
It’s hard to make friends period end of paragraph. It’s hard to find a friend is also a great record.
It’s harder to make friends when you’re grown up. I do think it’s harder for men to make friends with men. It’s harder to make friends once you got kids unless you make friends with the other people that have kids your age. And it’s a grand coincidence when you like the people your kids go to school with, it happens, but it’s a grand coincidence.
By my count I’ve made about five serious friends since having kids who aren’t also my neighbors or friends I met through daycare. One of those friends is Erick Anderson aka Afrokeys. I got to step out and celebrate Erick’s birthday last night and see him in his element, playing incredible keyboard. It warmed my heart.
We’re St. Paul musicians a certain age so we’ve crossed paths in small ways for years. We even played a couple gigs back together in maybe 2010-2012 both with Dessa and with my solo project. But we weren’t friends. In the early pandemic the universe brought us together. Basketball brought us together. Agreeing that a big national tour of Sam Cooke’s music curated and led by Har Mar Superstar was a problematic venture brought us together. And we were living blocks apart from one another for much of the pandemic. We slipped into some kind of rhythm where a fair amount of Friday nights turned into a bonfire gathering in my backyard. We had a nice rotating cast; neighbors, members of Heiruspecs, Nina Moini and a couple other folks. It felt like a little bonfire salon where a lot of people peed outside due to COVID cautions.
But some nights it was just Erick and I. And we’d listen to different records, or different radio stations and talk about different things with varying levels of seriousness. Adulthood struggles, parenting struggles, adulthood joys, parenting joys. We started playing ping-pong once I got a ping-pong table. I believe I beat him enough at ping-pong that he encouraged me to play pickleball where he routinely kicks my ass. My last night on The Current I was on until midnight and there was a snow storm. Erick and his girlfriend Camolly were one of few people nice enough to make the trek out and raise a glass. I bet this sounds wildly mundane to you. Middle age dudes doing middle age things. But, something about the friendship being at the center of it is what I love. We are only loosely in the same “circle”, we’ve both done a lot of hip-hop music, but we don’t share a group of close friends. We didn’t meet through our kids or through our partners. We don’t run into each other. But we go out of our way to hang, to play pickleball, to get some drinks, to go out to each other’s birthdays.
I spent most of my driving time yesterday listening to a podcast from the Ezra Klein show (he had a sub host, Roge Karma). It was maddening. It was about working from home, the end of the office, the monitored “knowledge” worker. I found the podcast interesting and I became grateful for so many aspects of my job. I thought I wanted to be one of the latte fancy folks using fifteen types of software to better organize the parameters of what the locus of the organization is. I don’t. I want dirty hands from picking records, playing bass and passing out trivia sheets. I don’t feel monitored minute by minute here at Jazz88. I feel like there are very high expectations placed on me to modernize and streamline how we discover, feature and promote new music. There are expectations for me to improve ratings and I can imagine catching an earful if ratings took a nosedive. This is a long way of saying, I will be judged by my results here at Jazz88. Do listeners appreciate the new music we are presenting? Are people continuing to listen to the radio in the afternoon? As the music director are you connecting with artists and labels and establishing a good network in the jazz world? These inquiries that are focused results mean that from minute to minute I feel free to do my work in the way that fits me. I love what I do, I think I do a damn good job at it. If the results say otherwise, I can work with that, I can change based on that rubric. But if my employer was measuring keystrokes, stuffing the calendar with meaningless meetings cause it looks good. . .I’d lose it. I don’t get paid per word, I don’t get paid per post. I get paid to make a great product, whether it be our music library, our label relations or my hosting on the Afternoon Cruise. What a lot of knowledge workers do is B.S. And it’s not that they themselves are B.S., it’s that the system is. They have to masquerade around with empty meetings and stack up mountains of inefficient hours. They do that to feed a system that requires it. I don’t bring much work home. I listen to Jazz88 and other radio stations all the time, I pursue new music, I think about how to synthesize my experiences as a music lover, musician and human being into good moments on the radio. But if you send an email to me at 10pm you’re getting a response the next day. I want my life. I want my children to see me. I’ve got a job where I miss their early evening hours, setting the table, walking the dog, doing a project, maybe practicing the clarinet. I miss all that. When I do get home I don’t want to have my nose in my inbox. I want to live a life that includes work without excluding the rest of life. I’ve gotten better work/life balance during the pandemic and it sounds like a lot of you haven’t. But my journey towards living a life outside of work started before 2020. One person that got me off the workaholic program was Radio Man Brian Oake. He came into the Current with such impressive work credentials I figured he was a work-all-the-time-guy but he made it very clear that he had some pretty firm borders. He didn’t have work email on his phone, he wasn’t defined by his job. It was impressive to see somebody who is so definitively RADIO MAN in this town not be defined by it himself. It inspired me to know that one needs a friend group, an identity, a passion that exists outside of your workplace.
There was a really important part of the podcast; the host asked about workers who will miss going into the office because they want to see their friends, they want to have human connection. This is a reasonable concern but one of the guests pointed out, “that’s not what jobs are! Jobs are transactional”. I’m an entrepreneur, I own a business, I do want Trivia Mafia to be more than just a blood sucking business. When we have kickball leagues and holiday parties it’s because I DON’T want Trivia Mafia to be purely transactional. I want people to be paid fairly for their work and I want them to be also treated as awesome friends who deserve parties and kickball. But, work is fundamentally transactional. You should have a life outside of work. And it sounds like a lot of people don’t. I’ve got a demanding job that doesn’t eat up every waking hour of my life. I have time for friends, I have time for bonfires, I have time for some travel, I have time for my children, I have time for my neighbor, I have time for pickleball, I have time to make a blog. It shouldn’t be, but this is uncommon. I’m glad in this world I’ve made time for friends and my friends have made time for me. I don’t think it’s healthy to just see the people you work with and your family. And I think that podcast is right, it’s not your job’s job to make sure you have a social life. . .they can help, but if they are your answer to all non familial contact, that’s on you.
It’s hard to make a friend. It’s hard to keep a friend. It’s hard to do that in Minnesota cause according to recent arrivals, nobody every reaches out for the second time. It’s hard to do friendship in 2022. But I’m thankful for my friends and I’m glad I got to see Erick behind the organ last night on his birthday.
Good For My Body, Good for Your Body
Clockwise from left: Tasha, Me (Alexei in the back), Heiruspecs, Heiruspecs with a random, Me. All 2003.
Today in therapy we spoke about photos of ourselves, about how we relate to our body and how we present our body. Especially how we present our bodies on stages and in public. I have unique feelings about this. I am a white man from a notably white part of the country, Western Massachusetts. I didn’t see a lot of people dancing growing up. I didn’t see a lot of people expressing themselves with their bodies. I didn’t see a lot of people engaging with their bodies or other people’s bodies. It was a physically distant place.
I started to feel something different when I got comfortable playing with Heiruspecs. I felt a freedom on stage that was nothing I had ever felt before. I felt a freedom to move my body and to let the energy I felt for the music come through my fingers but also through my legs, through my face, through my arms, through my whole body. I felt an ability to send my emotions out to the world through my body. It felt freeing, it felt revolutionary, it felt sexual and it felt sexy. And I felt special doing it being fat. We ask fat people to keep their bodies quiet. My best friend’s on Earth will say “I don’t even really think of you as a fat person”. We’ve made that verboten to say for black folks; it isn’t a compliment to tell black friends that you don’t even consider them black. But we agree that the ultimate goal for a fat person is to transcend fatness. But on stage with Heiruspecs I felt I was forcing my fatness, my talent, my charisma, my sexy into the space. It was all a part of what I was expressing. That felt powerful, to not be apologizing for my size, to not be hoping it would go unnoticed. Notice it, love it, and dance with me. Dance with us. Dance with this energy we have. This was good for my body, this was good for my soul. I don’t get to be in that space very much anymore, a couple Heiruspecs shows a year and your mind is different when you are dusting off the bass for the first time in months, I’m using different muscles, I”m thinking about different thing.
The overarching work I’m doing with my therapist is about blame. I have a lot of blame issues, they go way back. Everything I’m working on goes way back. I’m a scorekeeper. I’m a get even guy. I’m a definitely don’t forget and probably don’t forgive guy. That’s served me in the past but it doesn’t serve me now. Not everything gets a ledger line, you can’t titrate karma. And I know that this scorekeeping has done tremendous damage to my soul, to my body. In our touring days I was an evangelist for something more elevated than blame, something that raised me and hopefully our audiences above that self-doubt, that self-critique. There was something bulletproof about the magic we had on stage and my body was an ingredient in that magic. But it wasn’t just goodness in that magic.
For the first time in my life I’m not taking the good with the bad wholesale. There was something magic there, but I was vindictive, I was impossibly overbearing, I was controlling, I wasn’t living my best life. And I can keep the good in, take the bad out. I can titrate my formulas, I can find better paths. Paths that let the hard times wash over me without me finding someone to blame, so often finding it to be me or my wife.
But right now I think about how good that time with Heiruspecs was for my body. Finding a new way to show my emotions. Finding a new way to show myself. Showing the small but dedicated group of people who like Heiruspecs that a young, fat man could talk through his body, could share his spirit with his movements. It’s a line of communication that goes so unused by so many and I’m glad I used it, I’m glad I found it and I want to dance again.
Easing into Kindergarten in Stages
Sadie Levitt McPherson
Today marks the first day of kindergarten camp for my oldest daughter Sadie. One week half days, a dry run for what is coming in September. I tried to explain to Sadie how different the world was when I started kindergarten, in 1986. My mom cried when I went to kindergarten and I didn’t understand why. I assumed she would be happy I would be gone more. And that wasn’t pure hyperbole, my mom brought a lot of negative energy into that era of my childhood. It would stand to reason that less of me would be good news for her. But little stands to reason about how a parent feels when their children make a life transition. I think my mother cried cause her youngest was getting older, no matter how much I bothered her I was growing up and there’s something worth crying about there. And now my oldest is getting older. She’s relating to the world different. She has that inspiring combination of curiosity and courage that is stretching its arms as wide as possible to cover up some justified fear. That fear that comes from your world changing. But more than the fear she’s bringing in that opportunity to take on the trappings of the older kids. The backpack, the lunchpack, her own markers, her own things, her own projects. It scares me, it stuns me. She has this authority to engineer a moment. In the picture above you see her standing proudly next to a fire. It was her idea, her sweat equity, her multiple marshmallow snacks.
Childhood is turbulent. Childhood is transitions. Childhood is tears. Childhood is false starts. Childhood is fake friends. But childhood is yours and contrary to what my heart feels sometimes, the world is not going to squeeze out your fascination, your willingness to love hard, to care, to cry, to propose a fire party. The world didn’t squeeze it out of me, out of your mother, out of my mother. Adulthood will change us all, it changed me. But the way the world looks to you right now is often how it still looks to me; like a huge mystery, with things that I understand playing in harmony with things that completely elude me. There is a magic in holding hands with my daughter as she navigates what’s next, as she also completely exists in what is right now. I have no deep desire to protect her from anything but danger. I will protect her from things she needs no protection, I will send her headlong into things she should be shielded from, but she will crash into the walls, break the rules, build something and roast a perpetually-about-to-fall-into-the-fucking-fire marshmallow above the embers and ask her daddy if she can have another and I will say yes.