Of the Marine Bank and not much else (1983 Part 4)

I started working for the Marine Bank in Milwaukee when I started attending the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. It was early in 1983. I had just transferred schools, just moved back in with my parents, thanked my dad for co-signing a loan to pay for tuition, and needed a job. My aunt and my cousin worked at the bank, and I got a job in the mail room.

I processed mail, delivered interoffice mail to bank branches and picked up stuff. I’m never sure exactly what I was picking up. Mostly receipts and canceled checks I guess. They were in metal boxes with locks on them.

I enjoyed driving to the different branches in suburban Milwaukee. It was nice to be on the road, stopping at fast food restaurants and such as they generally gave you plenty of time to get from one destination to the next.

Most of the time I spent at a building about half a mile from the main office building, which was housed in a rather tall building for Milwaukee. Then, I got switched to corporate headquarters and had to use the freight elevator to get huge dollies full of boxes and stuff from the service entrance to the mailroom, where it could all be sorted, then delivered to the various departments.

Well, the place demanded dress shoes as I was near corporate people. But mine were somewhat worn and trying to get a head start on a linoleum floor to push that heavy load up the ramp to the mailroom proved a bit of a pain sometimes. I had to have one of the maintenance guys help me once. He was some body building pro wrestler type who looked kind of mean. I didn’t like thinking I was going to be squashed by a load of boxes rolling back on top of me. But then I didn’t like having to ask him for help either. I finally did because it had to be done. I wore tennis shoes from then on and had no problems whatsoever.

Then, for a time, I drove the big blue van back and forth between the two downtown buildings. We transported people as well as used hand trucks to pick up shiny metal boxes from place to place on a schedule that was rather tight. Not too much time for tomfoolery.

We had a mailroom Christmas party once where some of the guys who worked there had an air band. I won a bottle of wine andtwo wine glasses in a raffle just after telling my friend that I never win anything.

Mostly, though, I remember some of the people I worked with.

There was a deaf guy in the mailroom who ended up committing suicide. There was “Shaky Jake,” an older messenger with a shaky hand. There was the short dude who was my boss who spent his evening hours introducing a band called “Rocket 88,” which played rock and roll oldies. There was a guy who got fired a few months after he started cause he was stopped speeding at some unreal speed. There was the guy who said that wearing “protection” was like taking a shower in a rain coat. Then there was the guy I hung out with a couple times who lived in a somewhat suspicious area of town with his wife and his guitar. The guy who was a drummer in some local bands andgrew up with my cousin. I had actually met the guy several years before at my aunt and uncle’s summer home in Hancock, Wis., and was scared of him cause he had really long hair. By this time he was balding. And others, of course.

After a while, I picked up work at the Milwaukee Sentinel as a scoretaker in the sports department, and eventually to a part-time reporter. By the time I left the bank and all its wonderment behind, it had been bought by Bank One.

Of Crazy TV Lenny, Trees Falling in the Forest and more (1983 Part 3)

A continuing look down memory lane by checking out old desk calendars I found not all that long ago:

My second semester of my sophomore year in college included a change in majors … from the 14,892 I thought about at Madison to Mass Communications (Radio/TV) at Milwaukee. Even though I was a sophomore, I had to take the freshmen Mass Comm classes since I hadn’t taken any yet.

I wish I could say I recall a lot from those early Mass Comm classes. But I don’t think my professors are around anymore, so I wouldn’t be hurting their feelings to say I don’t recall much.

Some of what I do recall are the hands-on types of things we did. Playing DJ and recording our own radio commercials in the Mass Comm radio studio was pretty cool. I did mine as a play off some commercials we used to hear back in the day. There was a guy called Crazy TV Lenny out of Madison, who used to do these real loud, fast commercials spouting the bargains you could get as his stores. So my parody was Crazy TV Lenin. I did this whole Soviet thing (it was still the Soviet Union back then). I slowed the reel-to-reel tape down when I talked into the microphone. So, when you played it at normal speed later, it sounded almost like you were one of David Seville’s chipmunks. I also know I played the Split Enz’s “I See Red” at the end, a Communist reference.

I also wrote a series of radio and/or TV spots for Miller Genuine Draft using Doors songs behind the voice over. And I wrote a script for a radio play on the history of the Doors, even so much as timing every portion of every song to the second. It was a lot easier to do the work when it was something I was interested in.

Then, there was TV Production. Everyone in class had to produce a TV news broadcast, using people in class to do the various parts of the show, from the anchor to the weatherman to each camera position, and the guy who typed the graphics onto the TV screen. Wow, what a lot there is to direct. We had one guy who was hilarious as a weatherman, and everyone wanted him to do it. He’d put on a scarf and pretend he was being blown about, and other tomfoolery. A black guy, he used to tell us he went to tanning salons now and then just to freak the white people out.

In one class, I had to write a letter to the editor. I wrote to one of the local sportswriters and told him I thought he did a great job. I later found out that this guy was the professor’s son’s best friend. I had no idea! No, really!

Other than that, it was a lot of theory, a lot of the FCC and stuff like that.

One of my favorite classes that semester, though, was a basic philosophy class. It was quite interesting, although I thought I failed the final exam right up until the time I got my report card in the mail. I think I may have had a B or B+ average heading into the final. In the final, we were asked to discuss certain philosophies, who purported to philosophize in such a fashion, and when they lived and crud like that. I had no idea. I could discuss the ideas, though. So, I talked about each viewpoint, said what arguments could be made for and against each viewpoint, and left it at that. No names, no dates, no nothing. I do recall that one of the questions was that old tree in the forest one … you know, if nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? My answer was “it doesn’t matter.” Of course, I did expound upon that statement, explaining why. And I also explained the two viewpoints on the matter. But I thought because I hadn’t mentioned the names of the dudes who were the main dudes known for such things, I was cooked. But neigh, I was not. I got an A for the final grade. I almost went back to the professor to ask him what I did on the final that was so right. But then I thought that he might have seen he had made a mistake and given me a grade that I wasn’t supposed to get. So, I didn’t go back.

Holy cow! I just realized I forgot to put one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen … in fact I do have to rank this No. 1 on my all-time concert list … on the 1983 Part 2 post where I listed all sorts of concerts I went to. On St. Patrick’s Day 1983 at the Milwaukee Eagles Club, I saw Those XCleavers open for the Bus Boys. That was the best show ever. The Bus Boys were awesome. They did some tunes in “48 Hours,” the Eddie Murphy/Nick Nolte movie. And it was the firts time I’d seen the local band, Those XCleavers. Very excellent also.

Of the Milwaukee Music Scene, the 21 Bus and More (1983 Part 2)

Moving ahead with the transition from living in a dorm at a Big Ten University in a state capital to living at home and taking a bus to classes at a commuter school in a big city…

Registration for UWM (the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee) took place Jan. 11-12. Here I was in the middle of my sophomore year of college, having just moved back into my parents’ house, left a Big Ten university (Wisconsin) and started taking a city bus from the safe and sound suburb of Wauwatosa, through the city of Milwaukee and into the fashionable and somewhat trendy East Side to the commuter school with a bad Division III men’s basketball team (sorry guys, but it was) and a nationally renown men’s soccer team.

As I registered for classes, I’m not sure I knew what else UWM had at the time except for a library named for the Israeli premier, Golda Meir, who actually grew up in Milwaukee.

The bus rides on the 21 bus (North Avenue) bus were usually uneventful, even if we did go through a few seedy neighborhoods … or at least they sure seemed seedy to me. One time, after a particularly long winter day at school, I was riding the 21 bus home. We hadn’t gone all that far from UWM when I leaned my head up against a window and closed my eyes for a little rest. It was in the evening, and there were not a lot of people on the bus at the time.

All of a sudden, I heard (and felt) this loud BOOM right near my head. It startled the poop out of me (well, not quite). But it did scare me pretty bad. I jumped and looked around, thinking someone was shooting at me, or the bus. Some guy a few seats back started to laugh. So, I figured the shooting was out of the question.

I took a look at the window next to me and noticed the remnants from a well-thrown snowball. What a relief!

I tried to make friends with people who drove to school and hitch rides with them when possible. But mainly it was Rob Adams and I taking the 21 to school every day.

That time period was big for local music scene. It was post-disco, but there were still several “disco” clubs around. They just had morphed into non-disco music joints inside these nice big halls. And the music was pretty cool. A mix of hard rock, ska, new wave, power pop and such, not to mention the Violent Femmes were pretty new at the time. Check out this review of a compilation  CD made of Milwaukee musical artists of about this time and a little before:  http://www.answers.com/topic/history-in-3-chords

Jan. 29: Colour Radio. This was a band that included guitarist Jim Eanelli, who had been with the Shivvers, a band I followed big time when I was at the University of Wisconsin. Jim and the Shivvers parted ways over “philosophical” differences and he hooked up with a couple other guys. This was heavily synth, guitar stuff. Kind of Cars-like, I’d have to say. But with a little darker undertone. Check out these posters: http://milwaukeerockposters.com/images/posters/colour-radio_6-17_racine.jpg and http://milwaukeerockposters.com/images/posters/colour-radio-4-16century.jpg

May 21: Those XCleavers were a power pop/new wave/rock sort of thing that was very popular in the area back then. You can see them doing a song during a reunion concert on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_5pvD2EPD0

June 4:  The Beat and Bow Wow Wow at Alpine Valley. This was the only concert I ever went to at Alpine Valley, an outdoor music venue southwest of Milwaukee a ways. This was fun. My old college roommate wanted to dance at his seat and they told him he couldn’t. So he went off to a vacant area of seating and danced there. I think it rained. Maybe it didn’t.

July 31: Rocky Koelpin and the Otters. I went here with a girl named Birgitte, who was from Switzerland I think. She was a friend of my friend’s girlfriend. I think she’d been an exchange student at one point and was back to visit. Anyway, she was very cute. I did my friend’s girlfriend “a favor” by taking Birgitte out and showing her the town. We almost didn’t get in to see the Otters due to ID issues. We were both 18 … actually I was 19. And 18 was the age of admittance to such bars in Milwaukee back then. But her passport said something like “09-07-64″ or something like that. Since this was the end of July, they figured she hadn’t turned 18 yet. But in many other countries, they put the day of the month first, followed by the month and the year. So, “in American,” her birthday was 07-09-64. or something like that. Anyway, I explained it to the bouncers and they actually believed me. Either that or they just let it go because they thought I came up with an ingenious way to get a 17-year-old very cute girl into a bar. Whatever the case, she really was legally OK to be in there. So no laws were broken. Rocky played a Doors cover song and some TV theme song … maybe “Leave it to Beaver” or “My Three Sons” or something like that.

Aug. 27: Madness. A bunch of us drove from Milwaukee to Chicago for this one. Many of us had never really been to Chicago for much. I’d been there to see the King Tut exhibit about six or seven years before. But this was the first time for many of us without parents. A couple guys who went to Northwestern University drove. We went to the Avalon Ballroom for the show.  Or at least I think it was a place called the Avalon. Maybe it was something else.

Nov. 1: Numb Jitters at Teddy’s. This was a band of guys who went to UWM and we hung out with once in a while at school. I remember the guitar player once was playing (it may have been this show) where his finger started bleeding. You could see a big spray of blood all over high white pick guard. They played ska and they played pretty fast. We would dance for all three sets, and be absolutely drenched in sweat when we were done. And it would be all of us … all the guys, whatever women came along, whoever else was there. The dance floor was always packed when they played.

Dec. 8: Violent Femmes at UWM. This was first time I saw the Femmes live. Went there by myself I think. It was very good. At the end, they invited the two local newspaper music writers to come on stage and play typewriters to the beat. The one guy threatened to smash his typewriter on the stage.

Of Smoking in the Film Room, Music as a Weapon and More (1983 Part 1)

A continuing compendium of stuff that I experienced, with recollections recalled from some swell desk calendars I wrote stuff on back in the day.

We enter 1983 ready to go to a new school (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)  for the second half of my sophomore year in college.

In 1983, I wrote some lyric or line from a poem down on every month of the year.  Here they are:

January: “The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.” This came from the Doors’ song, “Roadhouse Blues.” The Doors were my favorite band for several years, and this line reflects a little bit about how many of us should go through life, if you put the right spin on it. The way I look at this line is that you never know what’s going to happen on this earth, and you never know when that time on earth will end. Even if your time to go is far into the future as it appears on earth, it’s just a speck of time when considering all eternity. When I think of this line, I think of doing all you can do today to make a difference to those around you. You never know when it’s going to end, and you don’t want to miss an opportunity to do some good.

Most of the rest of the months, I can’t really get so philosophical about.

February: “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.” A classic Simon and Garfunkel line. Sometimes, it’s those jerky boy kids with spray paint who can tell you what it’s all about, Alfie. Not that I condone vandalism, of course…

March: “This is the strangest life I’ve ever known.” Another Doors line. Kind of fit my life back then.

April: “You gave me a new lease on life, but I can’t afford the rent.” This was one of Paul II’s classic lines. He was a roommate of mine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Back then, he was a rather negative sort when it came to his view of himself.

May: “God created college so that hell wouldn’t get overcrowded.” I think I made that up. Must have just had a bad final exam or something.

June: “Life sucks and then you die.” Hmmm. Must have had another bad day.

July: “Mellow out or you will pay.” Something from the Dead Kennedys that I feel reflects the attitude that stressed-out folks pay in many ways.

August: “There are things known and there are things unknown and in between are the Doors.” Aldus Huxley’s writing that inspired the band that Jim Morrison fronted to call itself the Doors.

September: “Due to the nature of the medium, the film dept. requests that you please refrain from smoking in this area.” I took a couple film classes at UWM, and fire is bad for film. Ain’t that right, Scarecrow?

October: “Sixth time born again, last chance to survive. Seventh time, no time, we won’t be alive.” I put this in some lyrics I worte. Forgot the title of the song. It basically plays upon that myth that cats have seven lives. Looking at mankind as a cat, and the way we are behaving, we’ll never get to that seventh life. We’ll be extinguished after six.

November: “She was a bad luck girl. Came to think that sex was love and you know love is the world.” Another one of my ultra-famous lines. It pretty much talks about how all you need is love (thanks John, Paul, George and Ringo) but that some people come to equate sex with love. In that way, they end up thinking that all you need is sex. But that’s a fallacy and will get you into hot water every time, boy howdy I’ll tell ya right now.

December: “Music is you only weapon.” I think I probably wrote this. There is a line in the Doors’ “When the Music’s Over” that says “music is your only friend.” So, I’m guessing I played on that, thinking that music can be used in many ways and can mean different things to different people. Sometimes, it can soothe the savage beast, for example, and sometimes it can make you — or others — downright angry and bad.

So that’s it for this part of 1983. Stay tuned for more.

Of Col. Sanders’ lookalike, leaving Mad City and more (1982 Part 4 of 4)

As we peruse the desk calendars that I found in a junk drawer, we finish up 1982, when I was in my third (and last) semester at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

I see I had a statistics exam on Nov. 16. This is the class where I was a little out of my league, and the professor told us that we should have had one more class as a prerequisite as most of us didn’t know what we were doing in it. He was right. I was in a fog most of the time. At least I could understand him. I had one math class at Madison where the teaching assistant could barely speak English and every other sentence out of his mouth was “Do you understand?” And every other time, the answer out of my mouth was “No.” So, I only went to that part of the class twice and just went to the lectures thereafter.

On Nov. 3, I had an Economics exam. This professor was funny. He was a Colonel Sanders clone who liked to talk about beanie weenies and the fact that the stock market should have been way, way higher than it was. I think everyone was excited about the Dow Jones topping 1,000 back then. He said because of the strength of the economy at the time, it should have been 10,000, which not so many years later, it was.

At the beginning of December, I’ve got “job for next semester” written down. By this time, I must have decided I wanted to leave the big UW with Bucky Badger and everything. At the time, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life, I had no money, I was getting fairly poor grades and I wasn’t comfortable in my environment. Oh, it was fun. But I felt like I was treading water and not really getting anywhere.

So, I made the decision to bite the bullet and move back home. I really didn’t want to do this, but it was my only choice. I was going to get a job for a semester, make some money and get back to school later. My father dissuaded me from quitting school. He said if I took a semester off, I might never get back. So he co-signed a loan to help pay for tuition to UW-Milwaukee, the 25,000-student, mostly commuter school that was mired in Division III and NAIA athletics. At least it was at the time.

So, I went about finding myself a job, and in fact, found two. My aunt and cousin worked at Marine Bank in downtown Milwaukee, and the mailroom had need of a messenger and mail processing agent (a guy to put the mail through a postage meter). I think Marine eventually got bought out by Bank One. Anyway, I also got a work/study position in UWM’s sports information department, which turned out to be one of the most fun jobs I ever had.

I also found a direction for my schooling. A friend of mine was in the midst of a broadcasting major at Marquette University, and he said it was a lot of fun, and it was something I’d be good at. I figured I could do the Mass Communications thing at UWM. So, I took my imagination, my determination to get rid of my glasses and braces, my personality and confidence just starting to rise from the depths of a formerly bottomless pit, and moved back to Wauwatosa.

Of Devil’s Lake, body passing at Camp Randall Stadium and more (1982 Part 3 of 4)

More college daze (and other crud) from 1982.

Had lunch with Aunt Jeanne on April 14th. She paid. This was my dad’s aunt, I think. Her son and I were born two days apart in the same Madison, Wis., hospital, and she’d bugged me about having lunch some day as I was attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison and she worked in Madison. I remember seeing my first auto racing with my cousin Charlie and his dad years before. Angel Park was Sun Prairie’s racetrack. As I recall, it was dirt and we watched midgets (cars, not humans!) speed around the track form the top of the bleachers.

April 19, I had an orthodontist appointment. It must have been one of my last ones. I didn’t have braces much after that, if at all. Had them way too long. Here’s a suggestion for you kids who have braces: wear the stinkin’ rubber bands! It makes the process go a lot faster. I was dumb. I didn’t like the rubber bands (who does?), and wouldn’t wear them as often as I should. I kept telling the orthodontist I was wearing them, though. So, he’d give me stronger rubber bands , which were that much more uncomfortable. So I felt like wearing these even less. It was a mad circle that I lost at. Eventually, they just took the braces off. And boy, did my teeth feel long all of a sudden.

The camping trip that began the year before my freshman year in college became an annual event in 1982. The second, end-of-summer trip to Devil’s Lake State Park in Wisconsin was conducted from Aug. 15-17. This is a place where I acquired a taste for amaretto … mixed with sour mostly. But it also mixed with root beer, cola and any assorted soda we could think of. One of the parts of these campouts was walking on the entrance road to the camp from the main road at night. The trees lining the road were so thick that they provided a cover overhead so dense that even a full moon with no clouds could not penetrate it. It was so incredibly dark that you could not see more than a couple feet around you. I don’t think we were supposed to be out walking on that road at that time of night, but it was cool. Also, the lake had been created by a glacier that rolled though and left cliffs full of large boulders that were incredibly interesting to negotiate from the rim to the beach. I wouldn’t dare try to walk up this formation.

As the years went by, Devil’s Lake campouts were followed by campouts elsewhere and finally, an event called EdFest that just had to be experienced to be believed.

By the end of August, I was back at Mad City for my sophomore year of school. By the end of September, the NFL players were on strike, and with the Packers sporting a 2-0 record at the time! Man, what a bummer. After way too long a period of time, the sides settled, the Packers finished off a 5-3-1 record and smoked the St. Louis Cardinals in the first round of the playoffs. They had a truly explosive offense with Lynn Dickey in his prime, James Lofton, John Jefferson, Paul Coffman and a two-pronged rushing attack with Eddie Lee Ivery and Gerry Ellis. Oh, that would have been fun to see that group together for the entire season.

The Wisconsin Badgers were having a good season that fall, too, and I made sure to see my share of home games. The first year, I got season tickets in the upper deck, and some lady had to use the bathroom like 15 times each game. This year, my tickets were in the student section and we saw some cool games, including a game against Illinois where the Badgers employed a trick play for a big TD. Quarterback Randy Wright, who started for the Packers later and also married the sister of a high school track teammate of mine, threw a pass to Al Toon, a wide receiver who was in the process of putting up some very impressive professional numbers before concussions ended his NFL career. Wright threw the pass back and skipped it off the artificial turf at Camp Randall Stadium. So I’m not sure if it was officially counted as a lateral or a fumble. Anyway, the ball bounced true and right into Toon’s hands. He turned and fired downfield to a streaking Jeff Nault from his tight end position. Toon threw a strike to the wide-open Nault for a fairly long TD pass. I actually saw the play coming when I saw Toon line up well behind the line of scrimmage. I just didn’t know Wright would skip the ball to him. That was so totally wack. Unfortunately, the Illini had a potent passing attack and beat the Badgers, 29-28. Still, the Badgers went 7-5 and qualified for their second bowl game in as many years (a rain-soaked victory over Kansas State in the Independence Bowl) … a miracle in Mad City back then.

The very next Saturday after that disappointing Illinois loss, the Badgers pumeled Northwestern in Madison. I had some friends from high school go to Northwestern and they came up to Madison for the game. Beforehand, we hung out on State Street and they would whoop it up whenever they saw somwone else wearing Northwestern gear. They even got hugs form girls wearing Northwestern sweatshirts. So I said
“yeah, Northwestern!” once just so I could get a hug. I spent that game in the press box helping the student radio station broadcast the game. Well, we would have broadcast the game except for the fact that they put the station in a different booth that season, I guess, and the cable they needed wasn’t long enough. So, everybody did it for practice. I was the spotter, helping the “on-air” talent figure out who was making tackles and such. It was fairly cool, even if we were not really on the air.

I found out later that on of the Camp Randall traditions at the time cost the Northwestern crew one of the girls they came there with. They used to do body passing, where someone would stiffen up and they would pass the person up the stands from row to row until they reached the top. I guess by this time, the practice was considered unacceptable. Supposedly, this group of friends passed the girl up and they never saw her again. She just sort of disappeared. I wonder if she got booted from the game for allowing this to take place.

Of Mr. Dynamite, Wisconsin/Marquette basketball and more (1982 Part 2 of 4)

We continue with my life as I remember it through a bunch of old desk calendars I recently found in a junk drawer. The year is 1982.

OK, folks. This is very weird! I’m listening to the radio as I type this and the song “Message in a Bottle” by the Police is on. I’m listening to an oldies-type station and that song is about 25 years old. As I look at the February 1982 calendar, I see “WLHA 9-12 64AM” written down on Feb. 20. That was my first gig as a radio DJ. My roommate and I saw that the station was looking for DJs for its 9 p.m.-midnight shift on Saturdays. As neither of us were big party animals at the time, we offered our pathetic services. I recalled that I had, for some reason, written down every single song we played on the air during our shows. So, I went and found the folder that housed these songs. Opening up the playlist from that very first S.O.S. Show (I think we named it that cause we needed help) was that very same Police song, “Message in a Bottle.” Now, that’s wack.

Our first show was quite interesting as we had never been trained to run a sound board, a cart machine, turntables or pretty much anything else you’d need to know in order to get a radio show out on the air. We got to the station a little before our show was to start. Mary, one of the station’s student leaders, and Tony, the DJ who had the shift before us, were there.

We told them we were the next guys but didn’t know what we were doing. They rolled their eyes, and offered to stay and show us the ropes quickly. So, our show got off to a shaky start … not that it ever really stopped being shaky. However, we learned how to say “WLHA Lakeshore 64,” turn the record back a quarter turn so it would get up to fell speed before the song started and put commercials and PSAs into the cart machines. I don’t think we ever perfected timing the newscasts that came though at whatever time it came on.

Our first show featured blocks by the Doors and U2. We got to combine our musical tastes into one power-packed show … when we weren’t talking. It was good for us novices to have each other to bounce things off of since neither of us really knew what we were doing. Our first show concluded with “My Way” by the Sex Pistols. The song symbolized the fact that we did our show our way … badly. Hey, at least we actually played a few songs off the WLHA playlist … there weren’t all that many we liked and we never heard some of them either. We also played Devo’s “Working in a Coalmine” single at 33 RPM instead of 45 RPM. Slowing it down really created some artsy effect probably.

Over the next 14 months or so that I did the college DJ gig, my show was named the Amateur Hour, Morning Madness (although there was very litte madness), Music Explosion and Paul I Show. Seems I got the itch to change about every four weeks or so. I also went by some wacky radio names such as Mr. Dynamite and J.D. Morrison (back from the dead apparently).

The music varied, although I can saw mostly the stuff I played consisted of early 1980s new wave and punk, stuff by local artists if I had it and some regular old rock like Doors, Beatles, Kinks, Rolling Stones, etc. … and we’re not talking just the hits from those bands. Pretty much it was anything I liked or thought I might like if I’d never heard it before. The musical mix led to some interesting segments. I’d go from the GoGo’s to Jimi Hendrix to the Sex Pistols to the Raspberries, the Ringo Starr, Duran Duran and back to Hendrix and The Byrds. That was an actual segment from a March 6, 1982 Amateur Hour with your host, Paul I.

I actually ended up getting the first real date of my life through this DJ gig. The first weekend in April, the radio station conducted a 24-hour trivia contest in which all the Lakeshore dorms participated. All the station personnel took turns on the air spinning records and asking trivia questions. The dorms had teams that would call in and try to answer the questions correctly. If they did, they scored points for their team. Once they got the right answer, they kept calling back trying to clog up the phone lines so that the other teams couldn’t get through. We also had station alumni return for guest shows, and I recall some big-time Madison DJ came back while we were there.

Anyway, you get a little wacky answering phones over and over and over at 2:30 in the morning after a few hours. So you’d have brief conversations with the people who called. I started telling female callers that they had the wrong answer, but they had a nice voice. Actually, there was one in particular, by the name of Faye, that I kept telling that to. She seemed to appreciate that.

When the trivia contest had ended, I looked up all Fayes in the campus phone book who could possible have lived in the dorm that her team was from. I found just one, and called. We talked for a while and I asked her to go see The Shivvers the following Saturday at Headliner’s. She said yes. I was shocked that I asked and shocked that she said yes. I had no clue what to do.

But I showed up at her dorm room, and a very cute brunette answered. I was hoping it was her. But that was her roommate. However, when Faye came to the door, she was very pretty. She was blonde and had glasses and I don’t remember anything else about her really. I had problems concentrating on anything she had to say because I really couldn’t even believe I was on a date.

We went to see The Shivvers on April 10 (I, of course, have that written down on my calendar). We sat at a table for most of the show, as I’d never danced with a girl before and had no clue what to do. We talked, although I couldn’t hear much of anything except the music. The band dedicated a song to us, as my roommate spilled the beans to them that I actually had a date. So I told Faye we had to dance to that one as the band dedicated it to us. I also took her backstage afterward to meet the band. I felt so awkward. I walked her home and probably didn’t hug her or kiss her or anything. Again, I was so completely clueless.

I called her a few days later and asked her if she wanted to come to the radio station sometime to see what goes on inside the studio (not much). But she said I woke her up from sleeping and I’d have to call her again. I never did. Guess I got scared. I wasn’t sure what to do. I saw her once after that … that I know of. We passed each other on campus and she said “hi” as I passed. I hadn’t recognized her until she spoke, so I didn’t even get out a return hello until she was past me. Not exactly a grand start to a dating career.

Anyway, my final radio show was Dec. 9, 1982 as I would be transferring from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to the Milwaukee campus at the end of that semester. The final song? “The End” by the Doors.

Getting back to the calendars I’ve been reminiscing over…

On Feb. 22, 1982, I saw U2 at Headliner’s, a club in Madison, Wis. This was well before the band became a megahuge, stadium-filling rock act. The band, in fact, would not crack America’s Top 40 for almost three more years. But those of us with an ear for that kind of music could tell they were something special. My roommate used to write for the Mad City Music Mirror, a small paper that covered the local music scene. So he would interview all these bands as they came into town for gigs. He interviewed the likes of Nick Lowe, and Paul Carrack, not to mention Bono of U2.

I saw some good bands in Madison, including U2 and X. X put on one of the best concerts I’ve seen. U2 was good, too, but the only thing I really recall from the concert was that they let some goofball on stage at some point to sing Neil Young’s “Southern Man.” The dude in Army fatigues yelling into a mic and the song blasting Southern folk didn’t really fit in with the rest of the show.

I attended the Marquette/Wisconsin men’s basketball game on March 9, taking a Wisconsin fan bus from Madison to Milwaukee for the game. I sat in the nosebleed seats at the MECCA, previously called the Milwaukee Arena. The fan bus featured lots of beer, of which I did not partake, and several rowdy fans, some of whom I had to sit near during the game. Now, I grew up a fan of both teams. I followed the Marquette Warriors as national powers throughout the 1970s. I was as excited as anyone when the Warriors won the NCAA championship in 1977. But I was always a Wisconsin fan, too. I rooted for the football team through the Dark Ages of Badger football, listening to the games each Saturday afternoon on the radio while helping Dad change the oil on the car or whatever other task had to be done. I was also a big Wisconsin hockey fan as the Badgers won national titles a few times in the 70s. The basketball team was usually horrible, but I rooted for them anyway. And when it came to Wisconsin/Marquette, I opted for Wisconsin.

Although I wanted Wisconsin to win this game, the behavior of one or two adult males rooting for my Badgers sitting in front of me left me with a bad taste. I’ve always been pretty much a guy who enjoys rotting for a team and not against the other team. Some of the insults leveled Marquette’s way included assaults on the Warriors’ head coach, Hank Raymonds, who went to the same church I did while I was growing up. I knew this guy and it upset me that people who never met the man were yelling out that he was not very smart (in a not-so-nice way).

So, this 18-year-old, snot-nosed, sober little punk actually worked up the nerve to tell these 40-some-year-old, inebriated, red sweater-wearing guys in front of me that Hank Raymonds was a nice guy and didn’t deserve such comments. One of the guys turned around and said he didn’t mean to insult me, as I was obviously a Marquette fan. I told him I wanted Wisconsin to win and  was a student at UW, but that I knew Hank Raymonds and knew the kind of person he was.

The guy actually said he was sorry or someting like that and said he didn’t mean anything personal. He kind of toned it down the rest of the way.

I’d also been through something similar in Madison the year before when Marquette visited UW. I sat next to two high school friends during that game and wasn’t real pleased with some of the negative comments tossed the Badgers’ way. After these two incidents, I was kind of over that rivalry for a while and haven’t been to anymore Wisconsin/Marquette games since. I watch that rivalry from afar.

March 28- Went to see the Police concert at the Rosemont Horizon in suburban Chicago. Joan Jett opened. I sat really far away and didn’t see all that much.

Of Irving Shain, Joan Jett’s sweat and not much else (1982 Part 1 of 4)

1982 was a very interesting year for me. It was a year of major decisions. It was the year I finally started to take control of my life instead of allowing life to control me. Of course, all this stuff didn’t happen until the very end of the year, and there is so much cool stuff to get to before we get to that. So, without further delay, here we go … 1982 in all its splendor and glory.

We begin with an 18-year-old college freshman in the midst of changing his major 15 times. Well, maybe seven.

I went back for my second semester at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Jan. 17. At the end of that week, I was nearly crushed at a tiny little club in Madison called Merlyn’s while watching Joan Jett’s guitar go over my head and her sweat fall on my person. My roommate, Paul II, got tickets for us well in advance of the show. He was going to write a review for the Mad City Music Mirror.  He knew all about Joan from her previous band, The Runaways, an all-girl punk band. She’d had this Blackhearts thing going for an album or so, and we figured it would be fun. Well, by the time the show arrived, Joan’s first hit single was climbing the charts. ”I love Rock N Roll” eventually hit the top 40. In March, it hit No. 1.

We had no idea she’d become so popular in such a short time. I guess her management didn’t either as this tiny little club was filled beyond capacity. I’m glad there wasn’t a fire. Anyway, this band called The Suburbs opened. They were somewhat dark and from Minneapolis, which back then was a somewhat hip place to be from, musically speaking. They weren’t bad.

We were used to seeing a local band, The Shivvers, perform there, and there was always room on the dance floor. This time, the dance floor was pretty well packed. After The Suburbs finished, my roommate and I managed to slip up to the stage, such as it was. I think this stage couldn’t have been any higher than 18 inches off the dance floor. We stayed right there, just a tad to the left of Joan’s microphone. And that’s where we stayed until the show was over.

It didn’t take long before the crowd to press forward and force us to put our knees against the edge of the stage to keep from falling right on top of Joan’s high-top Keds. The bouncers sitting on the edge of the stage did a good job trying to keep us upright, but we ended up hunched over much of the show. To her credit, Joan saw us getting squashed and asked everyone to back up a bit. It was to little or no avail, however. My roommate was in even more dire straits than I was as he seemed to be crushed to the floor on a few occasions. But he said he was most comfortable that way. As for me, I just tried to keep from falling into a mic stand or guitar as my knees rubbed ever so hard against the stage, which was carpeted.

When we finally got free and left the place, I was so hot that I walked out in the Wisconsin winter carrying my coat. There were holes in my jeans and blood on my knees. It was my own personal badge of honor.

I ended up seeing the Joanmeister two more times that year. She opened for the Police at the Rosemont Horizon in Illinois, and played at the Wisconsin State Fair.

That semester, the tuition was raised $30. My roommate and I considered this somewhat of a minor travesty, and he decided we should write a letter to the editor of the school newspaper, and also send a copy of it to the chancellor, Irving Shain. I have a couple copies of the letter. It ran in the Jan. 28, 1982 issue of The Daily Cardinal. Here it what it said:

Letter to Shain

We, the undersigned, as students of the University, hereby give you, Chancellor Shain notice of a lawsuit currently pending in Kangaroo Court Circuit Number 873. Named as the defendants in this suit are Chancellor Irving Shain, the Board of Regents and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The plaintiffs claim unjust economic and psychological hardship induced by the Regents’ imposition of a $30 tuition surcharge this semester.

The suit seeks the following settlement: The revocation of the surcharge, the refund of all surcharge fees to the students who paid them and, in compensation for the great psychological hardships caused by this unforgivable action, the elimination of the College of Engineering.

The plaintiffs, however, expressed willingness to negotiate an out-of-court settlement. They have cordially invited you to lunch at Pop’s Club in Gordon Commons on Friday, Feb. 5, at noon to discuss this most distressful matter. We sincerely hope that you will attend this important meeting.

Paul A. Swinford

Paul J. Hoffman

Anarchists at Law

We never actually thought the chancellor would show up for lunch at a student hangout, and we never expected the chancellor of a Big Ten university to even respond to this letter that obviously was written in jest. In fact, we figured some secretary would read it, grumble and/or laugh … or both … and toss it in the wastebasket.

So imagine our surprise when we actually got a letter back from the chancellor. I wish I had that letter. But basically what he said was (in a similarly tongue-in-cheek serious tone) he’d love to discuss this important matter with us, but he thought our choice of meeting sites was not up to snuff for a matter of such grave importance. Therefore, would we meet with him and the dean of students, I believe his name was Peter Bunn, at Ella’s Deli, a fine establishment in downtown Madison.

So we did … on Feb. 26.

The two of us actually had lunch with the chancellor of a Big Ten university twice. And he paid both times, which was cool. We had lunch at Ella’s Deli, then we had lunch at some fancy joint out in Cuba City. It was one of the cooler experiences I’ve had in my life.

Years later, after Chancellor Shain retired, and I’d become a sportswriter at the Milwaukee Sentinel, I wrote him to let him know what had become of me. I think he’s still living in the Madison area, which would make him about 138 years old about now. What a great guy.

Of Halloween in Mad City, The Shivvers and more (1981 Part 3 of 3)

These memories from 1981 are bought to you by my old Hackbarth Insurance desk calendars that I found a short while ago in a junk drawer.

Here we are in October. Among the items I chose to mark down on my calendar that month were a couple of dates that a Milwaukee-based band called The Shivvers played in Madison, Wis., while I was attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My roommate, Paul II, was a big fan of this band, partially because the lead singer was cute and reminded him of Wendy Wu of the British band, The Photos. I’m not sure where he saw them first. But he introduced me to the world of groupiedom.

This band was a power-pop band consisting of a drummer, rhythm guitarist, lead guitarist, bass player and singer/keyboardist. They had some really good songs and were fun to see. Paul II also convinced me that you had to dance to every single song whether anybody else was dancing or not. So, I did … as weird and as self-conscious as I felt at times — I still did. I’m sure people thought we were weird or light in the loafers or something. Most of the time, a bunch of people, females included, joined right in.

We went to see this band every time they were in Madison. And sometimes when they were in Milwaukee on the weekend, we’d go back home to Milwaukee and see them. I procured the “official” Shivvers T-shirt, getting a yellow shirt with black lettering that said “I’ve got the Shivvers.” The “Shivvers” lettering was kind of jumbled as it was meant to evoke a feeling of shivering. Band members started calling us the Bees because of our yellow-and-black wardrobe.

My first real actual date was at a Shivvers show at Headliners in Madison. It was kind of a blind date with a girl I’d met on the phone while I was helping conduct a trivia contest on the student radio station.

We managed to get the band named the top local band in the Milwaukee Journal. My roommate and I and our friends all got the coupons out of the Green Sheet and mailed them in, citing our favorite radio stations, national bands and the like. There was this old guy at one of their shows that winter who kept telling us we’d better make sure all our friends voted for them. So, I made sure everyone put down The Shivvers for their favorite local band. There may have even been a couple I filled out for friends whose musical tastes I was very aware of, and who, given a heart-wrenching speech by me, definitely would have succumbed to my wishes and put The Shivvers down as their favorite local artist. Years later, I found out The Shivvers had been accused of stuffing the ballot box. They had nothing to do with it.

I have to admit that I became somewhat smitten by the lead singer, too, wrote her a letter at Christmastime, asking her if I’d managed to correctly decipher the lyrics of the single they had out on the market, and ended up allowing her to view many of the lyrics I’d penned to that point (most were horrible).

They band has some videos on YouTube, and there is even a Shivvers channel. Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheShivvers

The two videos on that channel were taped at a Madison TV station for a show on an extremely cold night on Jan. 9, 1982. My friends and I were supposed to go. But my dad wouldn’t let me use his car because it was so incredibly cold. He said that if the car wouldn’t start or we slid off the road, there might be nobody around to help us and we might freeze to death. So, we didn’t go.

The Shivvers eventually moved to Boston, but never got going out there as the lead singer got sick for quite a while.

Also, in that October 1981 calendar I have, I’ve got our vaunted Badger football team beating both Purdue and Ohio State at home to complete a sweep of the three teams that annual held down the top spots in the Big Ten in those days. The Badgers had been very mediocre for a number of years, then all of a sudden ripped off this great streak. They lost at Michigan State and Illinois before coming home to spank Northwestern on Halloween.

Halloween in Madison was a bizarre deal back then. I mean really bizarre. You’ve got a bunch of college kids, the drinking age was 18, you’re in a state that practically encourages drinking at every turn and you’ve got free music and cheap beer available everywhere. Plus, people dress up in costumes. It’s a recipe for disaster, and it often was. By the time I got there, the city has taken to greasing the light poles and electrical poles on State Street, a street where no traffic was allowed except for buses and bikes that ran from the state capital building to the campus.

Anyway, the Badgers finished off a pretty good season in November and went on to play Tennessee in the Garden State Bowl, losing to an unbelievably fast Volunteer squad.

That December, the Green Bay Packers lost to the New York Jets in their final-regular season game of the year, costing them a berth in the playoffs. A win there and they go. But they messed up and the end and missed a long field goal. That seemed to be the team’s modus operandi often during that stretch. Get very close to making the playoffs only to blow it in the last game.

The last week of December, Marquette University always hosted the Milwaukee Classic, a men’s college basketball tournament. There would be two first-round games one night, followed by a third-place game and championship game the next night. My friend, Pat, had an extra ticket for me this time, so I attended both games. Marquette beat Arizona State for the championship that year, and Pat and I got all the Marquette players’ autographs. That included Glenn “Doc” Rivers, who is now the coach of the NBA champions Boston Celtics. It also included Terrell Schlundt, who grew up in Antigo, Wis., my mom’s hometown. One of the dumbest things I’ve ever said I said to Terrell Schlundt during that tournament. When I got his autograph, I mentioned my cousins who lived in Antigo, and he knew who they were. So we chatted briefly about Antigo. Then, when I said thanks, I said, “Win one for me, Terrell.” Man, that was soooooo stupid! I didn’t really mean for it to come out like that. Pat teased me about it for months, adding in a whiny, schoolboy voice that I swear was not in the original line.

Oh well. We also got the autograph of the guy who hit the winning shot in the third-place game of the tournament. I’m going to have to look this one up as I can’t recall the team he played for .. his name was something like Pierre Jeanvier.

Oh shoot. I just found the program from the Milwaukee Classic I had been thinking of. It was actually contested in 1980. Marquette beat Arizona State in 1981. But the Pierre Janvier winning basket came in the third-place game in 1981 as Cal. State-Bakersfield beat Illinois State. We were sitting close, and got the guy’s autograph as he ran off the court. Marquette played Clemson in the championship. That Clemson squad featured Larry Nance, who went on to some NBA success.

Of ROTC, the Garden State Bowl and more (1981 Part 2 of 3)

Here comes some more of 1981:

I’ve got a couple paydays marked down in August 1981, the month of my 18th birthday, and the summer after high school graduation. On Aug. 13, I got a check from the Lutheran Home for the Aging in beautiful Wauwatosa, Wis., for $276.15. Two weeks later, I got a check for $253. That was big bucks back then and I was putting in basically full-time hours over the summer. But alas, my time at the home was to end soon.

I worked some after that, over school breaks. But that was the last fulltime gig with all the characters there. There would be no more old Jamaican guy who got angry all the time because a woman was his boss. He kept saying that in Jamaica, “the man is the king and the woman is the queen. The woman does not tell the man what to do.”

Soon, there would be no Mexican woman boss type person for him to get angry with. There would be no more hanging out with the young, white dude with the bushy hair and mustache who let me friend and I drive his turbo Trans Am to McDonald’s once to get for lunch. And the young black guy who had attended Alcorn State University for a time and took the bus out to the suburbs from the inner city. Of course, anything in the city was considered inner city by us suburban boys. There was also the black guy who sort of kind of wanted to get fired, so he didn’t do much. He wanted to leave and become a member of the CIA. I wonder whatever became of him.

The residents were interesting, too. We had one guy we called “Beh” because that’s all he ever said. I guess he couldn’t talk, and that’s the only sound that came out of his mouth. You could sort of tell what he meant by the tone of the “beh.”

There was another guy who used to make stuff with wood in the maintenance department workshop until they decided they weren’t going to allowed residents back there anymore. Seems they thought someone might hurt themselves.

Then there was the guy who sat in his wheelchair in his robe and slippers half the time, with a corncob pipe sitting in his mouth, telling us about how he got a sexually transmittable disease in World War I.

And another guy used to come up to us while we were cleaning windows or something and tell us a better way to do it. It usually had to do with old newspaper. He also like to play number games. He’d ask you to pick a number and he’d have you perform some sort of mathematical computations with it. Then he’d guess your answer.

On Aug. 23, I made my way to college … the University of Wisconsin – Madison. THE big UW. Bucky Badger and everything. 40,000-some undergraduates. Big Ten football. Dorm life. Roommates. People staying up late. Drinking (not for me, though … not at that point in time anyway). Navy ROTC (for one semester anyway).

My first semester in college was quite a unique experience for me. There was a lot of freedom, which apparently, I was not very good at handling at the time. I put things off until later. I didn’t always show up for class, especially for anything earlier than 9:50 a.m. I did, however, make it to almost every home football game as I got season tickets. It was a good year to see Badger football as they upset Michigan in the season opener and ended up going to their first bowl game in eons. So it was a trip to East Rutherford, N.J., for the Garden State Bowl … it was a bowl game!

I joined Navy ROTC when I went off to college. I didn’t get a scholarship, just signed up. Dad told me it would be a good way to get college paid for. If you did it for a year successfully, they’d probably give you a scholarship the the rest of the way, then you’d owe the Navy three years as an officer. If you signed up before you got there and they gave you a four-year scholarship, then you owed them four years afterward. That’s how I remember it.

I enjoyed ROTC. Among the highlights were early morning runs around Camp Randall Stadium while chanting in cadence, marching with rifles and wearing the uniform. I remember running the three miles in the physical fitness test, and also having guys yell to encourage you as you struggled to make just one more chin-up. And those shoulder boards were so cool. I even had a small kid come up to me once in Madison and salute me and say “hi, sir.” That was wacky. Here I was, some 18-year-old snot-nosed little punk, and a small child salutes me.

But, after a semester, I decided that I didn’t really want to spend three years of my life on a ship. As it was, I was fairly directionless at that time, and started making decisions … some good, some bad. But I needed a direction.

There was a guy who became a friend of mine through ROTC and Russian class. After I dropped Russian and ROTC, I didn’t see him for a good 25 years. Through the power of the Internet, I tracked him down and found out he was living within about 90 minutes of me. He’d stayed in the Navy for 20-some years, spent time in San Diego and Greenland, among other places, and retired from the military. We got together and had plenty to talk about.

My college roommate and I were quite a pair. We had the same first name, so we decided to name ourselves Paul I and Paul II. I was Paul I because Paul II decided that he could never be first at anything. So, with his poor self-image driving the name game, I became Paul I on the eighth floor of Sellery Hall Tower A. It was a fine floor … Nardin House. There was a girl there whose birthday was exactly one year before mine, and I quickly developed a crush on her. But alas, she was way more mature than I in the ways of romance. I was a bumbling fool.

He was into punk rock and new wave. I was a Doors, Beatles, Police and Cars fan who enjoyed giving new music a try. So I got sucked right into the power pop/new wave/punk scene. One day, we went to lunch together, he in his yellow Devo radiation suit and me in my Navy uniform. What an interesting sight that must have been.

Our favorite activities were going to see bands, playing basketball at the old rec center and collecting Old West buildings from boxes of Waffelos cereal.

One of the first bands I saw when I moved to Madison for school was a Doors cover band called Riders on the Storm. Paul II had already turned in some concert reviews for a local music magazine called The Mirror. That sounded like fun. After I got to the gig, I thought it would be neat if I could do that, too. So, somehow I managed to get ahold of the keyboard player and interviewed him at the bar between sets, writing my notes on napkins. I hadn’t planned on even talking to anyone, so I didn’t exactly go there prepared. It was a nice chat, the band was pretty good and I planned to try to write a review in the next day or so. But I was lacking for confidence, didn’t think I could write something good enough for publication, and never wrote it. Some start to a career in journalism, huh?

Well, I am running out of gas. And I’ve just got two months of calendar on this one. I am getting so more vociferous here. I guess there’s a lot more to say about 1981. So I will bid adieu to you for now, my gaggle of fans and be back another day with more from this momentous year.