(1)Freedom of ’76
As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a music critic. It’s a funny thing for a kid to want to be. Critics are always portrayed the same way, and it’s never flattering. It’s typically some pretentious bastard (a guy, without fail) shuttered away in somebody’s basement (always his mom’s), lashing out in jealous rage at the success he’ll never have. He’s cynical. He’s elitist. He can’t get laid to save his life.
Well, okay. Some of the stereotypes are true—at least in my case. But before any of them applied to me, I just loved music.
Some people’s first memories are centered on other people—their parents, siblings. Mine are of sitting cross-legged, alone, at the living room turntable. The stereo was a late-seventies department-chain model with an automatic record-changing mechanism, and I was transfixed by its hypnotic sequence. When a record ended, the needle drifted toward its center, spiraling in the deadwax. Then, the tonearm would lift, hovering back to rest in its cradle. The spindle clicked and down dropped the next record, right on top of the last one. The tonearm lifted again, shifted an inch to the left, and lowered to rest in the groove: a pop, a crackle, another song.
This stack of singles was the center of my three-year-old world. It included Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana,” a Broadway-size disco fantasy detailing tragedy at a New York City dance club; the Little River Band’s yacht-rock obscurity “Reminiscing”; and one of the purest, truest love songs I know, “Dedicated to the One I Love” by the Mamas and the Papas.
This version of “Dedicated”—not the 1958 original by the Scepter soul group the Shirelles—was my first favorite song. It pulled me in with its lone guitar, ebbing and swelling against Michelle Phillips’s shimmering alto, lost and searching in a canyon fog of reverb. “While I’m far away from you, my baby…” The song is a long goodbye, facing down the ache of separation. The subject only asks to be remembered each night. “Whisper a little prayer for me, my baby…” The music drifts in on a pale mist, broadcasting from the same spectral frequency as the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You.” “And tell all the stars above / This is dedicated to the one I love.” It was an awakening—the first song that moved me to my core.
Even at this young age, music made the world’s other curiosities seem comparatively minor. It also served as a sort of pre-preschool for me, a foreword to the human condition. Songs could transmit a whole spectrum of experience and emotion in concise packages, and their melodies, arrangements, and dynamics seemed like some strange kind of alchemy. They were snapshots of moments in life, and there were all kinds of them: love songs, sad songs, spirituals, fables, and, occasionally, dramatic narratives with a wide-angle sweep, like the ones in great books or films. Some could transport me to another world entirely, like Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe,” where a spellbinding tale unfolds against string arrangements that wilt like a flower in the sweltering sun.
My parents, Gary and Leann, insist I learned to read by following along with lyric sheets. Before I could do that, they said I’d find my favorite songs by looking at their album covers. Mom later showed me a notebook she kept during my first few years of development, where she wrote that I asked for a record player on my third birthday. Dad complained he rarely saw me; he couldn’t understand that listening to music was a shared activity. But he got me that record player anyway, so there I’d go, off to my bedroom, exploring these sounds alone.
* * *
DAD HAD WORKED IN STEEL MILLS AND FOUNDRIES EVEN before I was born on a snowy afternoon in January of 1976. In pictures from then he has the look of a young Bruce Springsteen: wiry and handsome, with a slight muscular build and a mop of scraggly dark hair. He worked nights, and often I would ride in the car with my mom and older sister, Kelly, to meet him in the mornings, the first light of dawn just breaking behind the munition factory’s towering smokestacks. He would hop in, depleted, reeking of grease and sweat, and adjust the passenger seat to ease the back pain that plagued him.
When I turned four, in 1980, Mom was looking to reenter the workforce, hoping to avoid returning to the garment work she’d done before Kelly and I were born. She wanted more for us, and for herself. Dad recognized her sunny disposition, easy laugh, and outgoing personality for what it was: an innate ability with people. He thought she might succeed at sales, and he was right. Once she got her real estate license and began showing houses, Mom was a natural. Before we knew it, she was earning more than Dad.
We lived in Brooklyn Park then, a working-class suburb north of Minneapolis, where winter starts early and never seems to end. When the thaw was finally around the corner each spring, pickup trucks would haul the last of the ice fishers’ plywood shanties off the lake tops and, at last, there’d be a few brief months of glorious, green summer.
Of course, the indoors suited me better. Other kids were around, but they liked doing other-kid things together, building forts and LEGO towns, playing games. I didn’t. Visiting their houses, I would gravitate toward their parents’ pianos and stereos—things I wasn’t supposed to touch—and ask if we could hear a record or two.
Soon I learned to distinguish the songs I liked from those I didn’t. I discovered that some songs were especially enjoyable and immersive, while others had the opposite effect: a sensation of visceral, almost physical distress. This polarity resulted in impassioned preferences and aversions. “Sh-Boom” by the Crew-Cuts, Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” and Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock” sounded awful—annoying, obnoxious, exasperating—and that went double for anything with a shing-a-ling, a shooby-doo, or a rama-lama-ding-dong.
Children’s music seemed patronizing, except for Alvin and the Chipmunks, who reworked popular songs with helium vocals that mesmerized me and made me wonder for the first time how such an effect was achieved. I was more drawn to rock, pop, and especially disco: the epic kiss-off of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” the mechanized tech-pop of Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown,” and Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough,” which I never could.
Although I couldn’t articulate these feelings yet, a pattern was slowly emerging among the records I loved most: When they strayed from simpler structures or familiarity, when they pushed complex arrangements or strong percussion to the fore, when they employed rich storytelling, vivid imagery, or intense emotion—when they did things the other records just didn’t—this was the habitable zone, where life felt possible.
My folks were barely scraping by, but they nurtured this odd obsession of mine and amassed more than a hundred LPs by the time I turned five. But these records were just a chance assortment, acquired on the cheap for a toddler from garage sales and discount bins. They never brought home any classic albums, none of the rock, psychedelic, or soul standards you’d find among the typical household stacks. I wouldn’t discover those—the Beatles, Stones, Aretha, Jimi, Stevie, Marvin, Neil, or Joni—until seeking them out on my own later in life.
Instead, there were piles of late-period Elvis and, luckily, loads of shit-kicking country by Waylon, Willie, and Cash. My parents also had a soft spot for soft-rock schmaltz. I later realized that if the era’s critics considered a song among the decade’s worst, it was probably in rotation at our house. Anne Murray. Tony Orlando & Dawn. The entire Captain & Tennille catalog? Bring it on.
When I turned six, in January of 1982, Dad started giving me a three-dollar allowance for our weekly department store trips. There, I might check out the toy department and pick up the odd Star Wars figure, but, inevitably, I’d wander back to the records and, after careful consideration, choose a single 45 from the store’s ever-changing, chart-dictated selection.
All music qualified as new to me, but I was especially drawn to the latest releases, and by age seven I’d discovered pop radio and was listening constantly. The Twin Cities’ twin towers of pop held down the center of the dial on KDWB and—no shit—WLOL, whose call letters mercifully were retired before the internet initialism took hold.
Tuning in weekly to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 radio countdown, I’d compulsively track each song’s chart position in notebooks and evaluate new entries, studying how they performed. Prince’s “1999,” Duran Duran’s “Rio,” and “Gloria” by Laura Branigan shot up the chart and went into the cart, cycling into play on my bedroom stereo. Inevitably, Thriller found its way home, too. The sheer excitement of it—the first album I’d picked out for myself—rippled through me in the car ride home.
* * *
AS I ENTERED GRADE SCHOOL, THE ONLY SUBJECTS THAT captured my attention were reading, spelling, and outer space, which is where everyone said my mind was. Report cards would come back with a range of “unsatisfactory” checkmarks next to various developmental skills, along with concerned notes from teachers.
I began to understand that my music obsession wasn’t the only thing that set me apart from the other boys. My disinterest in socializing during those formative toddler years had made me awkward in this new setting. I’d watch at school as others interacted with an ease I couldn’t find, making friends on the playground or collaborating on projects during activity time. Though I craved acceptance like any kid, others sensed something off about me.
My mind tended to drift, and, noticing this, teachers would call on me suddenly, snapping me to attention. It was always embarrassing; I never had the answers they wanted. Tag games like capture the flag and kickball reinforced this degradation; I strove to win but typically fell short. And forget baseball. Forever an outfielder, I was always distracted when the ball came my way. After so many losses, a few of my teammates confronted me in the hallway.
“Are you retarded?” one asked, as the others surrounded me.
“No? I don’t think so,” I replied. “What does that mean?”
“It means you’re slow, stupid!” he said, slapping the back of my head.
“He was slow on the field for sure,” said another. “Retard.”
They chuckled and high-fived. There it was: my first bad review.
While the boys jockeyed for dominance, I found it easier to make friends with girls. They were nicer, friendlier, and when they were curious about me, they were genuinely interested, not prodding me for weaknesses. So it surprised my folks when the first friend I made was my neighbor Bryn. “She’s cute,” Dad nudged, proud of his apparent Casanova son. “Do you like her?”
“Of course!” I said, oblivious. “She’s my friend.”
Bryn was seven, like me, but her parents had already been through a bitter divorce. Now she lived with her mom and siblings. We liked to hang out on the swings in her backyard and pretend to be He-Man and She-Ra. Every day, we adopted new superpowers and battled invisible space giants in a quest to save the galaxy.
But sometimes Bryn played differently, in ways that made me uncomfortable. When playing house or doctor, she exhibited an unusual curiosity about my body and invented scenarios that involved taking off our clothes. Over the summer, while playing Candy Land in my bedroom, she stopped the game and suggested we play charades instead. I had no idea what that was or how it worked, but she explained the premise and volunteered to go first.
She pointed at herself, then crossed her arms, then pointed at me. I was stumped. As she repeated the gestures more slowly, I followed along: “I? Something. You.” Again. “I … hug you?” Again, this time mouthing the words. “I love you.” She loved me? Wow, she loved me! I was overjoyed—it’s a wonderful thing to hear—but I didn’t exactly know what she meant. She crawled across the game board and kissed me, and it wasn’t just a peck. She instructed me to open my mouth and demonstrated a French kiss. I was repulsed and pushed her back.
After that, I didn’t want to play with Bryn anymore, and soon Dad asked why he hadn’t seen her around. When I explained what had happened, he immediately left the house, for what felt like ages. I hoped he wasn’t going to get her in trouble. When he came back, he sat me down and explained that Bryn had been hurt, and that’s why her parents had divorced. He also said that the two of us were grounded from seeing each other. I was so confused. I didn’t want her to do that to me again, but I knew how it felt to be rejected, too, and I didn’t want her to hurt even more. She was my only friend, and she loved me.
Back at school the next month, I didn’t want to make friends with anyone. I wanted to get away from all of them, to be at home with my records or, really, anywhere else. More and more, I felt like an alien among the other kids, and they reinforced that sense for me every day, mocking me in the hallways, pushing me around on the playground. I didn’t know how to stop it. I turned angry and resentful, which no kid should have to be.
By the third grade, I found myself full of restless energy I didn’t know how to manage. I started turning my hostility outward, agitating and alienating my classmates on purpose. I became prone to outbursts, scene making, and pranks—my own early version of “trolling”—all of which became my armor. A part of me loved getting under people’s skin, because they were always under mine.
This behavior was my way of coping, of developing my own personality and way with the world. Others might not have liked it, but it’s all I had to go on, and, crucially, it was mine alone. During these years, music would serve as my only companion. It offered respite from the cruelty of youth and, through MTV’s broadcasts from New York, promised a world beyond it.
* * *
WHILE FLIPPING CHANNELS DURING ANOTHER WEEKEND morning indoors, I came across two funny-looking guys on network TV talking about movies. These two nerds—Gene and Roger—would show a trailer, then deconstruct everything they loved or hated about the film at hand. I sat still and watched. These guys knew everything about movies; they’d throw around technical terms, reference directors and studios, make comparisons, and then argue—fiercely—when they disagreed. And that made it fun. It was kind of like sports, but for culture.
I was mesmerized. This was a job people could get? Going on TV to complain about The Karate Kid? I almost couldn’t believe my eyes. I wondered immediately if the same thing existed for music. I’d never seen it on TV, but if these two could do it, couldn’t I, one day?
Siskel and Ebert’s summer previews and end-of-year specials became appointment viewing. Their “Best of 1984” program opened with both men raving about the film counterpart of an album that had taken over my world that year: Prince’s Purple Rain. As a literal child, there was no way I’d persuade my parents (or anyone else’s) to let me watch an R-rated film by an artist whose songs were widely known to explore, in explicit detail, his many trailblazing kinks. Roger and Gene’s enthusiasm for the movie nearly killed me. Ebert called it “the best rock ’n’ roll debut film since the Beatles made A Hard Day’s Night.”
Prince had been a Minneapolis pop legend for years, but with Purple Rain he transformed into a global superstar, exploding internationally alongside Madonna and Michael. Our hometown radio stations showered his music, films, and concerts with constant praise. DJs referenced his childhood in the city, his suburban homes and recording studios, and his surprise appearances at local clubs. Even as a kid, these were all places I knew well: Uptown, Eden Prairie, Minnetonka, Chanhassen. I marveled at how Prince—this wildly strange and inventive pop genius whose music utterly transfixed and obsessed me—was, by some miracle, living, working, and creating that sound no more than twenty miles away.
From the moment “When Doves Cry” dropped in May 1984, it seemed to be everywhere at once, broadcast across video and radio channels every hour, on the hour. I picked up the 45 its first week out, awestruck by the purple-colored vinyl pressing, and listened on loop to both songs: the riveting A-side single and its non-album B-side, “17 Days,” still among the greatest tracks in Prince’s catalog.
When the album finally dropped, it shattered my expectations. I had never heard a concept album; Purple Rain’s narrative throughline, seamless segues, and transgressive adult themes sent me reeling. Beyond Prince’s astonishing technique across instruments—the searing guitar, the ingenious drum programming, and that expressive voice, shifting between lascivious purr, angelic falsetto, and tortured shriek—lay a sense of the forbidden. From the sapphic bath sequence voiced by the Revolution members Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman at the start of “Computer Blue” to the comically explicit “Darling Nikki,” Purple Rain checked every box, and then some, on my spectrum of sonic appeal. These songs went places others wouldn’t, created what others couldn’t, and, crucially, did things—for me, to me—that others simply didn’t.
When, at last, the movie appeared among the late-night cable listings, I waited out the whole day, then feigned an early bedtime, retreating to my room and plugging in headphones to listen to the record on cycle. Then, as the house went dark, I crept down to the den and flipped on HBO. There stood “the Kid,” backlit by stage lights through curls of peach and lilac smoke, poised at the mic with his dangling guitar, commencing that familiar sermon over warbling pipe organ keys: “Dearly beloved / We are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.” While Prince and the Revolution rip through “Let’s Go Crazy” in the opening scenes, the camera pans across a raving crowd in a montage of eighties nouveau hair, makeup, jewelry, oversize shades, and designer outfits. Cutting to stage view, we see the two neon-lit floors of the club itself, populated by bartenders, dancers, bouncers, and managers. Then, finally, we cut to the line outside. Prince rounds the block on his ’81 Hondamatic motorcycle to cheers from onlooking fans, and the location is revealed as the now-iconic Minneapolis venue First Avenue.
A pang of recognition shot through me. I’d never known quite what it was, but I’d seen that place with my own eyes from the backseat on car rides through the city. Seeing it here, now—in action on the screen, alive with sets by real Minneapolis bands—revealed the city’s music scene to be something I had never imagined.
Much of Purple Rain’s storyline and many of its performances were filmed and recorded live inside that club. “First Avenue is really famous,” the film’s costar, Apollonia Kotero, notes in an early scene. “A lot of bands make it after playing there.” I would later realize this was true when, as a teenager, I discovered the Replacements and Hüsker Dü, prototypical indie bands that came up through the venue right alongside Prince.
* * *
IN ’85, MOM HIT IT BIG IN REAL ESTATE—AT LEAST BY OUR standards. She started bringing home generous checks, each one celebrated like a lottery jackpot. There were nights out to fancy dinners and the mall, movie rentals and video games, and then, finally, the sprawling five-bedroom house at the end of a cul-de-sac in Maple Grove, complete with the requisite brand-new Cadillac. (She actually bought it secondhand, but it had a moon roof. A moon roof!) By then, Dad was able to leave his job at the foundry and join her in the business. On weeknights, I’d tag along to their offices at the real estate firm and entertain myself by playing with the typewriters and copy machines. There was even a primitive computer connected to a red telephone: a modem.
I continued expressing interest in instruments—anything with keys—and one day my parents brought home a piano, which each day after school I immediately ran to and played. I loved to play and focused intently. Soon, I worked out how to play by ear, sounding out the melodies of pop hits. As I grew to understand how chord patterns fit together, I began improvising and then writing songs of my own. I was briefly enrolled in piano lessons, but, as the old saw went, my teacher couldn’t keep me focused. She tried training me on nursery rhymes, simple pieces that could teach me notation, but I just wanted to show off what I’d taught myself that week. Never mind “Jingle Bells,” did she want to hear me play Madonna? (She didn’t.)
As the markets rose and fell through the decade, though, so did our fortunes. My folks even had to file for bankruptcy. But then an interest rate would change, and we’d be back on top of the world. They were the first generation in either of their families to claw their way up to middle-class status. It was a better life than they ever imagined they’d have, and they were proud of it.
Not that it changed anything for me at school. By fifth grade, the bully mobs had grown in strength and numbers, their contempt for me so visceral it routinely spilled into violence. At least I was getting better at defending myself. Over time, I’d adapted protection skills to minimize the damage from group pile-ons, and the episodic chases made me one hell of a sprinter, too. On one occasion, I managed to book it twelve blocks to a fellow loner’s house, even if it didn’t quite save me. His mother saw me coming and locked the front door, closing the blinds as a pack of savage preteens jumped me in her driveway.
Every couple of years, my folks would pack up and move us to some new suburb where I’d try again for a fresh start. They told me it was because they earned a commission on every house they sold, even when it was their own, but really they were trying to find a place where I’d finally fit in. Through sixth grade, I attended four different schools, and though I always held out hope that things would change, the cycle invariably repeated. As my love of music held strong, my grades deteriorated, and the beatings became so fierce and frequent that my parents decided to pull me out altogether. My last six months of grade school were home-taught.
Mom made as much time for lessons as she could, and by working one-on-one with me, she was able to teach me concepts like fractions and geometry that had stumped me in the classroom. But it wasn’t sustainable for either of us. The more time I spent alone in my room, the more stir-crazy and unmoored I became, and, following that bankruptcy, she needed to put in more hours at the office. So that fall, we decided to give it another go, selling off the Cadillac, moving back to the grimier suburbs we’d started out in, and putting me back into school. Maybe junior high would be better.
* * *
Junior high would not be better. On my first day, I saw a kid pointing me out to others and snickering. I wondered what it could be this time. My clothes? (They weren’t new.) My teeth? (I did have some crooked ones growing in.) He walked toward me as the others watched from afar. Here we go again.
“Hey, retard, remember me?” I didn’t, but I knew now that it wasn’t my demeanor or appearance that had pulled me back into this fray. It was something new: my reputation.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” I said, fumbling the padlock on my locker.
“Well, I remember you and you’re still a fucking retard,” he shot back and knocked the books out of my arms. The herd brayed. Enraged, I ran up behind him as he walked away and gave him a shove. He turned around and socked me in the face. I went down. So much for a fresh start.
If nothing else, I was proud of myself for pushing back. I’d never done that before, and the rush I felt in the moment was glorious. I resolved to start standing up for myself, even if it didn’t change the outcome.
Meanwhile, I discovered stand-up comedy on cable; the more eccentric and provocative the comics, the more I liked them—Pee-Wee Herman, Robin Williams, Andy Kaufman, Steven Wright. And with all my frenetic, haywire energy, I started emulating them, making bigger and bigger scenes. I wondered if maybe I was really an extrovert at heart, and that’s why I acted out: I liked the attention, even when it was negative. If I wasn’t going to be liked, I was at least going to be noticed.
No one really tried to get to know me, so no one ever did. But I knew me, and I liked me. It’s not like I was dying to be friends with them, anyway. What was to like about a bunch of knuckleheads always going on about sports and girls?
Well, okay. There was one who wasn’t quite like the others: Anders was a blond, blue-eyed track star with chiseled, Nordic features, a slender build, and sculpted upper arms. I generally steered clear of the athletes, but Anders was kind, almost serene, and he moved with exceptional grace. He was also forever encircled by swooning gymnasts and clearly enjoyed the girls’ attention. I tried to ignore my attraction; anything more would surely make my already unbearable existence an unimaginable hell.
That year, my folks met another couple who worked in real estate together. Part of their bond with Jack and Janice was that both of them had twelve-year-old boys who had a hard time at school. They’d come over on the weekends, drink, and play cards upstairs in the kitchen, and I’d hang out with their son, Joshua, in the basement.
Joshua was a couple of inches taller than me, with sandy, auburn hair cut short; olive-green eyes with thin, blond brows; and freckles like mine. We found we were both musically inclined: He played saxophone in his school orchestra and always brought tapes with him. He loved Prince, too, and was also into new-wave stuff: Tears for Fears, ’Til Tuesday, Crowded House. I liked that his taste in music was his own. We listened while playing Nintendo, and when we got tired of that, we played Risk, which was more conducive to conversation. We got along so well that, after a while, our folks allowed sleepovers, pleased that their awkward sons had become fast friends.
I’d never enjoyed Risk before; I was a video game guy. As I got a little older, it started to make more sense. But the real appeal of moving all these little men across the board was watching Joshua do it. He was a great talker. We chatted about movies and books and what life was like for us at school. He wasn’t chased and beaten up like me; he was quiet and kept to himself.
“I can’t understand why they treat you like that,” he said.
“Just lucky, I guess.” I’d been careful to keep my manic energy in check around him.
“Are you interested in anyone?” he asked, rolling the dice.
I paused for a moment, holding back the truth about my boy crush. I felt him studying my response.
“I guess not,” I said finally. “What about you?”
“No,” he said, assuredly.
I sensed a subtext, but I was too sheepish to follow up.
“Your move,” he said, gesturing to the game board.
As we spent more time together, these conversations turned increasingly direct. Eventually, I confided that I admired Anders, and Josh confessed that he had been intimate with another boy. I was awed and electrified by this discovery and wanted to know more. How did that feel? What was it like? He offered to show me.
One kiss led to a series of fumbling trysts that winter and a sense of extraordinary discovery. These moments always came at night, followed by sleep; the next morning, we’d act as though nothing had happened. Whether these encounters were a matter of hormonal experimentation or pointing toward my true orientation, I didn’t have a clue. I just knew I didn’t want them to stop.
After the holidays, though, something changed in Joshua. He seemed somehow distant, somewhere off in his thoughts, not as talkative, colder. Eventually, one night at our house, he said he was feeling ill, and my parents drove him home.
A few nights later, my parents called me up to the living room and asked me to sit. Dad sat across from me with his head in his hands, staring at the floor; Mom looked me over with piercing concern. “I just had a long talk with Janice,” she said. “Did something happen between you and Josh?” Oh god, no. I felt the walls narrow, my cheeks flush. As I tried to swallow the lump welling in my throat, a question slipped out: “Like what?” I grimaced as acts I’d never heard my mother describe hung in the air.
Dad stood up to pace the room, and the team interrogation commenced: “Has this happened before?” “Is this why you’re having problems at school?” “What were you thinking?”
And finally the dreaded, pointed inquiry: “Are you gay?”
My face crumpled, and tears spilled out. My mind spun so fast that all I could force from my lips were denials, while inside I wondered: Was this all my fault? How could he betray me like this? It wasn’t for anyone else to know.
In all the years of bullying, I had never experienced a single moment of such mortified, shrinking humiliation. I pulled my knees up close to my chest, tucking my head between my legs, the same position I used to shield myself during afterschool ambushes.
As I look back, my folks did their best with a difficult situation. There were moments of genuine concern and sympathy, suggestions that this sometimes happened among boys, that it was not an inherent condemnation of my character. But it was all outweighed by the shock and shame the three of us felt collectively, their chiding warnings about AIDS, how gay sex was akin to a death sentence, and, of course, “What would the family think?”
I ran to my room and slammed the door. Clutching my pillow, I wailed uncontrollably. They gave me space.
Sometime later, Dad knocked and opened my door. He said he hoped, for my sake, that I wasn’t gay, but if I was, nothing would ever change that they loved me. I wasn’t so sure. I’d heard him mock gay people throughout my childhood. It was ceaseless. Home had long been the only place I felt accepted. And anyway, I told myself, I’m not gay. I’m not.
Whatever else this episode triggered in my life, it shut down my interest in boys for years. I had enough to worry about, I decided. And I was tired of finding reasons to make my parents worry about me. We never spoke about it again. We tried our best to pretend that nothing had happened.
* * *
BY 1990, IN THE MIDDLE OF MY EIGHTH-GRADE YEAR, MY FOLKS were back to being top earners at their real estate firm, and we moved into a duplex in upscale Minnetonka. Dad’s music taste had shifted from country to the classier “lite FM” stations. The smooth crooners Celine Dion and Michael Bolton partnered with the songwriters David Foster and Diane Warren, spilling glassy synths and overwrought ballads all over the dial. The pop channels I listened to weren’t faring any better. The hair-teased sleazoids Poison, Def Leppard, and Skid Row ostensibly followed on the heels of seventies glam rockers Kiss and the New York Dolls, but actually bore more likeness to the cartoon rocker Jem, who seemed to me a far more aspirational figure.
Despite my best attempts to blend in better during my first couple of months at Hopkins West Junior High, I couldn’t change who I was. But luckily, through a mutual interest in obscure Nintendo RPGs—Crystalis, Ultima, Wizardry—I did find a friend: Jim Goeman, a gawky, curly-haired metalhead with a deranged sense of humor and a shared affinity for trash-talking schoolmates, invited me to sit at his lunch table. I started trading tapes with Jim and his friends, finding metal through Metallica, Slayer, and Anthrax and hip-hop through Public Enemy, N.W.A, and the Beastie Boys.
I appreciated the virtuoso musicianship and complex time signatures of metal and the inventive sampling of rap, but both felt hypermasculine to me. And I wasn’t that hard. I traded back Pink Floyd’s The Wall and the corny Gregorian chants of the new age / trance hybrid Enigma. Jim drew a connection, though, and lent me a mixtape of industrial music featuring Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, KMFDM, Laibach, Foetus, and loads of other acts centered on Chicago’s Wax Trax! Records. The clank and clatter of sampled, sequenced machines hit me like a brick.
Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine perfectly articulated my seething resentment while, on a musical level, mutating eighties synth-pop into an unrecognizable new form. Trent Reznor’s pummeling, mechanized dance beats and ricocheting synths turned on a dime as he strutted the line between slinky, feline sensuality and blind rage toward anyone who dared exert power over him. I saw a shadow of myself in how he lashed out at his aggressors even as he remained powerless against them.
Reznor’s look was just as striking, playing with bondage in mesh T-shirts, leather gloves, and tight jeans—all black, always. That spring, I grew out my own jet-black hair, had my bangs cut asymmetrically in front with my neckline in the back shaved to the skin, and began dressing in darker shades. I debuted this new look, augmented with a touch of my sister’s eyeliner, at my junior high talent show, sitting down at the piano for a solo rendition of Pretty Hate Machine’s “Something I Can Never Have.” Leaning into the song’s climactic expletive (“just a fading fucking reminder”) earned me a week’s detention, and the look a fun new epithet (you know the one) but the liberation was undeniable. Some new part of me was stirring to life.
(2)Corporate Magazines Still Suck
Increasingly disillusioned by the banality of pop radio, I began channel scanning the radio dial on my bedroom boombox. Soon, I landed on a song I’d heard somewhere a few years earlier, but hadn’t been able to track down since. It struck me as the pinnacle of eighties pop: brooding and subdued with glistening guitars, intertwining bass, expansive synth pads, and homesick vocals turning over a simple, restrained sentiment: “However far away, I will always love you.”
As the song’s final chord rang out, the DJ droned, “You’re listening to KJ104, modern rock radio, and that was the Cure with ‘Lovesong’ off Disintegration. Coming up in the next hour, more music from Depeche Mode, Sinéad O’Connor, New Order, and Morrissey.” I glued myself to 104, and new favorites poured out: Sonic Youth, Pixies, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Suddenly, I understood that an alternate history of music had transpired throughout the previous decade right under my nose.
This music—dubbed “modern rock” by the LA station KROQ, which had invented the format a decade earlier—possessed a level of range and complexity that I rarely heard on pop radio: it was moody and ominous, grappled with existential crises and alienation, and experimented with noise and dissonance. Just as compelling was how it challenged every aspect of the cultural status quo, from religion and capitalism to patriarchy and homophobia.
As I listened to 104, I learned that a few of the artists I already knew from pop radio—especially queer-coded ones like R.E.M., the Pet Shop Boys, and the B-52’s—were also part of this new musical lexicon. I didn’t know whether the Cure’s Robert Smith was gay, but he had his own style of androgyny that was at once dark and dreamy, thrillingly weird and confrontational. I loved how he wore smeared makeup and women’s blouses, teased out his hair in a tangle of wild black spikes, and sang in a contorted, ghostly, ungendered voice.
It turned out that modern rock had a litany of artists to represent every kind of outsider: Bauhaus and Joy Division for the goths, Black Flag and Minor Threat for the aggro punks and antiauthoritarians, XTC and the Smiths for the literary introverts, Kate Bush and Bowie for the theater types, the Replacements and Spacemen 3 for the drunks and druggies. This was more than just smart music for kids who didn’t belong; it encouraged wearing your differences proudly. In fact, it illustrated how embracing those eccentricities could be cooler and realer than any aspiration toward conformity.
Some folks stumble onto their subculture and feel instinctively moved to gatekeep it; I wanted to share it with everyone, to use it as a beacon to find others like me. I developed a fandom for 104 unlike anything since my first exposure to MTV, soaking up the music’s history, scenes, and subgenres, and even fell in love with a new sound that was just then emerging: British shoegaze. The swirl and shimmer of its effects-laden guitars, reverb-drowned vocals, and clattering tin drums were dreamy, mysterious, and surreal. I was awash in bands like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, and Ride; Lush, Curve, and Chapterhouse.
Entering high school in the fall of 1991, some of my earlier, attention-drawing behavior receded, but the reputation stuck. I’d made a permanent mark of myself, and, worse, I could never resist escalating a conflict. Whether by outnumbering, strength, or skill, I was always—always—physically bested, so I learned to take my wins in riposte, meeting any invective with a crueler comeback.
That summer, modern rock catapulted into the mainstream, rebranded as “alternative” by Jane’s Addiction’s front man, Perry Farrell, who had used the term to describe his new music festival, Lollapalooza. And when Nirvana exploded with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that fall, Kurt Cobain became the movement’s reluctant spokesman.
Kurt’s conviction inspired me. A beacon of anti-hegemonic beliefs, he emphasized equality and progressive ideals, and his disdain for the music industry was refreshingly blunt and brash. When he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, draped in a bleach-white T-shirt reading “Corporate magazines still suck,” I was absolutely enthralled. Opening to the feature, I read how Cobain had endured his own childhood traumas at the hands of classmates, and how his gifts for music had made him seem strange to others. Now he was a global icon.
His success helped me understand that, beyond the long hallways and locker rooms—as soon as I was out of this shithole—I would have another chance. In the real world, you start clean. No reputation as the beak-nosed, freckle-faced freak to follow me. Kurt had showed them, and that brought me hope.
Kurt’s experiences seemed to instill in him a profound empathy toward others who experienced even greater difficulties. He even spoke out against abuses occurring within his own fan base. His essay in the liner notes for Nirvana’s B-sides compilation, Incesticide, read, “At this point I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.” I wasn’t reckoning with my sexuality yet, but a part of me still felt protected. I couldn’t recall a rock star ever calling out bullies and abusers.
Deeper into that Rolling Stone piece, I learned that he shared values with a new feminist punk movement that was just emerging from Olympia, Washington, where Kurt lived before making Nevermind. The riot grrrl scene had emerged from essays and manifestos in zines like Puncture and Jigsaw, and coalesced around bands such as Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and the Minneapolis trio Babes in Toyland, on labels like Kill Rock Stars and K Records. Through this, I saw that real change could be made through music, ideology, and publishing—even with the most limited means.
I read how Kurt was protective of independent music culture, distancing his band from fellow Seattle grunge gods Pearl Jam, whose music he called “a corporate, alternative and cock-rock fusion.” “I would love to be erased from my association with that band,” he told the Rolling Stone reporter Michael Azerrad. “I do feel a duty to warn the kids of false music that’s claiming to be underground or alternative. They’re jumping on the alternative bandwagon.”
Through cover songs, band tees, and interviews, Kurt used his status to advocate for DIY punk bands like Melvins, Bad Brains, and the Raincoats, and outsider artists like the Vaselines, the Shaggs, and the brilliant songwriter Daniel Johnston, who tape-recorded cracked paeans to comic book heroes while institutionalized in Texas. And how did Kurt say he discovered this strange, subterranean world of incredible DIY music? Through US zine publishers and the British music press—specifically Melody Maker and NME. I took note.
I realized then what Cobain’s T-shirt on that Rolling Stone cover meant.
It was a pointed jab at the aging rag—and, in a roundabout way, Nirvana themselves, sure. But more crucially, it signaled that a network of smaller, fan-made publications existed, and that these were the genuine article—a collective counterweight to the boomer industrial complex.
I identified just as closely with Tori Amos, another new alternative artist who shared Kurt’s against-the-grain bona fides. Like me, her instrument was the piano—but she fucking shredded. Her album Little Earthquakes dealt explicitly with abuse and rejection from schoolgirls and boys, conservative Christian parents, and God himself. In her intimate recollections of these encounters, the wounds felt fresh, as if the sheer invocation of past trauma still carried physical implications. I heard an echo of my own experiences in “Precious Things,” in which a classmate delivers a vicious put-down and Amos shudders at her own confused response—which is to thank him for it, ever more desperate to win his approval. To bare such vulnerability was itself a form of courage, a reclamation of stolen dignity. I drew commiseration from her music, which became a source of solace.
In August of 1992, though, KJ104 made an announcement that broke my heart. Allegedly underperforming for its parent company, the station was doomed to become “Thunder 104,” yet another country channel on a dial littered with them. Sure enough, on the morning after Labor Day, as my clock radio alarm went off at 6:00 a.m., I rolled out of bed to the sound of R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” Packing my backpack and dreading my first week as a high school sophomore, I grabbed my headphones, headed for the bus, and listened as station DJs played the song in protest on a repeating loop. Eventually, finally, the signal crackled out, then slowly back in, to the slow twang of Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places.”
* * *
I FELT THE VOID OF KJ104 INSTANTLY, BUT I’D LEARNED ENOUGH about alternative music to start seeking it out on my own. I began spending my evenings in record stores. Cheapo, a local chain with a location near our house in Minnetonka, was a cavernous warehouse of used CDs, records, and tapes—hundreds of thousands of titles—with a friendly, knowledgeable, and, it must be said, impossibly patient staff.
Cheapo was unusual in that it didn’t have a great selection of music magazines, but on my way out one day, I saw a stack of papers I hadn’t noticed before. It was our local alternative weekly, City Pages. The free paper launched in 1979 as a punk zine called Sweet Potato before rebranding to cover the city at large, but music had remained a focal point. As I leafed through, I noticed the upcoming concert listings and the paper’s clear commitment to documenting the Twin Cities’ music scene.
City Pages shared my love of alternative rock, thus opening a new avenue for discovery. I waited impatiently for issues, soaking up the features and incisive album reviews that grappled earnestly with their subjects. If only there was a way to hear the music I was reading about. Then I remembered that Cheapo had an open policy that allowed customers to preview any title at the shop’s listening stations. These were nothing fancy, just standard all-in-one units with headphones that played records, CDs, and cassettes. And those tape decks gave me an idea.
When I returned the next day, I came armed with a list of records tipped in the latest City Pages issue. Then, having carefully chosen a stack of discs from the bins, I pulled a Maxell C-90 from my coat pocket, inserted it into the deck, and covertly pressed record. It’s hard to say precisely when the clerks figured it out, because I’d filled up sixteen tapes before they pulled me aside to say it had to stop. Miraculously, I wasn’t banned from the shop; it was a victimless crime, after all, and I, a regular, already spent more than I could reasonably afford there—not to mention that I was always haunting the aisles and racks, reshelving misplaced titles and occasionally fielding shoppers’ inquiries. (“Do you work here?” they’d wonder aloud. “Not yet,” I’d shoot back, ever reaching for the stars. “But if you have a question, I bet I can answer it!”)
I came to realize that City Pages was a national beacon for music journalism. Its arts and entertainment editor in those days, Will Hermes, commissioned pieces from certified music crit legends such as Greil Marcus, Chuck Eddy, and Terri Sutton, whose work planted seeds that would be sown by a second and third generation of younger writers.
One of those writers was Jessica Hopper, already renowned locally for her handmade Hit It or Quit It zine and a 1992 Newsweek feature that profiled her as a progenitor of the riot grrrl movement. “Reading Terri Sutton as [a] teenage music fan and burgeoning feminist effectively gave me a path in life,” she told the paper’s final editor, Keith Harris, in a 2020 New York Times piece regarding City Pages’ inevitable shuttering. “Because City Pages had a feminist critic, I assumed, mistakenly and blessedly, in those pre-internet days, that every town had a feminist rock critic at their paper.”
I, too, took for granted the exceptional scarcity of such a resource. In that same New York Times piece, the City Pages critic Lindsey Thomas recalled later being hired by MTV News based in part on her association with “the Minnesota music critic mafia.” To an extent that I find difficult to sufficiently explain, the Twin Cities just happened to be a hotbed of music writers: The Chicago Sun-Times critic Jim DeRogatis got his first work as a freelancer while living there, as did Chuck Klosterman and Michaelangelo Matos. Even Craig Finn of the Hold Steady—who, while not a music critic himself, led the most literary local pub-rock band not called the Replacements—graduated from my high school a few years before I enrolled.
Branching out to other publications and reference books, I came to see that City Pages’ affection for alternative music was not an isolated virtue. In fact, the entire alt-rock canon had been established over the course of a decade-plus by a sprawling network of music writers and editors. Soon, I began cutting across the parking lot from Cheapo to Barnes & Noble, gathering up stacks of music mags and stretching out on their reading sofas. There, I’d pull out a notebook and pen, open to the reviews sections, and copy down anything that piqued my interest.
B&N had everything: the dominant stateside voices of rock, Rolling Stone and Spin; hip-hop and R&B bibles The Source, Vibe, and Ego Trip; punk zines Maximum Rocknroll, Flipside, and the locally published Profane Existence; fledgling art-rock mags Puncture, Magnet, and Raygun; and, on import from the UK, those British music tabloids Cobain adored: Melody Maker and NME.
Spin’s reviews section was the toughest of the stateside mags, doling out a couple of scores in the 4–6 rating range (on a scale of 10) in every issue, but it seemed wrong that they were the only serious US magazine willing to pan alternative releases—and still they weren’t as fun to read as the snarkier British rags, which would elevate acts they adored with hyperbolic reverence, tear down those they didn’t with ruthless, often hilarious abandon, and spin up ridiculous tabloid drama by relentlessly sensationalizing any snide comment or drunken mishap.
I noticed, though, how many of the artists covered by the UK weeklies were, in fact, British. The US indie mags veered closer to my taste, but most were so bound up in community backscratching that, even when it was obvious their reviewers hated a record, they were reluctant to plainly state as much, and that frustrated me. Where were the snarky, edgy punk reviews for American indie rock?
* * *
THAT FALL, THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA’S RADIO STATION, KUOM, switched from lectures and study programming to a college music format. The change had been rumored for months, and when it at last happened, I was poised and ready at my boombox, blank tape locked and loaded, impatiently sweeping the tuner across its frequency. Finally, a voice punched through the static, introducing the station’s first song: “Do You Remember Rock ’n’ Roll Radio?” by the Ramones. I’d loved the Ramones since hearing their music in the Stephen King B horror Pet Sematary, but this song was new to me, and the energy was electric. With its booming, martial beat, towering horns, and ballpark organs blasting from the same silver Sanyo I’d listened to pop radio on since I was eight, I pogoed around my bedroom, echoing the song’s manic chant: “Rock! And! Rock ’n’ Roll! Radio! Let’s go!”
Broadcasting on the AM frequency, Radio K bore all the fidelity of a landline receiver, and that was part of the charm. Its crunchy, metallic clatter crackling across the airwaves—always with a faint hiss or buzz buried deep in the signal—was completely unlike the FM channels I’d once relied on. And with none of the commercial restraints, Radio K’s student DJs were free to play whatever they thought was cool, plunging into indie, experimental, and underground terrain. Now I was really in it: a subculture where people made weird, homemade pop music for tiny labels without compromise or concern for “crossing over.” This was pure art, total freedom, a whole universe of classic records to explore. It was the only college education I wanted.
* * *
BECAUSE THEY’D ALWAYS STRUGGLED WITH MONEY, MY FOLKS were big on pushing me into the workforce. When I turned fifteen, they insisted I get a summer job—at the McDonald’s down the street. I biked there four days a week to flip patties in the fetid steam of the Filet-O-Fish grill. The next year, it was Wal-Mart. I worked a register for three months before I decided to stop letting my mom pick my jobs.
I dreamed of working in a record store and often applied at the ones I kicked around in, but if I heard back from them at all, it was to inform me that prior music store experience was required. Most record clerks were cooler and older, anyway. I needed to start further down the ladder. So I looked to our regional mall chain, Musicland. Although its selection was aggressively mainstream by my standards then, I still remembered lightly dissociating from my terrestrial body when I first stepped into one as a child, agog at how its seemingly limitless selection—an entire store devoted to records!—had put the department stores’ tiny music enclaves to shame. And I suspected they’d be hiring, because a major addition to the Minnesota mall scene happened to be national news just then.
The Mall of America had recently opened its doors with a sprawling indoor amusement park (Camp Snoopy!) and four floors of stores—more than three hundred in all. The sheer scale of the place was as inconceivable as its array of bewildering specialty shops: BareBones hawked replica human skeletons, skulls, and anatomy charts; Butterflies & More stocked rainforest insects mounted in Lucite; Just Silver literally carried just silver. It was the kind of place that summoned non sequitur celebrity ventures like Hulk Hogan’s Pastamania, a short-lived food court moment molding pasta shells in the wrestler’s image. You could even get married there, at the full-service wedding emporium Chapel of Love.
Dwarfed by this whimsical grandeur, tucked into a tight corridor near the entrance to the LEGO Imagination Center, sat the mall’s sole Musicland location. Unlike the ostentatious flagship stores touted by most other brands there, the shop was strikingly modest, no greater or more ambitious than any of their other outlets. But I was right that they were hiring, and when the store manager chose to hire me—me!— I could hardly contain my excitement.
During my time at Musicland, cassette singles were the rage, and the shop stocked nearly every tape on Billboard’s Hot 100. By now, though, I had tunneled so deep into alt-rock that I was losing my grip on the pop charts, so when folks came in improvising hit songs (“Do you have the one that goes, ‘Slide, slide, slippity slide?’”), I often didn’t have the answer. Worse, my troglodyte manager hoarded access to the in-store disc changer, playing the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge for a minimum seven of my eight-hour shifts. Still, compared to Wal-Mart? This was a waking dream. I was being paid $5.25 an hour to obsessively organize a wall of tapes.
Eight months later, I reapplied to those cooler record shops and was brought on at Down in the Valley, an independent record store and headshop combo with decades of patchouli and incense baked into its walls. I was a disaster at the rear counter, struggling to decode stoner jargon and identify paraphernalia. (“Sorry, dude, what the hell is a dugout?”) It was only a fifty-cent raise, but with a secret perk: I got store credit for every customer-rewards card I sold, so I sold loads of them, resulting in three-hundred-dollar monthly shopping sprees.
Of course, I wasn’t sure where any of this was heading. It’s not like I was learning much, and I knew I couldn’t support myself beyond high school on the paltry wage. For now, just loving my job would do.
* * *
IN DECEMBER OF ’93, A FRIEND SCORED TWO TICKETS TO SEE Nirvana, with openers the Breeders and Shonen Knife, at the Roy Wilkins Auditorium in St. Paul. I had been to a concert before: When I was eight, my folks had taken my sister and me to see Willie Nelson and Family at the Minnesota State Fair, an experience so thrilling I puked in the stands. But nothing prepared me for Nirvana. It was nearly two months into their big stadium tour, and they were functioning at an absolute peak, with the Germs guitarist Pat Smear joining to fill out the mix on the road.
After tearing through twenty-five songs in an hour twenty, the group lit into a ten-minute version of the Nevermind hidden track, “Endless, Nameless,” unleashing a squall of feedback. Toward the song’s cacophonous end, Kurt flogged his guitar against the stage, and the band began wrecking every scrap of their gear to the roar of five thousand rapt fans.
Then Cobain repurposed his mic as a prop, stuffed it in his mouth, and feigned pulling an imaginary trigger. He snapped his head back and collapsed motionless, sprawled out flat on the stage. The crowd howled as Dave Grohl kicked his drum set apart and knocked the pieces off his riser. Kurt’s fascination with firearms was well documented, as were a series of overdoses he’d suffered during the preceding months. This didn’t strike me as the typical showmanship flair; it seemed like a cry for help. The bassist, Krist Novoselic, a giant at 6'7", walked over to Kurt’s tiny, splayed-out frame, nudged it with his foot, and, shrugging, picked him up, slung him over his shoulder, and carried him away. The stadium PA speakers buzzed as the crowd shouted Kurt’s name, hoping for another encore. The house lights came up.
Four months later, I was driving back to school from an off-site sixth-period elective when the DJ broke into Radio K’s broadcast with an announcement. A body had been discovered in Cobain’s Seattle home. More details to come. It could only be him, I thought.
I pulled up to the school lot and ran to grab my books from my locker. Kids chatted casually, carelessly, on the way to their last class of the day. I was the only one here who knew he was gone.
Skipping out on environmental science, I ran home to the television, where reports confirmed the body as Kurt’s, and the cause of death: suicide by self-inflicted gunshot wound. He’d left a suicide note. It all tracked. In an interview with MTV’s Kurt Loder on the night of the show I’d seen in St. Paul, Krist Novoselic had joked about getting business cards listing his profession as “suicide counselor.” As details leaked, I felt tears welling up and cycles of emotion coursing through me: frustration, ire, grief, repeat. I thought the era had only just begun; how was it ending so quickly?
* * *
THAT SUMMER, MY PARENTS BROUGHT HOME A PC TO TRACK real estate listings online. I’d messed with Apple IIs at school, but the PC wasn’t as intuitive. The drive came preloaded with a spanking-new operating system, Microsoft Windows 3.1, but its app selection was skeletal, and its two measly games, Minesweeper and Solitaire, felt like the dullest ever committed to disc. It seemed impossible that this fully loaded, state-of-the-art system could be so boring.
Relaying my frustration to the guys at my lunch table, I caught the ear of another Ryan. Long-haired and quiet, Ryan Stanley was withdrawn to all but this close circle of friends. He had the first notebook computer I’d seen, a rugged portable PC weighing precisely twenty-six pounds, and when he brought it out at the lunch table, its grayscale LCD display glared intensely against his face, lending him the pallor of a basement apparition. Like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, I had no idea what was in that box, but I guessed it was something like seeing God.
Stanley brought the laptop over, connected it to my parents’ computer with a cable, and began transferring files and software. He showed me how to work around Windows to operate at the system’s core level, navigating files and folders via text commands and manipulating vital settings. The training wheels were coming off. But it was the modem that really floored me.
Stanley had loads of unlisted phone numbers that hosted local networks offering cracked versions of commercial software, entire books and film scripts, fetish porn GIFs, and unimagined other illicit materials à la carte. Connecting to these hubs was like descending a long ladder down to a winding tunnel full of mankind’s most astonishing filth.
There was also a source of connection in the form of message boards established by freaks and geeks who were, even then, extremely online. More than fifty of these bulletin board systems (BBS) had sprung up in the Twin Cities area alone, running primitive, text-only platforms that permitted just one user online at a time. Most were named for obvious sci-fi references (Skynet, Wintermute) and drew Comic-Con-type crowds to meetups at restaurants and bars in the city.
That’s how I met Jason Josephes. He’d been “boarding” since 1985, when he received a modem for his thirteenth birthday, and was among the most active members on the bulletin board systems I frequented on my parents’ computer. He regularly held huge parties at his Minneapolis apartment, gathering BBS regulars and stragglers of the Twin Cities music scene.
Jason’s roommate, Eldon Elmer Iverson III, was a professional graphic designer and the living image of The Simpsons’ Professor Frink: rail-thin with oblong, wire-rimmed frames and a drawling, nasal voice like a warped kazoo. Known to friends simply as “Al,” he stayed perpetually glued to his Macintosh LC in the apartment his roommates nicknamed the Velvet Glove. During parties, he would briefly step away to sip a cup of Zima, and his screen saver would cycle through photoshopped images, including webcam shots of partygoers and friends that he’d enhanced and distorted with satirical text and effects: primitive memes of our oddball crew.
I was captivated by this astounding new tech and pestered Al with questions. The more I saw, the more I wanted to know. When he fired up the World Wide Web and prompted me for a search query, I chose “Nine Inch Nails,” and the search engine WebCrawler returned a selection of fan sites—some relatively spare, others stunningly exhaustive. One featured a downloadable QuickTime file of the uncensored “Closer” music video, snapping the internet’s capabilities into immediate perspective. (At 25 MB, it would have taken about a day to download, but there it was: the clip they didn’t want you to see!)
I was wowed by the web’s potential as a forum of self-expression: Here, I quickly learned, anyone could make a personal homepage, or a fan site that provided news and catalog information for artists, or maybe even something greater. I asked Al to teach me how—with just a file-transfer program, a handful of HTML tags, and a cursory knowledge of Photoshop—I could build a site of my own.
Copyright © 2026 by Ryan Schreiber
