Flashback - So I filled

Flashback - So I filled in for Bob Davis last night on KSTP.

Now bear in mind, doing talk radio was in many ways the first big love of my life. A very dysfunctional love, of course - radio is an industry that goes through boyfriends faster than Cher or Julia Roberts. And it was a love that took me a few years to get over.

And I guess the best result you can get from a failed relationship is that you say friends. So hopefully talk radio and I can get along, get together, have a few drinks and a laugh or two from now on.

The evening was an extended series of flashbacks. I was on right after Tom Mischke, who I remember from long before he became the king of stream-of-consciousness radio. He used to call in to the old Don Vogel Show (his '85-'87 incarnation) with these anonymous, incredibly hilarious bits - and I was the first person who figured out who he was (his brother edited the newspaper I freelanced for, and he dropped the dime inadvertently. I sat on the secret for the next year or so).

A wierder flashback - a phone call from überblogger James Lileks. He's a household name on the blogosphere today - but I remember him calling into my old weekend graveyard-shift conservative talk show, arguing politics (he was a liberal then - and no less articulate verbally than in writing, then or now), back when he was working on his first novel. And as we argued about was the better expat North Dakotan ("Hah! I pour the ice tray down my pants, rub rubbing alcohol all over my body and THEN go running in the snow!". "HAH! Pants are for pansies!"), it was all I could do not to break up laughing on the air. God, it was a blast.

Stranger still, it's led to some mutual flashbacks - in today's Bleat, he reminisces about the whole scene we were in back in '87; our mutual pal, ex-hippie-turned-bodybuilding-talk-host Geoff Charles (whose show I produced), and even the lead singer of classic Twin Cities cult punk band The Clams (who used to be indistinguishable from Chrissie Hynde, and now has three kids at the same daycare as Lileks' Gnat).

And just like back in 1986, when I'd get lost in my harangues and the arguments and the fun of it all, two hours passed like it was a fast half hour. I talked too fast - in radio, you need to talk slow, and when you think you're going too slow, slow down some more) and jumbled some points and stammered a bit, but Kodiak the producer didn't call security, so it couldn't have been all bad.

When I finished my program on March 29, 1987, I had no idea it was going to be the last one I'd do, at least until I changed careers twice, got married, had two kids, got divorced. It felt like a big bloody stump in my life for years (although I got over it eventually).

And while it may well be last night was the last talk show I'll ever do, this time it's OK, one way or the other. It was fun, it was enlightening, it was a great rail dragster ride down memory lane in many ways.

Talk radio and I? We're just good friends.